Goodbye 2020, and don't come back

2020 is finally drawing to a close. Virtually every human being will agree that it has been a year like no other in living memory: much worse, even, than the years of world war, I think, because the vast majority of humankind then went on with business as usual, and did not stay cooped up at home in mortal fear, though they knew that tens of millions, no, hundreds, were dying or becoming maimed for life, or destitute, or losing loved ones. It has been tumultuous, infinitely wearisome, difficult and utterly disorienting – on that, too, most people would agree. A relatively small number have also enjoyed it hugely, one way or the other (it is incredible how many people can actually be quite content staying at home doing virtually nothing other than chores for months on end!) and even made sudden huge fortunes or reputations (like ‘experts’ whom nobody had ever heard about before crawling out of the woodwork to luxuriate in their moment under the sun spewing every kind of nonsense and insanity to fuel and sustain the panic). I shall not make a survey of the thoughts of vast swathes of mankind here, though, only put on record bits and pieces of my own experience and reflection.

I experienced early (semi-) retirement. It has been enough for the rest of my lifetime. I have vowed to keep working till my dying day hereafter, so help me God.

The single bit of joyous good luck that I revelled in was that circumstances allowed me, after many years, to spend five whole months with my daughter in three installments: something that only a ‘pandemic’ could have arranged at this stage of our lives. I shall be ever grateful for it.

I was also, thanks to learning about how to conduct ‘online classes’, somewhat freed from the iron shackles of routine that had bound me tightly for three decades: as I have noted before, I shall always stay in touch with my pupils via the internet in future, so that there would be no serious interruption of studies even when I take it into my head to make quick, short and unplanned getaways.

I was even more deeply embittered about the mass of mankind that surrounds me than I had become over a long working life, as I gradually found out how many people – parents of students – are shameless frauds, and will cheat a teacher of his fees after taking advantage of all he has done for their children for months on end. This, after I had voluntarily reduced fees and accommodated every single parent who talked about difficulties by telling them to pay only partially at long intervals. Since I was not keeping tabs and not forcing them to pay regularly online (not having imagined that this absurd shutdown of the entire educational sector would continue for so long, nor that so many people could be so disgustingly dishonest), I was taken for a ride by many ‘clever’ folk. Thank God there were many others of the decent sort, who have supported me loyally all through these difficult times, so that I tided over the crisis without any really serious financial hardship. I do wish we lived in a country where the old, old rule dushter domon ar shishter palon (suppression of the wicked and nurturing of the good) was imposed with an iron hand. I am also truly glad that a lot of parents, and even some students, the more interested and sincere among them at least, are beginning to agree with me that exclusively online studies just do not work over any length of time.

I went travelling to Bangalore and met up with a few old boys back in February. I mention this because it seems to have happened in another time and place…

My daughter had just started on her first job when, after seven months, the lockdown began. Ever since then she has been working from home. She and her contemporaries are going to have a very different experience of life than our generation, that is a dead cert. I hope they cope well.

Pupu has said that their entire circle of friends have decided to forget 2020 once and for all when the new year dawns. It would be nice if that pledge can be kept. I shall look forward with a vengeance to the return of normalcy in 2021. And since everything else has more or less opened up, from tourism to transport, from malls to gyms, from factories to beauty parlours, I shall pray that the schools and colleges too would open up, and soon.

Pupu is twenty four today. Quite the grown up woman. Have a very happy birthday ma. It’s been many years since we were apart on this day. I wish you godspeed with all your enthusiasms and endeavours in the year ahead. Above baba, there is only God, and may He dispose generously.

Pandemic, indeed!

Ten times more people died prematurely in India owing to pollution-related health issues in 2019 than fell victim to the so-called coronavirus epidemic this year. Remind me: was anything shut down nationwide for any length of time to avoid that scourge?

Look up this link before it is taken off the Net.

Digha, four years later

I might not be Rabindranath, but I am peripatetic enough: stuck for a few months in my house and town, I get breathless. So I announced a three-day break and took my mother along on another trip to Digha on the 16th, almost four years since I last visited with Pupu in January 2017.

I won’t write a travelogue here, because my daughter did that already in 2017, and we virtually visited the same places over again. I shall instead make a few remarks on the changes I noticed, especially in this (almost) post-pandemic season.

The road is good, even excellent, in patches, but there are long stretches where it is narrow, or in poor condition, or simply too congested, passing as it does through little market towns where people neither know nor care about traffic rules, their only catch-all solution when there is an accident being to beat up the driver of the bigger vehicle if they can catch him. There were two heart-in-mouth moments, one on the journey outwards, when a man thumbed down a bus and suddenly ran across the road, entirely oblivious of the traffic, and our car missed him by an inch or two, and once on the way back, when a truck tyre blew up right in our faces while both vehicles were going at high speed. The blast was a real shocker, and it’s a wonder that our windscreen remained intact. The trucker went on driving unconcerned, he having 15 or 17 wheels to spare, but we stopped briefly to take deep breaths, and some bystanders came running over to check whether we were okay. Google was quite right in predicting that the average driving time each way would be six hours and a half, but given better road conditions throughout, it can be done in an hour less with far less anxiety.

We put up at the renovated Tourist Lodge this time, and it was good for the price overall – much better than most private hotels in the same tariff range – though the food, which is very good, is rather overpriced. The secure parking and the lush garden were part of the bonus. If you prefer to eat out – there are cheap eateries aplenty within a stone’s throw – this might just be the best place to stay. You cross the road, take a hundred steps, and you are on the beach.

Digha is swarming with happy holiday makers, and for once I did not even mind the noise. We were told that it would be still more crowded during the weekend, and even more so during the year-ending holiday week. Good to see that a lot of people have decided enough is enough, and gone travelling with family and friends. We heard sad stories galore about how badly business had been hit all through March to September, including one from a smart and affable young man selling tea on Mohona beach, who lives in nearby Contai, used to work as a cook in Mumbai, came home at great expense and trouble during the lockdown, and still cannot see any prospects in venturing back. So I am truly glad that things are getting back to normal again, and I curse all those who not only stayed at home all through the year but were quite happy that they could eat well, the rest of the world be damned. My moral sights have become very clear: the biggest problem with the world today is that there are far too many people who can not only afford to ignore the misery of others but even pontificate about how everybody should emulate them. Ministers, doctors, journalists, pensioners, or rentiers, they are fundamentally sick, and bad for all the rest of us who, for economic or mental health reasons, cannot ‘live’ (if that is called living) like them.

The Saikat Sarani walkway, not having been maintained for over a year, looks rather down in the mouth now: many structures could do with repair, replacement or at least a fresh coat of paint. New Digha has become overcrowded with hotels. The entire beachfront from New Digha to Oceania Park to Udaipur was a treat for sore eyes, but we liked best the Mohona point (where we saw gigantic lobsters on sale, along with a huge variety of seafood) and Tajpur, which – besides Mandarmoni – has the only extensive sandy beach available, all the others having been dumped with boulders and laid out with concrete to prevent the sea eroding away everything. Lunch with freshly caught pomfret (when will Bengalis learn to pronounce it correctly?) on the beach was a moment to remember, and we lazed around till almost sunset, watching the white light slowly mellowing to golden and then red, and the horizon vanishing from sight… ma was content, too, because she had not visited these sites the last time she was here, back in 2013, she told me. Dad and she had come to Digha to mark a quiet golden jubilee.

When we were strolling on Digha beach at 9 p.m., it was still crowded with tourists and vendors selling an incredible variety of snacks and knick knacks. The lights twinkling form the trawlers far out at sea gave me a very strange feeling: this is one of those very, very rare cases when I am at a loss for words! Believe it or not, we had to use the ceiling fan at night (after pulling on a blanket, though) in mid-December.

