While it rains

It pleases me greatly to see that The worship of the wealthy has crept into the most-read posts list. This is an issue that has been close to my heart all my thinking life, which would be nearly fifty years now; my views were set in stone early, and all I have seen of the world over a lifetime has convinced me that I am right. Great private wealth, like great poverty, is a great crime, a very large blot on civilization. If we have not been able to design a world where we can all live reasonably well without having to tolerate a tiny handful of plutocrats and billions who salivate over them and mimic them strenuously, we are not only in a bad way but hastening our collective doom. If I through my writing can manage to persuade a hundred decent and sensible men about it, I will not have lived in vain. But I don’t believe in bloody revolutions to change the world – they achieve nothing much over the long run at very great cost – so Chesterton’s way is the best: kill off the vermin with ridicule.

It has occurred to me that though I have tried my hand at poetry and short stories, I was meant to be first and foremost an essayist. And many of my best essays have found a place in this blog over the years. A blog attended to by thousands (I guess) is fine, but I like to think that someday someone will cull the hundred best essays from it and make a book.

It is early afternoon, but the sky is overcast, so it is dark inside my room as I write. The monsoon has set in in right earnest, and it is drizzling off and on all day and night. The temperature has fallen so fast that whereas only three or four days ago the a/c was working ten hours a day, the tap water is distinctly chilly right now. As the poet wrote,

নীল নবঘনে আষাঢ় গগনে তিল ঠাঁই আর নাহি রে,

ওরে আজ তোরা যাসনে ঘরের বাহিরে। 

I love this season, I am grateful to God that I don’t have to travel in this weather to make a living, I have P.G. Wodehouse at my elbow and lively children to fill up my house with chatter and laughter every day, and I am happy. Maybe I’ll write a bit more here later, but let me put this much up on the blog for now...