Could India have developed differently, and much faster?

The current excitement over the ‘Amrit Mahotsav’ marking the 75th year of our Independence has set me thinking about how much India has achieved since 1947 (I am the last to belittle all the magnificent achievements against what had once seemed insurmountable odds), where we have failed – often dismally, if not tragically – whether we could have done better, and how we can still change courses sharply in order to see a far stronger, healthier, more civilized India that we can be much more proud of  by 2047.

India has at least a hundred million intellectuals, especially highly concentrated in Bengal, if you include the sort who dominate the conversation at roadside tea stalls, TV quarrels (I hesitate to exalt them with the title of debates) and op-ed pages in regional newspapers. I shall not let myself forget that every one of them knows vastly more about the answers to the above questions than mere me, and is absolutely confident that s/he is right. Also, it will constantly echo at the back of mind as I write this essay that, as some famous man observed, whatever you say about India, the opposite can be asserted with equal authority by your interlocutor, if he is sufficiently informed and cunning. However, I believe, too, that fifty years of concentrated reading, observing, thinking, teaching, writing and debating has qualified me to contribute my mite to the argument.

I believe that, despite having a dazzling galaxy of great leaders at the helm when we set out to fulfill our tryst with destiny, we set our priorities wrong. To my mind, industrialization with the latest technology, setting up a chain of institutes of ‘higher’ education focusing on science and tech and medicine and law and accounting, establishing nuclear-and space research centres, building up a huge military machine, encouraging the proliferation of vast urban conurbations, carving up the states along linguistic lines, grappling with the ever brooding menace of casteism, fighting extreme left inspired terrorism – all these things might have been necessary and desirable, but they could have waited a few decades. Four things that should have been given the very highest priority right from the start are 1) fostering universal respect for the rule of law, to which every man from the highest in the land would have been as subservient as the lowest, regardless of differences in age, gender, education, wealth, social position, caste, religion, language and native place, 2) drastic control of population growth, so that the 300 million in 1947 could not have reached the monstrous and almost completely unmanageable level of 1400 million today, 3) complete removal of absolute poverty, with programmes focused on redistributing a very large chunk of national income and wealth from the richest ten per cent to the poorest, 4) universal free basic education for all children up to the age of 14 or 16, coupled with a 25-30 year long project that would have ensured a secondary school level education or its equivalent to all adults between 18 and 50 who had never attended formal school, the primary aim of this education being to make good citizens rather than those preparing to go on to making ‘paying’ careers for themselves.

Reflect on this quietly, attentively, for a considerable length of time. Wouldn’t you be persuaded to agree that if the four above criteria could have been met, say, by 1977, and only after that we unleashed full democracy and (state monitored-) capitalism, then within the next 45 years we might have actually surpassed China on every index of progress, including freedom and overall material prosperity by now? And who would argue that that would have been a bad thing?

Is this a pipe dream, something that could never have been achieved? I do not think so. Let me explain categorically why.

Napoleon made  fun of the British (half-seriously, actually with admiration), saying ‘They are a strange race. They make their own laws, and they are mortally afraid of breaking those laws’. As I said, from the lowest to the highest in the land. Churchill suffered a landslide electoral defeat after having steered Britain successfully through the Second World War, and relinquished office without demur. As someone observed, if there were popular elections in the Soviet Union at that time and Stalin lost, it would not even have occurred to him that he should relinquish office – he would instead simply have had several hundred thousand contrarian voters shot or sent to the gulags. And Jerome K. Jerome wrote (in Three Men on the Bummel) that the Germans were far more law-abiding than the British! At a much less exalted level, I personally know a rich and well connected middle aged lady who plucked a flower in a London park despite being aware that it was strictly prohibited, and was politely but promptly hauled away to the nearest police station to pay a fine and have her name and photograph recorded: her husband, knowing how the system worked, did not raise a finger to ‘save’ her. Suppose this had been imposed in India right from day one: MPs and MLAs and even local councillors would not have dared to behave like demi-gods (I won’t even mention CMs and PMs), and no one, bar none, could have avoided a hefty fine and at least a night in the lockup if he had dared to challenge a policeman over an obvious case of breaking some law by shouting ‘jaanta hai mai kaun hun?’ (or ‘…mera baap kaun hai?’) Would that have helped to make India a better place, and governance much easier, or not? Why did we spread among the elite as well among the masses the pernicious idea that our newly acquired freedom meant that from now on everybody could do as he pleased, cheat and hurt anyone he pleased as much as he pleased on his road to power and pelf as long as he had the right connections, and public safety, decency and welfare be damned?