We returned in the afternoon of the third day, yesterday. The class in the evening had rather more pupils than usual, because I had punched classes together, and they were all in a chirpy mood, happy to see friends after a long time, having had to make do with the incredibly tedious and lonely ‘online studies’ nonsense for so many months on end. I was deliberately lenient with them, so we had a little less of studies than usual, but the happiness going around was well worth it.

I’ll see later whether there are some worthwhile photos to put up.

P.S.: Last night, 18th December again, it suddenly became very cold. Weird coincidence this, the very same day as last year!

Two eternally favourite poems

 ... in my own voice.

The first, Dushsomoy (Dark Times) by Tagore,

and the second,

Crossing the bar, by Tennyson.

The socialism of my dreams: a postscript

A little chat with an old boy (not really old, but one who reads my posts intelligently and thoughtfully) led me to think that I should write a long postscript to the last one I wrote on the question of bringing back, or re-imagining, socialism (Socialism, capitalism and human nature). If ever a good socialist society is to be built, the designers will have to keep in mind some very important things, to wit:

1.      Power must never be allowed to be concentrated in the hands of one person, or one small (and fairly homogeneous – like old white males of the same caste, race or religious background) group: it is bound to be corrupted and turned into tyranny very soon. That is one of the few ‘iron laws’ of social psychology. If this cannot be ensured at start, better not to attempt it at all, because it is too costly to undo it at a later stage, in terms of human lives ruined and destroyed. Never again must Stalins and Maos and Pol Pots be allowed to take up the reins.

2.      Though socialism avowedly aims at doing away with all kinds of extreme and unearned privilege, it is the inherent tendency of human society to reconstruct ever new forms of privilege even as old ones are weakened or destroyed. So in Russia we got the commissars and apparatchiki fat cats in place of the nobility of Tsarist times, and in China we got a whole generation of high-living communist ‘princelings’, while in India, we got ministers and bureaucrats milking public sector organizations dry to live the high life, in exchange for guaranteeing their employees assured cushy jobs, however incompetent and ill-mannered and plain unnecessary they were (so government-run industries came to employ three or four times as many people as they actually needed, and kept them in gravy even while they piled up huge losses year after year). Let us get this clear: it is not only traditional aristocrats and priests and rich capitalists who want to live off the fat of the land but almost all of us, and most of us are always looking for a chance to do exactly that – socialism must not create new opportunities for them. Leaving aside only perhaps very old and ill and handicapped people, for all the rest Tolstoy’s interpretation of the Gospel should apply: ‘He who does not work shall not eat’. Remembering always, though, that it is not only farmers and factory workers who ‘work’: great artists, scientists, poets and social workers do, too, and without all their contributions, we should all be still living in the Stone Age.

3.      To ensure that over-concentration of power simply cannot happen, we must retain such ‘bourgeois’ facilities as citizens’ rights enshrined in written Constitutions, as well as elected parliaments, independent courts and a free press – if only because we have not yet discovered any better alternatives. Precisely why I admire the successful social democracies so much: they early realized the deadly folly of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

4.      Carrying on from the previous point, government should not run businesses. Encourage, regulate and tax, yes, to a greater or lesser extent (though how much may be debated and changed frequently), but run, no. They simply cannot. If we still haven’t learnt that lesson after nearly a century of failed experiments in countless countries, we shall never learn, and go on to commit the same folly again. It may still be argued that in times – necessarily short periods – of special exigencies, as after major economic devastation caused by things like war (and, as was in the case of India in the late 1940s and 50s, Partition and extreme poverty and a very small and weak pre-existing private sector), government may briefly step in to organize the fundamentals and ‘prime the pump’ as it were, but as soon as the economy has returned to an even keel, it must step back. And it NEVER makes any sense whatever for governments to run things like hotels! On the other hand, schools and hospitals, yes, because leaving them entirely to profit-seeking businessmen can only spell disaster. But schools and hospitals will be allowed to survive only if they can live up to certain standards of efficiency and sincerity of service: they must not become havens for millions of unsocial job-seekers and petty bureaucrats.

5.      Socialism must never try to crush and exterminate religion. That only builds up titanic forces of reaction, which are bound sooner or later to burst and destroy it. The need for spiritual sustenance and inspiration, no matter how polluted by silly tradition, ritualism and superstition, is too deep and too widespread and too permanent (if the last few thousand years are any guide) to be done away with any time soon. The best that a progressive socialist government can do is to try to keep religions from going for each other’s throats, and to make them as socially beneficent (by way of running hospitals, schools, poorhouses, orphanages, old age homes and relief operations at the time of natural disasters, for example) and as little dependent on utterly nonsensical as well as harmful faith as possible.

6.      Finally, something about women. They do, indeed, make up half the human population, and an increasing fraction of them are now educated, and economically independent, and even in positions of influence and power. Without co-opting them in very large numbers into the neo-socialist movement, it will never succeed in today’s climes. And here I feel wonder at the best of times, despair at the worst. Can women even be made interested in such things? I have personally heard of no major female figure in the socialist movement since Rosa Luxembourg, though I am willing to be educated, and it is my eternal regret that I don’t find women who are willing to discuss such things with me, face to face or via this blog. I am ever willing to engage, except, as I have said before, with loonies – be they male or female.

Thank you, Aveek Mukherjee, for coaxing me into writing this post.

P.S.: I personally consider these essays on socialism so important a part of my work that I have now put all of them together under one tag on the blog.

P.P.S., March 04, 2022: I happened to read a most relevant essay on the subject today by Yogendra Yadav, one of our rising young politicians, and I thought I should provide a link to it for the benefit of like-minded readers.

November notes

It’s early winter, quite the nicest time of the year for me. Mercifully there are very few anxieties and pressing problems bugging me at the moment, and I am more delighted than I can say that my normal at-home classes have slowly got going again, so I have been luxuriating – hence the long delay between posts.

Also watching a lot of movies and TV shows. I actually like Young Sheldon more than The Big Bang Theory, believe it or not. (Oh, did you know that they mention Byomkesh Bakshi in episode 18, season 7 of TBBT? Made me feel good. Maybe Indian culture is really beginning to go places at long last). Newton made me wonder that there are weirdos like that in this country, too – people who make a crazy fetish of taking work and punctuality and personal responsibility seriously, I have seen a few such in real life – maybe that’s one of the few things that make us go on ticking! At a young pupil’s insistence I tried to watch The Haunting of Hill House, but gave it up quickly: ghost stories usually only make me yawn, and that combined with dysfunctional, cantankerous families is more than I can take. The Bureau of Magical Things is OK, but I am actually keenly waiting for the next movie after The Crimes of Grindelwald). The Crown has brought in a new series, but the next few episodes are going to be about the whole sordid Diana saga, so I think I’ll break a habit and go over to the next season straightaway. I watched Bettany Hughes presenting Geniuses of the Ancient World (Socrates, Confucius, the Buddha) and Geniuses of the Modern World (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud) one after the other, but one-hour capsules on titans like them couldn’t really teach me much beyond what I already knew. I guess, though, that in these Dark Ages a lot of people, especially those below thirty, might find them both interesting and instructive…

I have promised myself that I won’t write anything more connected with the so-called pandemic until the crisis has become history, so I won’t, but just one thought: is the whole species going to withdraw once again into hibernation mode if another virus begins to spread far and wide just two or five years down the line?

