Bad people

I have been amusing myself by making a list of people who are now considered ‘bad’ by majority opinion, almost worldwide.

Men.

Religious people.

Those who keep telling us that ‘truth’, including scientific truth, is not to be based on how many people think it is the truth. In Copernicus’ time, most people, including the most ‘educated’ people, thought that the sun went round the earth, and lepers had been cursed by God, so they deserved to be stoned to death.

Those who insist that everyone should take some responsibility for their own lives instead of perennially expecting to be ‘compensated’ for one kind of unfair treatment or the other, often only to remote ancestors.

Those who ask for courtesy and decency and reasonableness in public discourse, and accuracy and precision and beauty (or at least absence of ugliness) in the use of language.

Those who say that some women are bad people, just like some men.

Those who insist that childhood should not be endlessly prolonged – it harms both the individual and society.

Those who teach that you are not the most wonderful person ever born, nor does the world exist to please you; that the vast majority of people are destined to live and die as perfectly ordinary and forgettable people: the sooner everybody accepts this the better for all concerned.

Those who say that there is much good and nobility, even greatness, to be admired in very ‘ordinary’ people, but worshipping money and fame and power makes us blind to all that.

Those who say democracy cannot long survive without education, and discipline, and limitations on individual whims hiding behind a narrative of ‘rights’.

Those who say that patriotism is a very different thing from ignorant, intolerant, majoritarian jingoism.

Those who insist that you cannot become civilized, indeed even human, without reading a lot of literature and history – that is precisely why they are called the humanities, and no degree of expertise in any technical vocation, be it surgery or rocketry, can substitute for that.

Those who warn that a world dominated by robots and artificial ‘intelligence’, however safe and comfortable it might be for the majority, will be a world fit only for pigs and slaves.

Those who remind us that all kinds of wishy-washy ‘environmentalism’ is stupid; for while it is very important to learn to live more in harmony with Nature (including the nature that makes up our own bodies and minds), it is also very important to remember that Nature lives by the dictum of kill and be killed, that Nature kills swiftly, mercilessly, relentlessly, and the long march of civilization has been a story of man’s endless, defiant fight against Nature’s mindless, devastating cruelty, from disease to man eating animals to extreme heat and cold to tsunamis and earthquakes.

Let me see whether I want to extend this list… meanwhile, questions, doubts, arguments, alternative views, as long as they are decently and coherently expressed, are welcome. 

I am almost free. And it frightens me.

Although I have tried to order my life by an extraordinarily strict self-imposed routine (you know I never took a jamaishasthi break in 25 years of married life, lest I should miss some classes?), and passed most of the years of my active adult life that way, it amazes me how life has nevertheless taken its own obdurate course, like a river in flood, eroding mountains, breaking banks, changing course again and again as it rushes towards the sea. So I have passed through several distinct stages, which I can see clearly see now, as one on a hilltop, looking down at the plains below through which he has trudged and from which he has climbed for so long.

First was that quiet and oppressive childhood, where my only pleasures were reading and the occasional company of my grandfather, and terror of living under my father’s mercurial tyranny. That changed when I first fell in love, and started wandering unfettered around town on my bicycle, and started smoking and drinking on the sly – early tastes of freedom, and, constricted and limited as it was, it still felt heavenly. The next stage was moving to the great city; first income, almost enough to look after myself, some exposure to the world of important affairs via print, a host of carnal and romantic affairs, encounters with harsh and sudden violence, multifarious scholarly quests, introduction to politics, travels on my own, being evicted from home for a few years – more taste of adulthood (many of my contemporaries acquired that much varied experience, I have discovered, long after thirty, and some never at all). There was a sharp jolt again when I gave up the newspaper job and university life very suddenly to return to Durgapur, and took up the schoolmaster’s job, and went abroad. A few years down the line, after staying away from my parents for a couple of years, getting married and becoming a father. The next big thing, starting the new century with a bang as it were, was quitting the job to fend for myself, all on my own. Eleven years after that, my wife and daughter leaving the hearth I had built. It was too tremendous a shock for me to have fully recovered yet, but I soldiered on, partly because I had to, too many worldly burdens to shoulder alone, and partly because I was sure that if I gave up I would go to pieces, partly because I still enjoyed it and couldn’t imagine anything better to do. And so for another eight years, while my daughter grew up, till the pandemic struck, and I had to adjust dazedly, painfully, to so many students quitting, ‘teaching online’, occasional breaks when I could resume regular classes again, only to lock down again… and that is how a year and a half has passed till the time of writing.

