Elections and lockdowns

My mother and I did our citizens’ duty today by going over to vote for the highly fraught state Assembly elections. I don’t take that ‘duty’ very seriously though: I’d have run away if I had seen a crowd, quiet or unruly. The heat was bad enough. I have been wondering for many years now why the polls cannot be held during the most comfortable months and why, in a land and age when so many things are being done by so many people constantly over the internet, facilities have still not been created whereby people can vote from the safety and comfort of their homes. I also never stop reflecting over the irony that the same neo-liberal thinkers who tell you, while teaching economics according to their favourite (and utterly fantastical-) ‘perfect competition’ model that your choices, as one consumer among hundreds of millions, count for nothing at all, turn around and solemnly assure you how important your single vote is!

The Covid scare is back with a vengeance, alas, and, after a straight six-month offline run, I have had to temporarily shut my classes down again, heaven knows for how long this time round. I have sworn that I shall not comment any more on this now-sickening issue (pun intended) any more until it is well and truly behind us, but I shall say that this ‘second wave’ was entirely man-made and hence avoidable – and when I say ‘man-’ I blame the governments at the state and central levels only partly. So many hundred million people need not have started partying and attending political meetings and religious fairs as though there would be no tomorrow as soon as the first wave started receding. As I keep saying wearily, I see only opposite kinds of madness pitted against one another all around me…

I am stuck at home, I cannot even go off to swim, the summer is roasting us, and there is no hope on the horizon of going travelling anywhere anytime soon. Talk about vegetating. How I miss the cool hills and scent of pine and snow in the air! It’s been two years since I had my last glimpse of the Himalayas.

My daughter is stuck in Delhi under lockdown, which they keep extending, though it should have become clear to the meanest intelligence that lockdowns don’t work, at least not any more – look at Maharashtra, where the daily tally of new infections, according to government sources, has remained more or less the same despite the whole state having been shut down for more than ten days now. And I suppose it will be West Bengal’s turn soon, as soon as a new government has settled in. Heaven knows how we are all going to carry on. Financial distress as well as mental health problems are spreading like wildfire, but there is too little attention and concern about them yet…

I wish all my favourite ex students, scattered all around the country and abroad, the best of health and spirits. I hope we shall prevail, and I know most of us will.

Meditations on death and dying, part three if you like

I was very tired at the end of secondary school, because I had suffered such a nasty, brooding childhood, and had read so much (it takes my breath away to see how little the vast majority of ‘educated’ people have read by age 16 these days, but maybe it’s good they haven’t…), and had grown up so achingly lonely and misunderstood.

Then came eight years in Kolkata. Went through high school, college and university; broke my heart over a love affair that was doomed from the start, had a very bitter disillusionment and rejection inside the family, read vastly more than anyone I knew, had more than a little brush with the working world, suffered the ghastliest of physical pain over and over again (look up memoirs of things like how a friend cut out a festering carbuncle with scissors and forceps with no anesthetic beyond ice and alcohol), discovered how utterly unsympathetic and downright nasty so many people could be, fell seriously ill, was thrown off the ladder of career advancement by a soulless fate, and came back to my home town. I was more tired than I could have believed I could be eight years ago. I had no idea how I could get on with life.

Life picked me up and got me that schoolmaster’s job. Then for a while it was roses and sunshine, though there were dark patches enough in between. I found a calling, and gave my heart and soul to it. It brought me rich rewards, in many forms. Despite much angst and heartburns and nasty unexpected turns of fortune every now and then, it was on the whole a wonderful time. For a while, I forgot the tiredness and bitterness and sense of futility aching in my bones.

And then my daughter was born. No, it was as if I was born anew, and truly, ‘bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven’. It was as if I had finally found what I had been longing for with all my being all those barren years behind me without knowing it: not religion, not politics, not socializing, not philosophy, not money-making, not romance, but the sheer, unadulterated, all-fulfilling joy of bringing up a child.

Two decades and a half have rolled by since then again. So many thousand pupils have passed through my classes in the meantime: so many have adored me and gushed over me, then forgotten me or remembered only to badmouth me. So many small and major cataclysms in the family, including yet more heartbreaks, and bringing home the parents I had thought I had lost forever, gradually losing my most loved ones including my lifelong dogsbody, my grandfather then my father, and watching my mother slowly growing old. My wife and daughter leaving the family hearth and moving farther and farther away, not just bodily but in mind and soul. I keep on ploughing my lonely furrow still, mostly because there’s not much else that I am good at, and it at least keeps me sane. These last years have been merely slogging away, pulling the oars relentlessly towards a dimly visible shore that now often seems like a mirage, knowing more and more that the world grows increasingly boring, repetitive and unrewarding, and eventually it will come down to dragging on mere bodily survival; ‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’. Only hoping it won’t drag too long. Some people are so lucky; they are still working like a horse according to their old, old routine when they just drop down and die. Well, I do at least hope that it would be only a matter of days or weeks, not months or years. So you can treat this post as the third installment of my Meditations on death and dying… not everyone, at least at my age, and having lived the way I have, is afraid of dying as such. Which is why I feel like throwing up, in this pandemic context, that so many people, even much older than me or with parents who have long passed three score years and ten, are wetting their pants to think that they or those close to them might die off soon.

