Household concerns, cosmic vibes

So another admission session is more or less over, and I am all set to start yet one more seven-days-a-week work season again, which lasts till the end of November. I am wishing myself luck! This year I am a little extra bucked up, because the ICSE Council has prescribed Julius Caesar after a very long hiatus: 2011, in fact, was the last year they tested candidates on that text. I did JC myself for ICSE back in '79, started teaching with it, and now I guess I am going to retire with it. Nice: I like closure.

It's been raining off and on over this last fortnight, quite unlike in 2022, lowering the temperature briefly but repeatedly as it tries to soar beyond 37 Celsius, which makes life miserable. Last night, from latest inputs over the phone, I learnt that it was raining more or less simultaneously in Kolkata, Durgapur, Ranchi and Delhi. Don't know about the rest of the country. I love the rains.

Just finished watching the first episode titled Chasing Starlight of a new Netflix series called Our Universe, with Morgan Freeman doing the voiceover. Nothing factually new to me, but the commentary woven in with striking visuals - some real life, some special effects - was delicious to watch. Everything ultimately lives on and dies of starlight: that is the theme that runs through the narrative. The sun's energy absorbed by the grass, eaten by wildebeest in the millions, turns into vital energy in the mitochondria of Wa Chini the cheetah and her cubs on the vast plains of Serengeti Wildlife Reserve. They could have, of course, completed the circle by pointing out how Wa Chini when she dies will be eaten by bacteria and turn into soil, while that eternal indestructible energy is released back into the cosmos, to take new shapes again. They might also have pointed out that it is the same starlight which powers the worst of disasters, like hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. So it has been for the last three and half billion years, so it will continue for a few billion more. 

One cannot, unless one is emotionally very dull, help going all mystical over this. If at all any aspect of Nature has to be worshipped, it has got to be the sun, for it powers everything that we call reality - a true god, certainly (though not, I think, God). Hence jawakusum sankashang kashyapeyang mahadyuting... How strange that some of our rishis fairly anticipated much of the whole process purely through superficial (but long and methodical-) observation and meditation thousands of years ago: all our recent physics and chemistry and biology with their equations and tables, microscopes and telescopes and spectroscopes have only helped to fill in and confirm the details. 

But this is not where thought stops. What came before and after the sun, what before and after the universe itself? Oh, okay, the sun will explode into a Red Giant, then collapse meekly into an insignificant White Dwarf after a while, but modern science currently stops - indeed, prohibits asking such questions beyond the speculative Big Bang and Big Crunch: you cannot ask such questions about the Great Beyond, because space and time and causation themselves stop meaning anything beyond those singularities. However, Man will NEVER stop asking. And so some have suggested that there is God, from whom everything came and into whom (or which) everything dissolves: only to be recreated over and over again. So God is immanent in Nature, and yet above, beyond and infinitely greater than Nature: indeed, many religions have called identifying Nature with God, despite her vastness, power and complexity, the ultimate blasphemy. That is where the poet and the seer takes over: through a riddle, in the end, sagacity must go.

That is when the bhakta implores tuhu kaise Madhav, kaho tuhu moye (Tell me what You are, Lord) and only the Upanishadic sage and Sri Ramakrishna have said, 'I have seen the effulgent Being beyond death, the darkness and the void...' Who knows better?

And yet, and yet, the greatest of all miracles of creation is Man himself, for, so lately emerged from  animal  ancestry (if the scientists have got the story right) he alone wonders, and imagines, and creates, and keeps on changing the Reality around himself, not always wisely and well, but relentlessly, burning with the Promethean fire. Just a few thousand years - less than a blip on the cosmic scale - and he has gone from the Stone Age to the age of atomic reactors, computers, space exploration and artificial intelligence. So agonizing and insufferable, this existence, but all our wisest men have rightly claimed that of all births this is the most wonderful of all...

Exam scores, successes and very sick people

Looking at the advertisement of one of the nationwide cram shops in my newspaper today, loudly tomtoming their great recent 'achievement', namely that eight of their students have been placed in the 100th percentile of the JEE (engineering entrance examination), I was reminded of something that I have been pondering over for nearly two decades now.

Ever since the public examination boards started showering marks on their candidates, so that even in English and History hundreds, if not thousands started scoring astounding numbers (I won't call them marks, and I shall presently explain why not), in the high nineties, some even scoring 100 out of 100 - which, as any real examiner with long experience will tell you is simply impossible, unless the entire question papers are full of only multiple-choice questions with a single correct answer for each, preferably in one word, short phrase or date (can you imagine a meaningful English or history exam paper like that?). For at least two decades, I have been watching students who never score more than 65-70 per cent in the tests I give them (despite my having become much more liberal than I was in the late eighties) go on to score 95% plus marks in the board exams. Their mothers go wild celebrating their 'grand success' (it of course occurs to no one that nothing that thousands of people can do every year should be called success in any significant sense), but maybe it should not be called success at all? Maybe it all looks so glamorous because the boards have started quietly replacing actual marks with percentiles? 

