End of a dreary year

31st December, and the year is closing with the dark shadow of something called Omicron looming over us. A ‘tsunami’ of Covid, the so-called third wave, is about to crash over our heads, say the experts. Mercifully, even the experts believe that this wave will be of very short duration, maybe only a few weeks. I am only taking heart from the latest numbers. Over the last week, the number of new daily infections in Delhi has surged from 40-50 to 1300+, yet the daily death rate has remained constant for more than a month at 0-1 (today’s number is zero). Countrywide, over the same period, the infection rate has doubled, while the death rate has remained the same, or dropped slightly (today it was 220, while even a few days ago it was nudging 400). Make of that what you will.

I wish almost everyone – meaning everyone who has not made hay on a monstrous scale in the time of the pandemic – a much happier New Year. May divine wrath consume the other kind. I like to console myself with Holy Scripture: ‘The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small’.

There is a private diary in which I have been scribbling what I consider important events in my life every year since I went to school, meaning 1969. I wonder what my entries for 2021 would be?

Long-time readers, I should very much like to hear from you about your expectations from the new year.

Pupu's birthday

My daughter is twenty five today.

Since the hour she was born, it was my steadfast, passionate prayer – over the last decade, my only prayer – that I be allowed to stay by her side till she reached this day reasonably healthy and happy, not only with an uninterrupted supply of physical sustenance, but heart and soul, as a fully- and forever trustworthy friend.

As any thoughtful reader may understand, there are several dimensions to that prayer, none less important than any other, and I am deeply, deeply grateful to Providence that it has been granted for the most part.

I know to how few such a prayer is granted. So, from today onwards, I shall not pray for anything more, except maybe for a demise that is no burden on anyone on earth, including my daughter and me.

And from today onwards, though I may still keep on working and earning my daily bread for a while yet, I shall regard myself as essentially a Retired Person, in the most fundamental sense of that expression.

Urbi's latest story

My daughter has posted another story on the internet: listen to it here.

I am so glad I introduced her to Kenneth Anderson - among a few other authors :)

Serious listeners, do egg her on with comments. That alone I think will motivate her to do more!

... and Man will live for evermore

 because of Christmas Day.

God bless all, even the most benighted. 

O God, My Lord, abide with me. I am tired, I am sad, I grow old, and my heart hurts for far too many poor folks whose woes I can do naught to soothe.

Of this and that

In the last week of November I went over to Delhi again. It was after a gap of nine whole months, but it felt as if I had never left! Everything has become so pleasantly familiar and comfortable, comforting even – not only my daughter’s digs but the folks all around, including the landlord’s family and petty roadside vegetable vendors (‘haan ji madam, papa aa gaye na?’), the nearby park, the dense but orderly traffic, the profusion of trees, the view of the Qutb Minar from the rooftop, faintly through the fog. It’s almost as if it is as long as I am in Durgapur that I feel I am in exile – imagine, after thirty four straight years of living and working here! If anything, the new puppy has added to the warmth and vivacity. I did very little besides eat, sleep, chat, walk and read … with Pupu, books are never in short supply, new books included. I devoured Shashi Tharoor’s latest, The Battle of Belonging (when will the BJP come up with someone who can present their case in an equally rational, informed, civilized manner?), and Sujata Massey’s new Pervin Mistry title, The Bombay Prince (she’s improving with every book, and I have become a fan), and came back with Madhulika Liddle’s newest oeuvre, The Garden of Heaven, which seems to promise a delectable dish of historical fiction, besides several e-books on Kindle, including Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s  Curse. What sad little lives they live who don’t read books! Naturally, as always, six days passed by all too soon, and I am back in Durgapur to my regular work routine once more. It seems I have been doing this for ages, although in fact it began only in 2018.

Two little boys in my class, both 15, passed away this year, one by suicide and the other very recently of a massive heart attack. As they say in Bengali, life is like a drop of water trembling on a lotus leaf, liable to drop off any moment, regardless of how young or old you are… and yet we plan, and dream, and draw up grandiose schemes for the future, because that is the only thing that keeps us going, the most human thing about human beings. At my stage in life, I look forward to very little, though. That I may have ever less conflict and discord in my life, that I can continue to feed myself for some more years, that my daughter can take good care of herself, that we can share slightly better living facilities in Delhi (or some place even better), that we might perhaps be allowed to do something enjoyable as well as gainful together for a while, that I can relax and sleep and tell stories to eager audiences with ever diminishing guilt and worry, that I can doze in the sun and go as quietly and peacefully as Don Vito Corleone did… is that asking too much of the universe? Who can tell?

One of the big things that the world is just beginning to take notice of is the fact that population growth rates have been falling everywhere (except in Africa), so in many countries the old are gradually going to outnumber the young. To me this gives a strong sense of déjà vu, because I became aware of the phenomenon in the late 1980s, when Italy, I seem to remember, became the first country in the world where the old became more numerous than the very young – a time when the Indian population was still ‘exploding’. Now the reactions only make me smile, or grimace. China is becoming desperate for its people to have more children again, Elon Musk says he is having more and more babies to ‘save mankind from extinction’ (God knows what his wife thinks about it, in this supposedly very gender-rights-conscious age), some countries have already seen fit to start veterans’ Olympic style games and seniors-only shopping malls, this article says a time is coming in the not-too-distant future when schools will have to be merged because there will not be enough children around, many economists see a huge opportunity for overpopulated countries like ours to send vast numbers of young people abroad to rich nations which will suffer from a huge shortage of labour, government policies will have to be drastically redesigned to cater to the special needs of the elderly, who will be a very sizeable fraction of the population everywhere by 2050 – when my current pupils will reach middle age – and gerontology will become one of the most sought after branches of medicine. In a country where we are still bursting at the seams because of having too many people around, whether in search of jobs or swarming the roads and hospitals, all this sounds like a pipe dream as of now. I shall probably not live long enough to see all of it come true, but in some ways it will be nice if I do: more peace and quiet and cleanliness all around, and far less public violence and lawlessness, much more decency and courtesy and consideration for others, perhaps, simply because the number of young, brash, crass, hormone-driven idiots has dwindled, to name just one good thing that might come about!

That is the sort of thing I keep thinking about.

We had another picnic at home today, Sunday, I with four of my old boys, and hugely enjoyed it, all of us, while some others let me know in the Whatsapp group that they missed it. This is growing on me! And I badly wish to go on one, if possible two more trips with some or the other old boy(s) before this winter leaves…

Oh so far, the palace of wisdom!

The older I grow, and the more I reflect on the great variety of humanity that I have seen, heard about and dealt with, the more convinced I am that the old Chanakya niti, as adumbrated in detail in the Arthashastra, (dushter domon aar shister palon – subdue the wicked and nurture the good) is the only way not just to organise, administer and protect society but to preserve civilization itself and bring about any kind of meaningful progress hereafter.

I could write a whole book about this, but let me restrict myself to a short essay.

