I 'teach' disrespect. Huh?

I hear from my boys in class that some so-called teachers in that school where I, for my sins,  taught for fourteen years are still abusing me behind my back, seventeen years after I quit – futilely, it goes without saying, because they are too dense to notice that what they think and say about me hasn’t mattered one whit to my professional reputation. The real reason is of course only impotent envy, one of the basest, and alas, most common of human emotions, especially if those humans are middle class Bengalis. They have said many ugly things about me in the past; now, apparently, all they can think of to revile me is that I ‘teach’ my pupils to ‘disrespect’ their parents. It could be brushed away with a derisive laugh of the Bertie Wooster vintage, but let me do them the honour of taking cognizance and analysing why I should do such a thing if I do it at all…

One reason I might behave like that (and have been apparently doing so for donkey’s years) is that I am simply mad. An interesting conjecture, really, and one that not a few have toyed with. If I am, there’s no help for it at this late date. But I wonder if it is possible for a madman to be professionally successful – and that too in a sober job like teaching – and if it is, shouldn’t madness be prescribed for young people who are aspiring to be as successful or more so?

But just suppose I am not mad. Why, then, should I ‘teach’ youngsters to disrespect their parents? Won’t the word spread far and wide soon enough, and seeing that it is the parents who pay me, won’t they get miffed enough in bulk to see to it that their wards stop attending my tuition: my only source of bread and butter for all these years? Why, instead, have the numbers kept swelling over the last two decades to the extent that my real problem is having to handle too many people, and making many of them unhappy by having to turn them away? If I did teach my pupils to be disrespectful, how have I managed to keep that a secret from the parents for all these years – a secret which, curiously enough, lots of schoolteachers in my town are privy to?

Then again, most of these wiseacres forget that I have been (quite a successful-) parent myself. My daughter attended my classes like any other pupil for several years. Naturally I dealt with them the same way and said exactly the same things to all of them: and look, my daughter has not grown up to ‘disrespect’ me! Which means that I either don’t ‘teach’ them anything like that,  or that I am a very poor teacher, doesn’t it?

I teach English, which involves not only dealing with the prescribed textbooks of the ICSE syllabus but also handling things like grammar, comprehension and composition. In the course of such things, I discuss many things with my pupils indeed, so that they can understand their texts well and learn to express themselves intelligently, coherently and in a well-informed manner. Among hundreds of subjects, the issue of parent-child relationships certainly crops up now and then, as for instance when we discuss what to write in an essay titled ‘Teenagers should be given more freedom’, or ‘Parents always know best’. I tell them to think and write in a rational, balanced manner, taking note of what keeps happening in the real world, so most of them agree with me that though parents may as a rule have their children’s best interests at heart, that is not a universal truism – many parents can be very bad parents – and even the most well-intentioned parents may not always know what is good for their children (like mothers who never allow their children to go out to play, and ply them constantly with junk food), and some even give highly anti-social lessons to their children (‘always put your self-interest above those of others, never share your notes!’), which goes a long way to making anti-social adults of the next generation. Then there are stories in which we actually have to read about very stupid or nasty or indifferent parents, such as when we discuss David Copperfield’s guardians, or Harry Potter’s – and there was this story by Mrinal Pande called Girls in the ICSE syllabus some years ago which showed how women in the household can oppress girl children, and, in the current syllabus, how Jessica in The Merchant of Venice hates her father Shylock for being a cold-hearted, money-grubbing monster, or Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Little Match Girl, where the beggar child freezing on the street doesn’t dare to go home because her father will beat her if she doesn’t bring any money, or the woman in T. S. Arthur’s story An Angel in Disguise who died of a stroke as a result of ‘idleness, vice and intemperance’, and who took so little care of her children that the neighbours agreed the children would be better off in a poor house. Yes, while dealing with such things, I do rub it in that just giving birth to children doesn’t qualify you as a good parent; you have to achieve that status through much learning and very hard work. When I am doing that, I am trying to make a better generation of parents for the future: I am saying ‘respect’ should not be taken for granted as an automatic privilege, it must be earned. Isn’t that a big part of what a teacher is supposed to do?