Diwali night is usually fun night at my house, with a lot of current and ex students visiting. But it was rather dull and depressing this time round without any fireworks. Ah, well…

A visiting old boy showed me the words of blessing and advice that I had scribbled in his notebook on the last day in school, twenty years ago. It made me proud to think that I wouldn’t have to change a word in it, and that he said he wished he had listened more attentively then.

To current pupils especially, do look up the posts under the tabs headed Books and Movies and Travels. To older readers, I’d strongly recommend those under Education.

Bye for now. Maybe I’ll post something again soon.

the rangoli that my mother made for Diwali

P.S.: A pupil reminded me today 'Sir, you haven't told a story online for two months!' Made my day.

Mayhem at barrage, water crisis

(men at work at the damaged lock gate)

 (the gate cordoned off to dry)

Many hundred thousand residents of Durgapur – including myself – went through a harrowing week after water supply from the Damodar Barrage was suddenly cut off on Saturday the 31^st October, following the collapse of one of the lockgates.

Mercifully we are only two people in our household at the moment, and I immediately filled up my little reservoir (unlike most of my neighbours, my father never built a magnum tank underground), the overhead tanks and the oversized bathtub before the taps ran dry. Then the endurance test began.

Repair and restoration work, involving the Irrigation Department of the government of West Bengal (which runs the barrage), DSP engineers and the municipality started apparently on a war footing immediately: but, of course, ‘war footing’ means something very different in India from what it signifies, say, in Germany. In any case, they had to wait four days for the river bed to run dry, cordoning off the affected gate with massive piles of sandbags (very low tech, I think… aren’t there faster, more efficient ways in this day and age?). Then the repair work itself took nearly two days, then they started releasing water from upstream (Maithan dam), and the water level in the feeder canals had to rise to a certain height before the pumping stations could start working again. The water supply was restored at about 9 p.m. on Friday the 6^th. I filled up the tanks again, running the pump at midnight, and since then I have kept my fingers crossed, lest something untoward happens (someone has already told me that the hurried repair has been in the nature of patchwork, and the damaged gate is leaking) and the supply is cut off again.

Why does this sort of thing have to happen? The barrage was built in 1955, and the tremendous pressure of water that it has to withstand (including especially abnormal times, such as the great flood of 1978), combined with the extremely corrosive properties of our river water, makes it a given that the gates suffer slow but cumulative damage over the decades: you don’t have to be either an engineer or a professional administrator to know that, and give warnings and take timely preventive action. A very similar mishap actually occurred three years ago; it was quickly mended, but that should have set the alarm bells ringing. It seems from newspaper reports that a decision was taken to repair eleven of the gates which were visibly in poor shape, but till date only four have been taken care of. Now, after this second scare they have decided to replace all the gates one by one, but, given the speed at which our authorities work once  a crisis is past and forgotten, heaven knows whether that, or the next disaster, will happen first… and I wonder why, in an increasingly more populated town which aspires to be tagged ‘smart city’ soon, we should go on depending on a single source of water. The luckiest people in town were those who had their own wells and tube wells, but, since people like me happen to live in one of the ‘smartest’ (read ‘planned’-) parts, we are not even allowed to dig wells of our own, because that will severely lower the water table soon. Granted that is a valid argument, but then, why are we still depending, this entire Bidhan Nagar area, on one small supply tank built half a century ago, which runs out of water within a single day, when the population of the area has increased at least fifty fold over the same time period? [P.S., Nov. 09: I am delighted to read in today's newspaper that in this one instance, at least, the municipal authorities are doing some serious forward thinking. Better late than never, certainly.]

Another thing I learnt is that Bengalis – they have always been know-alls, however uneducated and socially insignificant they might actually be – have become absolutely confident about talking absolute nonsense. I heard so many authorities on TV and in newspapers, I met so many on the street, and they all told me with total certitude that the water supply was going to be restored on such a date and at such a time, and most of them got it dead wrong (indeed, according to someone in uniform at the local police outpost, we are not going to get any water at all till Monday, the day after tomorrow)!

One last thing. I saw my neighbours – the same people who have far bigger reservoirs at home than I do! – queuing up before mobile water tankers morning and evening from the third day onwards, and buying large plastic bottles of drinking water every day on top of that. My mother and I had simply decided to avoid all usage of water except the bare essentials, drinking, cooking and washroom use, and our stored supply sufficed to tide us over. How much water people must be habitually wasting, really! I wish the government would finally get it into its thick head that instead of charging flat water taxes, which encourages waste, water supply should be metered, as electric supply is metered and charged for – which is what the World Bank very sensibly advised decades ago. But no, we shall wait for real, nationwide disaster to strike before we take wise, farsighted decisions of any sort. We are Indians after all.

[By the way, whenever I provide a link to some old blogpost, so many people visit it that it quickly gets into the Most Read list. It has happened with my review of the movie The Bucket List this time. Why on earth don’t visitors explore older posts on their own?]

One truly new experience

 I had – guess what – a full body massage today. No news really, except for the fact that I had been mildly curious about it for decades, my daughter has been nagging me for years to get a taste of it, yet this was the very first time in my life at age 57, and yes, it was good. In fact, much more than good, else I wouldn’t have bothered to write here about it. 

I have always hated (or rather, felt embarrassed about-) anything that smacks of self indulgence, so always tried to avoid anything which attracts that label, though I have wanted my loved ones to enjoy them, so long as they didn’t do it to excess. Getting a massage, to my mind, has always sounded like gross self-indulgence, so I limited myself to the head massage that barbers sometimes offer (once upon a time when barbers were content to be poor they came free: now no longer!) I had always thought that such things were for effete zamindars, sybaritic politicians and fat, corrupt policemen. Halfway through life I learnt that some people within the extended family needed such treatment as part of recuperative therapy after some forms of serious and prolonged illness, and that massages were good for the circulation and the heart and for reducing stress; besides, I had started to develop all kinds of aches and pains myself, so I began to waver. That wavering, however, had gone too far… for more than a decade, in fact. But the mountain had to come to Muhammad, so I waited, and waited, until a young friend who had qualified as a physiotherapist, and had treated me as well as my parents, set up a clinic a stone’s throw from my house, and asked me to come over for a first experience at a time of my choosing. So I did this evening, and it was grand.

For half an hour, in a dimly lit and lightly perfumed room, with slow and soothing music playing softly in the background, I was pushed and pulled and pressed and kneaded and, well, subjected to the entire bag of tricks in the professional masseur’s repertoire. I cannot pay him a greater compliment than to put two things on record: that I nearly fell asleep, and that my heart rate had become slower afterwards than I have ever seen in the last twenty years! I really must do this again, preferably soon.

And maybe it’s time that I started seriously to draw up a bucket list for myself. Would it be a long one, I wonder? Most things I have wanted I have got and grown tired of; others, I know, will always be beyond my reach, and not always merely for lack of time, money or facilities available nearby. But maybe there are a few things that can be done without too much trouble, and would give me just as much fun?

Filling in my diary

Back in Durgapur, daughter with me, because after two months alone in Delhi, she decided that if she has to work endlessly from home, it’s best to stay for long stretches with the parents. I am not complaining! Delighted that Andal airport has reopened: it makes travelling so much faster and cheaper. The Air India flights have been replaced by Spice Jet, and they fly at decent hours, so no more getting up at ungodly hours on bitterly cold winter mornings.

Would like to start classes, at least with the senior year, in November. I hope it works out, but I am not being too optimistic: best strategy against avoidable disappointment. (The crowds on the roads these pujo days have given me some reason for cheer, though).