Just look about yourself, from the school classroom to the sports field to the mass media and parliaments today. Things are falling apart because we have overdone the ‘fight for your rights’ thing too strenuously for too long. Oh yes, for ages until very recently (and to some extent even now in too many relatively undeveloped countries-) lots and lots of people have suffered, often horribly, because all-powerful elites have neglected, harassed and oppressed them, women, children, the old, handicapped and poor, dark skinned people, religious minorities, and so on and on. And it is indeed an unqualified Good Thing that, thanks to widespread concern about the ‘common man (and woman)’, now enshrined in many national Constitutions and enforced by courts, his and her essential interests (the right to life, personal liberty and pursuit of happiness, to put it pithily) are far better protected than ever before in history. Also, as anyone who has carefully read my several posts on the need for socialism will know, my sympathies are by and large with the ‘common man’, because I have always believed that the enjoyment of unearned privilege (such as gained through birth and inherited wealth, for example) is a fundamental blight on civilization as well as obstacle to progress – reformers, statesmen and geniuses are not born only in traditionally elite families.

What I shake my head sadly (and with growing dread) at is the spread of anarchy and decadence, vulgarity and stupidity, lack of concern for other people’s convenience and feelings, growing rebellion against asking for any kind of standards in any sphere of life at all (from personal hygiene to language to traffic rules), acquiescence to everybody’s demand that his or her ‘right’ to enjoy themselves their way be treated as sacred and inviolable, and insistence that if I am on the same page with the dominant majority at the moment, then I must be right.

What are we seeing these days? ‘Nobody has a right to be offended’, scream the very same people who get offended at anything anyone has said, however famous or obscure, however well-informed and sensible that person might be, and spew vicious profanity at the latter, however stupid and ignorant the comment writer might be (‘You say Modi’s demonetization scheme was an unnecessary disaster? You are a…. unprintable!’, writes someone whose very use of language makes it obvious that s/he would never pass a basic exam in either language or economics). Parents who know their children are as lazy and distracted as they are dull scold teachers for not giving the darlings not just passing grades but excellent ones. Students disturb classes at will and show teachers the middle finger if they are remonstrated with, but the teacher may be hauled away to jail if she so much as scolds them, because she has ‘caused irreparable damage to their immature psyches’. Society falls over itself to ‘protect the future’ of seniors who brutally rag freshers in college. A drunken woman kisses a policeman who stops her for crazy driving and then lies down at a busy crossing to ‘lodge a protest’ against high-handed authority. A tired doctor asleep on his feet after touring the wards for twelve hours straight is beaten up with impunity by the relatives of some neglected patient, who died because they didn’t care to bring her to the hospital before they could hear the death rattle. The police are warned that they had better be nice and polite to people who abuse them in the noisiest way and the filthiest language for trying to make them obey the law – including women bikers who won’t wear helmets because it ‘spoils their hair’, because it is after all a ‘democracy’. A lot of people are very concerned about violation of the ‘human rights’ of terrorists who are unrepentant (indeed, gleeful) about blowing up unarmed and innocent women and children and old folks but turn a blind eye to the rights of the victims. Minor and failed actors pontificate about how our independence from foreign rule was fake, and actually get applause for such moronic, bestial nonsense. You object to people littering the streets, screaming on trains, parking under No Parking signs, and they get back with threats of physical violence and let you know what VIPs they are, far above both law and decency. Schoolgirls skip classes and exams to lecture heads of state for not doing enough to save the environment (‘How dare you?’) and they are tolerated by people in high places and feted by the media, instead of the security guards sending them home with a slap on their behinds and a warning to the parents to teach them to behave themselves and know their place. People who have learnt a very little of science and never read a single book of theology confidently assert that there is no God, nor soul or spirit, nothing higher than an accidental, short and pointless animal existence on this planet. You want more?

‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,

Mere anarchy is loos’d upon the world, the blood-dimm’d tide is loos’d…’

Yes, as I said right at the start, I am growing old. But I am still writing because lying sleepless at night, I worry myself to distraction about what is waiting for my daughter’s generation. Things, it is said, have to get worse before they get better. Moderation is the highest virtue, but it is arrived at through very costly experience of endless excess… as William Blake wrote, ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, for you never know what is enough until you have seen what is more than enough’. Alas, not everybody will survive to reach the palace of wisdom.

(Thank you for prodding me, Aveek!)

Harry Potter again

I have begun to re-read the Harry Potter saga – and watching the movies in tandem. Already finished HP and the Philosopher’s Stone (and now into The Chamber of Secrets).

This time – maybe this is a regression to the child’s mind – I am reading primarily for the thrills, chills and spills. Yet, all those wonderful words of Dumbledore’s come back…

‘Ah, music! A magic beyond all we do here’.

‘It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live’.

‘The trouble is, humans do have a knack for choosing precisely those things which are worst for them’.

And the grandest utterance of them all: ‘… to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure’.

Christ, he said that in the very first book. The awareness of the inevitability and perpetual nearness of death has been a continuous thread all through the saga. And one of the dumbest real people I have had the misfortune to know, once a teacher (!) in a local girls’ school, scorned these as ‘children’s books’. God help us.

[some new readers might want to read what I wrote on the subject of Harry Potter last time round] 

Vanaprastha

It has been uppermost in my mind for quite some time that I am approaching what in the ancient Hindu scheme of things was called vanaprastha, the third stage of a full and well-lived life.

The first stage, after infancy that is, is preparation for living a life (which means education in a broad sense); the second, living the life of an active householder – earning a living, raising a family, perhaps influencing the world in some significant way or the other, as artists, scientists, reformers and statesmen do. In the third stage, you have not only done most of what you could, but you have begun to grow weary and rather bored about it, your worldly responsibilities as well as cares (‘what do people think about me?’) are both on the wane, and so, in the fitness of things, unless you are chronically ill or very poor or seriously disabled, you begin to think of withdrawing from close, daily, ceaseless involvement with the world. You may still for a while (for some that may mean a decade or more) keep doing more or less what you have been doing for ages, but you do it in an increasingly more detached, relaxed way, and you try to find more and more time and opportunity to enjoy yourself, your real self, not the sensuous monkey that keeps chittering away inside, endlessly eager to stay drowned in ‘what most of the rest of the world is doing’, which usually means dressing up, shopping, watching TV, surfing the Net, drinking, gambling, partying, preening, envying others and so on and on. For a lot of sane, self-possessed people, it means paying more focused attention to their favourite hobbies, whatever they may be, music, gardening, exercise, travelling, reading, writing, charity, religion, blissful sleep… the options are almost as numerous and varied as people.

