End of 2022

And so passes 2022. For me, as for nearly the whole world post-pandemic, a pretty nondescript year, I think.

It started well, with a lovely road trip, and I finished it with another one-dayer yesterday: Bhatinda falls, Topchanchi lake and Maithan - with the same team of boys plus one (Koushik, Swarnava and Pratyush, besides Firoz) which, too, was perfect. The boys discovered for me how good the music system in my car was. Good adda, good food, good sleep...

In between, there were two traumas: once we nearly lost poor Bheblu in mid-February, and then my mother in late September. But God was kind, so we all survived.

The highlight of this year, of course, was Pupu staying with me for a while, first time after the lockdown of 2020. This time it wasn't forced, though. Otherwise, with a few short breaks, it was work, work, work. Luckily, I enjoyed it for the most part.

Some of my favourite old boys have been having a tough time, so my prayers go with them for a better new year.

My prayer for myself: please God, keep me far away from people who don't like me but fake it for a while.

As usual, I am already and eagerly looking forward to the next mid-February break. Even if it is only vacationing in Delhi.

I have often written more feelingly and at considerably greater length about the Christmas-New year season. See, for instance, Santa Claus is coming to town and Behold, there cometh the Lord. No point repeating myself. 

December 1989

18th December. Alas, it seems we won't have a proper winter this time round at all! It became comfortable enough by mid-November, but even today the maximum has touched 26 celsius, while the minimum yesterday was barely 12-13. This can be called winter in Mumbai, Kolkata or Chennai maybe, but certainly not here.

I was re-visiting the memories of December 1989, when I was 26, exactly the age my daughter is now. More and more I love to make these mental comparisons. I had joined St. Xavier's School as a teacher the previous year, and helped very greatly to organise their silver jubilee celebration: they have airbrushed me out of their official memoirs, the idiots, imagining that that way they can actually erase history! In 1989, they were paying me a very modest salary, which was shored up just a little bit by the extra I was earning from private tuitions - many of my less gifted contemporaries were making considerably more then, and it would be more than a decade later that I would manage to draw ahead of them. But I was enjoying myself hugely. I was my own man, helping out with the family finances; we had just finished building (the first floor of-) our own new house, and that December, I floated the idea of taking some boys and colleagues on a school excursion. First time ever for our school. 'Who will take the responsibility?' asked Father Wavreil the headmaster, thrilled but wary. 'I will, of course,' I assured him, and so it was done. Even the railway booking was done through my father's journalistic connections. We went travelling for about a week, I seem to remember, visiting Hardwar, Hrishikesh, Lakshmanjhula, Dehradun and Mussoorie, staying and moving around very comfortably on just seven hundred rupees per head, which was even in those days a shoestring budget, and still managed to return a bit to every boy afterwards. 

I remember we got off the return train early in the morning, and the headmaster was waiting for us. He took a suitcase from my hand, and as I shook hands with him, crying exultantly, 'Father, I did it!' He laughed like a boy and said, 'Yes, you said that you would do it and you did it!' (for the illiterate, that was an impromptu quote from Bernard Shaw's play, Pygmalion). If his successors can read and are reading this, I hope they feel ashamed to realize how far they have fallen, and just why I quit. This was a headmaster: I couldn't tolerate lesser creatures. 

One reward was that some parents later came to see me and said, 'Sir, given the glowing reports we are getting from our sons, and the dirt-cheap way you managed to do it all, why don't you arrange a trip like that for us parents?' and another was that some of those boys (ICSE 1991) looked me up much later and declared, 'Sir, we have travelled much, far and wide, but never have we enjoyed a trip as much as that one!' It is a pity that I was such good friends with my senior colleagues like Uday Roy and Shanti Biswas in those days, and they have all found it preferable to forget me or badmouth me... I still wonder what they got out of it.

But Pupu, note well, I was still poor then. So you have time to make a solid career for yourself, see? All that matters is that you want to, you have faith in our Maker, and you are giving of your best. And remember, I did have lots of fun even though I was poor!  

Books I recently enjoyed

In the chapter titled On Books in To My Daughter, I expressed the fervent hope that my daughter would grow up into a good reader. That prayer has been richly answered, and as I have mentioned before, Pupu has of late turned into my main supplier of highly interesting books from many different genres, not excluding books on cookery! 

This time round, we went shopping to Pupu's new favourite haunt, The Book Shop on Lodi Road, inside the Embassy of Georgia complex. Tiny, yet very enticingly stocked. It was a delight to pore over all kinds of new titles, many by authors I hadn't read before, and to see a place where people of different ages came solely to explore and talk about books - made me feel intensely for the umpteenth time that I, sadly, live for the most part in a village, where reading is anathema to highly 'educated' people.

Within a span of about ten days, I have hugely enjoyed reading four books in quick succession. One was a Bengali volume, Goyendapeeth Lalbazar, by serving IPS officer Supratim Sarkar, from Ananda Publishers. A compilation of twelve bizarre criminal cases solved by the detective department of the Calcutta Police, once proudly called a close second only to Scotland Yard. Well written - even a bureaucrat can sometimes write well! - and a valuable contribution, maybe the first ever, to the history of crime detection in our country. Mr. Sarkar deserves the kudos and thanks of many.

Two more detective books - fiction this time round, but based on a lot of hard historical facts, and both very interestingly set in India, during the late years of the British Raj. One, The Last Kashmiri Rose, based in south Bengal 1922, at an imaginary military outpost called Panikhat: quite a gripping page-turner with a most unexpected and rather sinister twist in the tale, very expertly written with excellent and accurate historic details woven in, though I have no idea where the writer found hilly country fifty miles from Calcutta, and the biggest mistake was not making one mention of the biggest thing that had happened over the previous year, namely Gandhi's Non Cooperation movement which had nearly brought the whole administration to a grinding halt. The other was The Rising Man, written by Abir Mukherjee, who grew up in Scotland, whose protagonist is Captain Sam Wyndham, survivor of the trenches during the First World War, now employed by Calcutta Police on the express recommendation of the legendary commissioner Charles Tegart, though the writer has got some details wrong or confused: the name was Tegart, not Taggart, and he was only a 'Sir', not a 'Lord' at least in those days (look him up on wikipedia), and who unravels a deadly mystery against all sorts of odds, in the process exposing the dark underbelly of the Raj. I have some issues with the writer's English: no Englishman in those days would have used the expression 'called out' to mean 'criticised', simply because it did not exist then, nor written 'he was likely sent to jail' (the word used to be 'probably'), nor 'he looked like he wanted to say something' when he meant 'it seemed as if he wanted to say something': these are all Americanisms from the social media age, four generations after a 1919 detective. And writing 'he was sat' when one means 'he sat' is downright wrong and silly. Also, a Bengali brahmin from a rich old Calcutta family with a first class law degree from Cambridge and a cut-glass English accent who passed the IPS entrance exam got his first posting as a mere sergeant in shorts, not allowed to sit down before his British superiors? when Satyendranath Tagore, the first Indian ICS officer, had become a deputy magistrate half a century ago?! But at least this writer took into account Jallianwala Bag, and the story is well told. I shall look forward to the next three in the Sam Wyndham series. The one book was written by an Englishwoman, the other by an expatriate Indian: I can only marvel at the dedicated amount of research both  must have done to get 99% of the period details right.

Finally, a book from a very different genre: Quest for Kim, by Richard Hopkirk. Those who have not read Rudyard Kipling's Kim and adored it lifelong as the finest book about India ever written in English will be left cold; so will all those who hate everything about Kipling without knowing much more than zero about him, but I am one of the lifelong diehard aficionados, and for like-minded people, I'd say, re-read Kim at once, then go and read Hopkirk's earnest, arduous and years-long labour of love to retrace Kim's steps across the length and breadth of India, and find out all he can about the Great Game and all the outstanding characters, old Teshoo Lama, Kim himself, Field Marshall Roberts of Kandahar the Jang i laat sahib, Mahbub Ali, Lurgan Sahib and Babu Hurree Chunder Mukherjee. You will be regaled and rewarded beyond your expectations.