Also, I have heard all my life about real-life parents who scald their children with hot irons or throw knives and cleavers at them as a way of ‘disciplining’ them – the wonder is that in this country most children grow up to forget such horrors, or forgive their parents, or come round to believing that that is indeed the right way to bring up children. Now while I do NOT believe in pampering children – my daughter has been brought up under a pretty strict regimen of do’s and don’ts – I have also always believed that such creatures are not parents but perverts, and should be locked away: most people in this country might not know this, but they indeed are, or their children are taken away to foster care, in all civilized countries. My own daughter has been taught ever since she became capable of thinking that if your father behaves like a monster, he stops deserving respect as a father; treat him like the monster he is. Aren’t we all aware that in this country lots of parents are spendthrifts or irresponsible drunks, many parents sell off their girl children or marry them off underage or force them into early labour, and other horrors too awful to mention? Whom are we fooling when we pretend not to know such things? What kind of future India are we building by telling our children that they should ‘respect’ us regardless of our faults and crimes – indeed, that it is forbidden to even think that we, being parents, can have any faults at all? Aren’t many of the millions of criminals in jail right now parents too? Should they, too, be respected?

And there is something else that I try to teach my youngsters in this connection – that ‘respect’ involves courtesy and consideration, though never unthinking deference and obedience. I see too little of courtesy and consideration from youngsters to their elders in this country, within the family and outside: evidently that is not what they are ‘taught’ at home or in school. In many countries, young people are taught much better to yield a seat in the bus or train to any elderly person, not just to their own parents, not to push ahead of them in queues or shove them aside while walking, not to use loud and vulgar language in the presence of much older folk. I wish our parents and so-called teachers tried teaching such good manners. I should, if I like to think of myself as a gentleman (or woman), treat all elders with courtesy and consideration, even while not listening to everything they say, when I know they are saying foolish or wrong things, as they sometimes do. Isn’t that something we elders should try to teach our young more strenuously?

So yes, though I do not bring up such issues unless we are doing something directly connected to the syllabus and question papers they would have to face, I do indeed talk in a rational, factual, un-hypocritical way about parents and children and what the ideal relationship between them should be like. Some children, I hope, learn good lessons from me, some don’t; some parents know and approve, some don’t: I really don’t care, because I have the backing of the best authorities, philosophical, legal and pedagogical, behind me as well as my own conscience; it has never hurt my professional interest, and you can’t teach an old dog new tricks – this is the way I have worked all my life, this is the way I shall go on working till the end, cocking a snook at all my pathetic detractors.

But I have a theory about why insistence upon blind parent-worship is so strong in this country. Shall I tell you?

Well, let me save it for  a future blogpost…

Universal basic income: prescription for disaster?

I have written over and over again about the necessity of socialism in order to achieve anything like real civilization in human life, and about the gross evil of extreme and growing economic inequality all over the world – the latter, I am pleased to see in a rather weary and cynical way, is beginning to grasp the attention and stir the anxiety of a lot of thinking people even in positions of wealth, power and responsibility lately – and I am much exercised by the spreading idea of putting some sort of ‘universal basic income’ (UBI for short) guarantee into place within the short- or medium term. A lot of people, from Mark Zuckerberg to Nobel Prize-winning economists to the long-serving chief minister of the tiny Indian state of Sikkim are rooting for the idea. 

Many people are claiming, very plausibly, that UBI will not only go a long way in reducing inequality, but will prove to be much simpler and cheaper overall to implement than the plethora of complex and leaky social welfare schemes that most governments currently run, give the average citizen greater choice about the way s/he wants to live life, and could perhaps be the best protection against the sort of widespread social chaos that could arise out of very large scale unemployment stemming from increasingly universal automation – something that is inevitable within the next half century, and something that is unravelling the social fabric as nothing else has done since the first Industrial Revolution began more than 250 years ago.

Why am I not too keen on looking at UBI as a panacea, then?