Delhi was already cool, so I found Durgapur hot on the first day. There was also a very dense cloud cover: I could see the ground from the air only when the aircraft had descended to a few hundred feet. We had to use the air conditioner the first night, while we had been shivering in the morning! But the change in the weather, though very slow, is still perceptible. The sky is azure, the breeze is gentle, and though the sun is still hot, the evenings come sooner, and there is a nip in the air if you go out in the late evening on a two wheeler in shirtsleeves. The IMD has predicted a long winter with several cold waves, I have noticed.

This was the first time since it was built, back in 1988, that the house had been under lock and key continuously for a month. We are still busily cleaning up. I was glad that some current pupils visited me on the very first morning after my return.

Vegetable prices have gone through the roof here. I wonder why. The newspaper says people are eating much more fish and meat instead: exactly the opposite of what the doctors would recommend amidst the ongoing pandemic!

One very good recent development that I noticed in Delhi is that a lot of people have taken to riding bicycles again, and not only poor folk either. I think the government should strongly encourage the trend – one way would be to subsidize bikes for poor people, another to mark bicycle lanes along the sides of roads. I badly miss good, smooth footpaths in Delhi as much as in Durgapur, though otherwise both are so good for walkers. Delhi, at least, has huge parks galore, but here we don’t even have that much, something I keep grouching over endlessly…

Our prime minister has been growing his now-snow white beard ever since the lockdown days began, as I am sure lots of people have noticed. It has given him a distinctly wise-old-sadhubaba look. Is it simply because he has been avoiding the physical closeness that a barber’s work entails?

I read somewhere recently that China’s economy has been growing, albeit slowly, all through this year – the only one among the ten biggest economies to do so in the coronavirus year, while all others have gone into a tailspin, India included. And China is where the pandemic began! What do the Chinese know and do that we don’t? It is high time the whole world started studying them seriously without bias and preconceived notions (such as that capitalism works best without state involvement, or that the price in terms of oppression of the masses in such a regime is not worth paying) – much more seriously than we have done since the People’s Republic was established. If we cannot learn and follow quickly in their footsteps, then, regardless of what any non-Chinese thinks, wants or likes, no one will be left in any doubt by 2050 that this is definitely going to be the Chinese century…

Book review: Korma, Kheer and Kismet

For those of my old readers who might be flabbergasted to see me reviewing a cookery book, I shall only say, imitating Sherlock Holmes (who was himself paraphrasing Shakespeare), ‘I trust that age cannot wither nor custom stale my infinite variety’. Only, a very great deal of the credit must go to my daughter.

The wheel has come round full circle. I tried with every fibre of my being to make her an avid reader with an eclectic palate; now, over the last few years, she has been increasingly guiding my reading, introducing me to some writers to whom I have grown addicted, like Madhulika Liddle and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Julian Rathbone. Not that she actually told me to read a book on cooking, but I had been rummaging through her ever growing collection when this book, Korma, Kheer and Kismet by Pamela Timms caught my attention after I had casually flipped through the first few pages, and I literally devoured it at little more than one sitting, then liked it enough to write about it here.

Needless to say, the book is much more than a mere catalogue of recipes, else I would not have bothered: I am quite a gastronome, but one of the odd few who have never bothered to learn how to cook the simplest meal themselves, so no reading material could be less interesting to me than a cookery book as such. I have always shown my profound respect – not to say awe – of the culinary arts by both being content with whatever regular meals I have been fed by the women in my life and also paying back their special efforts with the most fulsome praise I could muster, or at least bearing up with stoic silence when they occasionally turned out to be disasters (some people in my family still laugh with guilty wonder over how I ploughed through a cup of supposed tea where the herb had been mistakenly replaced by kalo jeere – black cumin – or a largeish plate of visually appealing pudding that had been untouched by sugar). This has always been one of my conceits: that if no woman feeds me with love, there will always be some eatery not too far away which would fill my belly as long as I have money in my pocket, and if even such things – lately bolstered by services like Swiggy and Zomato – someday fall beyond my reach, I shall decide that my Maker has rung the final bell, and be calmly reconciled to my fate. I have come a long way with that outlook unchanged. But as I was saying...

Pamela Timms and her husband Dean are natives of Scotland, both journalists. They came to Delhi experimentally for a year in 2005, fell in love with this magical city (as I have been over the last two years) and stayed on till 2015. The book is subtitled Five Seasons in Old Delhi, and the whole book is unapologetically dedicated to her adventures in the dingy, damp, cluttered, maddeningly crowded, thoroughly unhygienic, noisy and occasionally dangerous serpentine lanes and bylanes on and off Chandni Chowk, savouring the vast variety of mouth watering street food that the city rustles up daily for pockets deep and shallow, hunting down the creators even at ungodly hours to watch them work and perchance to wangle some of their secret recipes out of them, then trying them out at home with her own innovations and improvisations and jotting down the recipes of those dishes which turned out to be somewhat better than just successful. All this she has described in the most luminous and evocative prose that went into, first, her blog Eat and Dust, and finally took the shape of this 2014 book, which someone like myself – unlikely candidate as I am – can certify as good literature. Below are a few samples of her writing that persuaded me to make a blogpost out of it.

Here is a description of what happens when the much awaited food arrives before a hungry and impatient crowd of diners in one of those famous hole in the wall eateries that have been carrying on for generations: ‘...a nervy silence gripped the diners; then at last the rotis were ready and plates of korma were unceremoniously slapped down in front of us. Juicy pieces of mutton shimmered in a lake of deep mahogany sauce – so far removed from the anaemic, gloopy, bland concoctions that go by the same name in British curry houses as to be an entirely different species. Armed with pieces of hot, crisp, coriander-laced rotis, we all dived in. Some immediately started chewing on the bones but most of us made straight for the gravy. The first taste was an eye-watering blast of chilli heat that had me spluttering and reaching for the water bottle. This was quickly followed by layers of more nuanced, elusive ingredients – ‘up to thirty different spices’, one of my dining companions assured me between mouthfuls – in a devilish pact with ghee. The meat itself had been cooked long and slow, and fell away easily from the bone at a nudge from the bread. For the few minutes it took us to devour our korma, no one uttered a word, and we paused only to signal to the waiters when more rotis were required. Too soon, we were again staring at empty plates, this time with no hope of a refill. The day’s korma was already sold out.’

For those with a sweet tooth, on the other hand, here is a rhapsody on that ethereal delight called daulat ki chaat, snack of wealth: ‘one of the great highlights of the winter is a heavenly milky dessert that makes a brief but unforgettable earthly appearance in the gullies of Old Delhi almost as soon as the last Diwali firecracker has fizzled. From then until Holi, the chaat vendors wander through the bazaars, their snowy platters dazzling in the pale sunshine, as if a dozen small, perfectly formed clouds have dropped from the sky... the taste is shocking in its subtlety, more molecular gastronomy than raunchy street food, a light foam that disappears instantly on the tongue, leaving behind the merest hint of sweetness, cream, saffron, sugar and nuts; tantalizing, almost not there... the means by which a pail of milk is transformed into the food of the gods, though, is the stuff of Old Delhi legend rather than of the food lab.’ And she goes on to narrate the kind of tale that would fit in seamlessly into The Thousand and One Nights.

And though this last passage is not strictly about Delhi and therefore does not really belong to the book, being about the ecstasy that tasting roadside kulcha and chhole in Amritsar (which some Indian friends had described to her as the ‘street food capital of India’, though as a proud Bengali I should have liked her to reserve judgment until she had toured our own great metropolis) at the crack of dawn brought her, I cannot resist the temptation of quoting a part of the lyrical description here: ‘I was wary, but also cold and famished... I broke off a small piece of the bread and scooped up some of the chickpeas. It took a couple of mouthfuls before I noticed the extraordinary texture of the kulcha – buttery, flaky shards, as if the finest Parisian feuilleté had been combined with a perfectly spiced nugget of soft potato. Then the chhole – melting, nutty, vibrant pulses – spicy yet soothing. A third element on the plate brought it all together – a sour tamarind sauce cutting brilliantly through the buttery bread and creamy chickpeas, making the whole dish sing its heart out... I felt, as M. F. K. Fisher once did, “a kind of harmony, with every sensation and emotion melted into one chord of well-being” ’.