To the population question next. Consider this: if we had been able to achieve the degree of development that we have already done, in terms of overall national income and social infrastructure (roads, schools, houses, hospitals), to name just two major indices with a population which had stabilized at about one-third of the present number, wouldn’t we have been vastly better off already? (the simplest of arithmetic would tell you that our per capita income would have been three times its current value, which would have placed us comfortably among the middle income countries of the world, rather than still among the poorest!) And isn’t it an unarguable fact that we have left far too many problems – from jobs to availability of the most essential commodities to pollution to caste wars – to fester and grow steadily worse and insoluble simply because the sheer number of people scrabbling for a bare sustenance, at which level no moral or legal bars can stop them from doing what they do, from stealing to rioting to cheating and fighting for more and more ‘reservations’, has grown relentlessly larger over the decades? It would have taken so little of concerted and well-meaning effort, really: significant material rewards for birth control to the poorest, who would have grasped them with both hands, combined with mild punitive measures for parents who have more than two children (withdrawal of ration cards and tax concessions, no permission to stand for elections, things like that): no draconian measures, and some thousand crores of rupees spent – we have spent vastly bigger amounts on prestige projects galore, and are still doing so! – which would have rewarded us by creating scope for much easier governance and faster economic growth later on, and brought back the investment many hundredfold. Even as I write this I am reminded of the German poet lamenting ‘against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain’…

To come to the third point now. This is truly tragic, because we started off by promising ourselves via the Constitution, and our first prime minister reiterating in his first and most famous speech to the newly free nation, to make the removal of extreme, centuries-old poverty, which reduced millions of human beings to the level of neglected and abused beasts, our highest and first priority. Then we lost our way. I shall not go into the very vexed question of apportioning blame – I have heard about every kind of panacea, including turning India into a communist or military dictatorship, and learnt how silly they are – but the fact remains that after ‘developing’ for 75 years, India is still home to almost half the total number of extremely poor people in the world (meaning, by World Bank standards, those who have to survive on less than two US dollars a day). Anybody who dares claim, despite knowing this terribly shameful fact, that after all we should take note of all the other kinds of ‘advancement’ India has made, is one who has either never known or seen such poverty first hand or simply doesn’t care, because he knows that he and his family and kin will never be affected by it. Could extreme poverty have been removed early? I believe yes. True, India between 1947 and 1977 remained overall a very poor nation, but if you take note of the top ten per cent (and even more so, the top 1%), there were a lot of obscenely rich people around even then, from business tycoons to ex maharajas to film stars and the mahants who ran the biggest temples, and if a stern government – say, cast in the Scandinavian model – had taxed away much of their wealth to feed, clothe, house, heal and educate the poorest, I believe the worst of material misery would have become a thing of the past by 1977, though it is true that the rich would have had to wait much longer to live in palaces, drive luxury limousines, go holidaying on the Riviera, deck their wives in gold and send off their children to greener pastures in phoren lands. Our ruling elite, from Nehru to Jyoti Basu, for all their fancy rhetoric, didn’t bother to pay attention, because they simply didn’t care, and the masses never really had a voice: that’s all. Sad, because today those vast unwashed masses are eating away so much of our resources through their incessant demands on the national purse (look at the intense competition going on among our state governments to launch ever more lavish ‘welfare’ projects to buy the next vote) that there are virtually no resources left for anything more worthwhile, from building infrastructure to supplying the military with new age arms and technologies! (our mainstay  fighter aircraft is still the forty-plus year old MiG 21, the ‘flying coffin’ – one air force chief has publicly complained that no one would drive a forty year old car – and the government, according to a now-retired army chief, cannot afford more than ten days’ ammunition for his soldiers in case of a full scale war).

So we come to the last point. Education. The one thing about which almost everybody who knows me will admit that I know a thing or two. Nothing shows how elitist and undemocratic India’s governments have always been – no point carping about whether the Congress was a little better or the Janata governments or the BJP – than how we have neglected basic education in favour of the ‘higher’ version. From Finland to Japan to New Zealand, I have learnt enough about the most ‘advanced’ countries of the world to be sure that they have done just the opposite, and prospered that way. And yet the Father of the Nation had wanted otherwise. He insisted so hard and so long that the requirement that the State shall provide universal free education up to the age of 14 was enshrined in the Constitution as a Directive Principle of State Policy, but then it was quietly and by near common consent forgotten. Why did he ask for it, and why was it forgotten?

To explain how I have understood him, I must be forgiven for a little dissertation on the side here. Do read it with the foreknowledge that I have not only read extensively about the right purposes and methods of education but personally taught at all levels from primary school to post graduate students of many disciplines for more than half a lifetime, while continuously reflecting on our real job all through.

To start with, then, the greatest authorities in both the east and west, from Russell to Vivekananda, have always given far more importance to school education rather than what passes for ‘higher’ education. There must be a very good reason for that. A schooling for at least ten years is essential for everybody, whereas only a tiny minority in every country goes for higher education, because they neither understand the need for it nor want it, nor have the aptitude for it nor can afford it (the vast majority of the millions in highly subsidized Indian colleges, whatever they are formally ‘studying’, are actually just killing time and scraping through exams somehow until they can get a job. This is an open secret. In any case, no country needs millions of new doctors or lawyers or engineers or historians or mathematicians every year – if some country, such as ours, is still churning them out, there is something very seriously wrong with the system).

Secondly, we must be very clear-eyed about why a certain period of schooling for everyone is needed, what it should seek and hope to achieve.

