Looking up an old diary

It seems just the other day that I was holidaying in the Kumaon hills with my daughter – December 2017, actually – and already seven months of the new year are gone. Time doesn’t fly, it zooms!

Which is why one day in my late twenties I decided to begin a diary to write down, year-wise, all the things worth remembering, good and bad, happy and sad, that have happened to me. I started with 1969, the year I first went to school, and got a lot of stuff down immediately, because my memory was still sharp and clear then. Thank God I did, because now, glancing through that diary a quarter century later, I realize I probably wouldn’t have been able to recall all those events in correct chronological order today even if I could remember them at all, and I would have been poorer for it. I have annually updated that diary without fail ever since, right down to end-2017, and while it has become a pretty long list, I also wonder that I didn’t care to jot down so many things which apparently seemed very important when they happened, and I was right, they weren’t really important after all, not in retrospect. Life is like that. Someone who has been big and important, the way society understands those words, realizes in the dusk of his life that he hasn’t done much after all, while history says that some son of a carpenter who preached a better kind of life to a bunch of illiterate poor shepherds changed the world forever. Meanwhile a great scientist said towards the end of his life that if he had a chance to live it all over again he would have collected more butterflies… why does wisdom come to us too late for us to use it?

As one looks backwards, so does one feel a strange curiosity to look ahead. How different is the world going to be by the time I am a really old man – say twenty five years from now? A world torn apart by war and pestilence and famine again, and ruled in patches by tyrants? A universal basic income in place everywhere, and robot servants in every house, and only computer-driven cars allowed on the roads, and agriculture and fossil fuels slowly becoming obsolete, cleaning up the air and greening the land and freeing up hundreds of millions of acres for human habitation and wildlife? Marriages of the traditional type becoming history too?  Education increasingly happening at home via the internet, conducted only by those who really can and want to, as it used to be in the distant past? Colonies sprouting on the moon and Mars? Will it be nearly unrecognisable from today’s vantage point, or will it be plus ça change, plus ç’est la même chose? Those interested in how I have been wondering about this sort of thing for ages can look up my old post titled How my world has changed. Been some time since I wrote that, too!

I am thrilled

...to see that old and lovingly written posts such as the one on The Mahabharata have suddenly climbed to the top of the most-read list, and old posts like the one I wrote about one of Google's billionaire owners going to work on a bicycle have appeared there too. It is obvious that some people are browsing vigorously through my blog, and my thanks are due to them.

What puzzles me is the complete lack of comments. Are people having trouble posting them? Note that before posting a comment you must log in with your google i.d. and password, click the box which says 'I am not a robot', press 'publish' and little things like that before the system will allow you to send anything over. And it's all done much more conveniently on a large screen; with a tiny mobile phone, you are very likely to miss out on one thing or the other!

A turning point

I went to Delhi on Tuesday after doing regular classes on Monday, dropped off my daughter at her new university about 60 km from the city on Wednesday, came back home on Thursday and returned to my usual work routine on Friday. Only those who know me really well will understand how unusual and breathtaking that is. Even at 22 I hated running around unless it was bringing me pots of money or I was going on holiday (yet another reason why I quit journalism – so much of it was pointless running around to interview very ornery and forgettable people), and now I am 55! And yet I enjoyed it for more than one reason. Most important of all was, of course, the fact that my daughter was looking forward to having a good time in the sense that we understand that expression. The next was that I like to drop in at Shilpi’s, partly for those endlessly satisfying chats and partly because we keep planning future projects even as she keeps filling me in about her current work (she is a departmental director with a renowned NGO now) while being a very good hostess, and partly because I discovered that no matter how often and strenuously I keep telling people that I am growing old, I can in fact look after myself and travel around without anybody’s help quite as easily and confidently as I could when I was 25. Ten years ago I wrote Forty five and counting. If I am still around ten years from now, and still going as strong as I am now, I can ease back without a trace of guilt. Perhaps I’ll get myself a walking stick, if only to show off. And maybe I’ll let myself be driven around by a Google/Tesla electric self-driving car!

A Volvo bus dropped me off near Kolkata airport (don’t try it if you have to haul a lot of luggage). We had a little excess baggage, but they winked at it. Shilpi didn’t allow me to try the airport to city metro service, but I am determined to do it next time round. For the next day, of course, we had a car with us all through. Pupu’s new campus is pretty and swank, but strolling around in the midday heat was not really fun, so we kept retreating to airconditioned havens. Back to Delhi in the afternoon, and a game of badminton with young ladies, me with my bad leg, and they didn’t roll their eyes at me, believe it or not – or maybe they were just being kind. Turned up early at Terminal 1 for an interminable wait, a smooth flight back, a/c bus from the airport to Esplanade (first time I tried it), veg-thaali lunch which cost me all of fifty rupees (while the little bottle of water at Delhi airport had put me back by 60!), then a quick and quiet bus trip home. All of ten hours from the time I left the house at Delhi: I really think I’ll take the Air India flight to Durgapur next time, even if I have to wake up at an ungodly hour.

This stuff, from a certain point of view, is quite mundane and not likely to interest too many people, I know. I am still writing about it because for me it had a dreamlike quality of a good sort, and I have been given to understand that some of my writing resonates quite pleasurably with a few readers at least; they tell me they like to know what goes on in my mind as I go through ordinary life. Of the many thoughts that kept going through my mind one was a deep sense of thankful wonder – I am still doing, profitably enough, what I was doing before my daughter came into this world, and now she’s gone to university, ready to make a life of her own, and I have been allowed to be at her side, still, in more senses than one. Another was that it feels good to have grown slowly more affluent even as the whole country itself did so over my working lifetime: I still vividly recollect the horror and disgust that I felt as a young man to have to rub shoulders with the dirty, smelly, ill-mannered hoi polloi to get around, and even though India has become vastly more crowded since the early eighties, I can travel far more swiftly and comfortably now. The third thought, intensely pleasurable, was that, despite very great odds, I have, with the grace of God, managed to raise my only child to a point when she is about to set out making her own life and career, and is still the very best friend I have as a matter of daily reconfirmed reality – I know how few fathers can claim as much, and placed beside that, all my angst about things I have not got from life pale into insignificance, especially when I eagerly anticipate all the wonderful things she will be telling me henceforth she is doing, hopefully for as long as I live, whether that be one more year or twenty five. It’s been a good life, and that is not an easy thing to claim when it has also been very very hard and unfair in patches.

And naturally, my thoughts kept coming back to the work I have done for nearly four decades now, and whether and how people who have gone through my classes have benefited from them.  Not that it matters very much any more: I have enough letters and emails to reassure me that I have been of some non-trivial use to many, and a modest but swelling fortune to prove that I have not done too badly for myself in the process. Only, I wonder about creatures like that so-called journalist who assured the world through her blog that she had learned a great deal from me (and hasn’t deleted that post yet despite my strongest objection) but proved by the way she has chosen to live her life that she didn’t learn a thing.  I wonder whose fault it is – mine, that I failed to be a true teacher, hers, because she was either unwilling to learn or congenitally incapable of learning, or God’s, because He decreed that I would have to deal with such creatures endlessly for my sins? If as a teacher I have anything to ask of Him, I should beg Him not to send that type to my classes for the rest of my working years.