Firstly, because I do not think that a genuinely meaningful UBI scheme will ever be feasible within the existing capitalist order. As the professor in this article calculates, trying to guarantee a measly $12,000 a year to every US citizen – hardly a guarantor of a decent standard of living at current prices! – will call for transferring something like $3 trillion from the rich to the poor: aiming for a higher per capita figure could raise the figure to ten trillion. Does anyone believe even for a moment that the richest 1%, who control nearly 50% (or more) of the country’s wealth (conditions are more or less the same in India) could be ‘gently persuaded’ to give up that sort of money to help the vast majority live in security and decency?

Secondly, because as an ‘elitist’ from lifelong experience who cares more for other people’s welfare than most people seem to care about their own, I am convinced that giving people free money to spend as they wish is not a very good idea: it is pretty well established that a very significant chunk of the populace would spend the money on drink, gambling and buying basically useless gizmos (like new smartphones or motorbikes every year) than on food, shelter, healthcare or education for their children. Call me names if you like, and I don’t like the situation one whit myself – but it hardly changes reality.

Thirdly, and most importantly, I think that UBI addresses only a small part, the economic part, of the crisis looming over us. And I believe (I may be wrong) that far too few people are yet worrying about what worries me. To put it very briefly: how will a society filled with vast hordes of unemployed people with money enough in their pockets survive for long? That is not wholly an imaginary dystopia, it is already a (though not-yet-all-pervasive) reality for those who have eyes to see with. I wrote in a post titled Technology in a demented age that ‘I know there are many hundred million people in the world today with too much money, too much time hanging heavy, too little responsibility, too empty brains and no real passions of any kind, who need to be kept constantly engaged and entertained…’ and you can check this out for yourself, really, though schoolchildren are still writing trash in their essays about people being ‘busy’ all the time. What on earth are they busy with? I see folks swarming in shopping malls even on weekday mornings whenever I care to go and look; enormous numbers are going to wedding- and other feasts or attending noisy picnics and festivals of one sort or the other all the time, still bigger numbers are dressing up for hours or glued to their TVs or mobile phones for many hours a day, or zooming around aimlessly on bikes; so many parents chat vacuously before my house every day dropping their kids to the tuition and waiting to pick them up again, obviously because they have nothing better to do… one has to be determinedly blind or stupid not to notice. Of course some people are really very busy, but they certainly do not make up a majority. And remember, this is already true in an age when not all – far from all – are assured of a decent, guaranteed, unearned income lifelong! Trying to imagine what is going to happen when everybody is so assured boggles the mind.

I have a great faith in proverbs – remember they represent wisdom about human nature gleaned and distilled over thousands of years, and human nature does not change significantly over a few generations – and I constantly worry over the proverb ‘An idle mind is the devil’s workshop’. Imagine a society where the vast majority of minds are always idle, and bodies too, because they never have to think of making a living. Colin Wilson wrote in his monumental Criminal History of Mankind that much of the worst kinds of crimes all through history have been committed by people who were bored stiff with a too-easy life. And that was in the days when most people had to keep their noses to the grind from early childhood to old age just to survive. Look around yourself, see how many crimes and offences are committed already by people (even supposedly educated people) whose primary problem is time hanging heavy in their hands, from drug-sodden teenagers screaming and swooning at rock concerts and football games to louts harassing women on the streets to gangs ready to be whistled up by any political party to create a riot just because it relieves the unbearable monotony of their empty lives with a few moments of violent, gory ‘fun’.  Then imagine a whole society full of such semi-humans…

Shall we acknowledge reality before we go ahead with well-intentioned but harebrained schemes which can bring about disaster? How many people, given what we are mostly like, use well-provisioned leisure to become Thomas Jeffersons, Lord Kelvins and Rabindranath Tagores? How many are much more likely to turn into pigs and wolves instead? (In case that last line sounds harsh or far-fetched, I suggest you look up Tolstoy's short story The imp and the crust).

January note

First off, I find it strange that I asked in a blogpost about your predictions for general elections 2019, and no one replied. Is it because no one noticed the question, or because most of India is holding its cards very close to its chest? If that is the case, most exit polls will get the results hopelessly wrong.

