Adieu, 2019

God is being good to me.

Durgapur was shrouded in fog on Monday the 23rd, so it was a miracle that my flight took off hardly half an hour late. I kept falling asleep on the flight, and the stewardess was kind enough to take away my food tray without waking me up. Arrived in front of Pupu's and Shilpi's office a little before 1 p.m., and we came over to Shilpi's flat - the new and bigger one - for lunch together. Then I had a lovely snooze while they went back to work. Talk about the perks of old age! I slept in Pupu's smart new digs that night, right in the next street, snug as a bug in a rug. As I said, I am infinitely thankful. What comfort, what joy, what peace... what a contrast with a tormented childhood and youth, full of privations and disappointments! What a blessing that I remember such a multitude of details so keenly, so that I can savour the difference so intensely!

The highlight of Tuesday, Christmas Eve, was the lovely dinner party we had at home, with Pupu, Shilpi, Aparna, Milli, Arpita, Pratyush and Kartikeya to warm my old bones while filling up on kebabs and wine and pizza. And  reciting poems off the top of my head, with a quietly attentive audience. Imagine, I was telling myself: I memorized these lines long before these kids were born!

Christmas Day was spent lazing and luxuriating, with a mid-afternoon walk around Lodi Gardens, something I can never have enough of. And regaling Pupu with another Parashuram story before going to bed...

The next four days were busy, because they were working days for both Pupu and Shilpi, and we got up early every morning to commute to a posh private school in Gurgaon, where Katha was holding their annual festival. About that, in a separate post, soon. I did a storytelling session in the course of the Parents' and Teachers' Colloquium (photo below) which most of them apparently enjoyed enough to ask for more. Kartikeya, in particular, was inspired to dub me with an honorific of his own coinage: 'Sircle' (Sir+Uncle).

Sunday was Pupu's birthday. Another dinner, at a fancy restaurant of the young folks' choice in Hauz Khas village.

These last two days have been spent lazing again. It's very foggy till midday, and bitterly cold: taking a bath is an ordeal, and sitting around in the mellow sunshine in the nearby park pure bliss. An astrologer had predicted long ago that in 2019 I'd find peace: it seems he was more than half right!

A new year dawns tomorrow. In this world swept by endless tides of artificially whipped up excitement quickly forgotten, does anyone remember APJ Abdul Kalam, and his once-much tomtommed Vision 2020 for India?

During this holiday I read Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's new opus, The Forest of Enchantments, or, as she has alternatively called it, the Sitayan. Very well written, though not in the same class as The Palace of Illusions.

The photo below is of a tiny tot who attended all four days of the Katha Festival with her mother, an angel of utterly lovable patience. Kept bringing to my mind Tagore's remark that the birth of every child is a reassurance that God has not yet given up on Man.

God tussi great ho! Peace on earth, and joy to all men of goodwill. Also, may all those who burn inside with all kinds of negative emotions, such as envy and spite and greed, find solace and comfort in the new year.

Mid-December notes

Glad to see that Tales from bygone days has been visited by a lot of people, probably because I provided a link in a recent post. There is a part two, too, you know. And talking of old posts, you might look up Moral Science, which was a subject we were discussing in class recently again. I am always surprised to see how old these posts have become, and how absolutely topical they have still remained!

This is playing out as one of the strangest winters in living memory. It’s December 14 today, yet the maximum temperature is showing no signs of dropping below 25 Celsius, nor the minimum below 14-15. Which means it’s comfortable enough, but far from a respectable winter. The sky is cloudy almost every day, but without any precipitation, so I almost feel jealous to hear that it has rained heavily in Delhi, while Kashmir is all snowbound.

Another year is now drawing swiftly to a close. These days whole years seem to pass in the twinkling of an eye. I am coasting towards (voluntary-) retirement, and the only thing that excites me about the future is the prospect of grandchildren.

I am also more than a little curious about how this state will gear up for the forthcoming Assembly elections over the next year. More and more the biggest question that looms over India is whether the democratic dispensation laid down by our Constitution makers will survive the increasingly frequent, violent and reckless assaults on it. Given that our entire body politic, including the ‘educated’ class, has become so uninterested in laws and rules, in decision making through informed and rational debate, in ideals like moderation, patience and decency, I have, I believe, grave cause for disquiet. The best I can console myself with is that I have spent the largest part of my adult, active, participative life already, and henceforth I shall withdraw more and more into the role of a passive observer, avoiding trouble as far as I can. A man can fight only so many battles in one lifetime.

It has occurred to me that at least a few people read my blog only to stoke their own fires of jealousy and impotent hatred, God knows why. I shall not do them the undeserved honour of taking cognizance of their individual identities, leave alone the ‘opinions’ they harbour in their sick little brains: my only advice to them is, stop visiting! You get one chance to be stupidly, ignorantly, pointlessly abusive anyway – then you are blocked off for good. I write here only for my own pleasure, and perchance for a few who enjoy what I write. The rest don’t count, nor ever will.

