Complaint, repeat

My other blog, the whimsy blog, is sulking. Too few seem to be visiting it these days, and that in turn makes me loath to write frequently there, though I like to think that anyone who visits that blog often gets to know about a less-familiar (to some unexpected) side of my character.

Swimming after Covid

My hopes of a mild summer after a year when it rained every month were cruelly dashed in early March. Summer came early and ferociously this year. For the last month it has been blazing, with the temperature having soared beyond 40⁰ C in early April. And there has been no respite: not a single nor’wester rainstorm has arrived yet to cool us briefly off. There was a day recently when it was actually hotter in Durgapur than in Delhi.

 I last went swimming in 2019. Then Covid struck, and the pool was closed for two whole years. I knew that it has opened this season over a month ago, but – call it old age, or the irritation of having to drive 24 km through increasingly dense and erratic traffic every time or just plain lost habit – despite knowing that I would love a dip, I had been postponing a visit endlessly, until today. This morning I went, and enjoyed myself just as much as I had hoped. God bless them for reopening the pool. They have opened a new one much closer at hand, but I found it to be rather small and overcrowded, so I haven’t tried it out yet. I wish there were one in every large neighbourhood. If I were really rich, an all-year, full sized, personal pool would be something I should definitely indulge on…

 A lot of people seem to be awaiting a fourth wave of Covid with what can only be called ghoulish excitement, and sound truly disappointed that though the infection numbers are very slightly rising once more, as in January, the death toll is almost insignificant. Let us see whether God gives them their kind of satisfaction! I for one am delighted that countrywide there are no takers for the booster dose of the vaccine, and most people are not wearing masks unless compelled. Madness must be called by its proper name and laid to rest sooner or later.

Rest in peace, doctor

Our family doctor, Paramananda Bhattacharjee, passed away a few days ago. He was about 74, had been undergoing treatment for cancer for years, and had been very depressed and fearful throughout the Covid scare. He had not been attending his chamber for a long time, and we had slowly fallen out of touch, though I had tried to keep track of how he was doing. Alas, none in his family bothered to let me know so that I could say a last goodbye in time, though they live virtually next door, and I am sure they all knew how much he meant to me…

He and our family went back more than forty years, since before he got married, and now his two sons are grown up. We and he owed too many mutual favours to count. I shall always remain grateful for everything he did for me. Though he was an excellent physician – I have always held that his power of diagnosis was near miraculous – he was more like a wise and respected elder brother to me than a doctor. When I say his death leaves behind a vacuum which will be hard to fill, I am not mouthing an empty platitude. May his soul hear me, and rest in peace. It is hard that I had to hear of his passing from casual neighbourhood chatter, and it will hurt for all the years I live.

Two long, swift, arduous but most rewarding decades

Ten years ago on this very day, I put up an exultant post, announcing that I had finished a whole decade of teaching at home with no salaried job on the side, no advertising, and no organizational support whatsoever, corporate, social or political, yet I had managed to do well enough for myself, certainly by Indian middle class standards. It was a moment of celebration well earned. 

Ten more years have passed since that day. My daughter is now grown up, my savings have swelled, my reputation remains intact despite the countless, endless, vicious and mean assaults on it, and having even survived the two-year long pandemic scare, I am still going strong, operating on the same large scale and relentless pace as I started after leaving that schoolmaster's 14-year long job twenty years ago. Only sensible, thoughtful, experienced and sympathetic working people in their forties at least will begin to appreciate how lucky I have been (though I prefer to ascribe it to God's grace), and also how much nose-to-the-grind hard work it has taken. Only the very lazy and very greedy and very stupid can envy me.

At this remove, and at this age, one acquires poise and perspective, even if he did not get them much earlier in life. All through my working life, despite all odds, difficulties, setbacks, rebuffs and disappointments - believe me, there have been many! - I have tried obstinately to stick to certain principles, and given my strong likes and dislikes very high priority. So I left the prospect of a university job, though more than well-qualified for it, because I wouldn't kowtow to ignorant political masters nor bribe my way through, and there was hardly any other way you could get a college lecturer's job. I gave up a possibly lucrative career in medicine simply because hospitals, as they existed in the 1980s, turned me off and I knew I wouldn't survive them. I quit journalism not only because it paid very poorly in those days but it had begun to stink (the stench is unbearable today, so thank God I chose rightly!) I didn't get through the national civil service exams, despite having done very well in them - and over the last forty years I have met numberless bureaucrats who were most evidently far less well endowed than I was and yet managed to get in, and now, after a lifetime's experience, I have very strong doubts whether I'd have hated the job and managed to survive in that stultifying atmosphere, so I  have no regrets. I got job offers from better schools, private colleges, publishing houses and national newspapers which I casually chucked up because by that time I was well settled ploughing my own furrow. I similarly gave the go-by to admissions in several foreign universities because I had by then decided it was too late to venture on entirely new experiments. I quit the school job because I had no intention of serving under an overbearing idiot where they could not even afford to pay me a decent salary. I have tried startup ventures several times over the last quarter century trying to spread my wings countrywide, with no success, but on that one I have not given up hope yet, because now that my daughter is of working age and showing a strong predilection to take up my baton, and literally everyone has access to the internet, things might at last work out in my old age as I had planned in my youth...

Today, approaching sixty (official retirement age for government servants, but teachers and doctors and lawyers never need to retire as long as they can continue working), I have not slowed down very much, but I am becoming more and more choosy, because I can afford to, and there is nothing left for me to prove. I have not managed to become rich or powerful or even famous (except in my own small town where I have been working for 35 years straight), but I am certainly better off, physically, financially, domestically and socially, than probably 90% of my compatriots. No man should ask for more. I can also look back and smile contemptuously at all the wise men and women who cautioned me decades ago that I was heading for disaster by living so proudly and willfully, and bring untold sorrow and suffering upon those who were dependent on me. My advice to the young: most of your elders are actually stupid, uninformed, lazy cowards, so don't order your life by their advice, learn early to be your own man or woman; 'heart within and God overhead'. The other way lies slavery and frustration all life long.

I am now a story, like it or hate it. My kind of life can be lived, and enjoyed, cocking a snook at all the conventional wisdom they throw at you, even in India. And trust me, I have enjoyed myself much more, in many more different ways, than most middle class adults can, except in their wild dreams. 

I have also learnt a great deal indeed about the whole educational system in India, with all its flaws and disgusting drawbacks. Let me mention a few of them here. 1) Not everybody wants an education, nor can be educated. 2) We have made a hash of education at all levels by blindly equating it with examination scores and degrees. 3) Most teachers are hopeless; at best they don't help you, at worst they confuse you and waste your time. 4) Some are born bright and eager to be educated; they are a joy to teach. Some others are not so bright, but they are earnest and willing to work hard: they are the only ones a teacher can help to grow. 5) Education is rapidly becoming a commercial product, and things are going to get worse very fast before a sharp reaction sets in: I wonder if I shall see that within my own lifetime. 6) As a very great teacher - trained by Tagore himself - warned me at the very early stages of my career, the key to good teaching is simply this: 'If you must teach Jack Latin, you must love Jack as well as Latin'. Very simple, very hard to do, especially when you have to deal with hordes of little horrors all your life. 7) Most children, if they are to be educated, have to be rescued from the mindless misguidance of their parents. Etc etc (a whole lifetime's lessons can hardly be compressed into one paragraph!)

What lies ahead, I still wonder... for me, for India, for humanity? But for myself, I can vouch that it has been a good career on the whole, and looking back, I wouldn't have exchanged it for anything else. I started teaching my peers, and here I am teaching the children of my older students and grandchildren of my colleagues. What a journey!