I managed to watch Thugs of Hindostan, and I cannot figure out where the loud chorus of disappointment around the country is coming from. There’s good cinematography and passable special effects, enough razzmatazz to please the average cinegoer, the storyline is no more ahistorical and silly than the average Bollywood concoction that manages to break all sorts of box office records, and Aamir Khan – I rather liked his Firangi Malla act, by the way, regardless of the unacknowledged debt to Captain Jack Sparrow – has himself got away with far cruder and sillier things before (remember how someone in Three Idiots getting an electric shock by peeing onto to a wired spoon became wildly popular?), so what’s the problem this time around? Don’t tell me the great unwashed masses of India have suddenly matured so much as an audience that they can’t accept such puerile entertainment any more, and are pining for Godard and Truffaut and Kurosawa?! I myself know a moron who found Queen to be a great movie and now thinks Thugs does not make the grade!

Anyone going to the Kumbh mela this year? Do let me know. My father went to the purna kumbh back in 1977 (it happens once in 144 years), when Prayag saw the largest ever gathering of human beings on the planet. I’d like to know how it goes this time, seeing that there is a yogi at the helm in UP this time, and he has reportedly pulled out all the stops to make the event the grandest imaginable spectacle.

By the way, don’t believe the kind of idiots who live away from Delhi and complain about its bad air. Oh, it’s bad enough, of course, but all the breast-beating you hear on facebook and twitter is journalistic nonsense. I wintered in Delhi, and believe me, the air is worse in my Durgapur. On the other hand, I miss Delhi’s greens and wide open spaces terribly.

I came back to Durgapur in 1987 poor and confused. Then God gave me a modest opportunity, and I built patiently and laboriously on it. It’s been 31 years. I am looking forward to (at least semi-) retirement in five years’ time. My material needs have always been modest, and now that I have brought my daughter up to adulthood, they have become even more so. Simultaneously, people’s demands on my time and effort have become more and more insistent over the last decade. Also, my many other attempts to be useful to society have never been much appreciated. Even worse, people make use of my services then by and large forget me at best and badmouth me at worst. So – and current and recently-ex students, do warn all those you know who are planning to get their kids admitted to my tuition this year – I have grown impatient and intolerant. Any parent who tries to throw his weight around at admission time (‘I’m a doctor/engineer/high official’, ‘I’m a very busy man’, ‘I want you to adjust to my convenience’…) will be sent away with a flea in his ear; I’ll simply thump the bell and growl ‘Next!’ Given that the queue is longer than I can handle and lots of people are waiting to hear that there are a few vacancies still, I will not take any lip from people whose contemporaries were my pupils 25 to 30 years ago; people who I know will not be of the slightest use to me after they have paid me my fee for the last time. I would like to take in only those pupils whose parents are absolutely determined to get their kids in here, and will behave politely and accommodate to all my conditions. All those who have problems with that, please don’t turn up at my door. You have been warned.

Desert trip

I am just back on the first day of the year from another enchanting and perfect holiday trip. If God is watching from on high, I feel more and more like telling Him that I have a lot to be very thankful for.

On Monday, Christmas Eve, Firoz drove ma and me to Kolkata airport. The day started very cold and slightly foggy. The drive was smooth and swift, ending all too soon (these delights matter a great deal to someone who sits at home taking classes for months on end). The airport was horribly crowded – it could almost have been Howrah railway terminus at rush hour. Middle class India is moving around like nobody’s business: and it shows, from the noisiness to the craze for clicking selfies… how utterly rustic most people using hi-tech are! An expensive first-time snack on an Indigo flight, then into Pupu’s arms at Delhi T1, aka Palam airport in another age. Delhi was chilly. A short snooze followed by coffee and snacks, then we were off to Jodhpur via the Mandore Express. I had reserved a first-class coupe: seeing that it needs four to make a proper ensemble, and I have always had fewer or more with me before, this was for the first time in my life. It was an old coach, but quiet, very clean, plush and private, so the overnight trip was a gently-rocking dream.

