Dusk of the year

This has been a busy but quiet and on the whole satisfactory year. After the trauma of last year, a  most welcome change. But I have lost one more of the grand old women in my family.

Notable things that have happened to me include the fact that my Facebook notice board has been in use for more than a year now, and the post on Rani Rashmoni has been – and this is a wonder to me – continuously on the most-read list for more than a year, too. Although I have been walking regularly for at least twenty years, this was a year when I walked literally every day, even in the most sweltering heat and pouring rain. Most seriously, my daughter has gone much farther away, but we have been in constant, cheery and productive contact all through, and we are enthusiastically looking forward to her building up a career of her own. Cheques drawn out in her name are being deposited in her account already, taking me back to 35 years ago! Also, my YouTube channel has been revived. Let us see what it does in the years to come… another interesting thing is that the second generation is attending my classes now. Age comes with good compensations!

I started the year with a travel post, and within a week it will be travel time again. But I haven’t taken the new car on a really long drive yet, and it’s already almost a year old. I wish I could give myself more breaks. Wage earners who get 15-20 days of leave and several public holidays on top of 52 Sundays a year don’t begin to get what being self-employed is like. I wish they were taxed much more heavily at least…

I am looking forward to several things next year, not least the looming general elections. What do you predict, and what would you like to see?

I wrote a post titled India: twenty years after in 2011 to mark two decades of our national liberalization program. It’s been seven years since then. I am asking those of my readers who have clear lived memories of at least 25 years – do you think India has definitely and considerably improved over that time period, and improved enough, and that her prospects over the next 25 years are bright? Are our young going to grow up in a country doing far better than their ancestors could have dreamed, or is a nightmare waiting for them? A question that is very important to me: shall we see more great men (boro manush, we say in Bengali) in the Gandhi and Tagore mould again in our lifetimes? I am so tired of pettiness, evanescent flashiness and inconsequentiality…

It has been a very mild winter so far. I am rather missing the biting cold – it comes and goes so quickly anyway. After several days of more or less bright sunshine, it has been cloudy since yesterday, and drizzling since the middle of last night. I hope it will make the dratted dust settle a bit, and when the clouds clear, the real winter will set in. High time it did!

Skyrocketing exam scores!

A minister in the Union government (looking after 'human resource development', too) has remarked critically on the habit that school-leaving examination bodies like the CBSE and CISCE have acquired of awarding astronomically high exam. scores to candidates: see this. 100 on 100 in mathematics, maybe, he's said, but in languages and history, too? How is that even possible, what sense does it make?

I have been teaching high-school students since the late 1980s, and I can vouch that this pernicious practice took off around then, but accelerated into cloud-cuckooland only since the early 2000s. The minister, who is 63, reminisces that when he scored 73% overall in his board exams, he was the regional topper, and I, who am 55, scored 'only' 87.5%, something that would be considered pretty pathetic today when tens of thousands routinely score in the 90s! But two things have happened - I know for a fact that those who go on to score in the 90s in the boards rarely got more than 70% in the tests I gave them (and that despite the fact that I have perforce become far more open-fisted with marks than I was 25 years ago), and after a brief euphoria over their 'fantastic achievement' (which serves no greater purpose than fuelling their mothers' preening at kitty parties), they come up against the harsh reality that the few decent colleges have upped the ante so much at admission time that even with 95%-plus scores they are often turned away from the gates, and have to queue up before the ever-mushrooming private colleges, which are eager to sell dubious degrees to everybody  for big or small mountains of cash... who is fooling whom, and who is really gaining anything from all this?

The said minister wants the boards to take a good, hard look at the way exam. papers are being marked. Will his request/order be taken up seriously, or given a quiet burial?

December has arrived

Datum to note: the pageviews counter has just crossed the 600,000 mark.

A thank you is again due to all those dedicated readers who have kept me going. Do wish me luck that I may hang around till the million mark is crossed!

A complaint, too: a lot of you who visit this blog regularly have not yet visited my YouTube channel, or even if you have, haven't bothered to subscribe, like and comment. Go ahead and do it!

The YouTube channel analytics page tells me that of all the visitors so far, 81%+ are male and only the rest female. Would anyone like to suggest an explanation?

There's news that will amuse many of my old boys: I have become a voracious reader of books on my phone! Indeed, I have been able to locate, download and re-read some books I had been searching for in vain on the hardcopy-book market for a long time. Never say I am a tech dinosaur. 

Winter is finally here. And while people are getting married like there'd be no tomorrow, I am sleeping long... and watching the new Christmas special movies on netflix and amazon video, as I have been doing around this time for years now. Never fail to warm my heart.

To all those who write only on special days, like Teachers' Day and the day they had their last class with me, I say, ho-hum.

I shall look forward to old boys writing in to say what sort of posts they would like to read next.

P.S.: I am delighted to see that a favourite old post titled A small dose of political philosophy has come back on the most-read list. I wonder what sort of people are searching my blog for old posts these days, and I shall be even more delighted if the conversation there, which had stopped in 2012, could be revived by current readers.