A boy who became an ex-student only a year ago and keeps dropping in was complaining this very evening how very disgusted he feels to hear his friends and slightly-seniors using abusive language constantly, compulsively, unthinkingly, regardless of company. There may still be, I reflected, some cause for hope. I wish our prime minister, while lecturing the country on why it is essential and important to be clean, thought it fit to insist that to be clean in the language one uses is an integral part of overall cleanliness…

I am reading Madam Justice Leila Seth’s autobiography, On Balance. I like to read about strong characters among women who were also big achievers without being rabid feminists, and Ms. Seth, who was not only India’s first woman Chief Justice of a High Court but a very successful mother who brought up three brilliant children, including writer Vikram, fits that bill eminently. I am barely halfway through the book, and I may write about it in detail afterwards, but right now I’d like to note I was bemused to learn about how she happened to name her second son, because it brought back memories of how we named our daughter. Did I tell you that story?

My publisher informs me that all through the year, To My Daughter has been selling slowly, but steadily. Reason for good cheer! All those who write long and earnest questions to me via email, I urge them strongly, buy that book and read it. You will find many of your questions answered, and in any case I can’t keep repeating myself for every newcomer who has become interested in me and my writing lately. That is one of the main reasons why I wrote that book sixteen years ago.

Another eight days, and my work will be over for this year. Yay!

P.S., Dec. 18: The Met. department got it absolutely right this time. As predicted, the sky is clear and blue today, the sun is mild, the wind is cold, and the water feels frozen. Winter, at last, is here.   

To those whose classes just ended

Remember the blogposts I told you about on the last day: To those about to become ex students and Bye bye time again .

Remember, also, about the one-year deadline. Don't visit after years of non-communication and expect me to remember you. 

On the other hand, those who do want to keep in touch and make an effort to will always be welcome. Especially if they have things to talk about.

Updating my web diary

I have been hibernating away from the blogs for a while now – by my own standards, that is – and musing over how the pageviews counter goes on rising relentlessly nevertheless. Evidently there are people who keep on visiting, and it’s good to see (from the Most Read list) that they are looking up old posts too. For instance, I am thrilled to see that a post titled First Video, made by my daughter when she was hardly more than twelve and put up here ten years ago, has come back into that list. So has I wish I had resigned sooner, heaven knows why. It stopped being something I think about at least a decade ago. If you ask me, I shall recommend posts like Tales from bygone days, parts one and two.

The beautiful season has come again. (I keep writing about the weather because it’s good fun to read up entries from years ago, especially when I can contradict people who complain or worry about how ‘different’ things have been this year. One thing is certain, though – the monsoons have been coming and going steadily later over time – but even that, I recently read in a Met. Office report in the papers, has been actually happening gradually over nearly a century, so nothing very recent and drastic. Perhaps the farmers have to readjust their sowing routines, and almanac writers postpone the pujas to a more salubrious part of the year!). It rained for three days at a stretch before Diwali this time, and now the sky is blue, the sun is mild gold, the nights are long and cool. My heavy work season ends with November: after eight continuous months, I’ll be able to sleep on Sunday afternoons once more. As soon as the vegetable prices come down a bit, things will be perfect for a while at least, barring unforeseen calamities of a natural or political sort. Dare I hope that it will be a good, long winter this time?

Indeed, I am more and more deeply thankful to Providence every passing day for all that I have been given. Things could have been so infinitely worse in such infinitely different ways! Some lines from Tagore which were a favourite of my grandfather’s keep coming back to me:

তুমি যত ভার দিয়েছ আমায় করিয়া দিয়েছ সোজা 

আমি যত ভার জড়ায়ে ফেলেছি সকলি হয়েছে বোঝা।

You have lightened all the burdens you have put upon me/ All those that I have entangled myself in have become a drag. In that spirit, I am severing ties with unnecessary and irrelevant people: I’d have been far better off if it had dawned on me decades ago that most people in life are a nuisance at best, a burden at worst; I am far better off without the company of all but that tiny handful who care for me. For all the rest, the businessman’s attitude to his customers is the sanest of all. Block them all out if they are not paying you for encroaching upon your time and attention.

In one of the episodes of the newly released (season 3) Netflix series The Crown, the prime minister of the UK in 1966, Harold Wilson, tells Her Majesty the Queen ‘You can’t be everything to everybody and still remain true to yourself’. How odd that you can learn the same lessons from life whether you are a political bigwig or a small-town private tutor all your life…

A bit of input about the feedback I have received lately. Apparently most people access this blog via their phones these days. The problem is, what they usually see is the ‘light’ or ‘mobile’ version, on which – apart from the difficulty with legibility – all the links do not show up. For that you have to click on the ‘view web version’ link given at the bottom of the page, and then zoom in so that you can read the stuff that becomes available. I have also been told that I would probably get much more by way of comments if I posted on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram instead, which, rather than blogs, are currently all the rage. Well, as to that, I am simply not interested.

Fun fact: I just made a mental calculation in the course of my evening walk yesterday. Over the last twenty years, I have walked between fifteen and twenty thousand kilometers in this town itself. Not bad, eh, even if I say so myself?

These days my pupils cut classes even for forty-minute, twenty-mark class tests in school. When I ask some of them why they need to, their uniform answer is that they are always ‘unprepared’ till the night before an examination. When I ask next whether or not this very sharply contradicts their other claim that they are ‘studying all the time’, they just stare blankly. As, in fact, do most of their parents. Just reflecting.

One last thing for now – I have seen how widespread the use of ‘app cabs’ has become in our metro cities, and how cheap and convenient they are for the likes of me, who use cars very sparingly anyway. I am looking forward to the day the same thing happens in my small town. I am going to sell off my car at once, and never buy another. The one I have right now is the sixth car in a row since my dad bought our first, back in 1973, and I have had my fill of owning them. 