I can't thank you enough, Pupu ma. Looking hungrily forward to what you will ask me to read next. Meanwhile, I am eagerly into Bending over backwards, by Carlo Pizzati, a very different kind of book again, and hoping to be much educated and entertained. Then a history of the British Indian army is waiting, along with a newly published collection of essays on the cimema by Satyajit Ray that Swarnava has kindly gifted me. What a feast! May God have pity on those who don't read books.

P.S.: I have linked some photos in the previous (travel-) post.  

Quick trip to Chail

I get very tired of sitting at home taking classes relentlessly for more than two months at a stretch (remember that I have no Sundays even, and I have stuck to this routine for twenty straight years now), and since my daughter was visiting till a while ago, I left Durgapur after a gap of four whole months. I took my mother along and went – where else? – to Pupu’s place in Delhi on November 29. As I have written before, I have been looking forward to wintering there, and I wasn’t disappointed first time round, Delhi still having a very mild winter at the time of writing, and a lot of sun and open air on top of that, along with a chance to sit out on the balcony every now and then.

At 3 a.m. next night, we set off in a hired car for Chail, which we had last visited in 2004, when Pupu was a child (though she still has a fair recollection), about 60 km from Shimla. You don’t have to visit Shimla to reach Chail, by the way, and we had been warned against visiting that now-overcrowded market town (Kipling must be turning in his grave) – you take a different route from Solan. The best time to avoid the terrible traffic snarls north of Delhi, our car hire agency had wisely advised us, was a few hours before daybreak, and so it proved. We whizzed past Sonepat and Panipat and Karnal and Ambala and reached Chandigarh by eight. The hill road starts minutes after you cross the turning towards Pinjore (of the fabulous Mughal garden fame), and within less than an hour after that we had reached Brahmapur, where we had stayed at the Whispering Winds resort en route to Kasauli in the summer of 2018. Then on to Solan and then Kandaghat, where, despite frantic but rather garbled instructions from Google Maps (that horrible accent!) we managed to lose our way and wasted nearly an hour. From Kandaghat the road becomes serpentine, with a lot of hairpin bends once you cross Shivphul, reminding you of the approach to Kalimpong; we were all a little tired and shaken up, including poor Bheblu for whom it was the first ever experience, being cooped up in a car and tossed about non-stop for so many hours, by the time we reached our destination, the Royal Swiss Cottages resort a little downhill from the erstwhile palace of the Maharaja of Patiala.

The last couple of kilometres were a nightmare for a car meant essentially for smooth highways, all bump and grind at a snail’s pace down a very narrow, wavy and rutted kuchcha road strewn with little boulders, so that I had begun to grumble when we finally came to a halt. Then clambering up a goat track very roughly hewn into the hillside for a hundred yards or so before we reached our room, and my own knees hurting like hell telling me how much my mother must have suffered. But I think we all agreed it was well worth it when we had seen the room and inspected the view. The last time I had stayed at a place like that was, I believe, at Rudraprayag in February 2018 – how the years have flown! – on a ledge overhanging the foaming Ganga just downstream of the sangam, and our accommodation this time was far more spacious and luxurious. There was a grand mountain vista right in front, and the rustling of the pine forest, even in the daytime, was like a distant storm. The wind was piercingly cold even at midday, but wherever the sunrays fell it was delicious, all the way into the bones. We caught a much needed nap that lasted beyond sundown. Young Kanishk Sen the son of the proprietor, who looks after the business, along with the service staff, Raju ji, Lata ji and Deepa ji, all smiles and eager helpfulness, gave us a very warm though informal welcome and a lip-smacking dinner. There was a young couple with their little son Rishi in tow in the next suite, both doctors in private practice in Meerut and evidently doing very well for themselves judging by their chauffeured BMW SUV, who were celebrating their anniversary. They got a bonfire going on the grounds and warmly welcomed us to share when we strolled down for a bit. Extremely well-mannered people, bringing up their child excellently, because we saw him enjoying himself variously without ever feeling the need to bawl or scream. Even their choice of music and the volume at which they played it left nothing to complain about. A blessing, because we know from long experience how bad fellow boarders can ruin your holiday.

The night was cold, the temperature going down to four or five Celsius, but I decided after some hesitation not to ask for a room heater, and in the event we were comfortable enough with all the quilts and blankets provided. A walk to look around the precincts in the afternoon with Pupu, which called for a bit of huffing and puffing, then Pupu got some work done online, ma sat out in the lovely private lounge for a bit, and I spent a couple of hours devouring a wonderful British detective novel set in Bengal 1922 called The Last Kashmiri Rose by Barbara Cleverly, written 2003, about which more later. We went to bed early, resolved to enjoy the pleasures of sleep for as long as we could, and in fact, though ma got up earlier, Pupu and I managed more than ten hours of the dreamless.

I had solemnly told Kanishk that I intended to ‘do nothing’ during the entire stay, and that is what I earnestly did the whole of the next day, determined just to ‘stand (or rather sit) and stare’. No better place than the mountains if you love them, and if you can find a place so beautiful as well as so free of noise and crowd and pollution. As Pupu said, every time we deeply inhaled, our lungs were being surprised by the sharp, exhilarating tang of what they had become quite unused to, namely fresh air. I spent several quiet hours simply sunbathing on the beautifully laid out wooden terrace. Dropping in every now and then, young Kanishk regaled us with stories about his ancestors, who were originally from Bengal, migrated to Kashmir in the era of the Khiljis, and became Himachali nearly a hundred years ago. We assured him that he was living our dream: I could imagine few better ways of ending my life than owning and running a property like this, taking in only very discriminating guests, while Pupu stays beside me and attends to other kinds of work. In a hundred little details, including signs put up here and there, we found evidence that some highly educated and sensible mind had taken care to plan the whole setup – ‘lose yourself in the hills if you want to find yourself’, said one, ‘green is the primary colour of the world’, said another, while another warned ‘do not waste food; remember, ten per cent of the world goes hungry to bed’.

The day passed like a dream, and like all good dreams, all too soon. I am glad now that so many dreams have become stored in my mind as so many happy memories: I can tell Wordsworth I know exactly what he meant when he wrote those last lines of Daffodils. The next morning, having given the palace a miss because we had seen it once earlier and Kanishk assuring us that there was no point visiting it again, we packed up in leisurely fashion, partook a brunch of very tasty sandwiches, packed into the car at around 12:30, stopped a couple of times for tea and snacks, and returned to our house in Delhi just after 10 p.m. We could have been half an hour sooner if we hadn’t been caught up in a nasty jam a little before entering the city limits. Oh well, you can’t have everything. On the whole, a lovely little getaway. I’ve already told Pupu, busy as she is, that we have to do it more often, and we have to find good locales a little closer home, not more than four to six hours’ driving.

For photos, click here.

Goodbye, ICSE 2023

It is end-November, and for the umpteenth time I have just said goodbye to another batch of class ten pupils. Sometimes it seems I have been going on forever, and the stopping will be far more sudden and surprising than the going on…

This year’s batch, unlike the previous one, was good to teach, and judging by the final reminiscent essays some of them wrote, they enjoyed my classes. I hope they also learnt some useful things for keeps. To them I say, remember, ‘education is what remains with you after you have forgotten all that you have been taught.’ Wise saws like this one become more and more meaningful as you grow older – wait for a decade or two.

These days I don’t write goodbye posts any more, but if you are interested, you might look up To those who are about to become ex-students, and Bye-bye time again. As usual, most of those for whom I wrote those posts have long forgotten them, and probably even me, as most of you will within a few years. No matter. I have long accepted that that is what people are like, especially in this day and age, and at my age I don’t really care, though I keep being happily surprised by a few people every year who give solid evidence that I still remain strongly alive in their minds, many many years after they left. A few of you will be like that. Enough for me.

Good luck to all of you, those of you who appreciate the good wish and those who don’t alike. As Shakespeare said, may every one of you get exactly what you deserve, but may my good wishes help you along.

