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…