The experience of writing about Abhijit Banerjee

I have been reading the papers and scanning social media commentary in this country closely in connection with the subject since the day I posted my little note on Abhijit Banerjee winning the Nobel Prize for Economics this year. An already deeply tired and cynical man, I have been horribly chagrined by what I have seen. I am coming to that, after clarifying a few things about my position.

Unlike most people in this country, I do NOT set much store by awards and other forms of public recognition. I know how prizes are given in our schools these days: I have been a judge at all kinds of contests for years before I gave up participating in disgust. At a vastly higher level, the Bharat Ratna, for example, has been so sullied and degraded over the years that many honest, decent and wise people would politely decline it in public and grimace with distaste in private. Book awards like the Pulitzer and the Booker, likewise: these days, it sometimes seems to me, you have to be essentially a failure with readers at large to even figure on their shortlists! As for the Nobel, most prizes in the sciences are given very late in the lives of the achievers, and many great achievers are never recognized at all. The prizes for literature and peace have always been heavily biased by politics one way or the other (Gandhi never got the peace prize, nor Tolstoy the literature!), so much so that a great French philosopher once rejected it as ‘a sack of potatoes’, and I guess Barack Obama got it just because he, a Black, had won the US presidency without triggering off a civil war. The economics prize has usually gone to those who have done theoretical work as apologia for the capitalist system, though lately the Nobel Committee seems to be trying to pose as more liberal and humane by recognizing scholars who remind us that for the vast majority of humankind, capitalism does not make life very liveable, let alone enjoyable. Hence Amartya Sen and Abhijit Banerjee.

In this country, we suffer from a strange admixture of violent contradictory emotions whenever Nobels are declared – those of us who have at all heard about it, and care at all. We suffer from a huge inferiority complex: a nation of 1.35 billion which wins so few of them, just as it is with Olympic golds. We go wild with joy and self-congratulation, as though we have won the Prize personally. We very, very quickly forget those who have won it before: how many can even remember what Venky Ramakrishnan did, leave alone C. V. Raman? We are sometimes ashamed, as when Kailash Satyarthi won the prize, because he has worked lifelong for the upliftment of our poorest, most underprivileged and exploited children, and he reminded us painfully, insultingly, of how badly off we are socio-economically, for all our vaunted ‘progress’ since independence, of how little we care, how little we have done to make life better for the worst-off among our fellow citizens.

This time round, the reaction is far more ignorant, savage, and unabashedly political, using that word in the most pejorative sense. They are bickering in the most vulgar language about whether Abhijit Banerjee is really a Bengali, whether settling in America is what has been most conducive to his winning the prize, whether it helps to have a white-skinned wife… my God, from ministers to cybercoolies, housewives to frustrated NRIs, the level of the argument is the gutter, and the level of awareness even lower, if that is conceivable. The utterly idiotic, irrelevant and vulgar comments on my blogpost I shall ignore, of course, but the award for ‘moronic’ goes to the comment writer who said that ‘if you have lots of money and suck up to a lot of white people you can get a Nobel Prize too’. First off, this troll is not even aware that no professor anywhere has ‘a lot of money’, secondly, if that were true then the likes of Bill Gates and Ambani and many of our godmen would have won the prize long ago, and thirdly, for some reason this cretin is absolutely furious about the lifework of a man who has been recognized for something s/he neither understands nor wants to!

In my own review of the book, incidentally, if anyone literate has observantly read it, I have not praised Dr. Banerjee much, and have even pointed out where the real problem with poverty lies – using statements quoted from his own book. Obviously no one I have heard of or read about lately has bothered to actually read the book, or study carefully what he does, what he has been rewarded for (randomized control trials, by the way, are not a new and brilliant invention: they have been routinely used in drug testing by pharma companies for a long time; Banerjee and Duflo’s credit lies in imaginatively and extensively applying them to practical economic research from which useful advice can be designed for governments to implement, regardless of which party is in power and in which country). Some of those comment writers are as ignorant as my maidservant, and far less civilized. Their ‘comments’ are, of course, ignored after I have read the first line, and then they are summarily blocked or filtered off. But it makes me sad, and I shall tell every serious pupil of mine, except maybe those who merely want to become this or that kind of technician rather than educated folks, to flee to more civilized countries, where true scholarship, just like sport, is given far more respect regardless of your age, sex, colour or nation of origin.  India neither wants nor deserves the likes of Abhijit Banerjee and those who talk about them with knowledgeable and sober admiration. I can see what lies ahead. This is how the Dark Ages descend.

Abhijit Banerjee honoured

I read in today's newspaper that Dr. Abhijit Banerjee, professor of Economics at MIT, ex-Presidency College, JNU and Harvard, has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. 

Those who are curious might want to look up my review of his seminal book on this blog, written two years ago.

I smiled quietly to myself, recalling that nearly a decade and a half before Professor Md. Yunus won the Nobel, I had told my pupils about his prospects too, when few people in India - leave alone this town I live in - had even heard about him.

