Another milestone

I just noticed tonight that I have had two-thirds of a million page views, and I wanted to take formal note of that. 

So anyway, it’s been a pretty long time now, and already I can only remember with difficulty the days when the internet did not exist, and weblogs (to give them their long forgotten original name) did not exist, and I was not writing in my blog. I was just about to step into middle age when I started, and I shall be a ‘senior citizen’ in four years! Those very few who have been reading this blog continuously from the start, can they point out, in terms of specifics, how I have changed over the years, as I must have?

As I said, I read up a lot of good books this last time I spent a week’s vacation at my daughter’s place. One of them the classic Hutom Pyanchaar Noksha by Kaliprasanna Singha (around whose character Sunil Gangopadhyay built his magnum opus Shei Shomoy, Those Times): what a master satirist he was! I can only compare him with Jonathan Swift, and in Bangla, with Rajshekhar Basu, aka Parashuram. In recent times, Chandril Bhattacharjya was going that way, but alas, he seems to have lost his touch too early, and become too hackneyed, besides being too much style and too little (original-) substance. I also read Shashi Tharoor’s Why I am a Hindu (constantly recollecting Russell’s Why I am not a Christian the while), and though it is very well informed and brilliantly written, I couldn’t help wondering how, in a much longer and much more involved life (in the sense of being in high places, at least) than mine, it could not have occurred to him to criticize much that is crude and bad and indefensible about Hindus, too: he has lightly touched upon the evils of casteism and superstition and fatalism, but hardly bothered to mention how our popular culture, with all its noise and corruption and discourtesy in public life and kowtowing shamelessly to the powerful and cruel indifference to the welfare of our flora and fauna, our near-universal prudery in matters sexual, our conflation of education with acquiring skills to make a living by, etc. etc. sit so uncomfortably with our pretensions to being the inheritors of the loftiest, most liberal, most spiritual body of philosophical speculations in the world. 

The Met. Department has hit the nail on the head once more. The nor’wester storm-showers have arrived one month ahead of schedule. It goes without saying I am enjoying them hugely. It is good that the cold has stopped biting, but the longer summer is delayed and the more the dust in the air is washed away, the happier I am.

I chanced upon this article on CNBC recently. It’s written for American youth, but since our youth, at least the urban, ‘educated’ section of it, is desperately aping them, I guess many of them could profit by it if they took its message to heart. I have lived by that outlook on life myself, and it has helped me hugely to live a decent and uncomplicated life.

And here’s a link to a news item about our PM lamenting about how pitifully few rich people declare their real taxable incomes. Most powerful man in the country, and he apparently can do nothing about bringing them to book: doesn’t even seem to know who they are! Can we safely assume, at least, then, that all the hoo-ha about how he will bring all the trillions of dollars in black money back home from stashes abroad, as well as all the noisy promises made back in end-2016 following the demonetization shock therapy (‘just give me a few months’!) was a farrago of nonsense, meant only to garner the votes of umpteen foolish and besotted millions? Mind you, this is not about one Narendra Modi: virtually all our leaders have proved to be men of straw where such issues were concerned. As far as I can remember the last man in power to make any more than a half-hearted attempt to book our treasure of black money was V. P. Singh when he was union finance minister, in the mid-1980s, but all the children who write their learned opinions about such matters on social media these days won’t even know what happened to him without googling it…

Just to let you know that as I head towards the million-page views mark, my mind is just as observant and active as ever. Bye for now.