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.