P.S., October 20: I was intrigued to learn from Banerjee's interview to my newspaper today that during the Eisenhower era in the USA marginal income taxes were as high (on the super-rich, that is)  as 95%, a time when America and indeed all western nations were nevertheless growing very fast, mind you, and even under Nixon's conservative administration, 70%. Dr. Banerjee was laughing cynically that somehow the populace at large, rich and poor alike, seems to have forgotten this historical fact, and convinced themselves that marginal tax rates above 40% are sure to spell disaster for any economy! Something I didn't know, and something which very strongly bolsters my arguments on behalf of socialism, though Abhijit underscores the fact that no communist made those laws in the US! At the same time, I strongly agree with Dr. Banerjee that a new-era socialism must focus strongly on pragmatic, efficiently-achievable goals rather than any kind of woolly idealism, which invariably breeds both incompetence and tyranny.

Knowledge, science, governance - and minds

Suppose one has learnt quite a bit of high-school/junior college physics, meaning he knows all about things like Newton’s laws and equations of motion, Archimedes’ principle and Pascal’s law and equations that govern the behaviour of mirrors and lenses, and the propagation of sound, and the basics of thermodynamics and electromagnetism and even the way atoms are supposed to be built and to behave – is that knowledge enough to understand all there is to chemistry? Any modern chemist would say no, while acknowledging that much of his domain overlaps with the physicist’s territory: still, you cannot pronounce on the way acids and bases interact to form an enormous variety of salts on the basis of the laws of physics alone, nor how organic compounds transmute from one category to another under the influence of specific chemicals, temperatures, pressures and catalysts, nor how very large compounds, such as amino acids and proteins, can be synthesized and modified. That is why a separate subject called chemistry still exists, and shows no imminent signs of dying out.

When you move on to the study of life – from the composition, structure and organization of individual cells to the specific study of the character and behaviour of tissues and organs and complex organ systems, meaning particular living species, and given that there are uncounted millions of incredibly different living species on earth from bacteria and diatoms to giant trees and whales and homo sapiens itself, it goes without saying that, though physics is still believed to be the most rigorous, determinate, fundamental Queen of the Sciences, and the study of modern biology is sought to be grounded in a good understanding of physics and chemistry, no biologist or medical researcher will dream of asserting that a good grasp of physics or even chemistry alone will equip you to understand life and its infinite variety and complexity: however unsatisfactorily descriptive, non-rigorous, non-mathematical the biological sciences are, they still exist in their own right, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. A ‘Theory of Everything’, that elusive Holy Grail of physics, even if attained someday, will not take you very far in becoming a good student of evolution or a competent doctor. It is wise to keep this in mind, despite the fact that most physicists sneer at the ‘lesser sciences’.

Our doctors, though they are (for most of the time) dealing with only our bodies – the material part of ourselves, hence most accessible to science as we understand it – are most of the time acutely aware, moreover, that we have something called minds (many biologists would claim that so do many other animals, like elephants, dolphins, chimps, pigs and horses, though admittedly of a far less complex and less multitalented sort), and the mind, though centred in the brain but spread throughout the body via the senses and an unthinkably complicated network of neuro-chemical connections, is so inextricably intertwined with everything the body does and feels that it is almost impossible to treat any really serious malaise, from accident-related trauma to heart disease, without involving the mind in the process. And the mind (as Yudhishthir averred two millennia ago and Asimov concurred a few decades ago, the single most complex piece of organized matter in the universe), still for the most part defies comprehension and conscious, rational control, though the cleverest of men having been trying to understand it for thousands of years. Psychology studies it most directly (alongwith, lately, neuroscience, using fMRI brain scanners), but so have all religions (and their insights are not to be ignorantly scoffed at). From what I have read of history, sociology, economics and politics, they are all diverse ways of studying the same thing, and after millennia of effort, no expert in any one of these fields can claim to have anything more than a partial picture, each often having special techniques of distorting and caricaturing the reality in its effort ot make it manageable and comprehensible (economics, especially of the mathematical variety, would fall flat unless it assumes the pathetic hyper-simplification that Man is nothing but a machine coldly calculating pleasure, pain, profit and loss all the time). That should give us some idea of how complicated the subject matter is. Literature (including, very importantly, biographies) and cinema, moreover, are very powerful ways of not only trying to understand the human mind but to explore its seemingly limitless creative powers. As the Bard said, ‘What a piece of work is Man!’, he himself being a prime exemplar.

It is with this mind that we compose Thus Spake Zarathustra, and sculpt Madonnas, and write Hamlet, and work out e equals m times c squared, and love and hate and laugh and learn and dream. It is with this mind that I long for God (who is this ‘I’? Is it an illusion? Does it mean anything? Where is it located? Is it coterminous with the body and bodily life? Why are some few minds so immeasurably more powerful than the rest? Do collective minds exist?...). It is this I which is reflecting while writing this essay…

The long and short of it is, even a fairly good grasp of the fundamental sciences, physics and chemistry, gives you little or no understanding of what is, or should be, the most important thing of interest to all of us, that which, individually as well as collectively, shapes and guides our destiny.

If this is accepted to be true, isn’t it a frightening thing that of late those who are guiding the fates of nations, heads of governments and CEOs of giant corporations, have very little education outside of one or the other of the sciences?

Don’t we need much more broadly educated people at the helm of affairs than we have right now? And doesn’t that beg the question, what does being ‘educated’ mean?