This is the first time EVER that three boys wanted to hug me before leaving, and I let them. I must be getting really old… but very happily old, God be thanked. I look back and vaguely remember all the mountainloads of mud that have been slung at me for years and years, and it feels good to have arrived where I am now.

Keep Sir’s parting shot with you. You will see how it will become more and more meaningful as the years pass. And remember: I forget all those who do, but if you choose to keep in touch, I reciprocate most gladly.

Especially for those who expressed the regret that they didn’t get to know Sir as well as they would have liked, there is always my book To My Daughter. It is part autobiography and part elaboration of all the really important things that I have tried to teach all along. You will find it on Amazon. My only request is, if you buy it, read it through till the last page with patience and attention.

May the GP culture come back

I am always thrilled when I hear of some famous expert saying that something I have been insisting on for ages as necessary to make a better India and a better world has become not only important but urgent. Whether that be a renowned economist or doctor or businessman or lawyer/activist. So I was delighted to read in my newspaper on Sunday the 13th that Andrew Elder, President of the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh, has lamented the proliferation of specialists (or, as they say rather ridiculously in India, 'super'-specialists) in the medical profession. It particularly badly affects the elderly, he says, who tend to suffer from multiple problems simultaneously, and running endlessly from one specialist to another is an often very difficult-to-bear drag on their time, patience and purse. No healthcare model, he says, in any country, can deliver the goods for the majority of the population by relying overly on the specialists. The general physician, or, as they used to call him when we were young, family physician, has to come back in a big way.

I have been insisting on this all my adult life, particularly because we in our family have been very lucky: we have enjoyed the invaluable services of excellent GPs almost all our lives. I myself had grown an almost superstitious faith in our own doctor, who had looked after us for nearly forty years before he passed away earlier this year. He only had an MBBS degree, but he was never once wrong in his diagnoses, prescribed very few costly tests, and gave us medicines which worked like charms. I have come to believe beyond the reach of any kind of persuasion to the contrary that a good, experienced, hardworking GP can take care of 90% of your ailments; you should go to specialists only upon his recommendation, and other than in the case of things like heart attacks or liver or kidney failure and serious accidents and major genetic disorders, the 'specialists' can do precious little for you, especially if your time is up, which is generally the case if you fall seriously ill in old age. 

Why has the 'specialist' culture become so widespread? There are many reasons which have worked together and reinforced one another. Only two of them have been mentioned in the above article. One is that young people have developed a childish faith in specialists (ironical, in an age when most of them pretend to be scientifically educated!): 'someone with simple indigestion ... seeks an appointment with a gastro-enterologist'. Another is pure greed for relatively quick money and status, so 'younger doctors almost always want to obtain a specialist degree before they start practising'. True and serious as these reasons are, I have come to be convinced that there are several other reasons, too. One is that - and this I have learnt from some of my best old boys who are now studying medicine - standards of teaching, learning and examination have become so lax that people with just an MBBS (or even MD in general medicine) simply don't have the confidence that they can handle all kinds of patients well: they need to bolster their own egos with one or more additional degrees. Another is that the corporate culture, promising young medical graduates modest but assured salaries, and fabulous packages to 'specialists', has nearly destroyed the ambition of fresh medical graduates to set up their own private practices ... the proliferation of clinical labs and tests has only helped to reinforce the tendency: why learn much of medicine when the tests will tell you everything (and the therapy can be googled)? 

The upshot has been that, as I can see in my own town, private hospitals have become almost as crowded, chaotic and messy as their government equivalents, and people are having to pay through their noses for often highly unsatisfactory, not to say sometimes disastrous, services. I have myself worked hard to find a replacement GP I can trust and respect, I hope he will see me through the rest of my life, and I pray that his tribe may prosper. This much I know: no 'specialist' who gives me all of ten minutes when I visit him for the first time is likely to do better than the GP with whom I can sometimes chat at great length in a relaxed atmosphere, who has treated me for ages, and who knows all my history.

William, Billy Bunter and glorious England

I have just been re-reading some of the books in the William series by Richmal Crompton about feisty little boys in the years immediately before and after World War II. YouTube has directed me to a TV series based on those books, so I am in seventh heaven. And William has reminded me of the Billy Bunter series by Frank Richards. I must get my hands on some of them soon, if only via Kindle.

What wonderful childhoods they had, these boys (at least in the author's imagination) and how poor the children I deal with are in comparison, for all their material wealth and enhanced security! I couldn't think of writing any entertaining stories about the latter, simply because, beyond parties and shopping sprees and exams, virtually nothing happens in their lives! And if anything, things have only gotten worse over the last quarter century...

Also, how incredibly rich a country England between the 40s and 70s must have been, aesthetically and intellectually speaking, that so many writers of the highest calibre and of the most diverse interests could have lived and worked there simultaneously ... P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie and J.R.R. Tolkien, George Orwell, Nevil Shute, C. S. Lewis, Alistair Maclean and John le Carre and Frederick Forsyth and James Herriot and Richmal Crompton and Gerald Durrell and Roald Dahl, not to mention so many highbrow authors catering to the elite (by which I expressly do NOT mean stupid rich businessmen): by God, if one little country of 50 or 60 million can support so many superb talents in reasonable comfort, how far must England have progressed along the road to civilization before backsliding within a few decades into worshipping only footballers and pop singers and moneygrubbing investment bankers and Princess Diana! I really think visiting England today would be a deeply disappointing, not to say upsetting, experience for someone like me. See this 11-year old post. Do decent Englishmen exist any more, the sort of whom none less than Tagore said 'they are the finest people in the world'?

P.S.: Without denigrating J.K. Rowling's talent, I should venture to say that had she been born fifty years earlier, when far more people could be held to high standards, she could not have achieved literary super-stardom with so little competition!

Rishi Sunak, and books, and dreams

We are a book-obsessed family - have been like that for several generations - and I have successfully passed on the relevant genes (if indeed it is a genetic trait rather than a habit acquired in childhood from parents, teachers and friends) to my daughter. I have a small but eclectic library at home, which keeps on being added to, and then there is Kindle, and it hurts me no end to see (as I have been seeing for decades) that Bengalis don't read any more, though there was a time, not very long ago, when we boasted that though we lacked in muscle and money-power and much else besides, we were by far the most padi-likhi community in India. Today the Kolkata Book Fair attracts far more lover couples who visit only to eat kaathi rolls and click selfies rather than buy or browse through books, and Delhi boasts of far better-stocked (-and informed) booksellers. My daughter has recently told me about one called The Book Shop at Jor Bag which is a delight for genuine bibliophiles, and it is going to be a must-visit for me during the next trip. 

Why am I not hyper-excited that Rishi Sunak has become PM of Britain? I can give you several reasons: Britain long ago ceased to be one of the really important countries in the world; Sunak is not really Indian by any yardstick, so there is very little for us to take pride in; being an inheritor of a vast fortune via his wife, he is hardly 'one of us', his premiership may last very little longer than Liz Truss's, and he has clearly demonstrated already that, beyond photo ops (like attending a cow puja) he has very little interest in India or India's concerns. But most of all because, to folks like me (maybe a fast-dwindling minority) it is all so strongly deja vu: all through the last 48 hours Parashuram's Ulto Puraan has been playing in my mind - a fable written close to a century ago about a time when Britain has been colonized by India, and how she would then be faring. I won't be surprised if I read, a few years down the line, that the streets in many urban neighbourhoods in England are stained with betel juice and reek strongly of stale pee.

Ruchir Joshi has written an article titled 'City sans wheels' in the editorial page of The Telegraph yesterday, complaining bitterly about something that I too happen to feel strongly about: why are the taxi cab drivers in Kolkata treating customers so shabbily again, Uber included? Not available when needed, cancelling calls right and left, fleecing their customers... what is wrong with Kolkata?

Cyclone Sitrang passed us by. I was looking forward to a few more squally and rainy days, which might have ushered in an early and chilly winter. Bad luck for us...

