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.]