Finished with ICSE 2024

As I wrote at about this time last year, I don't  feel much like writing a goodbye post for every outgoing batch any more these days. They can easily look up the several such posts I have written in the past, like this one, which haven't aged. That is not to say I did not enjoy my time with the latest batch: many of them were a genuine pleasure to teach, and show some promise as I understand promise, so while I live and still have my wits about me, I shall be glad to see them again and again. Meanwhile, as I have said already on my Whatsapp group, they might want to keep in touch especially through this blog, which I have always called an extension of my classroom.

I have been saying for donkey's years that I have always tried to hold on to some very idealistic, very old-fashioned notions about what education and teaching mean. Part of it relates to what I hope from my students: that they will see fit to keep in touch for ages, because they feel a) they got something of deep and lasting value here, and b) they still enjoy and benefit from my company. Quite a large number do, between ages 17 and 50: Abhishek Das, ICSE 2003, happily attended one of the last classes this year. The number, I am sure, could have been much larger if most parents did not drill into their children's minds that a teacher (or rather, tutor/instructor) loses his value as soon as their wards have sailed through some particular examination - and it does not help that most tutors are indeed worth nothing more - and if the children were not kept so permanently infantilized that even in late teenage or early adulthood they cannot dream of keeping in touch with someone without their parents' active encouragement and support. What a world we have made!

And that brings me to my greatest hope: that some of my students, when they have grown up and become parents and teachers themselves, will remember, if only because of a few people like me, what true education should consist of, and how it should be imparted. These days education, from pre-school to B-school level, has become one giant money spinning gig which packages learning in homogenized, merely utilitarian, easily digestible nuggets, to be swallowed, thrown up in exam halls and quickly forgotten. Those who 'succeed', it has been well said, are no better than circus animals trained to jump through hoops, good at nothing except taking examinations. It can at best produce only obedient, docile, unthinking herds in the name of good citizens (it makes me shudder to recall Auden's poem, The Unknown Citizen, written generations ago), and technical people who can only blindly follow standard operating protocols, whether they become teachers or surgeons, pilots or engineers. Even as fancy schools advertise not knowledge and reason and emotional training but air conditioned classrooms and swimming pools and CCTV equipped buses, and scream about how they are encouraging innovation and creativity, what they are actually doing is indoctrinating millions in utterly trivial and forgettable rote-learning, usually at vast expense, ensuring that genuinely bright, brave, original and experimental-minded people, the kind of people who take civilization forward, will become vanishingly rare. They will all be labelled as brilliant, and turn out to be conformist drudges; even tomorrow's 'talents' will be pygmies compared to the giants of yesteryears. Let a few children grow up to claim boldly that they know better, because they have had the good fortune to know some real teachers. I am grateful to quite a few such teachers myself, if mostly through books.

My love and best wishes to all who want and deserve it.

Police in Blunderland

It has been recently pointed out by some mindful and regular readers that I haven't written in quite a bit - three weeks, which is a long time by my own long-established standards. Guilty as accused - though most bloggers, after they have posted four or five items, can't think of another thing to say to save their lives, while I have been hammering away relentlessly at the keyboard  for seventeen continuous years, and there are more than 700 posts up there now. Anyway, the reasons are a) I wanted that last post to be on the top for some time, so that it might get a lot of eyeballs (which might translate into some much-needed donations), b) I couldn't think of something really interesting to me to write about (I don't gush over Cricket World Cups), and c) the older I grow, the more self-conscious I become about the unbearable crime of repeating oneself, as old people are only too apt to do.

Old boy Abhishek Das kindly sent me a new book which I found such good reading that I finished it in three days, in between attending to many other things. Police in Blunderland, written by retired senior IPS officer Bibhuti Dash - who, among other things, served for a large part of his career with the West Bengal Police. Dash has a number of excellent academic credentials, writes polished and racy English with a lot of highly literate allusions thrown in which most engineers will never recognize, sports a dry brand of humour interlaced with a lot of decent human sensitivity, and all the makings of a good raconteur who 'tells it like it is', rarely pulling any punches. Who says all our politicians and civil servants are ignorant and stupid? There are a lot of things I hugely enjoyed, such as when he berates Shashi Tharoor for 'daring' to call himself a Hindu without having gone to Hindu (College), when he talks about a maid who was skilled at BJP (Bartan-Jhaaru-Pochha), and when he explains why it is better by far to be a senior policeman's wife than a senior policeman. There is cynical gloom when he candidly admits that the police is shot through with corruption big and petty, and it has always been like that since at least medieval times, explaining why it is so, partly because of the hard-to-resist temptations galore, partly because it is a hoary tradition, partly because those who don't do it are regarded as inconvenient fools, and partly because all the countless recommendations for reform made by courts and inquiry commissions have been gathering dust for decades (though it seems I heard someone somewhere claiming that over the last nine years bhrashtachaar has been eliminated in this country). There is also sadness covered up with quiet bravado as he chronicles his current battle with cancer and pays tributes in the last pages to all those who helped him become who he was, from a bright classmate who dropped out early to follow in his father's footsteps to become a manual scavenger to a schoolteacher who coached and motivated him effectively to reach heights which would once have been unimaginable.

Good reading, as I said: to a lot of Indians and foreign readers alike it would be an eye-opener about what it means to live intelligently and empathetically in today's India, with all its 'pageantry, magic, comicality and pain'. Read it - a book like this deserves to be widely read, like Sudha Murthy's Wise and Otherwise. You can also visit and encourage Mr. Dash at his blog, b-b-dash.blogspot.com My salute to you as a fellow-citizen and teacher, Mr. Dash, and thank you, Abhishek, for giving me such a nice gift.

P.S.: The last time I read a good book written by a policeman in India was Goyendapeeth Lalbazar, which deserves to be translated into English: see this.