One very noble and desirable purpose of education is, certainly, nurturing the original creative urges of people born highly talented in every field. Two things, however, must be remembered in this context: one, that people like Mozart and Michelangelo and Lincoln and Tagore are so energetic, focused and self-directed that they do not really need a formal schooling, and that a formal schooling is actually often irrelevant, unnecessary, a burden and a bore to them, and may actually thwart and dampen their finest innate talents; two, the present day schooling system, which is designed for very average people working as teachers in a bureaucratic setup and dealing with vast numbers of pupils who are born and destined to be very average adults, is simply not capable of handling geniuses, so the less time, thought and money that is wasted on this goal the better – as most geniuses have shown, they can make their way through life very well on their own.

Two other, much more practical aims of universal schooling are a) to make good citizens of the future (reasonable, fairly well informed, non violent, polite, cooperative and law-abiding people, as long as the laws are obviously designed to serve the greatest good), and b) to give everybody some saleable skills that they can make a decent living with later on. Now I agree entirely with Gandhiji’s view (and not his alone) that ten years of sincere and intelligent schooling is quite enough to achieve both the above purposes (a certain small section will be found to be simply uneducable – how they can be dealt with is beyond the scope of this essay). Remember, indeed, that the best results for (a) can be achieved only when you start with very young children – I have always maintained that it is stupid to introduce a course in ethics to MBA students – and 90% of jobs in adult life do not need any ‘education’ beyond ten years of good schooling followed by a few months of technical training, whether you think of a shopping mall supervisor or optician or petrol pump manager or bank teller or policeman or low level IT worker (I say this last on Sudha Murty’s authority). It is a shameful waste of national resources to ‘educate’ millions of youngsters who will turn up in those professions in how to read Shakespeare or do integral calculus, or how the Krebs cycle works in your body cells or how plants and animals are classified in the Linnaean system. If millions of parents still send their children to college, they do so firstly because they associate a college degree with a silly thing called ‘status’ (which nobody really believes in anyway), or because the unemployment situation is so bad that they keep hoping that more degrees will finally fetch their children some halfway respectable job (and are then horrified to hear that a crane driver in some places earns far more than their ‘engineer’ children!), or because they are simply too ashamed to admit publicly that their children are really unemployed, when they have the option of calling them ‘students’ instead. But the long and short of it is that if 90% of youngsters could be employed after ten years of schooling and at most a year of professional training, not only millions of families but the whole nation would have benefited hugely (just think of lafungas on motorbikes posing a menace on the roads and their female counterparts burning their parents’ money at restaurants and beauty parlours and you will get what I am driving at).

Education has one more purpose: to give people a much wider appreciation of life and its treasures, by means of all the precious products of civilization, namely literature, art, music, sport – not its horribly caricatured professional version but sports for pleasure and comradeship – justice, true spirituality and so on. This is so neglected in our country that I have often been heard to say that if many people do manage to become educated in India, they do so not due to but in spite of the schooling they have received, so I shall not belabour the point here.

Finally, the fact that this kind of universal basic education has not happened in India, I am convinced, is because of the very deeply elitist (partly casteist, partly sexist, partly economic) bias built into the Indian system of governance right from the start, in open defiance of that famous Directive Principle in our Constitution. Perhaps if Ambedkar or Subhas Bose had been at the helm at the start things would have been very different today – or perhaps they would have been assassinated! In any case, the fact that it has not happened very largely explains why India is so backward still, for all its IITs and IIMs, and why our ‘educated’ population’s highest dream remains to run away to Umrica or failing that, to work for an MNC. As Tagore wrote: poschatey rekhechho jaare, sey tomare poschate tanichhe… the one whom you have shoved behind you keeps pulling you backwards.

Now think: if you broadly agree with this thesis, wouldn’t you also agree that if just these four things had been achieved by 1977, India would have found it far easier to race ahead on the road to progress thereafter, and been in a far more admirable position today?

[I deliberately wrote this essay to mark the day Gandhi died]

Netaji at 125

It's raining again today since daybreak: the second time in January. Outside it is cold and grey and foggy and drizzly at 11 a.m., more like Kurseong during the monsoons. For the record, this is now the longest stretch of continuous rainfall in Durgapur in my living memory - it has rained every month from March to January - but before anyone starts muttering about 'climate change', let me remind you that this is not unheard of. It rained every month from February to November some year during the early 1990s, though I forget which one exactly.

Subhas Bose would have been 125 today. Here is what Gandhiji's grandson has written for the occasion (click and read before they remove the link!) I am glad and proud that they are putting up his statue under the cupola before India Gate in New Delhi where the statue of George V once stood: His Majesty's Opponent has had the last laugh! Just as I am proud that in one of the most sacred Hindu spaces in India, namely the ghats of Hardwar, there are statues of two modern Bengalis, Subhas and Swami Vivekananda.

Which brings me to a travesty I witnessed, or rather heard this morning - a mini van stuffed with offkey zealots passing by, loudspeakers blaring, screaming Ram Narayana Ram, sounding like stuck pigs. On this day of all days, the birthday of the man who with his Azad Hind Fauz most vividly displayed what a secular India under his guidance might have been... and I hear that the current government has decided to remove Abide with me, one of Gandhi's favourite hymns, from the Republic Day ceremony this year, probably because it is 'Christian' in origin: though devout Hindus have always chanted the same idea to their conception of the Supreme Being... Madhav, hum parinam nirasha, tuhu jagataran, deen dayamay, ataye tohare bishowasa (My Lord, I have no hope of redemption, but you are kind to the poor and hapless, so I finally place my trust in you.)