Just thinking. Swarnava, it is budding physicists like you who give me the courage to wonder publicly like this, those who, despite loving their own subjects, already know that ‘this is not all there is’. Who know and respect and wonder over the fact that some of the greatest insights in science, too, come in dreams…

Travelling, on holiday

Ever since the heady days of childhood silliness ended, I have always been quite sure that if you want to really enjoy a cricket match (as distinct from the primitive tribal intoxication of participating in artificially stirred-up crowd madness), you should watch it in your drawing room - or, better still, bedroom - on TV. You will get closeups, and multiple angles, and expert commentary (with the added blessing of being able to turn that off anytime they get on your nerves), without ever stirring yourself, or having to jostle with hordes of noisy and sweaty people, getting your feet trodden upon, your shirt torn or your pocket picked or your bottom pinched if you are female. If you are watching a pre-recorded video, that is better still, for you can pause it when you are bored or have something urgent to attend to, then come back and resume where you left off when it suits you again.

Visiting the Taj Mahal for the fourth and, I hope, the last time, I had exactly the same feeling. The crowds are getting more insufferable by the decade; videos on YouTube give you the same tour without the expense and the hassle, and any good coffee table book (there are hundreds available) will offer you a treasury of beautiful photographs most of which you will never be able to see with your own eyes, and certainly not in one visit - such as from the air and from the river, at dawn, afternoon and on moonlit nights. Likewise, thanks to some old boys, I have been seeing lovely photos of several different countries, including, most recently, Serbia and Austria, and while I am thankful to them, I am quite sure that I'd not like to spend several lakhs to visit the same. For me, pictures and videos are good enough: one who can see sees with his mind. It's like people telling me that you can't really enjoy watching TV unless you have a jumbo flatscreen. Just because they can't doesn't mean that I can't either. As for the 'been there done that' crowd on Instagram, they can keep on entertaining their own little captive audiences: I know for a fact that that usually means only family and a handful of office colleagues, unless you are a serious celebrity. And visiting someplace like the Vatican City (see this video) is worth it - for me, at least - only if I were some VVIP or super-billionaire, for whom they would make exclusive arrangements, no ordinary tourists allowed while I am taking in the sights... if I simply want to stare hungrily and worshipfully at Michelangelo's Pieta, to my mind the greatest sculpture ever made bar none, I can do it here well enough.

At Itimad-ud-Daula's tomb, the real attraction was the tiny museum, where they have set up lovely videos that show you everything much better than walking around the campus can. In fact, the mausoleum looks much better on the screen than in reality: evidently all the renovation and refurbishing has been done only digitally! What made me sad was that all the squirrels have vanished.

Sikandra made me sigh, as always. That fellow Akbar speaks to something truly deep in me: it's like reading In Search of England. Never fails to bring to mind Kipling's magnificent poem. That one, and Gunga Din. And the novel Kim, and the incredible short story titled The Miracle of Puran Bhagat. But I must live in an age when asses with PhDs know that Kipling did not respect India, and Dickens was such a pathetic misogynist....

It would be remiss of me if I did not mention Sandip Solanki, young owner of Indian Homestay and garrulous biker. Though ma and Shilpi rolled their eyes when he claimed that he too has been a teacher of English in his time, I loved the way he and his wife Asha hosted us. God bless. If Durgapur had been a hot tourist destination, I certainly would have run a similar facility on the side.

Pujo has been wonderful. Because I didn't have to see or even hear any of it. Pupu, who is just back from Kolkata, has said দূর থেকে কল্পনা করতে ভারি ভালো লাগে !

P.S., Oct. 09: Another of my dreams fulfilled. I had a wonderful time today, hosting lunch for Pupu and her lovely young colleagues at their office. Ma and Shilpi were there too. My cup runneth over...

Oh, and do look up what my daughter wrote recently about 'Adulting'. I have written about lots of things in my time, but never about this. I somehow became adult without ever finding time to think about it :(

Gandhi, 150 years

Albert Einstein said 'Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.'

In Lage Raho Munnabhai, he says at the end 'Soch lo... do you want to listen to what I am telling you to do, or prefer to sit below my hallowed portrait on the wall and do the most despicable things?'

And this time round, all the political parties are vying frantically with one another to claim him as their exclusive inheritance.

Remember, Tagore first called him 'Mahatma', and Subhas Bose habitually addressed him as 'Father of the Nation'.

Meanwhile, senior journalist Sankarshan Thakur wrote this article in today's edition of The Telegraph of Kolkata. He is the one with whose my own views concur, most darkly. You won't remember me, Sankarshan-da, but we sort of rubbed shoulders once. Thank you.

Mahalaya again

আজ আবার মহালয়া। আকাশ মেঘাচ্ছন্ন, ভোরবেলা থেকে বৃষ্টি হচ্ছে, কখনো টিপটিপ, কখনো ঝিরঝির।  তিন-চার দিন ধরে এই চলছে, তাই হাওয়াটা বেশ ঠান্ডা, জলটা কনকনে - এরকম মহালয়া আগে কখনো দেখেছি বলে মনে পড়ে না। 

আবহাওয়া দপ্তর বলছে পুজোর দিনেও বৃষ্টি হবে। নতুন খবর নয় অবশ্য; গত কয়েক বছর ধরে এরকমটাই হচ্ছে। হোক, আমার আপত্তি নেই - রাস্তায় কিছুটা হলেও মানুষের বাঁদরামি কমবে, আর তাছাড়া আমি তো এখানে থাকছিও না! শীতকালটা যদি একটু তাড়াতাড়ি আসে তাতেই আমি খুশি। এবারে গ্রীষ্ম শুধু পাগল করে দিতে বাকি রেখেছিলো। 