Consider what percentile means (a lot of so-called educated people don't really know, or don't want to know). You place the scores of all the candidates in ascending or descending order, then arrange them in terms of percentiles (or deciles, or quartiles). Someone who has scored in the 100th percentile has NOT scored 100 per cent marks: s/he has only found a place among the highest one per cent of scorers. Then let the realization sink in: if the top scorer has got only 60% marks, say, then anyone who has got 58 or 59 will find a place in the highest (100th) percentile, though the fact is that his performance has been only mediocre at best! Yet by this little specious subterfuge, the examiners are giving a chance to thousands to enjoy a bit of false glory, a chance to preen among their relatives and neighbours for a short while... to what end? Tens of thousands of school leavers are stopped at the gates of the precious few government colleges soon enough, which demand absurd scores to give admission (a certain college in Delhi made headlines a few years ago by setting 100% aggregate as the 'cutoff' mark!), so that the great majority of them have to be turned away, and make a beeline for the ever mushrooming private colleges which fleece them in exchange for degrees of highly questionable value...

Indeed, I often wonder. It is a moot question whether exam standards have been declining over the last few decades, as some old retired teachers grumble, but even if they have not, have exam scores at the top remained more or less the same, or is it the case, as I have strong reason to suspect, looking at the pathetic intellectual quality of the thousands I have been grooming all these years, that the actual scores have been continuously declining, and that national shame is being sought to be hidden by replacing percentage scores with the little-understood trick called percentiles? I read a Harvard professor saying some years ago that these days they are having to routinely give As and A+s to the kind of students who would have barely managed to score B- or even C when he was young (meaning the 1960s), and I even have a newspaper cutting stored away somewhere which revealed that a large proportion of Oxford undergraduates couldn't even spell. Maybe what has been happening in the world's 'best' universities has been happening India-wide too? Maybe there is a global dumbing down, and, for reasons that I do not claim to understand fully, we are all involved in a giant conspiracy to hide the shame from ourselves? Maybe it is not an accident that 'artificial' intelligence is booming - the chief reason being that 'natural' intelligence (and knowledge, and wisdom) have sunk through the floor? When I read of a judge in the US awarding compensation to a customer who got burnt by spilling coffee over herself because the cafe owner had not posted a highly visible written warning that hot coffee could scald you, I begin to think that humans might have lost the right to call themselves intelligent creatures any more.

And think of what kind of adults these students are growing up into. I watched a true crime TV show on Netflix yesterday, a real life incident about a young woman (well, actually 33, not all that young) who was a low-level IT worker in Bangalore, earning a modest salary, who had got neck deep into debt trying to live a fashionable lifestyle far beyond her means (apparently a very common type nowadays), lavished money on her secret boyfriend, became gradually helpless, terrified, depressed and suicidal upon realizing that she was rapidly sinking into destitution - and finally killed her 'beloved' mother so that the latter might not have to bear the public shame of it becoming known what a wayward failure her daughter had become. This woman was a fair representative of the kind of 'educated', 'talented' youth who are swarming the streets (and bars and salons and malls) of our cities today, though not many of them take their sickness so far. What does it say about the society which breeds the likes of her in the millions? What does it hint about our collective future? Imagine if the woman had lived on to become a mother and perhaps even a teacher somewhere. It makes me shudder.

Springtime

The fortnight I spent in Delhi was deliciously languorous. I read a great deal, watched some movies, recorded podcasts with Pupu for future use, did the sort of household chores that soothe the nerves even while tiring out the muscles and working up a good appetite, followed by deep sleep. The new neighbourhood is becoming familiar, especially the marketplace, which I enjoy visiting. The young vegetable vendor says 'bahut din baad aye uncle', while the old Sikh spice vendor greets me with a warm toothless smile, and the meat seller knows that I have come to buy offal for the dog. 

The season was just right for lazing at all hours on the balcony. There was a visit to Diggins near Gargi College for risotto, and to Ghalib's at Nizamuddin for kebabs where we are sure to be cordially recognized now, followed by a dekko of Humayun's tomb and the vast verdurous expanse of Sundar Nursery next door. Another evening was spent dining at Moti Mahal in Daryaganj: run by Hindus, yet boasting of the 'best' traditional meat dishes in Delhi, and flaunting photos of every kind of celebrity who has visited, from John F. Kennedy (I think that's a fib: it was his wife who visited actually) to Amitabh Bachchan. I persuaded my daughter to accompany me on walks almost every evening. 

Talking of books, my big discovery this time (thanks to Pupu, again) was the Bartimaeus trilogy by Jonathan Stroud. Even those who have read the Foundation series and the Dune series and LOTR and Eragon series and Harry Potter are guaranteed to enjoy it hugely. A fantasy in which an immortal shape-shifting demon with a gift for sharp repartee is the central character! As I keep saying, there is nothing, nothing more wonderful than the human imagination, and may it flourish evermore, leaving AI for the unintelligent masses...

On the drive to the airport the day I was returning, I was charmed to see one roadside aflame with palash flowers. God bless those who care so much for trees and flowers in the megalopolis, and may the other metros learn from Delhi.

Now I am back in Durgapur, enjoying (or cursing) the lonely life once more, because my mother has not yet returned from her own holiday trip. The nastiest thing of all, for me, is groggily making your own tea first thing in the morning. It rained a bit yesterday evening after five successive entirely dry months, and I am hoping there will be a repeat performance soon. Gearing up for the next admission session. It seems the last one ended only yesterday!