Well, if you liked those little snippets, there’s 166 pages of it. And then,  like the perfect topping on a great cake, there are the few concluding pages spelling out the already obvious fact that the writer's labour of love was not really about food but about people who made Delhi 'home' for her. That is what endeared her to me. Go and read the book, and may it give you the same delight as it gave me. Many thanks, Ms. Timms. I hope you read this review, and come back and write some more about the India that you have come to love.

As for me, I am off on another flight of culinary wonderment with Chitrita Banerjee’s Bengali Cooking, seasons and festivals. Pupu has got me hooked.

In Delhi

 My family has been through a very nasty crisis - certainly much worse than in 2015 when I broke my leg and was partially incapacitated for nearly six months, and even than 2017, when my father died a slow and painful death - and it is still far from over. Nevertheless, because every cloud has a silver lining, I have, after prolonged reflection, decided that it has taught me a few valuable lessons which I shall live by till I pass on. Most significantly, that nobody except blood (my daughter) really cares (if some do, they live too far away to be of any practical use) - those who picked me up and took me to the hospital when I had that accident were mostly strangers, and those who helped during my father's troubled last days were mostly paid service-providers.

For whatever duration I live hereafter, I shall have to go it alone (even more than Harry Potter, I have realized this rather late in the day), barring maybe only my daughter, and that too if she is around to help  before it is too late. The flip side of the coin is, I can forever stop worrying about the welfare of other people. The world is welcome to take care of itself. Meanwhile, in my desperate loneliness, it has been wonderful to stay with my daughter and help with the housework. Living out my old age before I had anticipated it, and I can't say that I don't like it, even doing the dishes and taking out the trash!

Katha Daan Utsav

This is about helping people again: children who can benefit from your assistance to get along with their education in these unusually troubled times.

My daughter is closely involved with the project. I thought it won't hurt to give it whatever little publicity I can.

Click on this link to find out more about the 'wish tree' that she and her friends have put up on their organizational website. The link will be operational till October 08, so if you want to act, please don't delay.

I should have posted this yesterday, Gandhi Jayanti, but I was too upset about certain things in the family to remember in time.

Wikipedia abegging

 Last month, Wikipedia was begging for donations in order to keep going.

I gave Rs. 3000. If things had not been rather dire under the Covid situation, and if I had not already given to very many charities within the last six months, I’d of course have given much more, and I am still ashamed. They also let me know that the average donation was Rs. 150. Imagine. Wikipedia has hundreds of millions of users; there are many multi-millionaires among them, someone as humble as me gave 3000, yet the average donation is Rs. 150. So how much do most donors give – five rupees, or ten?

This brought back to mind a post that I wrote here twelve years ago: Charity and other things. Do look it up before you read further. This post will be about charity, and whether it is good or wise to depend upon alms (bhikhsha) if you want to make an impact on the world, however small.

Recall that many of the greatest religions have enjoined beggary upon those who tread the Way – the Buddhist sramana is called a bhikhshu; the Hindu sadhu has always been expected to survive on charity. The idea is that you live as simply/inexpensively as you can, and put no burden on your fellow man for your physical sustenance: you survive on whatever they give you out of the goodness of their hearts, demanding nothing (over the millennia, it has not remained so simple and humble: people were first taught they would acquire great merit by giving alms to holy men, and later threatened with future hellfire and untold torments on earth if they did not give, even unto their own near-destitution: that is how the old churches and temples grew fabulously rich!). Look at the reverse of the coin; numberless humble householders have been convinced, partly or wholly, that it is one of the most important religious duties to give in charity.

And it has worked wonders over the ages, too. Anathapindada the sreshthi, who might be called the Bill Gates of sixth century BCE India became a monk and gave away everything he had to the Buddha: that is how the Sangha got going! Much more than a thousand years later, the great Sufis like garib nawaz Hazrat Khwaja Muinuddin Chisti, quite like the even later Sikh gurus, enjoined upon their followers that they must keep giving so that no man who came to their door went away hungry – and the great kadhais at the Ajmer dargah remain as busy today as the kitchens of the Jagannath temple at Puri or the langar at any gurudwara. When Akbar visited Har ki Pauri in Hardwar he saw that thousands of mendicants were fed daily out of the charity of the countless punya seekers who came to the ghats daily to wash away their sins, and the donation collectors, to whom I have talked at length tell me they take every offering from a rupee upwards, and never raise an eyebrow when someone signs over a cheque for a million – they have seen it a thousand times before, and Akbar was told already in the late 16^th century that it was an immemorial custom. Vidyasagar came to be called doyar sagar, the ocean of charity, with very good reason, though no one who knows Bengalis up close will dare claim that he was a typical Bengali. Also, in this day and age, Gates and Buffett and other super-tycoons have pledged to give away 95% of their astronomical fortunes to worthy causes before their deaths. And yes, after more than a decade, Wikipedia is still going strong despite not carrying ads and not pricing their services, aren’t they?

Yet, surviving on pure charity, depending wholly on the goodness of your fellow man’s heart, is very hard, very wearying, very likely to grind you down to disillusionment, disgust and despair. Vivekananda during his wanderings across India often went unfed, despite Kipling’s assertion that no sadhu in India ever goes hungry; Tagore had to beg likewise to put Viswabharati on its feet, my daughter has had pretty depressing experiences, and the pathetic way in which those who run something as precious as Wikipedia have to beg brought tears to my eyes at least. I, for one, though God knows how many pupils’ fees I have waived when their parents complained of being in dire financial straits, hate it when I am cheated by people whom I know to be well off, and have made my anger so searingly clear to so many that I am much feared (and perhaps secretly reviled-) for it. I won’t be greedy, I swore to myself a very long time ago, but I won’t depend on people’s honesty and charity either – it is too untrustworthy, too dangerous.

So I wish Wikipedia (are you listening, folks?) would stop begging and make theirs a paid service. A very nominal fee: perhaps a rupee for every time I click on any of their articles? If I click 3,000 times a year, and have to pay 3000 rupees for it, why not? They would rake in billions, I would be every kind of a crook and liar if I said I cannot afford that, and that is equally true for millions of users, including I am sure tens of thousands who earn ten, a hundred, a thousand times more than I do! This too one must remember: few people want to pay anything at all if they think that they can go on enjoying something for free. Jimmy Wales, I don’t want you to wind up for lack of funds, so think about it.

Teachers' Day gift

 Well, apparently not quite ALL!

Tanmoy Chakrabarti, with whom I go back nearly thirty years, has thought it fit to recollect our classes together on his video blog. Take a look.