এই দিনে আমি জন্মেছিলাম। ছাপ্পান্ন বছর হয়ে গেলো! মা বলছিলো সেবছর নাকি দুবার দুর্গাপুজো হয়েছিল। খুবই আশ্চর্য ব্যাপার হয়ে থাকবে - আমার জীবনকালে আর একবারও দেখিনি। 

বাবা চলে গেলো তাও দুবছর হল। কোথায় আছে কেমন আছে কে জানে। আমি তো লোকদেখানো আচার-অনুষ্ঠান করি না, তা এই আমার তর্পণ। আমার মেয়েও আমার জন্য ফি-বছর এইটুকু করলেই হবে। 

বহু ছবি স্মৃতির পর্দায় সরে সরে যায়। তবে অনেক ছবিই ঝাপসা, অনেক ছবি ময়লা, কদর্য। সেসব যদি মুছে ফেলতে পারতাম তাহলে আজকের এই অনেক পরিশ্রম, অনেক ধৈর্য, অনেক প্রার্থনালব্ধ আত্মপ্রসাদটা আরো নিষ্কলুষ হতো - সেটুকুই যা আক্ষেপ। তা নাহলে বলতেই হয়, বেশ আছি। 

Writing on the wall

Two years ago, in a dark and anxious mood, I wrote a post here titled Farewell to Tagore? Do look it up. And in this connection, read Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri's very bitter satire in today's newspaper regarding how dangerous it is becoming to read and quote and swear by Tagore these days. History repeats itself in very unexpected and sinister ways...

But as I said before, I actually wonder about a far deeper malaise. Does this entire country - or at least that vast part of our population which is below 35 - care? And the way they have been brought up, does civilization and culture mean anything to them at all, anything worth respecting and preserving? Whether I look at youngsters 'living it up' in pubs or politicians of all hues bickering like the most vulgar of riffraff in our most august institutions, universities and legislatures, I tend to think not.

Besides, who says that we must lament because the liberal-democratic ethos is under threat from authoritarianism of various hues? My view, which has been hardening over the last two decades at least, is that liberalism was a very big lie anyway, always was: they are liberal only when they can have their own way, unchallenged. So whether they are free traders or feminists or gays or vegans or environmental activists or whatever, and however loudly they scream from the rooftops about their commitment to the sacredness of personal freedoms and the right to free thought and expression, when the chips are down they only allow you the freedom to agree entirely with them - and if that is not intolerant authoritarianism in the flimsiest disguise, what is? Now one of my strongest beliefs stemming from a close reading of old and contemporary history is that when any ideology inclines too far towards insanity, it invariably provokes insanity of the reverse kind in reaction. So now all over the world a lot of straightforward strong men (mostly men, yes) unfettered by sympathetic consciences have begun to call a spade a spade, and are going all out for a return to honest, in your face authoritarianism - the way the world has been run for millennia, actually. Who pretends to be surprised, and why?

Still more cars and bikes?

I am now getting fed to the gills over the collective breast beating in the media about the slump in automobile sales. There’s so much stupidity, ignorance, bad faith, sheer cussedness and hidden agenda sloshing around in the muck that it is enough to make any sane man want to throw up.

First, they are terribly worried that the slump in auto sales – which now apparently makes up half the organized manufacturing sector – is a sign of deep rooted malaise in the economy as a whole. The GDP growth rate is slowing down, and that is apparently an unquestionably BAD THING. Who says so, and why should an economy keep growing very fast endlessly? It’s not as if we are not growing at all; in fact, even the worst doomsayers are admitting that we are still growing at almost 5% per year, which is much faster than we managed for the four and half decades before 1991, and much faster than all the richest economies are managing to do; as the GDP keeps growing bigger, it becomes increasingly harder to maintain the same growth rate year on year, as anyone with basic common sense and primary school math ought to understand (5% of 10,000 is a much bigger figure to attain than 5% of 100!) – obviously journalists don’t fall into that category;  that a single sector slowdown could so badly affect the overall growth rate should be a matter of worry and shame (why have all other sectors taken together, including that darling of the pinhead millennial generation, smartphones, failed to shoulder a bigger part of the burden?), and why do we still not understand that limitless high growth in a finite world might actually be a deadly disease (in the human body it is called cancer)?

Who are the people who are predicting doomsday – mindless journalists apart? One class is those who are unthinking votaries of the endless growth ideal: I have already mentioned them, and I’ll come back to them shortly. Another is those who pretend that their hearts are bleeding over job losses, though the much more likely fact is that they stand to lose vast fortunes because they hold huge chunks of shares in auto companies (the billionaire quoted in The Telegraph report could well be a case in point): it makes me sick to see tycoons shedding crocodile tears over the loss of some of the most miserable jobs in the country (recall the complaints of the workers who went on strike at a Maruti-Suzuki plant a few years ago). The third is those who were thrilled to bits that we had grown a very large auto manufacturing industry, imagining in their blissful ignorance that that would mean being recognised by the world as a technologically ‘advanced’ country, though the fact is that all the technology we use in our factories, from engines to windscreen wipers, is borrowed and copied from foreign sources, German or Japanese, Korean or French: what we do is what they disdainfully refer to as ‘screwdriver technology’, merely putting together according to their instructions what they have imagined, designed, tested and put on the roads. The fourth would be those who will happily wield any stick to beat the Modi government with: it’s all that wretched man’s fault, and he’s going to ruin us all! I don’t carry a brief for him, and I don’t think very highly of the way he is running the country, but this is reaching absurd proportions. They make believe that all our previous PMs were paragons of virtue as well as competence, and that is very, very far from the truth! Suppose there had been twitter in the era of Deve Gowda or Charan Singh?

