Can
anybody tell me why they always hold elections in this blazing (or sweltering
-) heat?
And
while we are on it, why, in an age when we are doing so many things via the
internet, can’t they arrange things so that everyone can vote that way too,
using their laptops or mobile phones from the comfort and safety of their homes?
This
town goes to the polls the day after tomorrow. Given the heat, I am probably
not going. [P.S., April 29: I did go and do my civic duty after all, but only
because the polling station was peaceful and I had to wait for hardly ten
minutes at the booth. Once again, I feel the greatest pity for all those,
especially the policemen, who have to work in such horrible conditions all
through the day: the temperature has soared beyond 40 degrees C by 9 a.m.! I hope the
people who make such decisions will stop torturing so many millions sooner or
later.]
I
have observed this before: for children time apparently passes far more slowly,
so that they are often bored to tears. At least that was my experience. The
seventies and eighties seemed to crawl, despite my having lived a life so busy
that most teenagers and young adults these days can’t begin to imagine it
(those who think they are ‘cool’ because they have started keeping house and visiting
pubs at 22 and had their first real sex at 25, often only after marriage!), and
then between 1987 and 2019 time has passed in a flash: how did it happen, and
why? Or is it only because in childhood one’s memories impinge much more deeply
and numerously upon one’s brain, so that while reminiscing it seems so much
more ‘happened’ in those days when the world was very young… and then one
simply gets tired and bored and busy with routine and stops noticing a lot of
things, because one has grown a thick hide and a dulled sensibility? It is a
fact that I can remember well a lot of students of the previous generation,
while those who have passed through since 2005 have become a blur: most of them
anyway. It is only when I see all the white hair and that my insurance policies
are beginning to mature one by one and there are girls giggling in the
classroom whose mothers were doing exactly the same a while ago that it comes
back to me with a resounding sense of amazement that all those years have
passed by!
I
have been watching a lighthearted Netflix series of somewhat eccentric taste
called Brooklyn Nine nine. As always,
even when I watch things mainly for a laugh, I notice serious things
compulsively. So they work very hard to be politically correct, in the sense
that they feature a police captain who is black and openly gay and all his
colleagues go around strenuously behaving as if he is just one of the guys… and
yet it seems that in today’s climate, where such things are to be taken as
perfectly normal and okay, nobody minds using the kind of language that would
get them kicked out of my house (I would have said any civilized house, but
these days I won’t bet any more) in a jiffy: bosom friends of both sexes loudly
calling each other ‘you bitches’ and ‘you whores’, for instance, and
constantly, casually, referring to the act of fornication the way middle-class
Bengalis exchange notes about their bowel movements! What is the world coming
to?
It’s
been a long time since I wrote stories. I wish I hadn’t got writer’s block. In
which connection, my mother and I have been listening to Saradindu
Bandyopadhyay’s Sadashib stories on Youtube. I didn’t know that B. wrote them
in 1957, at Rajshekhar Basu’s request (look up this blogpost from ten years ago). I was born in 1963, so when my mother
first told them to me, they were pretty new! And what lovely stories too…
Bandyopadhyay could give Conan Doyle a run for his money if they had a level
playing field. They are so cinematic: why hasn’t that occurred to the directors
who are obsessed with Byomkesh?
I
read in today’s newspaper that they are going to start daily flights to Mumbai
from Durgapur from June, and Chennai flights will follow. So that’s one of my
wishes coming true. And I have bought a hookah in Delhi and just started
getting used to it. I might eventually install one in my classroom. Some people
have been urging me to revive my pipe too…
This
post was just to tell people who phone or email or send ‘How are you doing?’
messages on Whatsapp. It bores me to repeat myself, so to the likes of them,
keep an eye on this blog.