There was no morning tea served on the train, but we arrived at the ‘Sun City’ early, so it didn’t really rankle. The hotel was nearby, beside the landmark clock tower, and it was superb, with a traditional haveli architecture/décor, very friendly, courteous and helpful staff, fine rooms offering a splendid view of the fort, and a sun-drenched, windswept rooftop garden-restaurant where I could spend the whole day lazing. We were allotted rooms directly after breakfast, then we went on a city tour, taking in the fabulous Umaid Bhavan Palace (though Pupu and I agreed that at the price it was hardly to our taste), the lush, ornate and very well-maintained Mandore gardens (Mandore being the original capital of the Jodhpur royals, and having mythical associations Ravana through his wife Mandodari) where some street musicians, both young and old, tugged at our heartstrings as they strummed on their traditional instrument the ravanahatta (like this); then the Jaswant Thada, home to the cenotaphs of kings without number, and finally the pièce de resistance, the grand and vast Mehrangarh Fort itself. The sights were a feast for the eyes, and my mother amazed us by climbing all those breathless inclines and steep, steep staircases without huffing and puffing, slowing to a crawl or complaining even under her breath. Look at the photos…

We returned to the hotel, lazed a bit, drank beer while Pupu sketched a fountain on the roof, looked appreciatively at the gorgeous lights as we watched musicians singing and dancing with joyful abandon, took a walk around the local market where Pupu found herself a full suit of traditional Rajasthani attire, tasted fafla chaat, downed a sumptuous dinner and turned in early, having admired the sight of the great fort all lit up for as long as it lasted.

At ten the next morning the package tour to Manvar the desert resort began. It was a fast two-hour drive along the Jodhpur-Jaisalmer highway, just short of the little town of Dechu, right on the edge of the desert – and yet the campus was so green that it stole our hearts at first sight. Within ten minutes we had all agreed that it was worth every penny they were charging. A camera-chase after an inquisitive yet bashful nilgai across dry grass and brambles, followed by a delicious and sinfully excessive buffet lunch, hours of lounging on the warm grass followed by a short ‘village walk’, then an evening spent languorously chatting before the heater with our feet snugly tucked inside thick blankets, listening to the dense dark silence of the scrub forest outside from within  a very swank room while the TV murmured away in the background, until it was time for a delicious candlelit dinner (there was too much of everything for us to do justice to) under a sky blazing with stars. What could follow but deep and restful sleep?

The next morning there was a jeep tour of the sand dunes, the high point of which was several hair-raising plunges down inclines you’d think too steep for anything on wheels to cope with. We stopped at a point where the desert stretched out as far as the eye could see: despite having seen pictures galore, the feeling was eerie. The clumps of wild cotton bushes caught our eye: apparently all kinds of animals crawl into them for very cosy shelter on cold nights. Also the fact that the wind was so cold and the sun so hot on our backs at the same time. The quietly chatty driver told me he drove tourists around in season and broke stones for the rest of the year – ‘We are of a very neechi caste,’ he confided, a Bhil, and was delighted when I put my arm around him and told him that despite being a brahmin I didn’t believe in such sweeping social tags, and that I knew by tradition Bhils were so terribly important that for 13 centuries no Rajput could ascend the throne of Mewar without a Bhil anointing his forehead with a tilak using his own blood.

After lunch another jeep ferried us to the last and best attraction of the trip – the camp in the desert. The sun was blazing, so we had a short nap in our luxurious tent until it grew cooler, then there was a nearly hour-long camel ride, timed perfectly to catch the sunset from atop a high dune. The camels could be called ‘cute’ in the teenage girlie sense, with names like Rattu and Senti and Babloo, liquid, gentle eyes and very mild manners notwithstanding the peculiar loud grumbling and burbling they absentmindedly kept up all through. I wish the female tourists (and a few young males too, God help me) didn’t shriek and scream so horridly and melodramatically every time the camels rose, swung and sat down. And it would be a nice idea if they built a platform for riders to hitch on and get off: much less harrowing for them as, I am sure, it would be for the beasts.