Why do we need to keep on producing endless millions of cars and two wheelers every year? When shall we start giving a thought to how they are clogging up every street and alley, how they have made traffic jams an insufferable permanent feature of life in every city, how they are killing and maiming hundreds of thousands every year, how much they are polluting the air, how they have caused our oil import bill to balloon, how dependence on them instead of on foot and bicycles and the like is leading to an obesity epidemic, and how most cars, countless surveys show, stand around idly on roads or in garages or parking lots for most of the time?

I should argue that it is a good thing that the demand for private motor vehicles of all sorts is slowing down. I hope it is a permanent phenomenon. The slowdown might not be directly a result of an overall economic slump at all, but due to the fact that demand has reached a saturation point. As it is, we know that demand has been artificially pumped by criminally lax traffic control laws and too-easy credit, quietly encouraged by governments hungry for tax revenue, coupled with the fact that from Audis to Bajaj Pulsars, cars and bikes have been status symbols cutting across all social divisions for a long time. So every fly-by-night businessman wants to flaunt a fancy limousine as much as every slum-dwelling unemployed young son of a rickshawallah wants to zoom around on his own two wheeler, with all the nasty consequences listed above. Who will gain from that continuing endlessly? And perhaps the steam is running out of that artificially-inflated demand balloon – perhaps the bad loans are now piling up too fast for the banks to keep dangling the carrot of cheap loans any more? And perhaps there are too many fancy cars and bikes on the roads already for them to be aspirational any longer? As the banker Uday Kotak has wisely counselled the auto industry, they should start thinking seriously of other kinds of business, because cars are no longer an aspiration in this country: even his own son, a billionaire’s heir, apparently finds it much more sensible to depend on Uber and the like.

I have long cried myself hoarse saying that so far as transportation – especially road transportation – is concerned, a poor, congested, oil scarce, socially undisciplined country like ours should have followed the European or Japanese model of development, and most certainly not the grossly wasteful American one. Alas, we chose to do just the reverse, and we are now reaping the bitter harvest. But maybe we are beginning to learn some lessons at last. All future developments in India in this sphere should be aimed singlemindedly at improving public transport all round (everything from a/c buses to metro rail to Uber/Ola to e-rickshaws), and discouraging private vehicles so strenuously that they gradually become extinct. The overall social benefits would be so huge as to be nearly incalculable.

As for those who think that a slowing GDP-growth rate is the worst of all imaginable evils, I can only click my tongue with pity and contempt, and tell them to go and read books like J.K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society or Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics. For a long time, we have needed redistribution much more than endless growth: those who will not listen simply don’t deserve to be reasoned with.  

Addendum to the 'Population Bomb' post

If India’s population could have been held down even to the 1971 level (around 550 million – which would be gigantic by any standards already), we could have been two and half times richer per capita as we are today at the current GDP level, which would have put us firmly among the middle-income countries in the world. Reflect on that, please?

There would not have been the kind of unthinkably huge unemployment, underemployment and disguised unemployment problem as we have today: two million plus candidates sitting for school service qualifying exams when there are just a few hundred or at best few thousand vacancies, and people so desperate to get jobs with a modicum of security, even with very modest salaries, that MBAs and PhDs routinely apply for teaching positions in primary school, or as peons and clerks in government offices, knowing that there are tens of millions who are far worse off, cleaning sewers manually, hauling building materials at construction sites for a pittance, or working as virtually bonded labour, whether that be for old fashioned roadside eateries, vehicle repair workshops and domestic service or with new fangled body shoppers like Amazon. Only those who have lived mollycoddled and secure lives insured by their parents – that would be barely 10% of the population – can live in denial of this elephant in the room. I am ashamed to think that 99% of my ex students belong to that category!

We are still producing nearly 50,000 babies a day (half the babies born on the planet are Indian: did you know that?), adding anything between 4 and 12 million to the job-seeker army every year, on top of the vast existing army of the unemployed, mind you – no country, not the ones with the best technology, most capital, brightest ideas and most intense political will can keep on creating jobs for that kind of number year on year – as both Amit Shah and Mamata Banerjee have publicly admitted in their more candid and despairing moments. We are happily oblivious that we are sitting on a recipe for surefire social disaster: an enormous number of this virally growing army is sure to turn to every kind of unsocial and antisocial behaviour, from beggary to crime and organised political thuggery, just because those are the only ‘careers’ open to them, until our country becomes entirely dysfunctional, where nobody except the biggest tycoons (a few ten thousand people in a land of 1.4+ billion) can keep their lives, dignity and property safe any more. It takes a very special faculty to be blind to the fact that this is already happening!

One of the stupidest excuses I hear is ‘why should we mend our ways when the rich western countries are eating so much more and polluting so much more?’ I have grown tired over four decades as a teacher telling little children that pointing fingers at others’ misdemeanours never takes away your responsibility for correcting your own. Even if that contrary argument were true, 60-65 million Germans, however hard they try, cannot drink more water or shit more than 1400 million Indians do! As I have often said in many other contexts, you can be so open-minded that your brains fall out.

