Just scribbling

I have just been video-chatting with loved ones and old boys, back to back in London, Delhi and Singapore. Now I am at peace at home, having talked happily for a bit after class with a young old boy learning to become a doctor, come back after a vigorous evening walk and listening to raaga jaunpuri on youtube as I write while sipping cold beer. Imagine, I tell myself. See how far you have come, and life is good, getting better by the year! How often I say to the little ones currently under my tutelage that you shouldn’t be too nostalgic about childhood passing by – the best is yet to come.

The posts on Rani Rashmoni and the Mahabharata have at long last been dislodged from the top of the most-read list. Several thousand have read them already. I would so have liked to hear from some of them… but if you cannot otherwise create, keep writing, I tell them, it is one of the few things about you that will endure, or at least might. I was watching King Alfred of the 9th century CE saying in a Netflix series that the written word will carry civilization on its shoulders, and I couldn’t agree more.

To Rajdeep, thank you for the books that you keep sending. I am now deep into Mythos – never knew that Stephen Fry was such a good author! (Can somebody send me that movie of his called General Blackadder?) And thank you vastly more for being there for close to a quarter century now: few can claim as much. I really must make that Japan trip sometime soon. France too, if Nishant stays put for a bit longer…

To Subhadip Dutta and Saikat Chakraborty: are you, too, like so many others, beginning to forget?

To all of the younger  ’uns: don’t confuse Google with knowledge, leave alone wisdom.