It is also a time when one loses loved ones right and left, either because they quarrel and drift away or simply die. And so, alas, for many people it is a time of deepening fear of death. One of the most regrettable facts of modern life is that the ‘scientific’ outlook has only vastly spread and intensified this fear. On the one hand, it has instilled in us the conviction that this (this bodily existence, this world) is all there is, and we come here only once, so we must make the most of it for as long as we can; on the other hand the endless ‘advancement’ of medical care has stoked the hope that new drugs, new procedures, new prosthetics will keep us going for just a little while longer, and together, they have created absolute terror about the very idea that no matter how hard we try, we must die sooner or later. So even decrepitude – which happens to most people beyond eighty, when, even if they are not a burden on themselves or anybody else, it is quite evident to everybody that they are neither of any use to anyone nor enjoy anything about life any more, wearing diapers again, for God’s sake, and hobbling about with walkers, memory gradually fading away – is considered to be preferable to death, and there is now no dirtier word in the dictionary; nothing that you say upsets people more: I have checked a thousand times. Nijeke buro keno bolchhen Sir, why do you call yourself old, they all chant, consoling themselves with platitudes, not realizing they are irritating me with imbecility clothed as concern. Why not? What is so sad and shameful about getting old? Isn’t it the hard earned self-satisfaction of finally seeing the distant shore after a lifetime of struggle and suffering on the storm-tossed ocean of life? The joyful expectation of ‘quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over’?

Every religion in the world concurs on this – life means endless suffering, with happiness only a fleeting, occasional illusion. Every religion tries to prescribe a way of living that reduces the burden of suffering in this world, persuades followers that the aim is to get through this life as quickly and lightly as possible (‘this world is not my home, I’m just passing through’… echoed in every land and language over millennia), and tries to prepare them for what comes next, whether they call it extinction or another life or nirvana or heaven. Why have we forgotten, and what have we gained in exchange? More physical luxuries and distractions to ‘enjoy’ for a little longer than our ancestors did, and more prolonged, more exquisite suffering alongwith? The world today is full of hundreds of millions of well-fed, well-clothed, well-housed, constantly ‘entertained’ people who are bored to death, perennially depressed, merely drifting aimlessly through life, yet clinging insanely to it all the same. With what pity our cave-dwelling ancestors might have shaken their heads at us!

So vanaprastha, I am trying to teach myself, could yet be the best time of my life, precisely because the increasing immediacy of death will force me, if only I let it, to focus on the little that is left, the little that really matters, the little that could make my life ultimately worthwhile to me.

Ghatshila, Chandipur, Bhitarkanika

Aficionados – I know there are a few – will be happy to see a new travel post after ages.

With every passing year I enjoy Durga pujo more and more by giving it the miss – in which sense I belong to the second class of Bengalis, the first being those who stay at home or come home from all corners of the world to live it up amidst the crowds and noise and sweltering heat. This time I decided once more on a longish road trip starting on the morning of ‘shoshthi’. I had asked several old boys to come along, but in the event only Swarnava could manage it. So my mother, Swarnava and I set off with young Firoz (the older version has vanished) at the wheel at about seven in the morning of Monday the 11th October. For me this was after an unusually long hiatus: I had last gone on a proper trip in December, and never been out of Durgapur if you leave out two day trips to Kolkata except for the two weeks in Delhi in end-February.

We headed towards Ghatshila, just across the border in Jharkhand on the Subarnarekha river, once famed among Calcuttans for its salubrious weather and drinking water with ‘medicinal’ properties. Passing through Bankura, Manbazar and Banduan, and being casually stopped at a border police post to register ourselves as travellers and confirm that we had all been vaccinated (they didn’t bother to check the certificates), we took about five hours to arrive. There was an unfortunate mix-up over accommodation, because booking.com had uncharacteristically defrauded us by sending us to a third-rate hotel, after which we checked into something halfway decent (but good and cheap food), Hotel Akashdeep in the marketplace, freshened up, had lunch, then set off to see the local sites, starting off with Burudi dam, one of the earliest built by the British. One warning to future travellers: though the lake surrounded by misty hills is as scenic as you might wish, the forest road that takes you there is actually a nightmarish apology for a road, and if you are driving anything less than a high-clearance off-roader, you might seriously damage your vehicle, even if you don’t get stuck. It took very long and gave me a scare.

By the time we got back to the highway the sun was near setting, which, people had told me, was the best time to stop at Raatmohana over the river, close to the Hindustan Copper works, and the view was good, though nothing spectacular for someone much travelled like me. On the way back to the hotel we stopped briefly at Bibhuti bhushan Bandyopadhyay’s well-restored house, Gouri Kunja, which now serves as a little museum recording the life and times of the great author. Standing before the glass panels that housed some of his clothes, handwritten manuscripts and covers of first editions was a sobering moment. All Bengalis owe a big thanks to the committee currently headed by Tapas Chatterjee, the author’s son’s son in law, which has taken great pains to preserve the memory. As the newspaper article says and we found out for ourselves, they are desperately cash strapped, so every Bengali-literature lover should come forward to help (are there many such left?).

On Tuesday morning we drove off towards Chandipur, passing through Baripada and Balasore, arriving at the sea beach at just about lunch time. It was a trip down memory lane. I had last visited in the winter of 1994, long before my daughter was born, with an elderly friend and yet another old boy from the St Xavier’s ICSE 1991 batch. Only the OTDC-run Pantha Nivas had existed at that time, and it was a pretty down market place then (which suited our budget!), surrounded only by sand and casuarina forest. Now it is a bustling seaside resort, albeit still on a small scale compared with Digha and Puri, with private hotels everywhere, and none too expensive. Mercifully some of the peace and quiet still remains – one major reason being that the beach is a rather disappointing thing unless you appreciate its uniqueness: you can walk for half a kilometer at low tide before you reach the water, and almost that much again before it comes waist high, the very antithesis of Puri and Gopalpur and Vizag. Pantha Nivas was entirely renovated and upgraded in 2008, and now it’s good, though it doesn’t quite match up to Digha standards (one for you, Didi!). We nearly walked away because of the blaring loudspeakers at the pujo right in front, on the beach itself if you please, but the lodge manager virtually dragged us back, promising to ask the culprits to turn down the volume (which they did, though only for a while, but at least they stopped completely after 9 in the evening, so we could sleep in peace). Again, the food was good – and much less expensive than in WB tourist lodges. I sat for as long as I could on the steps on the seashore, but ultimately the ghastly mugginess of the air drove me back to the cool comfort of my air conditioned room and my vodka. They had got me a beer in the afternoon, but couldn’t supply me with ice, hard luck.