As for the old canard that India continues perpetually to be ‘rich’ in natural resources, this is either so ignorant and naïve or so bloody-minded that I hate to even engage with it. One simply needs to look up hard data from the best sources to find out what population pressure has already done to our forests and wildlife and groundwater reserves and soil fertility, and what the most conservative projections show for 2040-50 if we still merrily go the way we are going.

Finally, addressing the request that I should take cognizance of the ‘many other serious problems’ that we are supposedly facing – such as endemic corruption in politics and government at all levels – I would like my detractors to name three which do not either stem directly from overpopulation or are grossly exacerbated and sometimes made totally intractable because of it (the inability of governments in the most densely populated states to acquire land for the most urgently needed public projects, from hospitals to roads, is a glaring case in point).

Ultimately, if it all boils down to the fact that there are lots of supposedly educated people around, even among my readers, who have already closed their minds and will not be swayed by fact and reason, I am all the more convinced, most gloomily, that we are fated for a very nasty future.

The time has come

It is nice to see that one of my recent posts (A little slower, if you please)  has not only climbed quickly to the top of the most-read list but also brought back an old one: Is speed always conducive to human happiness?  I was sure it isn’t when I was very young, and the older I grow the more convinced I become that I have been right all along – and how ironical this is considering that as a teacher I have always urged my pupils not to dawdle, dally and procrastinate!

Another beloved post, A small dose of political philosophy, has also got back into that list on its own. As I have said and not once before, I keep wondering what brings people back to certain posts, who those people are, and what they are getting from reading these things I have written.

I hope that more visitors would read the post titled Anne Frank and my daughter, and those who have read the classic Diary of a young girl should get their hands on the new book I have mentioned there, The Legacy of Anne Frank: they are sure to like it.

During my latest trip to Delhi, I visited Banjara Market in Gurgaon, because Pupu needed to buy a large ornate mirror and some other bric à brac, and that is a place where such things can be bought dirt cheap, unlike places like the Cottage Industries Emporium, which have become watering holes for the dirty rich. These tribals have set up quite a little village by the roadside amidst the forest of residential towers in the new city. They live in makeshift huts – though they even have water coolers and washing machines around, I couldn’t figure out what they use for toilets – and while they flaunt smartphones and motorbikes and streaked hairdos, they still dress traditionally, and work and play are simultaneous, with mothers nursing, housewives making roti on open chullahs while scolding their husbands for trying to make foolish deals, wizened grandmas sagely pulling away at burbling hookahs and rolling their eyes at all and sundry. Some of the young girls, covered head to foot in flowing salwar, kameez and dupatta, looked like living Madonnas, putting all the cute and expensively dolled up customers with their assembly-line produced waxed legs, plunging necklines and donkey-like features to shame. They were living poorly and precariously by metro standards, it was clear enough, but definitely much better off than they would have at home in their native states. Interestingly, the wikipedia article on the Banjara tribe says they have enjoyed gender equality for ages. I wonder whether the civic authorities will give them a permanent and better settlement deal someday, or just uproot them with bulldozers and drive them away one fine morning. India is a strange, beautiful, and truly heartbreaking country.

I have been reading in my newspapers that the governments both at state and central level and thinking of ‘getting serious’ about reining in the plastic menace. Why don’t they dig their heels in and simply close down all the factories producing single-use bags and other containers? Talk about arrant hypocrisy. Meanwhile the world gets self-righteously furious that the president of Brazil laughs to hear that the great Amazon rain forest is burning away… and that reminds me, for those of you who are Netflix subscribers, do watch the three-episode show called The Future of Water. If I had my way, I would ask every one of my current pupils and their parents to do so.

My daughter has started her working career with an NGO that concerns itself with the education of disadvantaged children. Twelve years ago I wrote I fervently wished that she would do something meaningful, and not fritter away her life as a corporate executive selling soap. I am deeply thankful to Providence that she has been allowed to go that way, and I have lived to see it. Of course there will be other jobs, more education and new hobbies in the years to come, but I hope she always enjoys doing what she is allowed to do, and finds fulfillment. I have wished the same for all my pupils; alas, most of them and their parents did not even understand what I was blessing them with.

One last thing for now. I have been changing some very old habits with age, though very slowly. For ages I hoped that lots of old boys and girls will keep in touch; for ages I also did all I could to stay in touch. I have accepted with a profound sigh that that doesn’t happen: at least, not to me. Most of them just forget; at worst they vilify me from far away. The best of them gradually drift away after keeping the line alive for many years at a stretch. So these days I have stopped bothering about returning calls. It used to be a habit of mine to reply within 24 hours by email at least with a ‘thank you for writing, will get back at length very soon’; these days I don’t do that any longer with people who suddenly decide to communicate after a gap of a decade or more. It has happened far too many times that they write tentatively, then get back ecstatically once or twice when I respond with warmth and eagerness, and then simply fall off the planet again. It’s just not worth it by any yardstick to get back to such people at all.

[The title of this post, for those who cannot recognise it, comes from a poem of Lewis Carroll’s titled The Walrus and the Carpenter:

“…the time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things,

Of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings,

And why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings.”

I shall not waste my time trying to explain the humour in those lines.]