Ten days of yet another new year have passed by in the blink of an eye, and I hardly noticed. While it has been well said that the days are long but the years are short, sometimes the days flit by too. I have been languorously savouring the (very mild, very fleeting) winter days, doing precious little besides the daily routine work that earns me a living and reading, of course. 2024... and to think that there was a time, back in the 1980s, when I could not even mentally look ahead this far! Most people cannot, I suppose.
India - that is Bharat - has been changing. In a lot of ways that bemuse me, and certainly do not always please. The changes are confusing, because they are neither coherent nor unidirectional. Religiosity, for example - whatever people mean by that, and they mean many different things - is rising like a tidal wave, and apparently quite in harmony with rapid and remarkable developments in technology (as distinct from science; science is definitely stagnant in some areas, and in retreat in many other places). So are our ideas about poverty: how many are actually poor, how much they really suffer, how much welfare they 'deserve' and so on. And also what being 'educated' is coming to mean these days: something about which I have been thinking continually for at least forty five years. Some day I shall have to get down seriously to writing down all the changes that I have seen over my lifetime. Some day when I am truly a man of leisure, and have nothing to lose.
Many of my young friends - old boys and girls - are going through tough times, so I send them my earnest good wishes and blessings. A few are looking forward to happy events: I wish them the best, too. I wonder what unexpected things this year is going to bring, for me, us, the country and the world...
I came back to Durgapur, it turns out permanently, in 1987. Since then, the town has changed surprisingly little, either in its physical infrastructure or in the outlook of its denizens. Far more highrises and cars, some snazzy new hospitals and schools that give expensive service of dubious quality, many more liquor outlets, far more pujo-s round the year, much more noise, but little else to note. One thing that pleased me lately is how much the railway station has been improved, with clean platforms, coloured sleepers on the tracks, escalators, and even painted staircases! The people, on the other hand, have little else in life other than shopping and gossip and attending pujo-s and biyebaari-s; and they are still avidly interested in exam scores and whose son is going around with whose daughter; only watching TV has been largely replaced with watching social media. I would have been glad to say that I meet many better educated, rational, interesting, polite and good-hearted people nowadays, but that would be a laughable piece of fiction. When I go out, it fills me with wonder to think that most of those I see around me had not been born back in '87, and the young parents of those days are dead or dodderers now.
I have begun to read, for the third time, one of the truly great books I have encountered in this lifetime - The Scalpel, the sword, a biography of the Canadian surgeon/writer/poet/painter/social reformer Norman Bethune. Takes me back to the ideals of my youth, what a great doctor, a great teacher, a great communist should be like, ideals that, in my own very fumbling, faltering way, I have tried to hold fast all my working life. I recently lent this book to a very young ex student who, I had thought, had the makings of a good doctor in him, and he returned it unread. I like to say that few things shock me these days, but this one did.
2 comments:
Dear Suvroda
My good wishes to you. I can relate to your note.
Personally, as you know I struggle to adjust with the times. I’m sure there are lot like me with similar tastes and probably values – just that they are not around me to talk and interact. These days if at all, I attend any social gathering I sit with people who want to travel to Europe stating “amar History ta janar jonyo jete hobe” – reminding me one of my late uncles who didn’t travel beyond Puri a lot but was so well -read and knowledgeable (about European History as well).
When I go to these gatherings and remain quiet, I am mostly judged as being either an introvert or an intellectual (even if I keep my sarcasm within myself) – so one day I just joked, I am bored, I wished we smoked weed instead! Obviously, that offended people. 😊
You take care
Regards
Tanmoy
Dear Tanmoy,
I don't exactly know why, but your comment brought back to mind a line I had read at least fifty years ago: 'Most people live lives of quiet desperation'. It was a caption to a photograph of a woman sitting outside her poky little house in an American slum, with a basket full of washing in front of her. Most of us here - writing and reading this blog - are materially far better off than that woman, and yet I do think that most of our lives, too can be described like that... the desperation, the boredom, the emptiness being sought to be covered up with an ever more insane, mindless consumerism. So it seems one has to advertise a desire to travel to Europe in order to 'know its history'. Obviously they have never heard of the likes of Herge, Bibhutibhushan or Premendra Mitra, who wrote such wonderfully engaging and informed books about faraway lands that they had only visited in the mind, through books. Much better to avoid such people and smoke weed... a little, only now and then :)
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