I am reading the sequel to Janaki Lenin's My husband and other animals. Look her up on Google. She has been animal crazy all her life - a very rare Indian woman indeed - and runs all sorts of farms and shelters and foundations for them. She is also self-declaredly an ardent fan of Gerald Durrell, which is where the title of her book comes from. She is married to the noted herpetologist Rom Whitaker, and in this second book she declares unabashedly that though he is old enough to be her father and they have been married twenty five years, he can still give her butterflies in the stomach with just a look. Few things come closer to a fairy tale. I can only say God bless to the happy couple, urge people to read the books, and rue the fact that I have never met one such woman in my whole life. Thank you, Pupu, for finding me yet another good author, and thank you, young Swastik, for lending me Book Two to read.

I was fighting with my dad again last night. '... in that sleep, what dreams may come', indeed. 'The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven.' Shakespeare and Milton, thank you for finding the right words for me! Will readers share some of their weird dreams with me, especially recurrent ones? We might wonder together.   

October 2022

Mid-October almost, and it is raining much more heavily now than it did all through the so-called monsoon months. Yesterday it was a true deluge, and there was a repeat performance this evening. Climate change for you.

There is a nip in the air of evenings (and in the very early morning), though the days are often sweltering still. I am sure that winter is at least a month away, but I can feel the pleasurable anticipation again...

I am about to step into my sixtieth year. The emotion I feel most strongly is wonder. I have such vivid memories of youth still, and mentally I don't feel much older than when I was thirty, though the tiredness has gone much deeper into my bones. Also, it is sadly funny to see ex students twenty years younger or more, who look almost as old as I do... what on earth has gone wrong with so many people?

I had a delightful chance to meet, chat and dine with a lot of favourite ex students over the pujo holidays, but now they have drifted away again, and I miss them. With them I often manage to enjoy 'feasts of reason and flow of soul', as they used to say in a more enlightened age, which is the only sort of thing that makes life bearable to the civilized man. Thank God for Whatsapp and Zoom. And I forgot to mention this in my earlier post on fantasizing, but being able to afford calling over the best of old boys every now and then for gala meetings would be very high on my wish list if I had money to burn!

Since Pupu has been staying with me for some time, I have grown deeply attached to her dog. I would like to believe that the affection is mutual. I wonder how we shall both cope with the separation when that happens, even if that is a matter of a few weeks or months.

I am looking forward to our next holiday, towards the end of November, God willing. We haven't been amidst the hills for rather a long time.

Another batch of students is coming to an end. I wonder what old boys and girls will feel when they read these lines and remember their last day in my class, many years ago?

Gandhi Jayanti

It is Gandhi Jayanti today.

As always, some scholarly and thoughtful people have been discussing his importance, his relevance, his wisdom or otherwise in the media. I thought I might scribble a few lines myself.

There are some problems with discussing such men these days – even with supposedly educated people, especially if they are below forty. First, many of them believe that nobody should be called a ‘great’ man: great men do not exist. It goes without saying that I believe them to be, in the Dalai Lama’s favourite word, ‘foolish’. Secondly, however stupid this might sound, many actually believe that a man cannot be great unless he is rich: so Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are great men (to be forgotten within a decade, of course), but it would take ‘boring’ explanation to justify the same tag about, say, Newton or Mozart or Lincoln or Tagore. Third, you do not have to know anything to have strong opinions about any man. And finally, that people, including great men, come in clear black and white – so one was either a genius or an idiot, either a ‘good’ man or ‘bad’, did only harm or only good. This monumental imbecility, this inability to form nuanced opinions based carefully on a great deal of (often contradictory-) facts and reasoning which was once associated with children in primary school is now so common even among post-graduates that I often hesitate to take the trouble to put my own thoughts in writing: why  bother? Still…

To remind my readers, it was a man of the stature of Tagore who titled Gandhi ‘Mahatma’, Subhas Bose first called him ‘Father of the Nation’, Einstein said future generations will scarce believe that such a man really existed, Bernard Shaw said his assassination confirmed the belief that in this world it is always too dangerous to be too good. How deeply Charlie Chaplin was affected by Gandhi’s views on industrial civilization is unforgettably portrayed in his movie Modern Times. Yet – and to my mind most remarkably – none of these men, themselves geniuses of the highest order, blindly hero-worshipped him. Indeed they openly, publicly, sharply disagreed with many of his ideas, sometimes even going so far as to rebuke him or regret his intransigence. Only, in the gentlest, most respectful language, because, being great themselves, they knew deep within that they were talking about, or to, a very, very great man.

Well, that, in a nutshell, is my own position. A very great man, yet, alas, deeply flawed in ways that affected all of south Asia, maybe even the whole world. I believe I know too little about him, but what I definitely know would still fill a small book: I am not going to attempt that here. However, let me mention a few things at least.

I regard him with awe for the way he personified his own ideal of the life of plain living, high thinking and intense, unrelenting activity. I admire his views on environmental guardianship, which were two or three generations ahead of his time. I still wonder at his incredible charisma and organizational ability that long before the age of the internet, and without guns and goons and mind-numbing propaganda, in a land where the vast majority could not read newspapers, he could make the largest ever mass political movements in human history happen, which inspired so many other leaders in so many other countries. I almost worship his ability to go it alone whenever he found too few followers to rally around. I could go on, but interested readers should at least reflect on these few things.

I have remained very ambivalent about many things he did or said, including his attempts to find a perfectly non-coercive marriage between the best of capitalism and socialism, and his prescriptions for ideal womanhood, for instance, which sound too stultifying and demeaning to me, yet at the same time encouraging women to become ‘modern’ in many senses of the word, from getting an education to taking active part in politics. Again, I could lengthen the list considerably.

I believe some of his views had truly tragic consequences on a vast scale. I shall mention only two here: not throwing his whole weight behind Subhas Bose when it could have made a huge difference to undivided India, and refusing to believe that there was anything like a problem of overpopulation.

Let there be a renewed debate. And I shall urge everyone I know to read Nathuram Godse’s Why I killed Gandhi, just as I urge every history-minded person to read Mein Kampf. Only, let them read much, much more, and ask many more questions, before they start forming and airing their ‘opinions’. Right now, most people below forty know, like Munnabhai, only that Gandhi’s is the face we see on all our currency notes, and we are not allowed to sell or buy liquor on his birthday.  Of late, I have even been hearing that Gandhi – of all people! – was responsible for the partition of India. That is the situation that needs to change.

pujo season

It was Mahalaya again, yesterday. I was born on this day, and I have often scribbled in my diary on this day too. There are even two relevant posts on this blog itself - this and this.

By a strange coincidence, without thinking about it, I gave myself two small treats yesterday: a new phone (because the old one was getting really old) and lobsters for lunch, because my daughter is here. Really, there is nothing so pleasing as delayed gratification - I wish the current generations knew and understood why the Bard had written 'All things that are, are with more spirit chased than enjoyed'.

Despite a recent accident in the family in which my mother had a close shave with death, and despite the still muggy weather, and despite the fact that Bengal's Annual madness is just around the corner, I am far happier right now than I usually manage to be, because my daughter is staying with me for some time after ages, along with her dog which has become a dear pet, and because the workload is lighter than usual, and also because Pupu has put me to work doing what I can do best: preparing all kinds of study materials and ideas for her to use in her developing career as a teacher.

And I am looking forward to the feast that I am planning with some favourite old boys who will be visiting. So that is a fun list, don't you think?

P.S.: Writing this post somehow made me feel as if I was in primary school again (I started writing a diary when I was seven years old).

Elizabeth Regina, adieu and RIP

I see today that Google Chrome has marked in solid black the portion of its page where they usually put up some doodle or the other, and if you roll your cursor over it, you read 'Queen Elizabeth II, 1926-2022'.

I think Google has done well (remember, they are originally Americans, descendants of folks who fought hard to free themselves from British rule). I also know that a lot of people are surprised to know that I call the queen's death a tragic loss and the end of a remarkable era, despite being an Indian proud to be rid of colonial rule, and despite knowing that she lived a very long and very full life, and that there are so many ways in which monarchy has always been bad, and has been an anachronism for a long time, and despite holding strong democratic and socialistic ideas lifelong.

