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.

Monsoon post

This June was one of the rainiest in living memory. I wish that it wasn’t so perpetually sultry despite so much water falling from the skies!

I recently took the first dose of the Covid vaccine. The biggest motivating factor for me was the rumour going around that in a few months’ time inter-state travel might be allowed only to those who have been fully vaccinated. I am also hoping that, with all states now on high alert, a large proportion of the population already immunized through direct infection and an ever growing number being vaccinated, the third wave, if and when it comes, will only be a ripple, and after that Covid will be finally forgotten. The best sign would be schools and colleges reopening for all, and the online-education nonsense (you doubt me? Consider this: how would you like to be operated upon by a surgeon who has only learnt his craft online?) laid to rest once and for all.

A number of ex students stranded in Durgapur since March 2020 (mostly male, it goes without saying) have kept me alive and sane all through by turning up for adda sessions every other day, and going out wandering with me along the highways, sometimes on bikes and sometimes in cars. They insist I have done the same for them. They range between 16 and 35 years of age. Lately we have had some wonderful picnics together at home, my mother happily included, with all of them pitching in with the cooking – my contribution being paying for most of it and being hugely appreciative of all their efforts.

I am watching Ray on Netflix right now, episode by episode, there being four of them. I most definitely thought that the first one was vastly inferior in every sense to Satyajit Ray’s original short story, but I shall reserve detailed comment until I have watched the lot.

In connection with what I wrote in the last post about improving our democracy, I am delighted to see that no less august a personage than the current Chief Justice of India seems to hold exactly the same views: mere periodic polls are not an adequate safeguard against tyranny (in the name of the majority) – see this news report about his recent speech.