And talking of travesties, my newspaper (no wonder some people refer to them as rags!) carried an obituary of some American, long time director of Vogue magazine, supposedly a famous fashion designer - though I have never heard of him, and I believe I have heard of many more significant people than the average person - and referred to him as 'the great man'.  Well, you know why I feel like throwing up (you are welcome to look up the chapter titled On great and base men in To My Daughter). That is exactly the problem with democracy.

A new story, after ages

[There is a story behind this story. I wrote a number of short stories in the nineties, just to see whether I had lost the creative faculty since the days when I wrote If winter comes. Some of them were much appreciated by those I read them out to. Then the source seemed to dry up. For close to twenty years I haven't written another story. I started on this one in early 2020, and then lost track and stopped halfway. I don't know what gears and relays clicked inside my subconscious, but shortly after watching Jai Bhim I sat down at the keyboard and finished the story at one sitting last night.

I shall be glad to have thoughtful and observant comments. But don't bother to write in if all you can say is 'Good one Sir'!]

A thief’s story

‘Some of the strangest people are drawn into the detective dragnet from time to time’, remarked Dr. Mitra, almost sotto voce, staring into the dregs of his drink.

Priyanghsu’s ears pricked up at once, though. ‘I thought that that net was full of holes?’ he asked with mock innocence. He rarely lost a chance to needle the old man.

‘Don’t get fresh with me, young feller,’ growled the ex policeman, who had retired ten years ago as an Inspector General with the state police. ‘The vast majority of felons get arrested through routine, methodical, laborious police work, not through the smart tricks of the private sleuths that you read about in pulp fiction. And we’re cleverer than you think. If a lot of criminals get away, it’s because we’re not given a free hand…’ his voice trailed away, as if he was recalling bitter memories.

Some of us had smelled a story. Anish hushed Priyanghsu up, and said, ‘You were talking about strange people, Sir?’

That ‘Sir’ was unusual, and it made Dr. Mitra swivel a suspicious eye at him. But he didn’t seem peeved. ‘Care to get me another drink?’

We were a motley group of friends, some going back to high school, who gathered at one of our houses once every weekend, or at least tried to, for the traditional sort of Bengali adda. On an average evening nine or ten attended. There were doctors and lawyers, bankers and engineers and journalists among us, and we were all in our thirties or early forties, except for a well-heeled restaurant chain operator in his mid-fifties, and of course ex-IG Mitra, who was the senior most member. We told one another stories, cooked group dinners and had a few drinks, helped one another out in times of trouble. Mostly we told stories.

Crossing his dhoti clad legs (he had always dressed in uniform or jeans and blazer in his professional days, he had told us, but lately he had become fond of dhoti and kurta), Dr. Mitra pulled his favourite bolster close and nursed his second drink meditatively. ‘Oh, yes, a strange lot indeed,’ he murmured. ‘There was a bank officer like you once, Priyangshu, who had taken up tantra on the sly, and we nabbed him before he could put his plans for making a human sacrifice into effect’. Priyangshu looked startled, and vaguely guilty. He was going to mumble some sort of protest, but Dr. Mitra ignored him and carried on. ‘Then there was a transporter who had started blackmailing a movie starlet in the hope that she would get him a role in one of her forthcoming films, convinced that he needed just one break to become a hit. There was an airport manager who was helping sleeper terrorists to get in and out of the country because he was convinced they could make it a better place to live in. And then there was the rich man who hated rich men…’

‘That’s odd,’ I ventured. ‘Why should he?’

‘How much do we understand about the workings of the human mind, dear boy?’ shot back Dr. Mitra. ‘Do you want a philosophical argument or a story?’

‘Story, story,’ we cried in unison, and he seemed to be mollified.

*****

‘There was a spate of rather odd robberies from the houses of affluent and well-connected people in the city about thirty years ago. At first they were too minor to be reported, and if reported, we didn’t seriously bother to investigate… we often let things slide that way, you know; we always have too many things on our plate not to have to prioritize of necessity.

‘I was DC crime branch in the metropolitan police in those days. Eventually too many reports of the same sort began to pile up on my assistant’s desk, until he was forced to draw my attention to them. There didn’t seem to be much of a pattern, except that the thieves never stole cash, and usually not even jewellery, only things that were of great intrinsic worth to the owners themselves – small family heirlooms, art objects, presents or awards given on very special occasions, that sort of thing, things whose loss would hurt badly, because they couldn’t be replaced. Usually they couldn’t even be sold off, because it would be too easy to trace the source. So what could be the motivation? And the cases were scattered all around the city, some even in the well-appointed suburbs, or so the reports from many different thanas indicated. Nor could the aggrieved parties recall anyone in particular who had a serious enough grudge against them to do this sort of thing just to spite them. In every case the domestics were picked up, interrogated, the usual threats and blandishments wielded, to no avail. They were obviously not just innocent but plainly bewildered. The crooks were skilled professionals, that much was for sure: they virtually left no trace, no clues that help your Sherlocks so much…

Eventually one or two of the robbers slipped up, so they were arrested on suspicion. They were too clever to be caught red-handed, though, and the stolen goods were never found. We did all we could short of giving them the third degree (which you can’t do in the case of such relatively petty crimes anyway) but they were tight like clams; not a loose word slipped from their lips that could give us a lead. We could only surmise by and by that they were in someone’s employ, someone who paid them very well and had somehow even otherwise earned their complete loyalty, so that they would never squeal on him. Someone who had money and cunning and a very strange reason to keep doing what he was doing.

