Filling in, end March

These days, I am watching more documentaries than movies and TV series on Netflix. Those of you who are serious people and regular readers, I’d urge you to watch two such shows: Saving Capitalism and Inside Job. The latter narrates how shameless and rapacious neo-capitalism rampant since the 1980s is bringing about crisis after crisis in all major economies (in the course of which the poorest, weakest and most gullible suffer most every time, while the guilty super-rich manage to get away virtually scot free, and the former points out why it is becoming increasingly important to save capitalism from its own worst excesses, for the sake of the survival, safety and moderate comfort of the mass of humanity. If you have read my seven-part series of blogposts clubbed under the tag ‘socialism’, you will marvel at how much the narrators sound like me! (by the way, Netflix as an organization is very much a part of the liberal-capitalistic mainstream. That, I shall always maintain, is the greatest strength of the system, this ability to introspect, self-criticize and self-correct over and over again: all socialist systems devised so far have been far more fragile, insecure, and therefore unable to deal with timely and constructive criticism; that is why they always failed and collapsed sooner or later. If a better, more durable socialism is to be designed – and I believe it must, if mankind is to have any long term future – then the new generation of ideologues will have to do something about this enduring weakness.)

This time my daughter was not around, the first time since as a child fourteen years ago she started helping me (hugely) at the time of new admissions. She was away on a work trip. God be thanked, a large number of young and much older ex students willingly and most efficiently helped me out, so that over the last three days most of the hassle has been dealt with. I am hoping that I shall be able to embark on a ‘normal’ new academic year, regardless of the so-called second wave of coronavirus infections.

Pupu visited Ladakh for a week, and has just phoned in to say she is back home in Delhi. I am eagerly waiting for her to fill me in with the details. Meanwhile, my long-time suspicion has been adequately confirmed: Ladakh is too cold even in end-March, the air for some reason causes problems of discomfort including breathlessness even for those who are used to mountain travelling, and the so-called beauty appeals only to those who like barren deserts or moonscapes. I think as a tourist I shall give Ladakh a permanent miss. Give me Kashmir, Himachal or Uttarakhand any time.

Early summer is already making things unpleasant in this town. A day after I put up the last post here there was the first (and so far only-) nor’wester rains, first time in six months, and it made things comfortable by lowering the temperature and cutting down the dust in the air, but that pleasure lasted barely two days. I am praying the next storm comes very soon, otherwise we’ll start baking or boiling in early April!

Is there any hope of the swimming pool opening this year? I wonder…

To Delhi and back again

 I went over to my daughter’s place after four months for just a little less than a fortnight, and came back to a Durgapur already blazing. It hasn’t rained for six months – I can’t remember the last time this happened – and the dust in the air is becoming unbearable: I am waiting desperately for some early nor’westers.

My mother had gone along with me (I am too scared to leave her alone at home for any length of time after that last horrible scare in September!), and spry as she is despite her age, she took over the management of our little household in Delhi like a duck taking to water. I did my mite, including going over grocery shopping to C.R. Park and attending to some household chores, but it wasn’t much. A visit to Sunder Nursery (what incredible greenery even in early March!) and lunch over rumali roti and various kebabs and tikkas at Ghalib’s in Nizamuddin were two of the highlights of our sojourn this time. My daughter is currently doing a job which involves mostly working from home (except when she has to go on field trips), so I managed to share a lot of time with her, which is basically what I live for these days.

As usual, I did a lot of rich browsing in my daughter’s ever-growing repertoire of books. One of the most significant was The Cases that India forgot by Chintan Chandrachud, a very readable set of summaries of some of the landmark judgments delivered by our higher courts since Independence. The other two were both coincidentally written by  Indian women based in the US: The Twentieth Wife by Indu Sundaresan (a wonderful re-creation of the love affair of Noor Jehan and Emperor Jehangir – I am eagerly waiting to lay my hands on the two sequels) and The Satapur Moonstone, featuring the female lawyer-detective Parveen Mistry, set in the early 1920s, written by Sujata Massey: after the Mujaffar Jang books by Madhulika Liddle (I wish she’d write more), this was the best Indian writing in this genre by any Indian author that I have read: I shall make bold to announce that I prefer this sort of stuff over the Cormoran Strike books by J.K. Rowling.

We now have a bicycle in Delhi, and one afternoon I rode several kilometers along roads chock a block with speeding motor traffic: a pretty hair-raising experience. Seeing that a lot of people are again cycling these days, I hope the municipal authorities would see it fit to mark out dedicated cycling lanes along all major roads, and that soon.

The return trip to Durgapur was harrowing. I had set out from home with two hours in hand, and the drive normally takes barely more than twenty minutes at dawn, but that day everything went wrong, what with a never-before-seen traffic jam ahead of the airport (did it have something to do with the fact that the PM was flying to Kolkata the same morning?), followed by hopelessly slow and clumsy staff at the check-in desk, the usual swarming crowd at the security counter, and then a very, very long scramble to the farthest of the boarding gates, my poor mother huffing and puffing behind me – we boarded the plane with five minutes to spare for takeoff. I’ll probably go back to arriving at the airport at midnight and snoozing for four hours before the boarding gate. T3 is bursting at the seams already: the sooner they get the other terminal ready the better.

Here in Durgapur I am bracing myself for the usual admission rush at the end of this month. I shall have no more online-class nonsense, God willing, and I hope to start a normal session once more in April. I wish that the government(s) would make up their minds and announce something about when they intend to let schools reopen for the next academic year. Even if it is delayed by a month or two, a definite decision would go a long way to clear people’s minds. Trains and schools – those appear to be the only things that have not yet gone back to normal.

I have been avidly watching some of Karan Thapar’s interviews with Shashi Tharoor on YouTube, and I have also lately developed a fascination for the young but very articulate and dynamic Trinamul MP Mahua Moitra. Who says we don’t have polished, educated and intelligent people among our politicians? Perhaps our real curse is that the best of them don’t manage to rise to the top!

Have you started laying bets on the most likely outcome of the imminent Assembly elections in West Bengal?