On Wednesday morning we headed for Bhitarkanika wildlife reserve. We had booked cottages at the Estuarine Village Resort on the edge of the Brahmani river. I had planned the trip in such a way that we wouldn’t have to drive more than five to six hours at a stretch on any one day, but this one took a little longer, first because Google made us lose our way and sent us to a ferry which carried only people and motorbikes, so we had to come back eleven km to the highway, and then, at Pattamundai, where we left the highway once more, some over-zealous policemen diverted us on to a bad village road to avoid crowding a pujo site without giving us proper alternative directions. Still, we didn’t have to eat a very late lunch. On the way we crossed the Baitarani river, and when I say my worldly ordeal ended thereby tradition-literate Bengalis, I hope, will get the joke. The resort was nice though not fabulous. Given the horrible heat and humidity, what I missed most was the air conditioner – they hadn’t bothered about the extra expense ostensibly because the forest is closed to tourists during the three hottest months of the year, and most visitors stay only during the winter. In the afternoon, we visited the natural park nearby, complete with crocodile hatchery and museum, and the walk would have been idyllic in cold weather. My mother coped bravely, despite her age and creaking joints. Thank God she so loves to travel… the evening was spent lazing away, something I enjoy immensely. Just having nothing to do in particular and nowhere to go out of necessity remains as welcome after long months of rigid routine today as it used to be a quarter century ago.

That night the clouds burst. Thunder and lightning began their eternal mesmerizing drama from around 1:30, and then from around 2:20 it began to pour. It was still drizzling early in the morning, there was a blessed freshness in the air, and the garden was awash. That day we enjoyed ourselves immensely, going on two successive motor boat rides, in the first half and then again in the second, first through the creeks (Bhitarkanika is the second largest mangrove forest in India after the Sunderbans), tracking deer and monitor lizards and crocs, from little babies to fifteen foot monsters which can tackle tigers, when the migratory birds nesting thickly on one particular island strongly reminded me of Ranganathittu Sanctuary, and then down the Brahmani river as far as the Dhamara port where the river empties itself into the sea. For Swarnava and Firoz it was the first river trip ever, and for me the longest yet, a large part of it in driving rain, which was thrilling. In the evening I simply sat out on the porch, luxuriating in the rain which was pouring again, while Rudro from Bangalore kept me happily engaged in conversation, despite phone and net connections being rather patchy.

We left the resort at 7 next morning, found a much better road to Pattamundai, and arrived at Baripada much before expected. From there we ventured 25 km to Lulung, where you enter the vast Simlipal National Forest, but, though the drive was lovely, they turned us back before we could reach the resort, the Park not yet having opened fully to tourists. This too I had visited during that ’94 trip, but it could not be fully repeated. So we headed back to the highway at Baripada. The dhaba where we briefly halted served a basic but wholesome meal, but it was blazing hot by then, despite a spell of rain on the way (very strange weather we have been having this whole year round!) The town being absolutely devoid of interest (the circuit house beckoned, but it was closed for repairs), we drove on to Jhargram – back in West Bengal – before deciding to call it a day and checking in at a very ordinary sort of ‘guest house’, without a/c again, alas! Though there is a lot of greenery before and after, Jhargram itself is literally nothing to write home about. This morning, Saturday the 16th, we set out late, and arrived in Durgapur just in time for lunch, at Rannaghor off the state highway in Sagarbhanga, which Subhadip Dutta had spoken highly of. After a satisfactory biryani, we reached home at about 1:30. Thus ended a 1200 km, six day journey, entirely without mishap. My mother, I am glad to say, is content and in good shape, while both Swarnava and Firoz have assured me they hugely enjoyed themselves: I distinctly heard the former already musing aloud about the ‘next time’.

Now for a few observations. The roads were good to very good all through, but nowhere excellent by my standards: even on the best stretches of highway you have to keep slowing down for diversions where endless repairs and new constructions are going on, and remain on permanent high alert for everything from dogs, goats, cows and idiots crossing to sudden deep potholes which can shear your car’s bottom off and wild drivers with absolutely not a care about their own lives or those of others, so that your average speed never exceeds 50 km an hour, however many times you accelerate to 110. In Odisha and Jharkhand, apart from the language problem, the men in the street seem to revel in confusing you with contradictory directions, when they deign to respond to your queries at all. In both those states, the numbers of cows (and even more notably, bulls), goats and dogs ambling or dozing in the middle of the highways both irked and amazed me. We apparently ‘care’ too much to hustle them off, but apparently not much about maiming and killing them, especially the dogs. In Odisha they write most posters, banners and road signs only in the local language, which can prove to be a headache for out of state travellers. Hotel service on the whole was nice everywhere, though we must remember that the whole industry is licking deep wounds after Covid, and desperately trying to recover. Oh, in Jharkhand, hardly any biker cares about helmets, and in neither state were many people, barring policemen, wearing masks. About which I can only exclaim with relief, ‘Thank God. It’s been long enough’.

On this trip I drove twice over long stretches, and found it most exhilarating. I haven’t lost either the touch or the interest, really, and I would have indeed done it far more often if only road travel in India had reached American, or better still, German standards. Distance, as I keep saying, hardly matters, road conditions are everything: on bad roads a Merc can become a Nano, and on really good roads, my humble Dzire drives like a dream. Indeed, I enjoyed myself so much that I started inwardly dreaming about making long solo trips again, despite my age. All that I need to do is to convince myself that nobody would really care if I even died on the way in an accident or a heart attack at the wheel. Anything short of that, like a breakdown on the road, and I should simply lock the car, leave it in the hands of Fate, go find some food and shelter for the night nearby, come back with help the next morning, and all would be fine, so long as I didn’t have to do anything to a strict deadline…

Durgapur, dammit, is still hot and damp, though it’s mid-October. Classes resume tomorrow, my 58th birthday.

For a few photographs, click on this link.

Bad people

I have been amusing myself by making a list of people who are now considered ‘bad’ by majority opinion, almost worldwide.

Men.

Religious people.

Those who keep telling us that ‘truth’, including scientific truth, is not to be based on how many people think it is the truth. In Copernicus’ time, most people, including the most ‘educated’ people, thought that the sun went round the earth, and lepers had been cursed by God, so they deserved to be stoned to death.

Those who insist that everyone should take some responsibility for their own lives instead of perennially expecting to be ‘compensated’ for one kind of unfair treatment or the other, often only to remote ancestors.

Those who ask for courtesy and decency and reasonableness in public discourse, and accuracy and precision and beauty (or at least absence of ugliness) in the use of language.

Those who say that some women are bad people, just like some men.

Those who insist that childhood should not be endlessly prolonged – it harms both the individual and society.

Those who teach that you are not the most wonderful person ever born, nor does the world exist to please you; that the vast majority of people are destined to live and die as perfectly ordinary and forgettable people: the sooner everybody accepts this the better for all concerned.

Those who say that there is much good and nobility, even greatness, to be admired in very ‘ordinary’ people, but worshipping money and fame and power makes us blind to all that.

Those who say democracy cannot long survive without education, and discipline, and limitations on individual whims hiding behind a narrative of ‘rights’.

Those who say that patriotism is a very different thing from ignorant, intolerant, majoritarian jingoism.

Those who insist that you cannot become civilized, indeed even human, without reading a lot of literature and history – that is precisely why they are called the humanities, and no degree of expertise in any technical vocation, be it surgery or rocketry, can substitute for that.

