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.