It occurred to me that the only way we could eventually find some sort of trail was to keep inquiring about someone, any one person in particular, whom all the victims knew, who had at some time or other visited them at home and come to know them well. Think about how slow and arduous that kind of investigation can be, how annoying to both sides. Talk about looking for a needle in a haystack. Eventually the needle did begin to waver in one particular direction, but it was all too uncertain to merit a search warrant, let alone an arrest. It would have probably come to nothing, and we would have given up in despair and turned our attention to more pressing things, if the mastermind didn’t eventually show his hand himself. Some of his recruits, if we may so call them, were ill in custody, or their families were suffering, and he was careless in sending them help, careless enough for us to be able to set a tail on him.

This tail was a cat burglar who had turned informant in exchange for a greatly reduced sentence. He came to us one day with the tip that someone who seemed to fit our speculative description – rich, unsocial, secretive, and had sometimes been a guest at the houses of several of the victims – was looking for a man like him to carry out a robbery. It was a framed doctoral certificate in the name of a steel tycoon, scion of a fifth generation business family with high political connections, a man who liked to be seen hobnobbing in intellectual circles and was ashamed of his little secret, namely that he had dropped out of college. The detective in charge wired the informant when he went to receive instructions, but it was only from an intermediary who named no names and only specified a drop location. Even the drop was collected by a slum boy who was barely out of school, and when we nabbed this kid with the stolen article on him, his mother went berserk, and that brought the big fish into our net at last, because, silly and large-hearted as he was, he couldn’t bear the thought of a poor little boy being beaten up in police custody for his sake. In exchange for an immediate release of the boy with no charges, he volunteered over the phone, made from a pay booth, to come clean, but far away from police precincts. So the detective met him and took him home, though it was highly irregular, because the man did not seem to fit the regular image of any kind of criminal at all. And that is where he told his strange story.

*****

This Mr. Sarkhel (the name is obviously fictitious) was a most unprepossessing man, pushing fifty, thickset, his skin rather dark, his hair gray and balding, walking with a slow stoop, and talking with a slight stutter. There was a thick black mole on his right cheek. When he arrived in the detective’s house, he was dressed simply in dhoti and kurta … rather as I am now, but made of rougher material, and old fashioned, polished black pumps. He was visibly ill at ease, and yet there was a strange air of quiet pride and self-possession about him. It took the police officer some time to make him relax, and then he gradually grew voluble. It was an autumn evening, growing dark, and as he spoke from his shadowed corner, his voice seemed to become disembodied.

‘How can we be sure you are not covering up for someone else?’ he was asked.

‘Come on, detective babu, why should I?’, he smiled,  ‘I’m sure you have noticed a pattern in the thefts – the pattern of no pattern at all if you like – and who else could possibly stand to benefit from my confession?’

‘Well, then, what persuaded you to give yourself up?’

‘I told you, the most important thing was that I couldn’t bear to live with the knowledge that someone else, and a child at that, was going to suffer for my sins. Besides, it was a long drawn out folly anyway, and I had begun to grow tired of it. I would have stopped by myself soon enough, I think. There are other, better games to play…’

‘What made you start on this so-called game?’

‘Oh, I was angry, and I wanted to cause a little pain to some people whom I had come to despise deeply.’

‘That won’t do, you know. I need details. Start from the very beginning.’

‘What details do you want to know? It’s tied up with my whole life’s story, and that would be too long and boring for a busy man like you.’

‘No no, I have time enough, go on. Tea?’

He hesitated a little before launching on his tale, as if marshalling his thoughts. ‘Sir, my father was a primary schoolteacher in East Pakistan. He revered education, and instilled a passionate love of books in me. But our family was uprooted during the furious upheaval shortly before the war of liberation for Bangladesh. We had to cross over the border in a panic stricken hurry, my parents, little sister and I – I was 17 then – and arrived in Kolkata almost in the clothes we stood in, with no money to survive on for more than a couple of months. We found shelter in what was then called a refugee colony in the suburbs. My father had to start life anew in middle age, vending fish from door to door, while my mother became a cook in rich men’s houses.

Within a couple of years my father became too ill to keep on earning a halfway decent living. That is when I decided to quit school and step into his shoes to keep the home fires burning. I was determined that my mother shouldn’t have to work as a domestic help for long, and that my sister at least should get a proper education. – she’s a senior nurse in a government hospital now Sir, married to a drugstore owner who is a keen amateur actor on the side, with two lovely children; I hope you won’t drag them into this mess I have made. Please Sir.’