Those who warn that a world dominated by robots and artificial ‘intelligence’, however safe and comfortable it might be for the majority, will be a world fit only for pigs and slaves.

Those who remind us that all kinds of wishy-washy ‘environmentalism’ is stupid; for while it is very important to learn to live more in harmony with Nature (including the nature that makes up our own bodies and minds), it is also very important to remember that Nature lives by the dictum of kill and be killed, that Nature kills swiftly, mercilessly, relentlessly, and the long march of civilization has been a story of man’s endless, defiant fight against Nature’s mindless, devastating cruelty, from disease to man eating animals to extreme heat and cold to tsunamis and earthquakes.

Let me see whether I want to extend this list… meanwhile, questions, doubts, arguments, alternative views, as long as they are decently and coherently expressed, are welcome. 

I am almost free. And it frightens me.

Although I have tried to order my life by an extraordinarily strict self-imposed routine (you know I never took a jamaishasthi break in 25 years of married life, lest I should miss some classes?), and passed most of the years of my active adult life that way, it amazes me how life has nevertheless taken its own obdurate course, like a river in flood, eroding mountains, breaking banks, changing course again and again as it rushes towards the sea. So I have passed through several distinct stages, which I can see clearly see now, as one on a hilltop, looking down at the plains below through which he has trudged and from which he has climbed for so long.

First was that quiet and oppressive childhood, where my only pleasures were reading and the occasional company of my grandfather, and terror of living under my father’s mercurial tyranny. That changed when I first fell in love, and started wandering unfettered around town on my bicycle, and started smoking and drinking on the sly – early tastes of freedom, and, constricted and limited as it was, it still felt heavenly. The next stage was moving to the great city; first income, almost enough to look after myself, some exposure to the world of important affairs via print, a host of carnal and romantic affairs, encounters with harsh and sudden violence, multifarious scholarly quests, introduction to politics, travels on my own, being evicted from home for a few years – more taste of adulthood (many of my contemporaries acquired that much varied experience, I have discovered, long after thirty, and some never at all). There was a sharp jolt again when I gave up the newspaper job and university life very suddenly to return to Durgapur, and took up the schoolmaster’s job, and went abroad. A few years down the line, after staying away from my parents for a couple of years, getting married and becoming a father. The next big thing, starting the new century with a bang as it were, was quitting the job to fend for myself, all on my own. Eleven years after that, my wife and daughter leaving the hearth I had built. It was too tremendous a shock for me to have fully recovered yet, but I soldiered on, partly because I had to, too many worldly burdens to shoulder alone, and partly because I was sure that if I gave up I would go to pieces, partly because I still enjoyed it and couldn’t imagine anything better to do. And so for another eight years, while my daughter grew up, till the pandemic struck, and I had to adjust dazedly, painfully, to so many students quitting, ‘teaching online’, occasional breaks when I could resume regular classes again, only to lock down again… and that is how a year and a half has passed till the time of writing.

I begin to sense that another phase is dawning, probably the last. As with every great changeover, it has left me confused, disoriented, not entirely sure what is happening far less how best to handle it, unable even to imagine with much clarity what lies ahead, or guess how long this phase would be. Looking at it from a positive-minded perspective (which, I suppose, is always the best thing to do if at all it is possible), I am a very lucky man, for I have reached a stage where I am finally almost free – as free as a man in this world can be, largely free even of family obligations – and at the same time adult, solvent though far from rich, unconstrained by custom and superstition, and largely in possession of my native powers. Not everyone reaches this blessed state before it is time to pass on. I can at last turn my mind towards doing things I had always longed to do, but could never find the time and resources for till now.

And this very realization keeps very disturbingly drawing me back to one of the most influential books in my life, Fear of Freedom, by the great psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. The essence of his thesis was that the vast majority of human beings, though they declare their love of and desire for freedom so continuously and clamorously, are actually terrified of the reality of freedom, because (except in very rare situations, like wishing to be free of some sort of unbearable tyranny as one wishes to be free of toothache) freedom entails responsibility, and the imperative of making choices, and the necessity for hard decisions – the need to examine one’s own mind and make up one’s own mind, than which no task in this world is harder. What kind of freedom would I really enjoy for any length of time? What do I really want hereafter?

For now, I have been seeking solace in returning to books with a vengeance. This may sound strange to those who know me really well, because they are aware that I have been an avid reader virtually all my life. True enough, but the fact is that reading had been 90% of my life between ages four and sixteen, and I used to be able to get literally, happily lost in books during that time of my life, and I haven’t been able to read in that absorbed way ever since then. For too many worldly cares interrupted too often and too insistently. Until now. So now, I am trying to go back to a place which I left behind a very long time ago. But no matter how engrossing, reading cannot be, at my age, the whole of life. What do I want to do with the rest of it? From suicide to seeking God in all earnest, I have not yet been able to make up my mind.

Why do I write?

Why do I write?

As with so many other questions that I have wrestled with, answering this one clearly, cogently and adequately is important to me, even it might not interest anybody else at all. And so, as with all such things, I am writing down the answer here primarily for myself.

I write because I can. Not everybody can: that is something I have found out over a very, very long time, having been a voracious reader since early childhood and a teacher of language for many decades, over two generations. I might have sung or played music or sculpted or painted if I could even half as confidently, but I cannot.

I write because I love to. And unlike so many other ‘loves’, this one has endured. Over more than four decades, so I can expect it to endure as long as my head and fingers work.

I write because I have seemingly endless things to say about endless things, and the wellspring has not dried up yet! Has nobody marvelled over the sheer variety of things I have written about? Doesn’t matter; I have.

I write because writing lasts in a much more satisfactory way than talking does – and I should know, after having talked tens of thousands of hours for a living! That is why Hammurabi and Ashoka carved their edicts in stone, that is why Caesar and Babur wrote diaries so painstakingly, that is why some people cared to write down what the Buddha and Jesus and Mohammed said. This very (comparatively-) insignificant effort, this blog, has lasted a long time already, in relation to the average human lifespan that is. So many readers have left impressions, so many new readers keep coming to visit, so many people have sent me thanks or congratulations for writing a multitude of different things, so many people have raised questions that have been a challenge and a pleasure to answer, so many old posts come back to the most-visited list again and again… also there is a possibility that the blog, and some other things I have written, may outlast me. There is no harm in dreaming that I shall be judged more deeply, sanely, fairly, wholly, than I was in my lifetime. Writing is one of the very few ways of leaving something worthwhile of yourself behind.

I write because it remains one of the great pleasures of my life to get back to things I wrote long ago – my first published piece is now forty five years old – and relish reading the best of them. I have tried passionately to hold on to many people all my life, but I have discovered beyond argument that my writing stays with me as people just don’t. If I live long enough, I’ll probably be peering at the best writing of others as well as myself through owlish glasses long after most of my faculties are gone.

I write because I am good for very little else.

