Too many 'wokes' around?

The currently in-vogue meaning of the word 'woke' (which was, traditionally, just the past participle of the verb 'wake') is 'one who is keenly and actively attentive as well as empathetic to important societal facts and issues', such as racial- or gender-prejudice and injustice. Wikipedia tells me it is derived from African-American vernacular English. And the number of 'wokes' is rapidly proliferating not only in the Anglo-American world but also, apparently, among the urban, well-heeled, English-educated Indian elite under the age of forty.

Now I trust I have been more than commonly aware and empathetic about all kinds of social injustices, but I cannot help thinking that these people are overdoing things, and making laughing stocks of themselves at best, or making a lot of enemies at worst. Look at the way they insist these days, for instance, that you cannot say 'chairman' and 'chairwoman', because that is sexist, and not even 'chairperson' (what was wrong with that?) but merely 'chair': so these days someone is just Chair of the department of physics, chair of the inquiry commission, and I can never stop laughing when I wonder whether they say 'The Chair sat on his chair'! If only they could at least be consistent with their own usage! Even Americans go on saying 'Congresswoman' Jane Smith said so, not 'Congress' Jane Smith, mind you, which is what should be said if we follow the same rule... and, since we must bow to the sensitivities of a lot of unusual people these days, we must use the plural they for individuals when in saner days we would have said either 'he' or 'she'. What about the sensibilities of people like me, who wince every time they have to use a plural along with a singular? What is wrong with 'it', which our teachers long ago taught us was neutral gender? No no, that would be pejorative, even offensive.

Which brings me to another point: many of these 'wokes' insist, on the one hand, following Salman Rushdie I suppose, that 'nobody has a right to be offended', but, if my reading experience serves me well, it seems they themselves are among the most thin-skinned. They are capable of taking offence at virtually everything you do. Of late I see my newspaper is running a campaign exhorting people to be more thoughtful and careful about not unnecessarily hurting others' feelings by saying 'insensitive' things, like 'You know a lot of science for a commerce graduate', 'You are very punctual for a Bengali', or 'You are very strong for a girl'. For heaven's sake, doesn't it occur to these blockheads that one might be merely joking, or even paying a compliment, besides stating things which have long been known to be true (such as that Bengalis are notoriously unpunctual?). Has it occurred to them, moreover, that all normal conversation would grind to a halt if we have to monitor and filter every sentence we utter? In saner times, we sometimes laughed back, or grimaced, or came back with a biting rejoinder if we were clever enough - and then simply moved on!

More and more it seems to me that too few people have anything worthwhile to do with their time, besides having become incurably obtuse. I have heard that in some countries it is now perfectly alright for even pre-teen students to show the teacher the middle finger, but God help the wretched teacher who dares even to scold them for such gross misbehaviour - for the whole might of the woke-powered state would be commandeered to teach him a lesson in sensitivity towards the freedom and rights of children! In my time we should have been caned, then our parents told to chastise us further or else. And I am deeply thankful I grew up in such an era. Now, even in this country, teachers and schools and examination boards are falling over themselves to convince every schoolgoer that s/he is highly talented and absolutely brilliant, so everyone deserves to score 90%-plus in exams; the many thousand-year old and highly realistic way of grading them into 'Extraordinary-good-average-poor-hopeless' is going out of the window (the fact that most of them are going to end up being delivery boys, shop attendants, mechanics and clerks of various hues in ill-paid and dead end jobs after having been certified as brilliant all through school will not, of course, hurt their self-esteem). According to the latest 'science', children who have been reprimanded or given poor scores grow up severely maimed and warped mentally. I cannot see that I have been so harmed, nor can the closest of my friends. And that's one last thing: these days 'science' can apparently be harnessed to support any stupid idea that sounds avant garde. The way things are going on, it won't be long before the sacred name of 'science' is ruined beyond redemption and turned into a poor joke by too many people who don't understand it.

And then one turns around to face the other aspect of contemporary reality: authoritarian and orthodox-minded regimes all over the world are doubling down and reviving or reinforcing age-old, utterly stupid, highly unjust prejudices and superstitions, apparently with the support of large majorities: Newton's third law asserting itself in the social sphere? As a great author said, we only have a choice of nightmares.

Hiring for beggars... sorry, teachers!

First, Bankura University and then Viswabharati have posted situations vacant ads for teachers to be hired on contract (meaning on a purely temporary basis with no benefits) at ridiculous salaries - a couple of hundred rupees per class, ten to twenty classes per month - which have raised a brief storm on the internet. Now I find that storm rather disingenuous, if not downright dishonest and silly. 