‘We shall see about that. You should have thought of such things before you put yourself into this mess, as you call it. But go on…’

‘Well, Sir, I sold fish from door to door like my father, but I kept my eyes and ears open. I gradually got to know the ins and outs of the bheri – fish culture – business, and the kind of profits one could make in it. If only I had a bit of capital to start off, I used to daydream.

Fortune smiled on us when I was 22. I won a big lottery. Out of the blue I had nearly ten lakh rupees in cash, and that was a lot of money in those days. I put it all into the wholesale fish trade, found a patron who was getting too old to do the dog’s work, and slogged at it night and day, put my heart and soul into it, all the while living as frugally as I could. Business is a great deal about luck too, and I was lucky. I won’t bother you with the details, Sir, but in fifteen years’ time I owned two of the largest bheris in Bengal, and have now branched off into the trawling business, exporting shrimp from Vishakhapatnam. I also invested well into the nascent housing boom in this city, and that paid off handsomely. I have multiplied my initial investment several hundredfold.

By that time my father was gone, and I had married off my sister and got married myself, and moved in with my mother into a large, well-appointed villa in one of the posh new outskirts of the city. That is when I began to develop an urge to be accepted by the élite of Bengal. And that is when I had a series of very nasty shocks.

I did all the things people do: getting a good address, liveried servants and several nice cars, club memberships, rubbing shoulders with prominent politicians in exchange for hefty donations to party funds, attending thousand-rupees-a-plate celebrity parties (this was the early nineties, remember, said Dr. Mitra in an aside), the works. I was naïve enough to think that that would give me an entrée into high society. But it wasn’t too long before it was brought home to me that all I was getting was cold disdain from the high and mighty – and even more so, by their spoilt, useless, snooty wives and children! My wife was a plain housewife, rustic in their eyes; we had not gone to famous schools, we spoke broken English haltingly, we had no family history to boast of, our money was new money, still smelling of sweat I suppose, we hadn’t seen Paris and Rome, London and New York, so we just hadn’t managed to arrive. Our receptions were poorly attended, and our invitations rarely returned by anybody who didn’t owe me a favour in the line of business. There came a point when I began to thank God we did not have any children, who might have suffered even worse at the hands of these snobs.

What made it all the more galling was that I began to notice how ignorant most of these so called ‘high-class’ people were, how poorly read (I have read a lot, Sir, believe me, even if mostly in Bengali, and I know something about art and music too), how ill-mannered, how contemptuous of the weak and the poor, how uncharitable unless there were photo ops – in a word, uncivilized, by the standards of civilization my father had drilled into me. Their conversation was mostly banal and superficial, no better than what you get to overhear in roadside tea stalls. Yet they despised me for my caste, for the colour of my skin, for my indifference to overvalued branded products, you name it. At the same time, they were not at all ashamed, indeed they boasted in their own circles, of how they kept adding to their piles by cheating and bribing all and sundry – tax authorities, employees, customers, the media, low level government functionaries, their own in laws. Worst of ironies, these extremes of social prejudice and discrimination were not only tolerated but actually considered normal and eternal in a state that was ruled by a party that called itself communist, that preached equality and brotherhood!

These people who barely noticed me and scoffed at me behind my back gradually drove the iron into my soul. Little by little this mad desire to hurt them where it would hurt badly took possession of me. What could I do to get some of my own back?

Call it childish if you please, or mean or stupid or whatever, it doesn’t matter now. It occurred to me that the only thing that would hurt them was to lose the trinkets they so dearly prized, so loved to show off – a trophy here, a medal there, a degree, a citation, an heirloom with a story, things of that sort. I didn’t care for them, they had no value in my eyes any more than they did in the marketplace, but I figured it would give me a kick to hear of them mourning their petty little losses. So I began to list people I had visited at home, things I had seen, things I would like to remove from their owners. And then I got in touch with people who could get them for me. That part was easy; in your so called underworld, I have a lot of people in my debt for one thing or another. You know the rest of the story.

What are you thinking, Sir? Do you intend to turn me in? Do I deserve to have my name, my business, my family ruined, and spend much of the rest of my life in jail?’

There was a long pause. The detective sahib was thinking. ‘You know it’s not as easy as that. You asked for a private interview, without a recording of the conversation, and I have kept my word. So now I have no confession, and even if I did, it would be my word against yours, with no corroborating evidence unless you lead us to your hoard, which you have probably long disposed of anyway – I’d credit a man of your intelligence with that much. No one will come forward to bear witness against you in court, you can hire the best lawyers, and they would claim ‘framing’, I know that and you know. At best it would be a long drawn legal battle, and the police might end up with egg on their faces. I am sure you calculated those eventualities before you decided to see us, didn’t you?’

He smiled a slow smile, his eyes hooded. ‘Why did you bend rules to see me and hear me out, Sir, may I ask?’

It was the detective’s turn to be uncomfortable. ‘I had personal reasons to be interested. Let’s leave it at that. Talk turkey – are you willing to stop pursuing this hobby of yours once and for all? Do you give me your word?’

‘Does my word count for so much with you?’ his voice was solemn, with a slight tremor in it. ‘I swear by my dead father then.’

