Sukumar Chandra: a great doctor

In three months' time this blog will be twenty years old, and the number of pageviews will have crossed 1.5 million. The number and variety of things that I have thought of and written about boggles my own mind now and then. Hard to believe that I was simultaneously leading a full, active family life all along, at least until recently.

During my two-day visit to Labhpur in Birbhum this January, I had happened to visit the little museum dedicated to the memory of the most famous son of the soil, the writer Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, and there I came upon a little book titled Labhpurer Bishu Daktar - a biography of Dr. Sukumar Chandra, vastly better known as Bishu Daktar - which outlines the story of a true karma yogi, one that I have just finished reading, and I have been deeply moved. In his nineties (unless he has left us within the last three months), he is still attending to his calling, incredible as it may seem, which, being a generation younger, makes me both wonder and feel deeply ashamed about being so tired of life already: I can only say

ক্লান্তি আমার ক্ষমা করো প্রভু। 

Born into a very humble (but dedicated-) schoolmaster's family, he graduated from R. G. Kar Medical College in 1948, missed going abroad for higher degrees because of his father's untimely death and, at the great novelist's behest, settled back to practise in and around his native village, and has spent his entire working life there. Starting with two humble rooms which did not even have the luxury of electricity in the early days, he built up a vast practice over the decades, and evidently made a decent living, considering that the book says he took care of the upkeep and upbringing of a huge joint family and gave away a small fortune out of his lifetime earnings to all sorts of local welfare projects, especially those that look after the furtherance of education and culture. He has earned countless awards and trophies from far and near, including one from the state government personally handed over by Smt. Mamata Banerjee, but he still counts the love and respect he commands among those who have benefited from his ministrations, help and wise counsel as his most fulfilling achievements. He has also been an avid and eclectic reader all his life. Where have such doctors vanished? Has any one of my old boys (some of them in their fifties now) become a doctor of that calibre and repute yet - as distinct from mere skilled technicians with one eye firmly fixed on the bottom line?

My grateful thanks to Mrs. Monalisa Chandra for having written with so much empathy about her father in law yet managed not to make it a hagiography. Else I wouldn't have known, and that would have been a loss. I shall make it a point to offer pronaam to both the daktarbabu and his Boswell, if I have the good fortune to meet them. It would be silly to wish Bishu daktar a long life at this point, but I certainly wish him a happy and easy passage when the bell tolls for him, and may he be remembered and idolized by thousands long after he is gone.

P.S. May 02: Oh, the pageviews counter has crossed the 1.5 million landmark already!

Start of poetry podcast

This is just to announce that I have tentatively begun to recite and discuss poems on Spotify. The first podcast, unimaginatively titled 'The Beginning', is already up there. I am still learning how to use the app, so I am likely to go about ham-handedly for a while: please bear with me. For now, I think clicking on this link will take you to where I want you to go. Alternatively you can search for Suvro Sir's beloved poetry on the app (yes, it seems you need to download the app first, unless you already have it - but it is free, and would take you less than five minutes).  Give me fifteen minutes of your time: listen and tell me about it.

P.S., April 27: The second episode has been uploaded. The link is here.

Time and wonder

Nineteen years ago I wrote a post here with the title 'The sense of wonder'. I am a much older man now, and would have been bored to tears with life if something of that sense didn't still linger deep inside me. 

One of the greatest wonders, of course, is the fact that I have lived all those years since that last post, and so much has happened, and the days dragged while the years whizzed by, until now I sometimes feel like laughing and crying at the same time to think that I am quickly becoming an old man, and 85%+ of the living human population, or so says Google, is younger than I am!

Some forms of wonder never seem to pall. I first watched my work being transformed into money with which I could buy things when I was in mid-teenage, and I have been working continuously for more than four decades now, and bought so many things with the money I have made, and yet it still makes me wonder like a child to watch people paying me so that I can pay others for their wares and services - imagine, me, pushing 63, and having a formal training in economics! So also the way the young keep being born and growing up into self-sufficient, self-important adults (or so they think) before my eyes, and I keep watching and cannot always remember that I am growing ever older along with them, with 'Time, which makes memories of everything'...

কাল ছিল ডাল খালি / আজ ফুলে যায় ভরে,

বল দেখি তুই মালি /হয় সে কেমন করে?

There are more bitter kinds of wonder too, like the all too common human folly of putting off the most important things for a later time (like telling your loved ones how much you care for them and miss them) until it is just too late, and the kind of stupidity that persuades people that they can somehow try the bad things that their forerunners did and the results will, this time round, turn out to be good. When shall we learn, for instance, that nothing truly good comes from going to war, for either side, that could not be negotiated in peace, over time, with much less horror and devastation?

And now there's a different kind of wonder. In his Ode to a Nightingale, Keats concludes with the line 'fled is that music/do I wake or sleep'? Having thought and read so much along those lines for much longer than most of my students have yet lived, I begin to wonder: what does 'real' mean? Was this life real by any universally acceptable definition, or was it a long, vast, bewildering dream which is soon to end? And will that truly be the end, or just a final waking up? I shall refer the interested reader to the chapter titled On Dreams and Daydreams in the only book I have ever written, To My Daughter.

One last item for now: I cannot stop wondering how the computer/smartphone/internet era has made the general run of humankind so ahistorical minded. From infant to 40-year old, they all seem to believe that the world was created maybe just about half a century ago, the way they talk, the way they are surprised to hear that we have been living with lots of things, from epidemics to spectacles, for hundreds, or even thousands of years. And also how very different things people mean when they say 'it happened a long time ago'. The ordinary man means maybe twenty years, a historian means thousands, a biologist or geologist means millions or tens of millions, and an astronomer glibly talks of supernovae exploding billions of years ago, as if that makes perfect sense to him, as if he really grasps what that kind of timespan means...

So here's as much time as makes sense to me, a very ordinary man:

Jenny kiss'd me when we met

Jumping from the chair she sat in, 

Time, you thief, who loves to get sweets into your list,

Put that in. 

Say that I am weary, say I am sad,

Say that health and wealth have miss'd me,

Say that I am growing old, but add -

Jenny kiss'd me.