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.