I can only explain myself at some length: every dish cannot be cooked like Maggi noodles. I won't take the trouble unless a lot of people express serious interest. Otherwise, as our wise men said a very long time ago, silence is golden, idle talk is not.

Let me see.

Oh my God, values again?

The importance of values, the need for value education, the persistent lament about the gradual demise of values, the very sharply different sets of values that seem to clash constantly all over the world… these are issues that have exercised my mind constantly, and I have written off and on about them, even here on this blog (see, for example, Moral Science, Values, prices, incomes and Indian values are coming). The discussions are forever interesting, but the solutions seem to be forever elusive.

Why?

Well, I have found some answers to the ‘why’, at least. It all begins, it seems to me, with what men want out of life in this world.

There are those who simply wanted happiness, have given up on it, and believe that from birth to death life is an endless, nerve-wracking struggle with the dice loaded against them; there is no lasting joy and peace and safety and comfort to be found here, so they make religions out of stoic acceptance and renunciation – which at least lightens the burden somewhat – and looking forward to a good afterlife. I belong, increasingly with advancing age, to the group that is convinced that, though early suicide is not a healthy idea, it is bad to want to live too long, and if you can look forward to something better after death or at least a peaceful extinction, why not? We can certainly assert pretty strongly that neither great scientific advancement nor great expansion of material luxuries nor vast social-engineering experiments such as those in early 20th century Russia and China have made human beings happier on the whole; maybe the very idea of creating paradise on earth will always be naïve and self-defeating. There are some people who will be able to find happiness in the midst of chaos and suffering and horror, but they will always be the lucky few: you cannot really make philosophies on their basis. There will always, as well, be some people whom nothing can make happy, not even the latest available psychiatric therapies. And of course, there will always be people who keep fooling themselves that they are happy – you have only to think of drug-sodden party animals the world over. The less thought wasted on them the better: they would have mattered not at all, socially speaking, if they had not wasted scarce resources on a huge scale and set very bad examples for the gullible young of successive generations to follow.

It is true that the average man or woman, if they can think at all, will aver that they do want to be happy above all else. It is also true that most great philosophies, some of them thousands of years old, have agreed that, besides trying to cope better and better with natural calamities (as science has helped us to do to some extent), happiness can come only from trying to control our worst impulses – the seven deadly sins – and being nice to our fellow humans, or at least tolerant and forgiving and helpful wherever possible. But if there has been so much agreement among the philosophers, why has it been so difficult to instill and spread those values among all humanity? – I think one part of the answer lies in the fact that our worst instincts are so deeply hardwired into the genes that most people find it impossible to do as directed, even if they have become civilized enough to pay lip service to those ideals (how many can, or like, to meditate and give in charity and not abuse power to assert authority regularly? How many monks and nuns, even?). Another part is that we limit our loftiest ideals to people ‘like us’ – so slaves or women or blacks or children or Jews or the very poor do not deserve to be treated according to the same standards. Alas, the deprived sooner or later rise in revolt and fight back, bringing in their train more and more unhappiness (the oppressed have a habit of turning oppressor). So it has always been, at least over the last few thousand years. Maybe more toleration and understanding and mutual goodwill is slowly spreading worldwide at last, but I am not too hopeful: certainly not for the next two or three generations.

Yet another part is that far too many people – and that includes lots of ‘educated’ ones and people in power – are fundamentally and incurably stupid, in the sense that they simply cannot see that in others’ welfare very often lies their own, at least in the longer run. So we shall all happily cheat one another all the time in the course of all kinds of transactions (including keeping promises), never realizing that we are ultimately creating a society where nobody can really trust anybody else, and that would be a nightmare for all. Without going as far as Dickens or Schiller or Russell, I shall say from my own experience that sheer stupidity has always been a far bigger factor in making or keeping people unhappy than is intellectually admitted… look at Duryodhan, or America in Vietnam or Afghanistan, or the broad failure of the cooperative movement in industry and agriculture everywhere.

The last part – or what I would call the last for now – is that while dominant values, wherever preached, generally tell everyone to ‘be good’, there is a lot of silliness combined with hypocrisy and impracticality mixed up with the good advice for those at the receiving end to take them seriously, or be able to live up to them for any length of time. Think of schools telling girls and boys ‘don’t think about the opposite sex’, or parents lecturing children about ‘studying all the time’ or godmen telling us we cannot go to heaven if we eat such and such kinds of ‘impure’ food, and you will get what I mean.

Things get far more intractable when we take into account the fact that lots of people – highly influential people, too – don’t seem to want to be happy at all, leave alone let others be happy. One very wise man has said ‘Men can tolerate a great deal of unhappiness, especially the unhappiness of others’, another has said ‘Who wants to be happy? Only the Englishman does’, yet others have variously said that the true goal of life should be not happiness but fame, glory, money, or power, and indeed, demonstrated how earnest they were by not only ruining their own lives in pursuit of those goals but those of enormous numbers of others, too (remember all the would-be world conquerors from Sargon to Hitler; all the numberless people who have died early and nasty deaths in their desperate hurry to become super-rich).  Given such obstructions, even the most highly enlightened people down the ages have discovered that it is not easy to make the mass of their fellow men happy: Confucius and Socrates and the Buddha tried, and the results are there for all to see.

I personally think – generalizing from the entire range of my adult experience, which is forty years long now – that these are dark ages, speaking in terms of values that those below forty have learnt and are learning. This is not to say that I look nostalgically back to any mythical Golden Age in the past: the moment I remember slavery and witch hunts and torture as widespread and socially sanctioned entertainment such idiocy goes out the window. There has never been a golden age. But every age has its own sickness, and ours consists of a combination of four diseases: perpetual distraction, laziness as an aspiration, obsession with self-assertion (as opposed to self-improvement) and slavering worship of wealth. The moment anybody starts talking about lost values, I try to figure out quickly whether s/he, from whatever I know about her or him, is afflicted by even one of the four: if I am sure that is the case, I know that there is no point in furthering the discussion; let the physician heal himself first. But of this I am now sure – it is really a waste of time arguing how important values are when everything ‘bad’ that is happening all around us, from the epidemic of dirty language to soft porn masquerading as modelling and music and acting, to vast business scams that make overnight billionaires to marriages breaking up right and left, schoolchildren cheating in examinations, judges being bought, college graduates being unable to spell, women learning to be just as badly behaved as the men they profess to despise, ‘depressed’ teenagers committing suicide because their phones have been taken away, rampant pollution and destruction of the natural environment… everything, everything stems from the fact that those four ‘values’ have become all but pervasive, no matter how much people deny it, how many contrarian sermons are delivered from the pulpits, how many papers are published from the universities, how many psychiatrists bemoan the epidemic of things like ADHD, and how many silly proto-dictators try to rein in the spreading madness by harping ever more frantically on the need for discipline, duty and higher loyalties like those to nation or religion.

Is there a cure? I don’t know. As one of my gurus said, it is important to spell out the problem even if I cannot offer a sensible solution for it. May better people try.

Which way are we going, then? God alone knows … or, as one of the Upanishads says, ‘maybe even He does not know’!

Why have I become so unsocial?

Though I daily have more visitors than all the people living on the two adjacent streets and mine rolled into one  – owing, needless to say, to the nature of my profession – I have gradually, over a long time, become a very socially aloof person. Neighbours know me as a man of few words, I rarely start a conversation or visit people or take part in social do’s, and though invariably polite in a formal way if similarly accosted on the street (‘How are you doing, Sir?’), I keep it short and get away as soon as is possible without being positively rude. This even applies to ex students who suddenly turn up after having been completely out of touch for years. Most un-Bengali, isn’t it? How did I become like this?