My heart is full, Tanmoy. My most loving blessings upon you and your family.

ar ami pari na

 যতদূর পুরোনো দিনের কথা মনে পড়ে আমি খুব একাএকাই ছিলাম। সময় কেটেছে মূলতঃ বইয়ের সঙ্গে আর নিজের মনেমনে অনন্তর কথা বলে। মা-বাবাকে তেমন করে কাছে পাইনি, বরং তাঁরা ভয় আর ভুলবোঝাবুঝির কারণই হয়েছিলেন অনেক বেশি। কাউকে দোষ দিতে চাইনা, অনেক দোষ আমারই। দাদু-দিদার অনেক আদর, অকুন্ঠ স্নেহ পেয়েছি, সেকথা পঞ্চমুখে স্বীকারও করে এসেছি সারাটা জীবন, আর সেই স্বর্গসুখ হারানোর দুঃখও কোনদিন ভুলতে পারলাম না। বড় হতে হতে অনেক কথা বলার তাগিদ অনুভব করতে লাগলাম, শিক্ষকতা করার কাজটাও শুরু হয়ে গেলো অত্যন্ত কম বয়স থেকে, করতে গিয়ে দেখতে পেলাম পড়ার বাইরেও অনেকে আসে আমার সঙ্গসুখ পেতে, আর সে তৃপ্তি অন্যকে দিতে দিতে মনে হতে লাগলো আমিও পরম তৃপ্তি পাচ্ছি। তাই থেকে গেলাম এ'কাজ নিয়েই। আজ প্রৌঢ়ত্বের শেষ সীমায় এসে পৌঁছেছি। অনেক কিছু পেয়েছি, হারিয়েছিও অনেক কিছু। অন্য মানুষকে চির-মূল্যবান কিছু দিতে পারবো বলে যে বিশ্বাস একদা জন্মেছিলো তা ভেঙে খানখান হয়ে গেছে। ডানাভাঙা পাখি ডানা জুড়ে যাওয়া পর্যন্তই কাছে থাকে, সেবা-স্নেহ নেয়, তারপর অবধারিতভাবে বাসা ফেলে উড়ে যায়, পিছন ফিরে আর দেখে না। সবাই 'বড়' হয়ে যায়, সবার কর্মময় ব্যস্ত জীবন হয়ে যায়, সবার কাছে ক্রমশ অপ্রয়োজনীয়, অপ্রাসঙ্গিক, বোঝা হয়ে যাই। সবাই, সবাই। কারো মোহ কাটতে ছ'মাস লাগে, কারো বিশ বছর, এইটুকুই যা তফাৎ। তবে আসলে তো পাখি নয়, মানুষ, তাই অনেকে শুধু ভুলে গিয়েই ক্ষান্ত দেয় না, নিজে ভুলে গিয়ে আশা রাখে যে সে কিন্তু চিরটাকাল আমার স্মৃতির মণিকোঠায় জ্বলজ্বল করবে! অনেকে আবার গালিও দেয়। মানুষ তো! শুধু করুণ  হাসি পায় ভাবতে যে কতজনই না বলে গেলো 'আমি তোমায় কোনদিন ভুলবো না, চিরকাল যোগাযোগ রাখবো'!

Abou ben Adhem কবিতায় লেখা আছে, যে মানুষ মানুষকে ভালোবাসে, ঈশ্বর তাকেই সবচেয়ে বেশি স্নেহ করেন। কেন করেন? সবাই মানুষকে ভালোবাসে না কেন? কারণ বলা অতি সোজা, কাজটা প্রায় অসম্ভব।এটুকু খুব দুঃখময় গর্ব করেই বলবো, আমার মতো এতকাল ধরে খুব বেশি লোক প্রাণপণে চেষ্টা করে  দেখে না।  এক তো আমার নিজের অনেক দোষ, ঈর্ষা ক্রোধ ভয় কুসংস্কার দ্বেষ সংকীর্ণতা-ভরা মন, সে মন খুলে মানুষকে ভালোবাসা যে বিষম কাজ! যদি বা প্রাণের তাগিদে সেসবের হাত থেকে কিছুটা মুক্তি পেলাম, উর্দ্ধে উঠলাম, কিন্তু মানুষ ভালোবাসা নিতে পারে কৈ? সব তো দু'দিনের। তারা শুধুই ভালোবাসা চায়, দিতে নাচার, যা দেয় তাও  ক্ষনিকের, তারপর ভুলে যায়, ছেড়ে যায়, মন বদলে ফেলে, অন্যত্র সে জিনিস খোঁজে। কেউ কেউ মুখে লাথি মেরেও যায়, মজা পায়। তারপর এও  সত্যি, যে 'বড়' হতে হতে সবাই আস্তে আস্তে আমার বহু দোষত্রুটি আবিষ্কার করে, সেগুলোই মনের ভিতর অন্ধকার ছেয়ে  দেয়, তখন যা কিছু একসময়ে ভালো লেগেছিলো তা আর মনে পড়ে না। অনেকের কাছেই আবার তর্কে জয়-পরাজয়টা  বড় হয়ে দাঁড়ায়, 'আমি ঠিক' এটাই যেমন করে হোক প্রমাণ করতে হবে, ওসব ভালোবাসা-টালোবাসায় গুলি মারো। আর সেরকমভাবে যখন আমার বিচার হয়, তখন নিজের অজান্তেই এভাবে চিন্তা করে... 'উনি কেন সর্বগুণসম্পন্ন নন?' যেন আমাকে বাদ দিয়ে তারা অনেক perfect মানুষ দেখে এসেছে, আর তাই যদি না হলাম তো ভালোবাসবে কী করে? - কে পারবে এইরকম মাপকাঠিতে উৎরে যেতে?

তো আমি আজকাল প্রায়শঃই বলে থাকি যে আর মানুষকে ভালোবাসতে পারি না, হাল ছেড়ে দিয়েছি। স্বভাব যায়না ম'লে, তাই বোকার মতো নিজের ইচ্ছার বিরুদ্ধে এখনো চেষ্টা করে যাই, তবে জানি, ব্যর্থ হওয়াই আছে কপালে। আসলে না, ন্যাড়া বেলতলায় যেতেই থাকে, শিক্ষা হয় না! তবে হ্যাঁ, এটা বুঝি, ভগবান বুদ্ধ কেন বলে গেছেন  জীবন দুঃখময়, খৃষ্টধর্মেও কেন বলে this world is a vale of tears. জৈন মহামুনিদের তো বলাই হয় 'তীর্থঙ্কর', অর্থাৎ কিনা যাঁরা বৈতরণী পার হতে সাহায্য করেন।

তাই এই মানসিক অবস্থায় বর্তমান পরিস্থিতিতে আমার অন্তত অপার বিস্ময় লাগে এই দেখে যে আমার থেকেও যাঁরা অনেক বেশিদিন বেঁচেছেন, জীবনযুদ্ধের জ্বালায় জেরবার হয়েছেন, তাঁদেরও কেন মরতে এত ভয়, এই জীবনকে আঁকড়ে থাকার এত আকুতি! ঢের তো দেখলি বাবা, এখনো  আশ মিটলো না?

Strange contemporaries in history

When I turn the pages of history, I sometimes notice something truly remarkable. If I think about it for a while I become confused and distracted, all well-reasoned schemata regarding how to think about the world fall apart, and it seems to me that the relentless efforts of scholars to make some theoretical sense of the great flood tide of human affairs is forever doomed to futility, no more than a child’s prattle or the rantings of a madman. – Precisely when Sri Chaitanya Dev was stirring up a revolutionary fervour of love for the Divine Krishna in Bengal, Leonardo da Vinci was making the first detailed and accurate drawings of a foetus in the womb, and the first engineering drafts of what would become the helicopter several centuries later, while the successors to Vasco da Gama and Columbus were raising their victorious pennants in newly discovered lands to the east and west of Europe. Just when Sri Ramakrishna was sitting at the Kali temple in Dakshineshwar and soothing the hearts and minds of his compatriots with the elixir of his message of a universal, all-embracing religion of tolerance and acceptance bathed in the mystic aura of the Mother, the godless intellectual whiplashes of Darwin and Marx were arousing Europe to a frenzy of both anxiety and activity. And it seems that precisely at the same time the gun-toting hard-riding cowboys, equally innocent of both great currents in the life of the mind, were having a great time creating the legend of the Wild West on the vast plains of North America!

