Holiday at home

Just back from my daughter's den in Kolkata after a week's holiday - following three months of classes non-stop every day. Simply eating (very well indeed!), chatting, reading and sleeping to my heart's content. Didn't enjoy a stay like this quite as much ever since this one, back in July 2013! Swarnava was there, and gave me grand company: I am getting back an extended sense of true belonging after a very long time. God bless... I was hugely helped by the thought that my most beloved young folks have grown up enough, in every sense, for me to stop (OK, at least lessen) worrying about them.

I read so many books back to back (my daughter's library is growing like mushrooms in the rainy season, and what lovely and eclectic taste she has...). There was one about the (in)famous Pakur murder case of the early 1930s, written like a thriller by an American journalist; another a wonderfully erudite and gripping travel guide around London, a compendium of first-person memoirs about rural English life as it was in the 1920s to 50s, a lightly fictionalized reconstruction of the life of our last Vicereine, Lady Edwina Mountbatten, In Xanadu by William Dalrymple, which is, as literature, more absorbing than Marco Polo's Travels, which he repeated 700 years after the original trip, a speed-reread of Charlie Chaplin's autobiography after more than 30 years, Helgoland, by Carlo Rovelli, a lovely little exposition of quantum theory for the lay reader, and a few others which I can't recall off the top of my head. Pupu has made a large part of my fondest dreams come true.

Such fun conversation too, with all sorts of things to laugh and snort over, such as why, in this age of AI supposedly advancing at breakneck speed, our banks still do not factor some sort of fairly simple algorithm into their PR-systems which might help them stop wasting time calling up customers like me endlessly, offering credit cards and instant loans and suchlike which we have told them hundreds of times we are not interested in.

Whereas the last post has come up to the very top of the most-read list, I am sorry to note that very few new entries have been submitted on that Google form yet. So much for people who claim to have many, diverse, strong and fond memories!

I am toying with the idea of telling stories my way via podcasts like I have always told in class. How many of my readers think that would be a good idea, and would listen enthusiastically? If you do, will you please take two minutes to tell me so?

Independence Day, and a request ... serious readers, please don't ignore

I-Day passed unusually quietly in my immediate neighbourhood, in the sense that the usual blaring, deafening 'patriotic songs' and speeches over loudspeakers that shatter my early morning beauty sleep were missing. Who knows why? I have been flooded by 'Happy Independence Day' messages, which made me wonder: has it become like 'Happy Valentine's Day' or some such inanity? After all, wasn't it supposed to be a day for sober retrospection and introspection, remembering with gratitude and awe all the great women and men who suffered and died so that we might have this enormous privilege? And then we just take it for granted and trivialize it? This was the season of the Great Freedom sale, and ads telling us 'Shop karo azaadi se'. Maybe all countries gradually become like that, but if anyone tries to glorify it or even justify it instead of lamenting over the cultural degeneration it implies, sorry, I am not on the same page.

One very personal kind of good news: the Income Tax department has just discovered that I have now become a senior citizen, and very graciously granted me a sizeable tax refund. This is the first time the government, any government, has done me a personal favour since I read in Jadavpur University at a hugely subsidized price. Since they have even withdrawn the old folks' discount on railway tickets, I guess I must be satisfied with this pittance.

I am reading a book based on the life of a real woman doctor in 15th century China - Lady Tan's Circle of Women - and I am entranced not only to know how much doctors knew in those apparently Dark Ages, and how many lives they saved even in situations where modern doctors would immediately give them up as hopeless cases. And (combined with my great grandpa's book mentioned in the last post) it reconfirms my conviction that someone I knew who grew up into a 'medical entrepreneur' and tycoon, and burnt a remark on my mind that 'a doctor is only as good as the machines at his disposal' is not only an ass, but a greedy, callous, lazy ass, unwittingly insulting countless great stalwarts living and dead in a time-honoured calling. Pity he has become so diminished, but maybe it's just the zeitgeist? Oh, by the way, I would have loved to read some comments on my last post. Readers, cat got your tongue?

Finally, one old boy, Soham Mukhopadhyay, a physicist just finishing his PhD in Vienna, has taken it upon himself to collect good memories about me from old boys and girls who have some such and would like to share. About a dozen of the best people have already written in. I now put the link here, and would love to read more contributions. They will be balm to my soul in the dusk of my life. So please do write. And nobody has to confine a reminiscence to one hundred words!