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 The Air India flights have been replaced by Spice Jet, and they fly at decent hours, so no more getting up at ungodly hours on bitterly cold winter mornings.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…