It was growing rapidly dark and cold, and the lights came on all around the open campus, electrical as well as flaming torches. Then there was a mesmerizing song and dance show by local performers (Pupu befriended one of them, not much older than she, who had already performed many times around the country and abroad), while we the visitors sat around in a vast circle on gaddis and reclining on bolsters, and liveried servants kept stoking the blazing bonfires and plying us with dainties, papad, nuts and sand-baked gram, tikka, pakora, soup and little chops, besides all kinds of drinks as though we were all kings of yore, until we thought that that would be all for dinner, but the real stuff was waiting for those who still had space in their tummies for it: I didn’t. Many eyes were on Pupu that night, she looked so good and natural in her local costume. By the time we went to sleep, the fan in the tent had been replaced by a heater, and they even gave us hot water bottles to tuck into our blankets and rezai in pukka old British style – truly the icing on a very good cake. We stood gazing at the vast blackness outside before turning in, knowing that there were deer all around, and it would have made my day if I had heard a leopard roar. Five hundred years ago, there really would have been lions for real aplenty.

This was my third Rajasthan trip over nearly a quarter century – I had kept the desert trip for the last – and I shall give that state the highest possible recommendation for tourists. It makes me proud that there are so many nice, quiet, good Indians to know. As I have often said, if I were a millionaire, I’d like to retire to a grand garden villa of my own on the outskirts of a city like Udaipur.

On the 28th, the resort gave us a fine breakfast, and then we were back in Jodhpur by midday. We checked into a just-okay hotel for the afternoon, retiring rooms at the station being unavailable, lunched and snoozed there (it was hot as long as the sun was high in the sky, in end-December!), and took the same Mandore Express back to Delhi at night, arriving at the capital at 6:40 in the morning – thank God for late trains, sometimes! Pupu’s 22nd birthday. Lazed through the day, sipping wine but skipping plans for a sumptuous lunch or dinner because all our systems were protesting against prolonged irregularity and overload, went strolling around the park in Sarvodaya Enclave in the afternoon and to SDA market in search of a cream cheesecake through the IIT campus, cold and desolate in the vacation, in the evening. Turned in early, because Pupu was going off on a solo trip to Mumbai the next morning to assert her adulthood. The temperature apparently dropped to 2⁰ celsius that night, and despite the thick quilts, my ageing bones felt the need for the heater…

The next day, after dropping Pupu off at the airport, we lazed till late, then spent a lovely afternoon sunning ourselves at Lodi Garden. I am truly in love with Delhi’s wealth of greenery now. Made a couple of videos that evening for my YouTube channel, and browsed through books. The 31st was spent on a tour around the city in one of the cars provided by our favourite agency of Singh-jis. Mehrauli – the Qutab Enclave – was good, and very well maintained by the ASI, though I was saddened to see that the famed rustless iron pillar had been fenced off, as I have lately seen so many historical landmarks being treated around the country – I guess a country of compulsive vandals deserves no better. Then the very interesting Garden of Five Senses, where they have even put up something as exotic as a Mayan gateway! And where we lunched on chhole-bhature. Purana Quila turned us off with its milling crowds, but Safdarjung’s tomb, the last bright spot of Mughal architecture before the darkness fell, was quiet and hospitable. A lovely drive along Chanakyapuri the diplomatic enclave – truly, that promenade can vie with the very best in the world – then we were back home, and it was time to pack up. Shilpi had played an excellent though sometimes over-anxious hostess for a whole week.

By 7:30 next morning we were at the airport, and by 12:20 Firoz had picked us up in Kolkata. Another lovely drive, stopping only for lunch at Hindusthan hotel near Gurap – try their vegetarian thaali sometime – and we were back home, safe, sound, tired but happy, by 3:30. Home always feels lovely after a long vacation. And it’s still not ended, because as at the time of writing, Pupu is sending me bulletins several times a day about how she’s enjoying her trip to Mumbai. She’ll be back at the campus today, and – another sign of inherited genes – she has discovered that she too, after a week or so of holidays, yearns to get back to work. Since yesterday, I have resumed classes, as so often in the past.

I love my India. Others can have their Malaysia and Umrica and Ewrope … as the poet said, may I die in the same light to which I first opened my eyes: oi alotei noyon rekhe mudbo noyon sheshey. May our India become the greatest nation on earth again.

For photos, click here.