Lenin, Henry Ford and Tagore shared the world’s stage; in the same terrible century men hurled the atomic thunderbolt on the heads of their fellow men, while Gandhi did his life’s work. it takes one’s breath away to think of what might have transpired if they had met and talked at length. In the same age and continent, some were hailing the writer of Principia Mathematica as God’s gift to man, while others were burning wretched helpless women alive by the thousands on suspicion of being witches, while yet others were destroying highly evolved civilizations like those of the Incas out of the lust for gold. We are told that Chenghiz Khan, Roger Bacon and Saint Thomas Aquinas were near-contemporaries. The emperor Cyrus and the Tathagata Buddha, great conquerors both, were separated by hardly a blip on the vast time scale of history; so were Aristotle and Alexander (who knows but eastern philosophy got its first foothold on European soil through the teachings of the ‘naked bearded sages from the banks of the Ganges’ that Aristotle had requested his pupil to bring him?); as were Pablo Picasso, Charlie Chaplin and Mao ze Dong. So were Benjamin Franklin, Jagat Seth and and the great shogun Yoshimune in Japan! – just as, in our own time, some people are sending off exploratory spacecraft towards the boundaries of the solar system, while others living in the same age are stoning people to death on the charge of being heretics and blasphemers, or trying to ascend to heaven up the coils of smoke given off marijuana-filled reefers.

And yet we are supposed to believe that all the myriad threads of this vast swirling mystery without beginning or end are tied together, playing the same harmonious melody, and one great sage or the other holds the failsafe key to the riddle.

[I wrote this essay originally in Bengali 31 years ago, in May 1989, six years before my daughter was born. I was recently reminded of it when she was musing over the phone – as we often do – that she had been struck by the same sort of remarkable coincidences during her own studies in history. I was almost 26 then, she is almost 24 now: that too!

For something else I wrote back then, see this post]

P.S., August 22: I am delighted that the post titled What really mattered has come back to hold a high position on the most-read list just because I provided a link to it. In the absence of meaningful comments, I wonder how many actually read, understood, thought about it and were affected by it, though! And I do wish that my readers - especially the new ones among them - would browse through some of the old posts by themselves, even when I don't provide links. Many of them might be pleasantly surprised. As I have said and not once before, I treat this blog as an extension of my classroom: if you want the full benefit of my work, keep reading this blog, and tell your friends to do the same. For their benefit, not mine.

Watching in the rain

শ্রাবণ মাস, যদিও পচা গরমটা ভাদ্রর মতো।  তবে বৃষ্টি হচ্ছে যখন তখন, মাঝেসাঝে বেশ তেড়েও হচ্ছে।  আজ সকালে বাইরের বারান্দায় বাগানমুখ করে বসে খাতা দেখছিলাম, তো আস্তে আস্তে আকাশ কালো হয়ে এলো, তারপর বৃষ্টি নামলো, প্রথমে টিপটিপ করে, ফের মুষলধারে।  চেয়ারটাকে জলের ঝাপটা এড়াতে একটু পিছিয়ে নিয়ে বসে খাতা বন্ধ করে দিলাম। ঢের খাতা দেখেছি সারা জীবন ধরে, আরো হয়তো ঢের দেখতে হবে, এখন বৃষ্টি দেখি।

হাওয়ার ঝাপটায় বৃষ্টিটা  বেশ একটা হালকা ঝাপসা পর্দা তৈরি করে দেখেছ? সে পর্দাটা আবার সরে সরে যায়।  কয়েক মুহূর্তে রাস্তা ধুয়েমুছে ফাঁকা করে দিল, গাছপালা লতাপাতা দিল ভিজিয়ে। কাঠবিড়ালি, প্রজাপতি আর বিচ্ছিরি চ্যাঁচ্যা করা পাখিগুলো সব  কোথায় জানি পালিয়ে গেলো, দুটো কাক বোকার মতো ডালে বসে ভিজতে লাগলো, ভুলো কুকুরটা ভয়ে ভয়ে দুবার আমায় দেখে নিয়ে  বারান্দায় আমার পাশেই গুটিশুটি মেরে বসে গেল। অল্পক্ষনের মধ্যে ছাতের নালি  থেকে অঝোরে ঝর্ণার মতো জল পড়তে লাগল। বাগানে শ্যাওলার বিরাট পাপোশ হয়েছে, সেটা ভিজে চুপসে উঠল।  পিঁপড়েরা গুঁড়ো মাটির ঢিবি করে বাসা বেঁধেছিল, প্রানপণে মুখে করে ডিম নিয়ে পালাতে লাগল। আমি দেখছি সামনের জবা গাছের সরু ডাল বেয়ে জলের ধারা নামছে, দেখাচ্ছে যেন মুক্তোর মালা। সেই সঙ্গে মেঘ গুড়গুড় করেই যাচ্ছে, আর থেকে থেকে এমন বিদ্যুতের ঝলক যে দিনের বেলাও চমকে দিচ্ছে। এই না হলে  'গগনে ঘনঘটা শিহরে তরুলতা'? শুধু ময়ূরের হরষিত নাচটাই যা দেখতে পেলুম না! তা সেও অন্যত্র অন্যসময়ে দেখেছি। ...

এ দৃশ্য আমার অন্তত কোনদিন পুরোনো হবে না।  অবিশ্যি এর থেকেও ভালো লাগে যখন রাতে শুতে যাওয়ার সময়ে বৃষ্টি নামে। মহাকবি বলেছেন 'অমৃত জিনিসটা রসের মধ্যে নেই, রসাস্বাদনের মধ্যে আছে', বড় সামান্য কথা নয়।  আমরা আস্বাদন করতে শিখলাম কই?  'বৃথা খেলা, বৃথা মেলা, বৃথা বেলা গেলো বহি'  ... আজ যে ভগবান সময় সুযোগ দুটোই দিয়েছেন, তার যদি সদ্ব্যবহার করতে না পারলুম  তাহলে দোষটা কার?

CoViD: sane voices making themselves heard

These lockdown diaries of mine will make good reading once the nightmare is far behind us. A vast number of people are going to giggle sheepishly to remember how wildly they had panicked; many will be deeply offended if they are even reminded. I hope my readers will recall that I took and maintained a consistent stance all through: the basic message was, don’t panic and over-react; that will do none of us any good.

I can see with the passage of every month that most of the things I said right from the beginning have come true. I shall not repeat them here: those who read really attentively will remember; others can simply scroll down and read the older posts, or re-read them.

For now, I shall offer two more links. One, to a video interview (dated August 01) of a very prominent doctor (epidemiologist and sometime head of CMC Vellore, one of our most iconic hospitals), offering ‘good news’. The other, to a news item in today's paper saying that various health groups and academics have been asking the central government to make public not just data relating to coronavirus infections and deaths, but to all deaths that have happened since March. It should be obvious to the meanest intelligence that if the government adopted a conscious policy of making people aware of what a vast number of people die daily of completely non-Covid related causes, and kept hammering on those data every day, the countrywide panic would subside within a month. As to why they are not doing it yet is anybody’s guess.

Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain!

A recent sero-survey (testing for antibodies) conducted by ICMR has indicated that up to 4.5 million residents of Delhi may have been infected by the novel coronavirus already (35 times more than the roughly 125,000 who have been found coronavirus positive through swab tests), shown no symptoms, suffered not even mildly, and recovered on their own without seeing a doctor. This is corroborated by the findings of a private patho lab, Thyrocare, which indicates that 180 million Indians may have already acquired natural immunity through infection and recovery. Which seems to confirm what I guessed in an earlier post: that Indians have a high degree of natural immunity to the virus. (by the way, if 180 million have been infected and the total death toll is about 28,000, work out the vanishingly small mortality rate yourself. Heart attacks, cancer and traffic accidents kill vastly more people, but the whole country, politicians and doctors included, have simply forgotten!)