I write because those who read my writing come closer to me than others can.

I write because I love life, because I believe that writing at its best can help to make living at least infinitesimally better for others, and also because I love the idea that I am going to die, and that most of my life is already spent.

Open the schools, repetition

I should like to keep on record that for the first time since March 22, 2020, a news item saying that there have been disastrous losses in learning skills among schoolchildren has made it to the top of the front page of a major national newspaper: see this link. In case it vanishes from the website after a while, I am going to post a photo of the item below, too.

The survey speaks of the damage done to underprivileged children, but I can vouch from my own daily teaching experience how much harm has been done to the most privileged section too, dawdling at home, playing video games while online 'teaching' is going on or attending 'classes' from restaurants or shopping malls, taking tests only in MCQ format with textbooks open in from of them or parents dictating from the side (and being allowed an hour to answer what should take only fifteen minutes), even below-average pupils being routinely given 80%-plus marks, etc etc... I should like everyone to read the very last line of the report: 'online lessons cannot pass off as meaningful education for any child'. I concur entirely, and I speak from some knowledge and experience.

End of August note

I am delighted to see that the fund to save Shyamali Das from cancer has attracted more than Rs. 200,000 so far. Once more, I am deeply grateful to all ex students and friends who responded generously to my plea.

This is the last day of August, so I have been able to conduct offline classes for two months straight. Barring Kerala, Covid infection rates – and much more significantly, mortality rates – have gone down sharply and stayed down everywhere for more than two months now, so I am hoping that all restrictions will be gradually removed countrywide, and even if the third wave comes and goes, it will be mild and of very short duration.

For some reason, August has dragged ever since my daughter went back. I hope September will go faster. One more month, and I shall be able to look forward to a long and pleasant winter once more.

Here is an article in my newspaper today written by a professor of economic law detailing how the present Union government of India has quietly shelved its electoral promises to reduce inequality, corruption and nepotism in the business world, and has in fact made a very sharp and unrepentant about-turn in policy. I hope the ordinary voter will begin to take note and understand what is going on. It is true that over the last forty years economic policy worldwide has chiefly helped the rich to get ever richer, and the best that can be said for India is that it has chosen to be no different. Allowing the ultra rich to get ever richer is the surest and quickest road to all-round development – that is the belief that has come back with a vengeance after nearly a century. A middle class which fattens on the crumbs thrown off the dinner tables of the plutocracy (personified by the engineer or journalist who earns in a month a fraction of what the owner/CEO’s daughter spends in one night’s party) will continue to cheer as long as it is not squeezed too hard, and the poor can go to blazes. Until another revolution comes, I guess. Viscerally against violence and committed to the middle path as I am, I sometimes cannot help feeling that cutting off a few thousand heads might not be too big a price to pay in order to return to some semblance of civilization, as long as they are only the heads of the dirty rich…

Here is another article from the same newspaper which pretends to be amazed to find out that major IT and computer tech companies are recruiting talent from liberal arts backgrounds. I can only go ‘hee hee hee’, and remind you of a post I wrote almost a decade ago, Engineer or bust.

Postscript to urgent appeal

I am writing a postscript to the previous post, and the postscript is being written in a far more sombre mood than the original.

The good news first.  The day I put up that post, the fund had attracted a princely donation of five hundred rupees; within two days of my appeal, it had topped one hundred thousand (the latest figure is about Rs. 142,000+). The great bulk of this amount has been contributed by a relatively small number of my ex students (and some parents of current students): the kindest and most decent of them, needless to say. My grateful thanks to all of them. The husband of the sick woman is ecstatic; he keeps telling me how thankful the family is, and that this amount was beyond their wildest dreams. That is good. The chemotherapy can at least be restarted immediately.

However, they are managing to make me feel deeply inadequate and guilty, because it is only too obvious how small the amount raised so far is, given the size of their need. It is also making me feel very bitter to think about how little success I have had over a lifetime of trying earnestly to persuade thousands of young people to grow up into socially useful, sympathetic, giving human beings, rather than merely ‘successful’. If a few more hundred of my ex students (and the parents of many hundred current students) had contributed generously, the fund would have already grown to ten times what it is, at least. It seems that a family jaunt to MacDonald’s or a cinema which costs them more than a thousand rupees is perfectly par for the course, but donating the same amount or a little more to save a person struggling to fight off untimely death is a horrific excess! May many people learn how important it is to help out others in distress only from going through the same experience with their most dearly loved ones: in this heartless world, I don’t think there is any other way.

I would never ask for monetary help for myself. I have known poverty, I have slogged for four decades to rise above it, and I prefer to put my faith in karma, or God, as you will. What I deserve I shall get no matter how many people try to stop it, and what I don’t deserve I won’t, no matter how much I pray, or how many pray for me. However – call me schizophrenic if you like – I also believe that if we all cared a little more for our fellow human beings, especially those in distress, not necessarily financial – it would go a long way to making a nicer world. One of my lifelong endeavours has been, therefore, to create a network of good, caring people, who make friends with one another, stay in touch regardless of their own troubles and woes, and help one another out in times of dire need. That was one major reason why I started writing this blog. Some old boys had suggested that in this internet age that would be a very good way of staying in touch. It didn’t quite work out that way, but let that go.

I have also been able to help a lot of people, mostly ex students, all through these long years, when they were in trouble, either through direct personal intervention (counselling, giving a patient ear to their laments when no one else was willing to listen, lending money, etc etc) or by putting them in touch with other ex students who were in a position to give a hand. Many of my readers know that they have been beneficiaries, though some of them would like to forget their debts – not to me, but to humanity, to God. (It has never ceased to amaze me how frantic and insistent people become when they are in serious trouble, and how quickly they forget once those troubles are behind them, how indifferent to other people’s troubles they can be). If the network were wider and stronger, I am sure that a lot more people could be similarly benefited. So I was wondering whether I should make one more effort to bring together the best people I know, my most beloved old boys mostly, in the hope that something good will be ignited. A platform where a lot of people will be able to make friends, wide apart in age, education, experience and location, but united by a common desire to make real friends (rather than ‘frenz’ on social media), interact to ward off one of our commonest, most painful problems – to wit loneliness – and help one another with every kind of gesture: attentive time, money, counsel, mentoring, being there when no one else is, I hope you get it. Do you think I should start off a Whatsapp group specifically with that goal in mind? Those of my readers who are interested – adult, earning their own keep, preferably my own ex students – should let me know, here via comments or directly by Whatsapp.

An urgent appeal

I have a student whose mother has been battling cancer for more than a year. The father/husband is in dire straits now, financially as well as mentally, and the doctors say he has to raise a huge sum - Rs. 1.65 million - for immunotherapy. Upon the advice of the hospital he has appealed for help through a crowdfunding website. 