Greatest lesson learnt from this sojourn on earth: most people don’t care for us for what we are, and the very few who do are not understood, let alone appreciated. The mother of an ex student, now pushing fifty, recently communicated to me, after complete silence for nearly a  decade, saying she wanted moral and spiritual counselling from me, because, to quote her, I am different from everybody else she has met in her whole life. In very polite terms, I told her to buzz off: I am too old to get involved. She should have asked twenty five years ago.

If there is something called an afterlife, not a return to this world, please God.

Rain at last, and a few other things

It was one of the gentlest and most welcome nor’westers we have ever had that rained on us early this evening. Started in the classic way that only Bengalis grow nostalgic over and lasted a full hour. I must say a heartfelt Thank God, because the heat and dust were becoming overpowering. It is still drizzling outside as I write, and the erratic wind keeps blowing in squalls through the open windows – pure pleasure. But for occasional mercies like this, the papers would have started wailing about incipient drought in various parts of south Bengal soon. I hope it is repeated several times over the next month.

My new batches have all started off on a good note. After a gap of two full years (remember what happened in early April 2020)! And it is a wonder to think that I have been going on and on like this for so many years, no, decades… God in heaven, I love doing this so much, still, after so much grinding labour and boredom and tiredness and frustration and heartbreaks!

I won My Family and Other Animals as a prize for acing some examination or the other in class ten, forty two years ago. I must have read that evergreen wonder of a book at least a dozen times, and so have hundreds of my students. My original copy, bound after the first twenty years or so to hold its yellowing and brittle pages together, finally went missing recently, so I have promptly bought a new one. I hope it lasts me the rest of my lifetime and brings unalloyed joy to hundreds of students yet to come.

On Netflix, I have been watching a documentary series called Magical Andes, and they are giving me a fantastic tour of a vast chunk of South America which I’d in all probability never have seen otherwise, and in any case, I tell myself more and more that this is the best way to travel, in the luxury and security and comfort of home, pausing whenever I please, hardly spending a dime, avoiding the milling crowds and insufferable co-passengers and lost luggage and delayed flights and bad hotel rooms and food that violently disagrees with you and so on and on and on. Especially because I don't belong to the ever-growing crowd which travels only to return home and put up 'been-there-done-that posts' on social media. The landscapes they show are truly sublime, and there is such a wealth of it on display they could make a thousand splendid wallpapers out of them (also you don’t get to see one magnificent scenery after another like that in the real world unless you undertake interminably boring journeys in between, and you don’t see the special effects in real life either, like a whole glorious sunset in half a minute and clouds literally rushing across the sky and the stars glowing so brightly and visibly moving across the heavens and plants bursting into gorgeous flowers even as you watch…). For the first time ever I thought, for a fraction of a minute at least, that it would have been nice to watch the whole thing on one of those humongous large-screen TVs they are peddling at atrocious prices these days!

Speaking of Netflix, I watched Sleepless in Seattle – rather late in the day, as many movie buffs would say. I adore Tom Hanks, and have hardly missed or disliked any movie in which he has starred, and this one is very mushy and very much a fairy tale, I grant you that, but Tom looked so young and handsome and vulnerable in those days, and Meg Ryan I have always found a dear though never great in the acting line, and after all, what’s wrong with a little mush? ‘We have got to be sentimental once in a while; it is like a fresh-flowing stream that washes off the protective coating of cynicism which we wear in our everyday lives’, wrote Erich Maria Remarque in Shadows in Paradise, and I swear, that man knew something about bitterness and cynicism and gloom and despair. Besides, life would have been unliveable without our fairy tales, and the desperate, lifelong efforts of so many men, the likes of Jesus and Mozart and Lincoln and Edison to make the fairy tales they dreamt of come true, don’t you think? There were two other things about the movie I loved – the movie within a movie bit, harking back to an old Cary Grant/Deborah Kerr classic An Affair to Remember that apparently stole and broke countless hearts in its day and beyond, and the grand view from the 86^th floor observation deck of the Empire State Building. I was there just two years before they shot the sequence, and glad memories came rushing back. For oft when on my couch I lie/in vacant or in pensive mood/ they flash upon that inward eye/ which is the bliss of solitude … those are lines not restricted to memories of fields of daffodils.

Tailpiece: Anil Ambani’s son has publicly lambasted the spreading lockdown culture in no uncertain terms. I post the link here without comment, but I must say I am vastly surprised, and I often boast that few things surprise me these days!

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/anil-ambanis-son-tears-into-govts-lockdowns/articleshow/81942731.cms

 

I hope, dear reader, you enjoyed reading this post.