I believe that circumstances mould and even to some extent permanently change character, especially if those circumstances relentlessly grate against  aspects of your essential self. I began life as a very shy, reserved person who liked best to keep his own company. Then, late in teenage, having found much that was fun and challenging about interpersonal interactions (from romance to debating to journalistic work and teaching), and simultaneously that I could hold people’s attention for extended periods as a natural talker, I dived into that kind of life with gusto. But experiences of a very unpleasant sort kept coming thick and fast, and just kept on coming, for years and decades. Snooty as this sounds, I quickly discovered that most people, my age and much older, were boring – their interests were very narrow, their knowledge almost non-existent, their sense of humour wanting, their grasp of language poor, their love of gossip distressing, and their only real purpose behind conversing was either to kill time or to impose their half-baked opinions on everyone else. Yes, that is what I sadly found (and that is what I still find on social media!), everywhere from tea stalls to wedding halls, from official interviews (remember the reporter’s job?) to the school staff room, and, alas, parties of peers.

As if that was not enough, I discovered to my great dismay that a) people who pretend as a rule do not actually like you, b) they speak nonsense, tell lies, and spread unutterable abuse behind your back, all the bhadralok you used to know, and worst of all, c) everybody ultimately forgets and moves on, male and female alike, including all those who had averred that I had marked their lived indelibly and they could never imagine falling out of touch. Call me naïve, call me silly, call me any derogatory thing you like, it took me a long, long time to find out. But it is a fact of life that lessons you learn the hard way over a long period of time are the lessons that are most deeply seared into your brain.

Finally, in contrast to what most people believe in this country – that you have to maintain at least an elaborate pretence of affection, caring and respect for relatives and friends and neighbours simply because you have to count on them to pull you out of every successive sticky situation in your life – I have been hurt, misled and fooled by far too many, and genuinely helped by far too few. So that over the last twenty years or so I have come to cling ever more strongly to a very old-fashioned idea: that it is God and my own karma which decides how much good and bad I shall have to face in life, not the favours or evil machinations of people whom I know or knew. And so today, beyond my old mother and my grown up daughter, I don’t really bother about any human being. I don’t wish anyone ill, I shall always try to help if someone I know is in serious distress in front of my eyes, I shall not speak harshly unless so spoken to… but I have stopped letting people affect my life in any enduring sense. I shall die lonely, and I am increasingly reconciled to the idea. As the poet wrote, ‘Tis God shall repay/ I am safer so’. In this life and hereafter. I wonder if any reader really believes s/he has a better idea about how to live a good life?

Jai Hind. Fears and tributes

I am a patriot, but alas, I never learnt to be a nationalist. 

You can look up what I have always thought of and prayed for India in earlier blogposts, such as My India, My mother is sixty and Free India is sixty five today.

This Independence Day, maybe simply because I am older and much more weary, I stay gloomily, apprehensively quiet.

To turn to more cheerful things, look up this new documentary on one of my lifetime heroes, James Herriot. I shall be delighted if that leads some readers to pick up one or two of his wonderful books...  

Heat waves!

I was reading, partly with sympathy and partly with a feeling of 'serves them right', the news about the recent heat wave sweeping across the UK - a few days ago London was considerably hotter than Delhi, the celsius having for the first time in recorded history broken the 40 degree barrier. A couple of years ago I had read about the same thing in France (people diving into public fountains, and looking around desperately for fans and air conditioners and mechanics who could install and repair them, these things being in very short supply there because they have never imagined needing them!), and about wild bushfires in Australia and western parts of the USA.

If climate change is both real and serious, it is good that it is beginning to affect the advanced western countries already. Let them learn first hand a little about the conditions in which we live, here in south Asia. That is the only way they will ever become really interested in doing their bit to reverse the damage, their societies learning at last to pay more attention to an issue like this than the release of the latest iPhone or the shenanigans of the latest pop music band. Who cares, after all, if the polar ice caps melt and kill off all the bears and penguins, or even if an insignificant country like the Maldives sinks within the next twenty years, or millions of poor and unimportant people suffer in countries like India and Bangladesh? Things will begin to change only if the white sahibs start taking big steps, and of course, that is only when we in India and China will follow hurriedly in their footsteps...

Clio stirring

I recently read a newspaper interview of a senior historian saying how Amit Shah’s insistence that history should be rewritten with a view to glorifying ancient (read Hindu-) India is ‘old hat’, because this project has been actually going on for over a century now; also, that people like Shah have a very clearly ideological-cum-political agenda, which is anathema to serious history writing, and also that many of the claims of such ideologues, though laughable (such as that ancient Indians had aeroplanes and plastic surgery and nuclear weapons), are full of mischievous potential, because average Indians, including those who like to think of themselves as educated, are only too eager to confuse mythology with history, especially when it serves to aggrandize their self-image.

All this is true, but I think that both interviewer and interviewee have missed the real point here. To my mind, the real point is, Indians by and large are not interested in history – not just because mythology is so much more entertaining and less demanding of the intellect, but also because (and this is the supremely important thing) reading history does not easily and quickly lead to jobs, and any cerebral effort that does not do so is hated by Indians of all classes and ages with a deep, fierce, collective and unalterable hatred. So it is drilled into children from a very early age that history is boring, useless, too hard to read because it taxes the memory with so many facts, names, dates and so on. By the age of 16, they are – well, 99% of them are – convinced beyond redemption. Notice that the same logic applies even to what is called ‘interesting’ by the entire middle class when they are in their early teens (hence biology and chemistry are far less commonly liked than math and physics), and a little later, when they all make a beeline for that great Indian ‘passion’, engineering, they all want to go into IT or some branch of computer science, not civil, mechanical, electrical or chemical, which have been the core branches for ages, not because they are in truth fascinated by computers but because the entire adult world has convinced them that in all other branches of engineering, jobs are too few and far between, so they must all convince themselves that they are ‘passionate’ about IT/computers. No other race can make a virtue out of necessity as well as we can. Here I agree entirely with our prime minister about the deleterious effect of a thousand years of ghulaami – servitude of the mind. Remember how during British rule most middle class Indian parents (including Subhas Bose’s father) were ‘passionate’ about their sons becoming judges or magistrates under the sahibs? As I have been saying for decades, if the word went around that these days there are no engineering jobs available while historians are being hired in vast numbers and at eye-popping salaries, every Indian parent would beat the idea into their wards that they must be ‘passionate’ about history, and God help those who timidly express any interest in ‘useless’ subjects like physics or chemistry! When the chips are down, Indians have no loyalty to anything except their pockets. As Noam Chomsky the American philosopher observed, you don’t know what materialist means until you have known Indians well…

I have been truly passionate about history since childhood. I have found that I have learnt more history, and still have instant recall about more historical facts, than most history scholars do (I have checked out with my own daughter, who earned a gold medal in history when she left college). That has not prevented me from learning economics very well up to the master’s level, or being a successful teacher of English over a lifetime at all levels from middle school to university. It’s a matter of being really interested in knowing, rather than in examination scores, which is all that middle class mothers (especially the Bengalis among them) care about. I have among my ex students – though their number is sadly few – people who have doctoral and post doctoral qualifications in science and mathematics, yet also pursue a strong and abiding interest in history on their own. I also know that much of the deep-rooted dislike of history that grows in school can be ascribed to the bad effects of utterly bored, boring, ignorant and unintelligent teachers. Moreover, to say history is boring is also to say that you are not interested in knowing about your past – your ancestors, your legacy, your past follies and mistakes, your long-term weaknesses – and only fools are like that, because it has been well said that men who forget their history are condemned to repeat it. I have seen that some of the most technologically advanced countries, far more really ‘advanced’ than India, are deeply interested in knowing and preserving their history: an interest in science and technology does not in any way impede the pursuit of historical knowledge, only a lack of interest in knowledge does.

To anybody who asks ‘What is the use of reading history?’, my first retort is ‘What do you mean by use?’ If all you want out of an education is a middling sort of mindless job, like clerkship, coding, or selling soap, it is certainly of no use. And it is true that no country needs to produce college graduates in history by the hundred thousand. But it has been well said, and will be valid when IT has long been forgotten as a hot career, that ‘man shall not live by bread alone’. History is entertaining in a civilized man’s sense. History warns you against common, oft-repeated stupidities and disasters. History prepares you to face the future better. History is needed to appreciate a great deal of art and literature and music. You cannot master a lot of subjects if you do not know a great deal of their history, be it law or medicine or aeronautics. You cannot make a lot of good movies or write a lot of good books without expert historical knowledge. AND: history misread and mis-told can misguide whole nations with disastrous consequences, as witness what happened in Italy and Germany in the 1930s (to know which, too, you have to read history!)

