Living inside an oven

My new batches have all begun, and there's a heat wave over southern Bengal, so it's all I can do to maintain my iron work routine - besides eating, reading, sleeping and chatting with old boys, that is: hence the delay in posting something new on the blog.

March was balmy this year, what with the three days of rain, but over the last two weeks summer has descended upon us with a vengeance. The Celsius breached 40 three days ago, and has been rising relentlessly. The Met has threatened that it might go close to 50, so I fear for us all, because those are killing temperatures. The evenings are, mercifully, cooling down rather quickly, and the air being very dry, the evaporation coolers are doing a great job, so this time round the tag of 'desert cooler' has suited them to a T: it indeed feels rather as though we are living in a desert. I feel most strongly for the poor kids who arrive for the mid-afternoon classes; stepping out of my cool, shaded classroom for even five minutes feels like walking into a blazing oven. No - I actually feel most for the crazy parents who wait out the whole class outside, since the children, after all, can sit and study in air conditioned comfort. I wouldn't have done it for my daughter, and I have grown tired and stopped trying to persuade these parents that it is simply not worth it. But when some of them enviously say 'apni khub bhalo achhen Sir', I laugh and say 'That is exactly why I decided to become a teacher long ago!' I wish the younger generation, at least the brighter ones among them, would think about it a little more seriously. Is it really so worthwhile to run around six days a week to make a living?

Meanwhile, I never stop thinking about a thousand things, and sometimes, when I sit down to wonder what I am going to write here this time, I am blocked by an embarras de richesses... I don't know which subject to select. Anyway, I have been thinking about what my old boy Swarnava sent me via text yesterday: something that some American said sadly in the 1960s, pointing out a malaise that has now spread worldwide. 'We are developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won't be able to think.' I wonder - would this make any sense to the citizenry that we see all around us today? Do they even know what it means to 'think', as distinct from reading posts on twitter?

One of the last books that my most favourite philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote towards the end of his long life was titled Has Man a future? It was written against the background of a possible all-out nuclear war, shortly after the Cuban missile crisis, and he was afraid of an imminent apocalypse. That crisis has probably passed for good, but the way I see it, maybe mankind is going to perish in a much less dramatic way, still owing to its own incurable follies. The words penned by Eliot keep echoing in my mind: This is the way the world will end... not with a bang but with a whimper!

Sorry about the gloom. It's probably the heat.