In the same vein, the chief secretary to the West Bengal government said only a few days ago that we should remember there are currently only about 660 critical cases in a population close to 100 million in this state: hardly a justification for mass panic.

In my own town, the newspapers, local word of mouth news as well as my Aarogya Setu app says that the number of people currently diagnosed as infected within the last month keeps oscillating between 30 and 37 – two or three are being freshly infected every day, two or three are recovering daily, there has not been a single mortality in four months. And yet, what people are saying is ki bhoyonkor byapar hochchhe (what a disaster is unfolding)!

If such vast numbers have been infected already and recovered with nothing more than mild symptoms or none at all, that should be cause for good cheer and a rising tidal wave of renewed confidence, right? If not one person has died of this disease in my town in four months, while a so-called pandemic has been raging countrywide, it should be more so, right? And if the infection is spreading yet causing so little harm while widening the net of immune people, that should boost our morale, shouldn’t it? So why is the reverse happening? Just what is causing the rising tide of panic?

Very much to the point, my mother, who has been teaching science for fifty years and is one of the sanest and calmest people I have ever met, has been laughing to see that a lot of ‘educated adults’ who are desperately waiting either for ‘herd immunity’ or for a miracle vaccine to emerge have no idea at all that ‘herd immunity’ requires the infection to spread as fast as possible, nor that vaccination actually means infecting you deliberately with a (mild) dose of the virus so that your immune system can develop a resistance to it. Make of that what you will. Meanwhile, we have resigned ourselves to long-persisting mass madness. As a student wisely said, we who survive and return to a normal life should remember for the rest of our lives that this was the greatest panic-demic we have seen, not a pandemic!

P.S., July 23: You really must look up this latest post on my other blog.

New story on Instagram

My daughter has put up another story I narrated on her Instagram account. Click here.

I made one little mistake while I was narrating (remember, it was said impromptu, with no text to refer to). Let me see if you can notice it!

Days of yore

A prayer for my grandchildren has climbed quickly up the list of the most-read posts. Very gratifying. So also the fact that two old posts have made their way back into that list after a long time: What sort of person am I? and 3 Idiots. The first one pleases me because it was very hard to write – just try it yourself to find out how hard – and writing it down gave me a profound satisfaction; the second one because a) it was written a whole decade ago and is still finding readers, perhaps even among those who were far too young to read and understand it then, b) so many things I said then are still so starkly relevant now. The one thing that I deeply regret is that though at that time my readers were so much fewer, the comments were so much greater in number! Are today’s readers far lazier, or clueless, or simply couldn’t be bothered, because Pubg entertains them better?

My daughter has made it possible for me to read several recent and very well written history books in succession – Dara Shukoh, the emperor that never was, by Supriya Gandhi, The First Firangis by Jonathan Gil Harris, one of Urbi’s professors at Ashoka University, and a new biography of Akbar the Great Mughal by Ira Mukhoty.  This comes hard on the heels of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy that brilliantly recreates Henry VIII’s England. How pathetic are people who don’t enjoy and profit from reading history indeed (if only to learn how humankind has fought, conquered and survived epidemics with great elan so many times before!). How sad that at least two generations have grown up in this country not knowing this, believing that reading stuff like history is ‘useless’, in the sense that it doesn’t lead to ‘paying’ careers (meaning, typically, becoming cybercoolies, or at best government doctors at vast expense through the private college route), and may even be a serious ‘obstacle’ on that road! I cannot deal in detail with all those books here, but just a few words, in the hope that I can get a few of my readers interested…

The First Firangis should ideally be read as a companion volume to William Dalrymple’s White Mughals. While the latter book is about Englishmen who started living like Indian grandees (focusing on the career of one particular man, James Kirkpatrick), the former is about foreigners – not even necessarily white skinned – who arrived in India when the Mughal empire was at the zenith of wealth, power and glory, meaning the times of Akbar to Shah Jahan (and even the Bahmani kingdoms and Vijaynagar in the south were thriving) and spent extraordinarily colourful lives here, all sorts of people from just travellers to beggars and sadhus, medicine men and courtiers, artists to military commanders, who often even intermarried with the natives and left behind hordes of multi-lingual progeny, vastly increasing the rich complexity of the cultural maelstrom that is India. It not only gives the lie to any claim about the importance of preserving some sort of ethnic purity but makes the very idea of ‘purity’ in this country laughable and dangerous: the ‘purer’ a population is, the poorer it is, culturally speaking: that is a historical truism for all time, added to recent discoveries in genetics. But of course, it makes India uniquely difficult to govern. Which is why a ruler like Akbar will remain a guide and beacon light for would-be rulers forever.

I take pride in saying I knew a lot about the first and greatest Great Mughal already, yet Mukhoty’s book kept me absorbed from the first page to the last. I found out so many things about the man still, such as how maniacally he cultivated the strong man image (riding and taming bull elephants in musth, for God’s sake), how great a patron of art he was, how, despite his lifelong and very violent military campaigns, compassion remained a very strong inner driving force with him, how hard he tried to ameliorate women’s condition and raise their social status against tremendous resistance, how deeply he loved his friends, what a prodigious memory he had as a student of so many different subjects despite remaining functionally illiterate all his life (I wish I had found one such ‘illiterate’ pupil in all my life as a teacher), how deeply he had absorbed what he considered the best tenets from so many religions in the light of his own reason and conscience, how deeply he wished to be the paternal ruler of all Hindustan… the writer manages to paint a glorious picture of the man despite quoting at great length from harsh contemporary critics like the scholar Badauni (it is a measure of Akbar’s greatness that even such men enjoyed not only his tolerance but his munificent patronage!) I can pay no greater tribute to Mukhoty’s writing than to say that I mourned over the chapter that describes the great badshah’s death as though I had suffered a tremendous personal loss. ‘Here was a Caesar. When comes such another?’

There could have just perhaps been another, or at least a pale shadow. That is what Dara Shukoh confirms. He was unusually gentle for a Mughal prince, a truly learned and eclectic scholar of many languages, histories and cultures, he strove lifelong to create, through his own efforts, a genuine Indo-Islamic culture (getting the Upanishads translated into Persian, as Akbar had done with the Ramayana and the Mahabharata), and continued the large-hearted, welcoming tolerance of men of all faiths and racial backgrounds into his court. But he did not have his great grandfather’s boundless energy, steely resolve, ability to judge men and earth-girdling vision nor foresight, he was arraigned against Aurangzeb, for whom he was no match as a strategist or a warrior, and, above all, he was unlucky, so he was put to the sword, and, though the writer asserts that he was ‘neither secular nor liberal’ in the current sense, India’s history, and maybe the whole world’s history (if the Mughal empire had not crumbled so early, and the British did not take over so completely so soon) would have been very different if he had managed to become emperor and carried on the inclusive legacy of the greatest of the Mughals: this biography definitely confirms that long-held and very popular belief among scholars and laymen alike.

What a magnificent epoch the late 16th-17th century was in India, and what horrors followed in the next! We are still to recover from the latter economically and politically, but the even sadder fact is that culturally, we don’t even seem to realize the need to restore the best, most invigorating, most creative features of that glorious age so that bharat abaar jogot shobhay sreshtho ashon lobey. How far can mere blind and parochial chauvinism take us?