‘Let us leave it at that. I shall write up this interview as a meeting with an obviously harmless crank whose story didn’t hang together, and that will be it. Case closed, unresolved.’

The detective stood up, and so did the ‘thief’. They shook hands solemnly before the visitor was shown out. He said ‘You don’t have to drop me anywhere Sir. I’ll take a bus to where my car is waiting for me. You didn’t ask for my name, address or phone number; you didn’t take my photograph, so please do me one last favour: don’t have me tailed home.’

The host nodded. He thought he heard a muttered ‘Thank you’ before the visitor vanished, out of his life forever.

‘No similar case of theft was reported to the city police for all the rest of the years I was in the service,’ concluded Dr. Mitra.

*****

A long silence, while we finished our drinks, and Mitra’s glass was refilled. Then Priyanghsu, idiot as he is, had to blurt out: ‘That detective was uncommonly sympathetic to this weirdo of a thief, wasn’t he? Could it be that he was none other than…?

‘Ask no questions and you will be told no lies,’ cut in Dr. Mitra. ‘Need to know, son, need to know. But yes, my father was a poet who died ill and hungry, because he was an ardent lifelong socialist, the idealistic sort the politicians rejected and forgot once they tasted the loaves and fishes of office. Now I must bid you good night.’

Rainy, lazy January evening

I have been forced to suspend my offline classes again after a continuous session of six months. I hope this won’t last very long.

It’s strange weather for January. The cold vanished a few days ago. Since yesterday the sky has been overcast. It started drizzling this afternoon, which turned into quite a shower as evening descended. Three hours later it is still drizzling. That, combined with the closure of markets, has left the streets silent and deserted. I hope the sun will come out tomorrow, and a strong chill return.

Having marked some homework and posted some lessons and exercises online, I am now left at a loose end. Been watching silly James Bond and Jason Bourne movies and listening to stories on YouTube; now I am trying Jai Bhim. A very important and much neglected issue: I wish they had made a better movie out of it. Some are born to deep delight, and some are born to endless night... that is probably more true about India than anywhere else on earth.

Oh, I forgot to mention this earlier: The Nutmeg’s Curse has turned me off Amitav Ghosh. He doth protest too much these days, and he is becoming something of a Luddite. Technology harnessed to commerce in the service of west-dominated capitalism has indeed done immeasurable harm to mankind and the environment, which calls for urgent and wide-ranging corrections, but a) he has forgotten that China and India have decided to follow the same path as the west now, so flogging that old dead horse doesn’t cut much ice any more, b) it is because of all the rich rewards of that same system that he is able to live the life he leads and write the kind of books he does for a worldwide audience, and c) he seems to be suggesting, though not in so many words, that going back to Stone Age minimalism will solve all our problems, which is a position too absurd even to waste time demolishing.

On the other hand, Madhulika Liddle’s Garden of Heaven charmed me. It is historical fiction based on Delhi over a two hundred year period, from the invasion of Muhammad Ghori to that of Timur, and she has promised three more books in a series, which I shall eagerly wait for. Her collaboration with her historian sister has borne very rich fruit!

As I have said before, I often re-visit some of my old posts. I recently looked up The world we are making for our children. It was written nearly fifteen years ago. How would you comment on it now?

All you who sleep tonight with lonely hearts, here’s love to you.

P.S., January 12: Corrigendum and apology after having watched Jai Bhim:

It was too important a film for me to have carped about the cinematic aspects. I am deeply ashamed that, informed as I consider myself to be, I had not heard of Justice Chandru till now. It takes my breath away to think that such men have been alive and working in my own lifetime. He is the sort of man that I would automatically stand up and bow to when he enters my room, and never address as anything less than 'Sir'. Maybe that is why India still works, and maybe there is hope for us yet. Do please listen to his interview here, and don't miss out a single word of it. 

I am glad I am writing this on Vivekananda's birthday. I am also thinking of Dr. Ambedkar.

Ranchi, Netarhat, Ajodhya Hills

Having avoided the Christmas-New Year tourist rush, I set off on another road trip on Monday the 3rd January. As usual, young Firoz was at the wheel, and this time both Swarnava and Koushik gave me company. This is the evening of Friday the 7th, and we have just come back home after a most satisfactory, 1100-plus km journey.

We had planned out the trip only vaguely, not being sure when and where we would be stopped and turned back during this freshly-rising Covid wave. In fact, our CM had announced on Sunday afternoon that tighter restrictions would come into force from the 3rd itself, including closure of schools (not that they had every properly opened!) and tourist hotspots. The only given was – seeing that the interstate border was open – that we would eventually drop off Swarnava at his BIT Mesra campus. We had a smooth and leisurely trip to Ranchi, stopping off to lunch at Hotel Rajdhani – the same place where we had eaten back in February 2019 – and visit the Jonha Falls, a picturesque spot from where we had to hurry away, no thanks to a picnic party which was playing raucous music at ear-splitting volume (typical Indians ‘enjoying’ themselves, all health- and environmental concerns be damned). The road via Purulia is in excellent condition though spattered with speedbreaker bumps till Jhalda, and then fine again after a while. We reached Ranchi in the afternoon and checked into the ‘International Guest House’ at BIT, which offers excellent lodgings for the price. Swarnava showed us proudly around the huge and lush green campus. That first night was pretty cold, but we managed to sleep well.