It has been true for a long, long time that, along with paying lip service to teaching as a 'noble' profession which 'builds the nation', we have always looked down on real-life teachers and paid them a pittance in terms of both money and respect. There is no better proof of this than the fact that many of the teachers who taught my grandfather's generation had to live like beggars and were never consulted by policymakers on anything that could mean 'nation-building', and many bright young people of my father's generation gave up teaching jobs for better ones in business and industry simply to make a tolerable living. Then, around the turn of the century, teachers' salaries - much more for college teachers than schoolteachers, though - were somewhat improved, but far from enough to attract the brightest and most dedicated to this profession, as I have seen all my working life as a teacher: hardly any of my good students have even considered teaching as an option, especially teaching in school, where, as I hold, 90% of all that is truly vital in education is imparted (as all the greatest minds, including Tagore, Russell and Vivekananda have agreed). I myself gave up the schoolteacher's job quite simply because the pay was so poor that without the option of private tuition on the side, I would have faced poverty after retirement.

Now what has been happening over the last at least four decades is that the set image of teaching as a relatively 'easy', unchallenging and 'secure' job which nevertheless offers some 'bhodrolok' status at the lower end of the scale (as opposed to, say, truck drivers who might earn much more but are 'chhotolok') has drawn vast numbers of the absolute dregs of humanity into this profession. Those who were simply no good for anything else, those who were laziest, least knowledgeable, least committed and most clueless became teachers by the hundred thousand (I am speaking a very inconvenient and unpalatable truth here, but truth it is). Add to that the fact that in millions of middle class families, schoolteaching has been considered one of the few 'safe' and 'permissible' jobs for females, and anyone who had a master's degree, however worthless, could become one, if only one could flatter and bribe the right people. Makes for a ghastly mix, doesn't it? The results are there for all to see, so I won't belabour them, but the fact remains that no one addresses the elephant in the room: the fact that private tuition has become near-universal and is considered absolutely essential right from middle school if not earlier for anyone who can afford it. I have been saying this publicly for a long time now - those who can teach become private tutors, those who cannot stay in school.

Nothing suddenly shocking is happening now; things are merely touching a nadir. Imagine: the job advertisers are confident that they are going to find enough young people with master's degrees who have cleared the NET or got a PhD  and are eager to fill those pathetic posts, 'teaching' jobs which bring in less than my driver and my cook make. (Meanwhile it has now become common knowledge that countless young people are openly bribing officials for jobs in government schools or working in private schools for sums that are too pitiful to be openly mentioned). Then imagine, how low the self-esteem of those job applicants must be, how little their confidence in their own knowledge and ability, how desperate their desire for a 'safe' and 'respectable' job, how lacking in ambition they are, that they would deign even to think of applying for such jobs. And then imagine what kind of teachers they will make, what they will do for and to their students! It gives me nightmares...

You could read this post in tandem with an older one, What price education? which I notice has just come into the most-read list again. And my profoundest salutations and apologies to those truly dedicated souls, few and far between as they are, who continue to give of their best as good teachers, despite the humiliation and privation lifelong. I have never been able to figure out what makes them tick: committed to doing my work to the best of my ability as I have always been, I have also been entirely professional about it, always. I teach because it feeds my family decently.

Endless summer

We are in the midst of the third 'heat wave' in West Bengal this summer, and it simply goes on and on and on. The real monsoon, of course, never starts before mid-July, but officially at least we get to know that on the first of June it has arrived in Kerala, so that we can expect its formal arrival in this state in about ten days after that, even if only to grace us with a token shower or two. This time round the monsoon has officially halted somewhere around the Andamans and has been stuck there for the last fortnight, with the Met having no idea when it will finally deign to start moving northwards again. So there is not even hope to sustain us through the gruelling heat. Even the occasional thundershowers that relieved us through May seem to have decided to go on strike...

After two and a half months of working every single day I took a two-day break and made a quick trip to Mukutmanipur with two old boys, Sahnik the newly-minted doctor and Swarnava, on his way to becoming a high-energy physicist (good fiction writer too, God willing). We ate well and slept well, but that is about all that can be said, because it was baking hot from eight in the morning till nearly midnight. My mother - God bless her strength and spirit - made a round trip to Digha without mishap, and she at least enjoyed it thoroughly, the weather by the sea being apparently much better. I don't know whether I should envy her. Given a different roll of the dice, I would have spent the entire summer somewhere lush above 6000 feet.

And now, to add to our woes, our street in particular is in the throes of incessant power outages and voltage fluctuations. An overloaded transformer burst, and we stewed for twelve hours straight, starting from 2 a.m. The replacement was quick, but has not apparently solved the problem fully. Yesterday I shepherded a few seriously-old local residents (the sort of dodderers who still regard me as a young man!) on a deputation to the Station Manager of the WBSEDCL Customer Service Centre. The lady at least heard us out politely, and accepted our written plea to do something urgently and prevent further misery. Let us see whether things improve, and how soon.

Meanwhile, I am soldiering on, and asking readers yet again to suggest things they want me to write about. Right now, I can't think of a thing by myself... as Sukumar Ray wrote long before all this ballyhoo about global warming and climate change began to be heard, 'raja boley brishti naama, noile kichhui milchhe na'!