I believe that, despite our first prime minister having been a profoundly history-literate man, the subject has not got a fair deal as an academic pursuit. First of all, by and large only science failures have gone to college to read it, as lately as my daughter’s batch: that is not how a country produces first class historians. Secondly, they have followed a too-rigid leftist bias for too long in the universities, and that has not served the discipline well. Thirdly, reading history didn’t lead to good jobs, and that confirmed people in their opinion that it is a ‘useless’ subject. Fourthly, too few historians have written well for educated laymen: how many writers can you cite after you have mentioned William Dalrymple? Fifthly, we have actually done too little serious, original research – why is the Indus Valley script still undeciphered a hundred years after it was discovered?

In my considered opinion, therefore, it would not be a bad thing if the controversy being stirred by those who are in power right now in their effort to give a sharp and sometimes silly rightward-orthodox twist to the reading and writing of history brought about a churning, an intellectual ferment among at least the educated sections, a shaking off of apathy, a stirring of renewed interest, in what history is all about. It might, in the end, do more good than harm. At least more books like Manu Pillai’s Rebel Sultans (which meticulously records how, rather than there being clear cut Muslim periods and Hindu periods in history, things have always been far more complex: for instance, Muslim has often fought Muslim with the help of Hindu generals and counsellors, and it was political power and economic benefits that were uppermost in their minds, not the spread of religious bigotry) might get written and read, even by engineers! What harm is there in being a little optimistic now and then?

Silly hyperbole, mad exaggeration, desperate sensationalism

At first glance at the headings, I was admittedly dismayed. ‘Supreme Court kills abortion rights in the US’, screamed The Times of India. It went on to say that the fifty year old landmark Roe vs. Wade judgment that had made abortion a ‘constitutional right’ had been ‘overturned’ by a conservative dominated court, and went on to quote President Biden (a Democrat) calling it a ‘sad day’ and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (also a Democrat) declaring that the ruling is ‘a slap in the face to women’. Someone has even said on record that it shows that in America the rule of law is being replaced with ‘rule by judges’.

What absurd hyperbole, what wildly speculative scare-mongering, what utterly senseless allegations are being thrown around (immediately to be supported by tens of millions of twitter posts from people who can neither read nor think nor care to go into the nitty gritty of any serious issue at all, even to the minimal extent of reading the reports in full)!  

First and foremost, they have done nothing like ‘overturning’ Roe vs. Wade. All they have done is a) mandated that, barring emergencies, abortions cannot be carried out beyond 15 weeks (a little less than four months) after conception, because doctors, lawyers and most ethicists agree that after that the foetus begins increasingly to resemble a human being, so MTP virtually amounts to murder, and b) that state legislatures will henceforth be free to devise their own (stronger) restrictions. For the sake of comparison, The Times thankfully provided a chart to show what sort of restrictions other countries imposed: from there I learnt that in 2021, Poland, for example, imposed a ‘near-total’ ban on abortions, but apparently even that near-total leaves out all cases where the child is born as a result of rape, incest, or when the mother’s life is at risk. For heaven’s sake, what ‘right’ or ‘freedom’ are women and liberals screaming about having lost? In India, I have just been told (doctors and lawyers among my readers, correct me if I am wrong), there is no such ‘right’ at all: it is the doctor who decides, based on purely medical considerations, whether an MTP is warranted or not (it is another matter that as with everything else, there is a huge grey area where millions of women lose their lives or ability to give birth and/or their babies as a result of forced and botched abortions, most often done by quacks). My understanding is that there are now a vast number of people around who take childbirth and motherhood as something as trivial as going to the beauty parlour or buying an ice cream – was happily fornicating around/ just learned that we’re going to have a baby/ took more than three months to decide we don’t want it/ let’s get an abortion (like let’s have dinner at a chic restaurant)! And when conservatives, whether in the US or America (including a lot of women!), regard such an attitude as sacrilege – people should not breed like dogs and cats, without responsibility – they are branded orthodox, stupid, misogynistic and every other abuse you can think of. No man or woman has a right, we say, to bring a baby into this world without first having decided to take responsibility for it till it attains adulthood: if they dare to claim that they were just ‘having fun’, or it happened ‘by mistake’, they do not have a right to have unprotected sex at all. Rigid? Yes. Moralisitic? Yes, too. Orthodox? Fine. We don’t think quadrupeds make better human beings. Remember, always, that unregulated freedom brings only chaos, anarchy and loss of civilization in its train. The least I can say is, if someone – a mother to be – really has to kill the baby growing inside her, she had better know that it should be treated as one of the most serious decisions she will ever make in her life, and she had better decide fast: if possible, within days of knowing what has happened. It is nothing short of sin to wait three months or more. And if some people insist on that kind of responsibility, they are not perverts.

Turning to the huge recent brouhaha over the Agnipath/Agniveer scheme for hiring soldiers in India. The way the liberals/opposition politicians and press are going on, it is as if it will be the end of the world. The truth is a) the government’s hand has been forced, because they simply don’t have money enough to keep on footing the already monstrous pension bill for retired soldiers any more, b) they are trying to reduce to some extent the average age of our soldiers (it was becoming an old men’s army – more of a joke in a real wartime situation than anything else), and c) many countries, as the same newspaper assures me, have schemes for very short service military jobs, as short as four or five years, so the Indian government is not doing something either stupid or utterly unheard of. What kind of opposition is this, what kind of liberalism and socialism is this, that they will scream blue murder at whatever the government does without considering the merits and compulsions? I am not a great admirer of Modi's, and I rue many of his hasty ‘reform’ schemes, but why should I abandon all reason and information to criticize, often in the silliest, most abusive terms, everything that he does?

And what kind of press have we got that insanely exaggerates everything that it serves up, especially in the headlines, knowing that 99 per cent of voters don’t read beyond them? Isn’t it high time that reporters and editors and owners were sternly pulled up for writing content where the actual report sharply differs from, even contradicts, the headline? Isn't it time to wonder whether the proliferation of 'journalists' has itself become a serious pestilence?

P.S., June 29: Delightful to read in today's newspaper that the government is finally banning single use low utility plastic bags (from July 01), so soon after I wrote here about it: see the last post. I hope the ban is implemented in all seriousness. Pupu, I know, will be happy - she has been refusing to accept such bags at shops since she was so high!

Summer of 2022

This summer – almost all over India, I hear – is turning out to be one of the longest and worst in living memory. The last nasty one was 2016: it was definitely hotter, I remember, but it started late, and we were not sweating from every pore night and day for weeks on end. My daughter confirms that it is right now warm to hot in and around Shimla, Delhi is again under a ‘yellow alert’, and here, though it has been raining intermittently all through the last month, every three rainless days makes life unbearable. The weather app routinely says that while the temperature in the shade may be only 38-39 degrees, it ‘feels like’ 50, whichever way they figure it out, and I have confirmed it with hundreds of people that there is nothing particularly wrong with me: everybody’s feeling half dead and murderous at the same time. Heaven knows when the real monsoon will set in. This is the time I start cursing my ancestors for having migrated to this horrible land and breeding like rats over millennia … assuming that the migration theory is true at all. Only North Bengal has been having almost daily showers, damn their luck!

Our Chief Minister has again prolonged the summer vacation for schools by a fortnight, and this time round it seems the government is forcing even private schools to stay closed, though even opposition leaders have started grumbling ‘have we never had hot summers before?’ I wonder what exactly is going on: is there some plan afoot gradually to do away with schools altogether? Online examinations have already put paid to the meaningfulness of examinations for several successive batches of students at all levels; now do they want to axe traditional organized education itself? Have they thought up real, workable alternatives?