The next morning we headed for Netarhat. Again, the road was good to excellent except for a longish stretch before and after Lohardaga. Shortly after Bishunpur we started climbing up a hill road through dense forest. It was my car’s first ever hill trip, and it went beautifully. We checked into Jharkhand Tourism’s Hotel Prabhat Vihar, where a friend had booked me the best rooms a week beforehand. It was fine, though I found it a tad overpriced: you can get everything you want in the same hotel much more cheaply, or in one of the numerous hotels/guest houses/homestays nearby. They only checked my vaccination certificate, considering that enough to cover all four! We spent the afternoon seeing the local sights, including the most remarkable feature of a sal forest within two km of the pine woods at Koyel View Point, and rounding it off with a lovely view at Sunset Point, which, alas, gradually became too crowded and noisy for my liking. At dawn next day we had a glorious view of the sunrise, which is the hotel’s USP. It got too crowded again for about forty minutes, because scores of tourists came over from all the other accommodations – I wish our hotel charged non boarders for the privilege…

Everybody agreed that the Netarhat trip was perfect, and for me it was the culmination of a nearly fifty-year wait. Wednesday’s leisurely drive was to Mccluskiegunj, about which I had heard some good reviews, but though the drive itself was most enjoyable, we all found the sleepy little town devoid of interest and no good place to stay either – Gulmohur Lodge could only offer very cold rooms and no food because the cook had run away, while Rana’s Country Cottage behaved most strangely, turning us away because ‘they were not taking in boarders owing to the Covid scourge’, though only the previous day they had offered accommodation over the phone. Don’t be taken in by the reviews you read online. So we decided, after seeing the ribbon-thin Degadegi river (whose sand, according to some dubious looking locals, had magical healing properties) we decided to drive back to Ranchi. There we finally left Swarnava after coffee and snacks and a little photo session, then checked into a room at a very ordinary but adequate Oyo certified hotel off the highway a furlong from the BIT junction. End of Wednesday’s travels. That night I took a sleeping pill to fight off both Koushik and Firoz snoring sonorously around me.

We had earlier planned to visit Bodh Gaya next, but that would be risking another border crossing, and in any case all ‘religious places’ had been closed, so there was no point going to a place where the monasteries were the only real attractions. So we headed back towards West Bengal on Thursday morning, and drove up Ajodhya Hill. Having taken a room at a guest house of one of our state government departments which Koushik’s father had booked for us, we drove around the locale, visiting the Upper and Lower Dam and notably the ‘Marble Lake’(a miniature version of the famed Marble Rocks at Jabbalpur) before calling it a day.

We turned in early on Thursday night and got up lateish on Friday morning, because the strain of early mornings had begun to tell on all three of us. Then we drove down to Mukutmanipur, where, strangely, they told us at the Sonajhuri government resort that every cottage and room was booked, though the place looked deserted, with not a car in sight except ours. There was no boat ride, because Koushik is scared of open water, and the park as well as the dam were off limits, so after a hearty lunch we headed back for home.

The highlights of this trip were a) the several lovely drives through forested roads, b) the good eating, sometimes at expensive joints and sometimes at roadside inns, and c) the delightful no-holds-barred, hours-long addas. And for me the best reward was being repeatedly reassured that everybody had enjoyed himself to his heart’s content. I know this much about myself by now: nothing pleases me more than pleasing people whom I like!

God willing, I shall go on travelling like this for as long as I live.

[Come back for some photos in a day or two]

See the previous post in connection with Covid:

A month ago, the daily new infection rate in India was around 5,000; today it has soared to 117,000. Yet the death rate remains stuck at exactly the same level – between 200 and 400 (today’s count is 302, and I am sure if you probe a little deeper, you will find that a large proportion of those were elderly people with high co-morbidities). Children are not seriously affected in any significant numbers. Only deliberately blind or stupid people can help drawing the only obvious conclusion – namely that this latest ‘Omicron’ scare is a load of hogwash; the infection rate seems to have skyrocketed only because the government encouraged, media-hyped scare has sent vast numbers (mostly ‘educated’ people, alas!), who would never have bothered otherwise, with no symptoms or malaise whatsoever, scurrying to get themselves tested. By now it should be quite, quite clear to all but the brainwashed that the whole thing is politically motivated, and driven by all those who have hugely benefited from the nearly-two year old panic, from the billionaires who run online communication platforms and edtech and pharma and IT companies to the millions who have been drawing salaries from home without doing any work worth the name. It was most telling that though I saw thousands and interacted with scores of people during this five-day trip, the only two who sounded ‘deeply concerned’ about the wildfire spread of the virus were people with assured salaries…

As for school closures, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, chief scientist at the World Health Organization, said only two days ago that 'schools should be the last to close and first to open'. Obviously we don't pay any attention to 'experts' unless their advice suits our pet prejudices. And in India, at least, just about everybody seems to be happy to see the schools stay closed.