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]