I know that this is just one life in mortal danger, and there are very many who need our help, but you will understand that the closer a person is, the more urgent and insistent his or her need to us. I have contributed my mite, but that is only a drop in the ocean. We need the support of hundreds, or better still, thousands of people. I do not have a very high opinion of our eagerness to do charity (see my old post Charity and other things) but will some of my readers consider that this could be their own mother, wife or daughter, and extend a helping hand? 

If you wish to help, please click on this link. Thank you from the bottom of my heart in advance for doing your bit to save a life. 

For God's sake, open the schools!

I should like to request frequent visitors to look up my other blog occasionally. Believe me, all of you will find something to smile over (thoughtfully) – and to many of you a different, unexpected side of my character will be revealed. That poor blog is neglected, partly because the paucity of visits and comments discourages me from posting too often.

There is, thank God, a (very slow, hesitant) start with reopening schools across the country. Many states, including UP, are apparently going to open up with senior classes from August 16. There is also a still-soft chorus, but daily growing louder, that all the other states follow suit, quickly. I read in today’s paper that a class 12 student (obviously prompted by his parents) in Delhi has filed a petition with the Supreme Court to urge the governments to reopen schools, saying that not only have millions of children suffered enormous academic losses since March 2020 owing to the endless shutdown, but are struggling with very disturbing and maybe irremediable mental health issues (a grim reality I can personally witness among my own pupils). This request is now being echoed everywhere, even from very high places. However, our own state government is still dragging its feet, almost unwilling to deal with the issue at all (‘we’ll think about it after pujo’). For heaven’s sake, why?

Surely one can no longer believe that children’s lives will be put at great risk if they start going to school? They are going everywhere – from crowded shopping malls to tourist spots and wedding feasts, their parents who go out to work are bringing home the infection, and nothing is happening to them, but they will die of Covid if they go to school? Contrary to all the evidence from all corners of the world, seeing that most other countries have kept schools open almost throughout the year? Why on earth can’t schools be opened tentatively but right now, the way I (and tens of thousands of tutors around the country) have done, ready to be closed down at a day’s notice if the infection graph starts soaring again? Can’t the authorities still realize the horrible damage* being done? Does it really need to be spelt out? Why after Durga pujo, still more than a month and a half away?

One thing should be remembered: barring the most benighted, no child in India goes to school any more with the expectation of being ‘educated’. They attend because a fairly old custom says they have to, and because they have to sit for examinations, and, most importantly, because they can socialize with their peers and get some outdoor exercise and extra-curricular activity. Most of their learning, such as it is, happens at home, by themselves and with the help of private tutors. We have been trying to ignore this open secret, this elephant in the room, for far too long. Bring them back to school so that they can get a reasonably healthy childhood, period.

Here is a link to an article suggesting why some other people think, just like me, that the real reason for the indefinitely prolonged shutdown is something very sinister, or at least very sad.

*This article reports a study which has tried to estimate the kind of damage that has already been done. (Alas, the reporter herself cannot spell. I hope the reader is observant enough to find out the howlers. Remember: spelling is the most basic proof of literacy).

A month of normal classes

It is the last day of July today, and I am happy to report that the god of Covid has let me take a full month of classes offline. Meanwhile infections and fatalities countrywide have sharply declined to reach a sort of plateau (and curiously, just two states, Kerala and Maharashtra, account for more than half of all new recorded infections now, while, if the official data are anywhere near the truth, UP and Delhi have reached herd immunity – nothing else explains the vanishingly low figures over the last month), and in West Bengal, the rate of new daily infections has fallen from around 20,000 to the 600-850 range, while deaths are now being counted in single digits.

So now we are waiting for the much-feared third wave. Experts are sharply divided over a) whether it will happen at all, b) when it will start rising (earliest likely end-August, but could strike as late as October, they say), and c) whether or not it will be as damaging as the second wave, or a little less or much less so.

As for myself, I am actually praying that it may strike and go away soon – because I am almost sure that once the third wave is gone, especially if it is mild, neither the authorities nor the general public will be held back from doing everything normally again for fear of likely fourth, fifth, sixth… nineteenth waves. As I have endlessly reiterated since March 2020, Covid will never ‘go away’, it can only become as insignificant an issue as influenza – the greatest mass killer a hundred years ago – has become now. Whether that will finally lead to reopening of our schools and colleges, I won’t lay a wager, because I am now deeply suspicious about whether we Indians, students, teachers, parents, government and all businessmen making money hand over fist from ‘online education’ at all want things to go back to normal or not. I cannot begin to say how grateful I am to Providence that my daughter’s essential formal education ended just before the pandemic struck.

I have told all my own students and their parents that I shall continue to keep a sharp watch on official numbers as well as local events, and go online again for a while if the situation so demands, but unless I make a public announcement to that effect, they should all know that offline classes are going on as usual, with infection-related safety protocols in place. I am waiting for the second dose of the vaccine in mid-September, and I hope that once it is done, I can travel freely around the country again. 

A lot is happening

What do Elon Musk, the Taliban and rigid Gandhians have in common? They do not believe there has been a population explosion over the last century; rather, they are afraid that the world is on the verge of being depopulated. Well, Musk is a nut (you don’t believe nuts can become hugely successful in a worldly way? You have obviously never heard of Howard Hughes and Adolf Hitler): he believes that we must procreate much more rapidly because ‘Mars needs us’, whatever that means. The Taliban are much saner in comparison, they only want an endless supply of suicidal mujahideen. And Gandhi taught his followers there can never be too many people around, because ‘God gave each man only one mouth to feed but two hands to work with’. Evidently no one ever explained to him the iron law of diminishing returns when you have to work with several productive factors in fixed supply, like land and fresh water and nature’s capacity to recycle toxic substances, when one factor (namely population) keeps increasing to monstrous levels (almost nothing to one billion 1800 years; one billion to nearly 8, the next two hundred years only). I wonder how Musk at least would feel if he were forced to live in, say, a one-room accommodation in Dharavi slum without a private toilet and able only to visit a government hospital when he is sick, or to sit for some job entrance examination where millions fight over a few hundred vacancies…

Manoj Jha, RJD member of the Rajya Sabha and a professor at Delhi University, singlehandedly and greatly raised the prestige of Parliament as the ultimate representative of the people on Tuesday the 21^st July by delivering an eight-minute apology (maafinama) to the entire country for the untold misery and loss visited upon us during the long pandemic, blaming all governments since Independence for the pathetic situation we find ourselves in today (attention to public health and emergency management has NEVER been a priority to any government at the Centre). I hope his speech will percolate deep and wide into the public mind, and go down in history. I wish even a single member of the ruling party attending the session had the guts, the honesty and the empathy with his voters to applaud. Jha was not even singling out their Supreme Leader for dereliction of duty!

Our current CJI, it seems, has taken several bulls by the horns by calling the sedition law a colonial hangover and promising to examine its Constitutional validity and relevance. In this context, I would like to note, like Jha, that no government since 1947 has thought fit to remove it from the statute books, for reasons that should be obvious! (the Supreme Court has also recently expressed deep consternation that our entire hospital sector is being run like corporate business, geared only to maximize profits, all ideas of rendering an essential social service be damned).