A reminder – I have to write this sort of thing again and again because new readers rarely know how to navigate this blog. It is best to read it on your computer; but if you must use your phone, scroll down to the bottom of the home page and click on ‘view web version’ – that is the only way you will be able to see everything that is there, including all the tabs along the right hand margin and links to old post, comments and so on. I would very strongly urge anybody who has become an interested reader to visit old posts: there are hundreds of them, on scores of different subjects, and I am sure many of you will be surprised to see that I have written so much. That would save me endless needless effort repeating many things over and over, whether it is about religion or economics, poetry or aeroplanes, Harry Potter or the Mahabharata, the state of education or the prospects for India. This is especially meant for new, young readers: I am glad that they visit, but sad that they look at only the tip of the iceberg instead of exploring the vast collection of essays that has accumulated over sixteen years…

P.S.: It gets on my nerves to see grown up people who should know better insisting that shopkeepers give them single use plastic bags to carry purchases home. It is as if all the dire warnings being constantly issued by environmentalists do not reach them at all, or they simply don’t care. In any case, how long will the government keep playing this shameful double game? If they were serious about banning plastic pollution, they would simply ban their production, wouldn’t they? Do they seriously think that merely ‘requesting’ people to stop polluting would teach anybody any lessons, at least in this country?

Latest sojourn in Delhi

I am just back from my one-week mid-year break in Delhi. It feels as if the routine set since 2018 is beginning to be resumed, now that (God willing) the long Covid-induced hiatus is over. If the good times continue, we shall keep coming and going several more times this year.

I wish they would restore a morning flight soon: in the current dispensation (going evening, coming back afternoon) I lose two whole working days merely travelling.

I stayed in Pupu’s latest house for the first time. Lots of space, air and sunshine: not too good for the long and terrible summer, but I am really looking forward to wintering in Delhi for the first time, with the lovely terrace to sunbathe in. God is fulfilling a lot of my little long-held wishes, albeit slowly: I presume to think that I may have earned them, and they are not the sort that harm anybody…

I was lucky enough to enjoy torrential rain twice in the space of a week which drastically lowered the temperature for a bit, and that was a small miracle, considering that all through March and April it hadn’t rained there for a single day. The violent thunderstorm on Monday the 30th evening uprooted hundreds of trees, killed two people and broke the finial off the Jama Masjid, so, considering that I simply enjoyed the chilling squall from my balcony, coffee mug in hand, I was among the very blessed ones! And it is raining now, Wednesday evening, in Durgapur, so we have been cooled down again.

Did some daily household chores, as well as worked alongside Pupu on her nascent project, so my holidays are not merely lazing days yet, though I got up very late every morning. Can’t tell you how much I enjoy being of some professional use to my daughter, and how fervently I thank the Maker every day for having allowed me to have lived this long with my faculties more or less intact. Brings back memories of the entry I made in my diary that day in August 2007 lying on my hospital bed. My appendix was about to burst, and the surgery was scheduled for that evening. I wrote ‘I must get back on my feet soon. I must go on slogging for ten more years at least’. It’s been fifteen.

Little weird experiences this time round: visited Nehru Place market, and discovered that half of India’s laptop- and mobile phone sellers and repairers are located in that one place! And while it was blazing outside today, and the air conditioners maintained a very mildly cool ambience inside the airport, there were people who were going around in full-sleeved sweaters, hoodies, and one man (I kid you not) in a fur-lined jacket that I would not wear in Delhi except at night in December or January! You should watch the traffic jams below my house every time a DTC bus tries to negotiate its way through, with vehicles parked along on both sides of the two-lane road, and every driver trying to use it like an eight-lane highway!

Now it’s happily back to the grind. Imagine, it’s the 36th year in Durgapur alone!

I write this sort of stuff because I like doing it, and because I know that some people enjoy reading it. I also know, sadly, that some people hate my guts and that is the sole reason they are revolted by anything I write. To all such people, I repeat: why don’t you merely stop visiting and thus tormenting yourself over and over again? How pathetic your sort must be!

Baby food shortage: history repeated upside down!

Reading about the current countrywide shortage of formula baby food in the USA brought back poignant memories of more than half a century ago. I was an infant then, and heard this story from my mother when I was a few years older. Back in 1964, when my father was pursuing a PhD in geology at Indiana University Bloomington and doing a field tour of the Rocky Mountains, there was an acute shortage of baby food in India (well, at least in West Bengal), and my grandfather had to run from pillar to post to find tins of Ostermilk (it was the Amul Spray of that era) for me. Meanwhile my father was travelling with professor and classmates, and one of their vans carried a huge tank of fresh milk, refilled every morning, overhead. They drank gallons of it each, and threw away the rest on the grass or into waterfalls. My dad was apparently horrified. He wrote a touching letter lamenting what he had seen back home, and my grandfather, his father in law, apparently used that letter to shame some low level government functionaries into allotting us a couple of baby food tins. How history comes full circle! I am glad I have lived long enough to see it, and if only it had not involved babies, I would have sighed contentedly and murmured to myself ‘Serves them right’. Advanced country indeed!

Request

My daughter is about to start up an online learning platform for adults who have a professional need to learn practical, communicative English. To begin with, she is doing a little market survey, and for that she has put up a google form online. Please click on the form below and fill it in: it will take you less than five minutes. We shall be very grateful if you pass on the message to all those friends, relatives, colleagues and neighbours who you think might be interested. Thank you very much in advance for your help.

Message from Urbi Chatterjee:

Hello everyone, 

I'm working on my startup that will offer communicative English training to adult learners. I am conducting market research to understand the needs and aspirations of those who are over 18 years of age and are struggling to speak in English. This short Google form will help me get a better idea of what people really require. I would greatly appreciate it if you could take out 10 minutes of your time and fill this form up. It is entirely anonymous, and you can choose whether or not you want to leave your contact details. Please do circulate this widely in your personal and professional networks. Thank you for your cooperation :)

https://forms.gle/EurBZkDPutmfLoG5A

Fantasy

Okay, how about a bit of fantasizing? If I were a dollar multi-billionaire, with at least five billion in guaranteed securities which would allow me to spend a million dollars a day indefinitely (let’s say that means for the next fifteen years) what would I do?

To start with, I would ensure that my daughter would never have to work except at what she truly loves.

I would entirely renovate and refurbish my present little house to my taste. That would include getting the street re-layered, and planting large, leafy flowering trees all alongside.

Next, I would buy a villa in the south of France, maybe, and penthouses in London, Paris and the bay area of San Francisco, along with one giant rural estate somewhere in the US where I could luxuriate in peace and solitude over at least a thousand hectares of virgin forest with a lake or a river nearby, and snow for at least four months a year. Every one of these would come with a proper butler of Jeeves vintage, if such men are available.

I would travel the world in first class comfort, slumming it only when my whimsy dictated me, and of course with armed security guards in top of the line SUVs in tow.

I’d have a lot of dogs, all-year swimming pools to myself, and a very nice wine cellar.

I’d have a small dedicated staff administering my charitable activities, which would amount to $ 80-100 million a year, aimed at only causes that I genuinely believe can make a significant difference for the better to this world. Education, as I have understood it, for those who I think truly deserve it and will make the best possible use of it, will be very high on my list. Especially being of some serious help to my most favourite and promising old boys.

I’d hire the best teachers to train me in subjects as diverse as Sanskrit and tai chi.

I have no interest in boys’ toys which are the favourite of low-class philistines who want to preen before people of their own mental calibre, but I might buy a little biplane if I can learn to fly it at this age, and a large sailboat with a crew of three or four to take me across the vast oceans now and then, with only salt air and sunshine and silence around me.

I shall find out whether there are comfort women available who also have brains, and who can perhaps be induced to become something like friends, if only for a price. Call me a cynical romantic if you like, incurable if you like, but that’s the way I am.

Above all, I shall meet and talk only to people whom I genuinely like, invariably one on one or in small groups. I shall most definitely neither attend parties nor throw any.

I shall make sure that I can have euthanasia whenever I choose to, and no questions asked.

[I wrote this thing because all my life I have been disgustedly watching and listening to middle-class people slobbering over the ‘lifestyles of the rich and famous’, and thought drawing up my own little wish list would not be a bad idea. This post could be read in tandem with ‘What sort of person am I?’, the link to which is a fixture on top of this blog]