Bye bye to 2025

It is 24th December. Just a week left of the year. Time again to look back... and ahead. This has been on the whole a good year for me: sort of quiet, no big bad news, travelling around quite a bit, welcoming a newborn into my extended family of old boys, watching my daughter become a well-rounded working cum family woman, blessed with the companionship of old favourites who have stayed by my side for years, slowly learning to relax in the sunset of my life. This has also been my storytelling year. I have been posting a story a week on YouTube (now linked to my Instagram and Facebook accounts) since April, and I shall continue for at least a full year: that will be a repertoire worth leaving behind. Also, within a few months this blog will be twenty years old, and I am proud, because I know for a fact that few people in this age stick to writing as a non-commercial activity for that long; indeed, most bloggers give up after a year, because they have nothing more to say. Other than teaching for a living and bringing up my daughter, this has been the longest single project of my life. Someday, Pupu says, parts of this blog can be culled to make a traditional book. It has truly been a labour of love.

2026 is going to be a busy and difficult year for lots of people. There will be the Assembly polls in West Bengal, with the BJP getting more and more desperate to throw out the current regime. Globally, the AI bubble is likely to burst, sending shockwaves through stock markets all over the world, and the climate crisis is going to grow steadily worse, along with the worldwide reaction against immigrants - Americans against Indians as much as Indians against 'Bangladeshis' (I am not going into the right and wrong of it here, but I have been predicting this for three decades and more). So also technology mania and the onward march of elected autocracies wedded to the most short-sighted kinds of populism (the Roman emperors kept the masses happy with bread and circuses - just read plentiful junk food, non-stop festivals and social media feeds: no substantial difference). Low level white collar jobs will continue to become ever scarcer, more ill paid and less secure. Economic inequality of the worst kind will keep becoming ever more acute. Language will continue to be debased until people are hardly able to figure out what others are saying, creating problems everywhere from workplace to family place and funplace. Nutcases of all sorts, from vegans to those who insist on unisex toilets, will become ever more strident. But also, countless people will go on quietly doing useful things they do because they love doing them, from nursing patients to teaching kids to gardening and making music, and all kinds of pushback against nutters will also build up steam. If my health and finances permit, it will be an interesting scenario to sit back and watch from the sidelines, sometimes to laugh at and sometimes to grimace over. It has been a fairly tough life, and if God gives me a fairly comfortable retirement for a few years (not too many, please!) I shall be quite content.

Thinking about all the old boys and girls who have taken a lot of my time, attention and love and at some point vanished completely from my life with not so much as a by your leave, I was suddenly reminded of something that an economics professor remarked in class while talking about Nehruvian socialism: 'He loved humanity but hated people'. Supposing that were true, at my time of life I see nothing wrong or cynical about that attitude; rather, I deeply understand. If you know enough of the best things in human beings, you cannot help loving humanity, but individual people are most usually so flawed (to put it very nicely) that, even if you don't hate them, you cannot bring yourself to love them: unless you are the kind of divine fool who would forgive even those who crucify you.

I have become fascinated with a website titled History.com - visit it and you will find out why, in case you have any interest in the past. Also, a most interesting fledgling venture that an old boy has been talking about and is involved with: see the website truecompanion.co (not dot com). Right now, I am almost through a six part web series titled Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on trial on Netflix. And over the next three days I am going to have my fill of feel-good Christmas movies. Merry Christmas, all: God give you peace, rest and warmth.