Meanwhile, recent sero-surveys have indicated that close to two-thirds of our population may have developed antibodies to Covid – which means we are close to herd immunity – and even Dr. Randeep Guleria, director of AIIMS Delhi, a committed and passionate doomsayer since early last year, has now gone on record saying it is high time that schools and colleges were reopened. Will India soon become the only major country in the world where they will be kept indefinitely closed? And will any half-sane person claim that that will be another feather in our national cap?

Here in West Bengal we have created history of sorts by declaring that 79 Madhyamik candidates have jointly stood first (with 599 marks out of 600!!) and not one of the many lakhs failed. Go figure. It terrifies me to think of what kind of future awaits these hapless youngsters, especially in the job market.

All kinds of unconnected musing brought me back to reflect upon the life and death of Harihar Ray, the indigent itinerant priest who was father to Apu in Pather Panchali, and died ‘unhonoured, unsung’ and virtually unwept in Varanasi, far away from his native Nischindipur. In this age of absolutely virulent and vicious insistence on reverse caste- and gender entitlement, there are still good men, poor Brahmins, who live simple, honest, hardworking lives, quietly doing the humble best they can for their wives and children until they drop dead, and they vanish without even a public eulogy: who cares? Not even their own families for very long: Apu neither shed tears nor remembered by the time he got married. While all around us we can see the most privileged (and often worthless-) children of  SC, ST and OBC folks who have already got the best of all possible worlds – father IAS, mother successful surgeon, luxury accommodation, fancy cars, five star dinners, holidays abroad – and still getting every kind of unearned advantage from school to college to jobs and even seats in legislatures, so much so that getting at least an OBC certificate through fair means or foul has become one of the fastest ways to social advancement for hundreds of thousands, and then being resentful whenever anybody even insinuates that they got it all because they were born in a lucky time, because their ancestors were badly treated, sometimes many generations ago… many years ago certain expert committees urged the government to cut out this ‘creamy layer’ at least from all such entitlements, and the CPI(M) alone among all political parties has always insisted that affirmative action should be based solely on the criteria of economic and educational deprivation, but no one has ever bothered to take them up in any meaningful way. And one last question: why should someone, who has been allowed to get through school on much easier terms than his peers, continue to get similar advantages through college and in the job market? By greatly relaxing entry requirements for our future doctors, teachers, judges and civil servants, are we benefiting the nation in any way at all?

Our sins and follies are deep, old and toxic.

Mid-July already!

This month the blog became fifteen years old. A long, long time to keep writing a public diary. My current students were just being born then, those who were students then were hardly mature enough to take serious interest in what I wrote – and some who were already old-timers then have now reached the age when they can begin to appreciate and agree with a lot of things I have been writing in the light of their own lived experience, things that strongly irked them when in their callow youth they read such things for the first time. To top it all, I myself keenly enjoy reading a lot of old posts, and seeing some of them surfacing on the most-read list after ages when I had myself forgotten about them (such as the one titled Hunger, tycoons and little girls and another, A gem of a wit).

A decision that is likely to affect the future of all humankind profoundly in the coming decades has been taken very recently by the European Union in a typically no-fuss way: that their governments are going to work together to reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2030, the long term goal being to become the first carbon neutral continent by mid-century. I hope they largely succeed, and that the rest of the world, India, China and the USA in particular, follow their lead, for the sake of all our children and grandchildren. A slightly more important issue than the launch of another iPhone model, or another rich man’s toy to make a jaunt into near-space.

Something very nice and something heartbreaking happened to me recently. An old girl visited along with her husband after ages (I wish she had brought her 16-month old along). She was thrilled to bits that I recognized her at first glance, and true to her old bubbly self kept us regaled with her infectious, voluble enthusiasm for the entire duration of her visit, assuring me that literally everybody around her, from shoshurbaari to colleagues and bosses, have been bored to tears over the last decade with stories about her Suvro-Sir. If so many people have such good and strong memories, why don’t they share more with me, and keep more in touch, for God’s sake? – and a 14-year old, obviously gone cranky with endless staying at home for more than a year, hanged himself in a silly spur of the moment urge to scare his mother recently. The distraught parents came to see me, dissolving into tears which I could only watch helplessly: what comfort can one offer to those so devastated? It only brought back horrid memories, other children, similar disasters. These parents agreed entirely with me that millions of children should not be locked up indefinitely at home like animals in cages for fear of a disease. People didn’t do that even when world wars were going on for years! But who is listening, and how many more young lives would have to be sacrificed so that they could be ‘protected’ from the pandemic? I am sure that while suicide is not a very common thing, literally tens of thousands of young and not so young people are going slowly mad, but nobody has even seriously begun to count…

I have been lately reflecting on how many ‘things’ came into our lives and went away soon, like video cassette recorders and CDs and phone booths. Many so-called hi-tech innovations, such as contact lenses, which were already available in my youth, never really caught on. On the other hand, especially given the lack of public transport and maybe a little more health consciousness among the rich, bicycles seem to be making a big comeback. And ordinary people’s clothes have hardly changed over my lifetime, except that more mothers wear jeans and T shirts these days, while their daughters wear more or less the same; hardly any can be seen in shorts after they are twelve. As for men, time seems to have stopped after 1980! I see the same media-managed mania over cricket and Durga pujo as it used to be forty years ago, and people go just as crazy over getting married (though marriages are going sour ever more quickly) as always. So much for the opinion that ‘everything has changed sooo much!’ (some of you might like to look up an old post titled Change resistant, am I?)

I am reading a new book called Murder at the mushaira by Raza Mir that Pupu has given me to try. I don’t know how good a whodunit it will prove to be (I shall have the Muzaffar Jang mysteries to compare with) but it is interesting because the poet Mirza Ghalib is the Sherlock Holmes here, and the author wonderfully recreates the social atmosphere of Delhi on the eve of the 1857 revolt.

One thing I would like to report with great contentment is that parents of students are on the whole behaving far more decently, deferentially than they used to twenty years or more ago. Is it because I have mellowed (and become more unwilling to engage in needless talk), or that the parents are much younger than me now, or that the collective weight of good opinions has finally outweighed the bad?

July already. Half a year since I last went travelling. How I wish that things would get back to normal soon…

Ray... baba re!

OK, I have watched all four episodes, and here is my one-word review: don't.

The only barely watchable episode is the third (based on Barin Bhoumik-er byaraam). Three things set it apart from the others: a) it has taken the least liberties with the original story line, b) it is the only one where the characters do not spout utterly unnecessary obscenities (supposedly to show that they are 'adult, mature and contemporary'), and c) there are no female characters. Does that explain something?

If this is a 'tribute' to Satyajit Ray, I'd like to know what a deliberate insult would be like.