I begin to sense that another phase is dawning, probably the last. As with every great changeover, it has left me confused, disoriented, not entirely sure what is happening far less how best to handle it, unable even to imagine with much clarity what lies ahead, or guess how long this phase would be. Looking at it from a positive-minded perspective (which, I suppose, is always the best thing to do if at all it is possible), I am a very lucky man, for I have reached a stage where I am finally almost free – as free as a man in this world can be, largely free even of family obligations – and at the same time adult, solvent though far from rich, unconstrained by custom and superstition, and largely in possession of my native powers. Not everyone reaches this blessed state before it is time to pass on. I can at last turn my mind towards doing things I had always longed to do, but could never find the time and resources for till now.

And this very realization keeps very disturbingly drawing me back to one of the most influential books in my life, Fear of Freedom, by the great psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. The essence of his thesis was that the vast majority of human beings, though they declare their love of and desire for freedom so continuously and clamorously, are actually terrified of the reality of freedom, because (except in very rare situations, like wishing to be free of some sort of unbearable tyranny as one wishes to be free of toothache) freedom entails responsibility, and the imperative of making choices, and the necessity for hard decisions – the need to examine one’s own mind and make up one’s own mind, than which no task in this world is harder. What kind of freedom would I really enjoy for any length of time? What do I really want hereafter?

For now, I have been seeking solace in returning to books with a vengeance. This may sound strange to those who know me really well, because they are aware that I have been an avid reader virtually all my life. True enough, but the fact is that reading had been 90% of my life between ages four and sixteen, and I used to be able to get literally, happily lost in books during that time of my life, and I haven’t been able to read in that absorbed way ever since then. For too many worldly cares interrupted too often and too insistently. Until now. So now, I am trying to go back to a place which I left behind a very long time ago. But no matter how engrossing, reading cannot be, at my age, the whole of life. What do I want to do with the rest of it? From suicide to seeking God in all earnest, I have not yet been able to make up my mind.

Why do I write?

Why do I write?

As with so many other questions that I have wrestled with, answering this one clearly, cogently and adequately is important to me, even it might not interest anybody else at all. And so, as with all such things, I am writing down the answer here primarily for myself.

I write because I can. Not everybody can: that is something I have found out over a very, very long time, having been a voracious reader since early childhood and a teacher of language for many decades, over two generations. I might have sung or played music or sculpted or painted if I could even half as confidently, but I cannot.

I write because I love to. And unlike so many other ‘loves’, this one has endured. Over more than four decades, so I can expect it to endure as long as my head and fingers work.

I write because I have seemingly endless things to say about endless things, and the wellspring has not dried up yet! Has nobody marvelled over the sheer variety of things I have written about? Doesn’t matter; I have.

I write because writing lasts in a much more satisfactory way than talking does – and I should know, after having talked tens of thousands of hours for a living! That is why Hammurabi and Ashoka carved their edicts in stone, that is why Caesar and Babur wrote diaries so painstakingly, that is why some people cared to write down what the Buddha and Jesus and Mohammed said. This very (comparatively-) insignificant effort, this blog, has lasted a long time already, in relation to the average human lifespan that is. So many readers have left impressions, so many new readers keep coming to visit, so many people have sent me thanks or congratulations for writing a multitude of different things, so many people have raised questions that have been a challenge and a pleasure to answer, so many old posts come back to the most-visited list again and again… also there is a possibility that the blog, and some other things I have written, may outlast me. There is no harm in dreaming that I shall be judged more deeply, sanely, fairly, wholly, than I was in my lifetime. Writing is one of the very few ways of leaving something worthwhile of yourself behind.

I write because it remains one of the great pleasures of my life to get back to things I wrote long ago – my first published piece is now forty five years old – and relish reading the best of them. I have tried passionately to hold on to many people all my life, but I have discovered beyond argument that my writing stays with me as people just don’t. If I live long enough, I’ll probably be peering at the best writing of others as well as myself through owlish glasses long after most of my faculties are gone.

I write because I am good for very little else.

I write because those who read my writing come closer to me than others can.

I write because I love life, because I believe that writing at its best can help to make living at least infinitesimally better for others, and also because I love the idea that I am going to die, and that most of my life is already spent.

Open the schools, repetition

I should like to keep on record that for the first time since March 22, 2020, a news item saying that there have been disastrous losses in learning skills among schoolchildren has made it to the top of the front page of a major national newspaper: see this link. In case it vanishes from the website after a while, I am going to post a photo of the item below, too.

The survey speaks of the damage done to underprivileged children, but I can vouch from my own daily teaching experience how much harm has been done to the most privileged section too, dawdling at home, playing video games while online 'teaching' is going on or attending 'classes' from restaurants or shopping malls, taking tests only in MCQ format with textbooks open in from of them or parents dictating from the side (and being allowed an hour to answer what should take only fifteen minutes), even below-average pupils being routinely given 80%-plus marks, etc etc... I should like everyone to read the very last line of the report: 'online lessons cannot pass off as meaningful education for any child'. I concur entirely, and I speak from some knowledge and experience.