What's happening all around?

I have reverted to the practice of first writing my blogposts on the computer and then copy-pasting them on the blog. This has been prompted by a very recent warning from Subhanjan that someday Blogger could simply take down and trash twenty years of my loving labour. I wouldn’t like that to happen. Meanwhile, I am looking for someone who has the technical expertise to download everything I have written here so far.

I must admit to feeling a little disappointed at having received so few congratulatory messages from dear old boys (and a few girls) in response to my last post. I should have thought that many of them, especially those of them who have been reading a long time, would somehow feel the urge and find the time to write a few lines. ‘Screen fatigue’ does not explain everything, you know; laziness, distraction and confusion together account for quite a bit of the things we know we could but did not do.

Which led me to reflect upon a passage that I have been dealing with in Julius Caesar. In Act IV scene iii, Brutus displays superhuman self-control by quietly absorbing the grief brought upon him by the news of the horrible death of his beloved wife. Perhaps he was only demonstrating how good a stoic he was; stoics believed it was a sign of moral weakness to make strong overt shows of any emotion, whether it be love or fear, anger or sorrow (by the way, we don’t lack the same ideal in the great Indian tradition: Sri Ram, described as the maryada purushottam, the ideal man, was said to be sukhey vigataspriha, dukkhe nirudvignamana … indifferent in joy, unworried in sorrow). Cassius is filled with awed admiration and a sense of inadequacy at this display of self-control: he says ‘I have as much of this in art as you, but yet my nature would not have it so’, meaning, I too have been taught this in theory (though he subscribed to a different philosophy, all schools taught self-control and calmness as a fundamental virtue), but my character is too tempestuous to submit to such discipline. What would they have said if they surveyed our world, where habitual and wild expressions of manic joy (whether it be over a World Cup Final victory for the favourite team or the son graduating from high school) is counterpoised by everyone falling into traumatic depression every now and then when they can’t find strong enough stimulants from day to day, and even language has degenerated into mindless repetition of empty superlatives (everything has to be ‘amazing’ and ‘incredible’… you call someone merely good or something just nice, and people take it as a snub, even an insult!). Could they be blamed if they wrote off modern ‘civilization’ as a babel of eternal children or madmen, regardless of all our vaunted technological progress?

Coming to the strong, growing and spreading popular protest movement spearheaded by the whimsically named Cockroach Janata Party, I can only wish them well (yes, I know some readers have been wondering when I will begin to comment on it). I am proud that so many young people have woken up to some of the most urgent and legitimate needs of the day. If we believe in democracy as the ideal form of government (or at least, Churchill fashion, the least bad among all the options), if we truly respect the Constitution, the right to dissent, argue and demand reform peacefully simply cannot be denied to the people: it is fundamental and non-negotiable. An Opposition-free Bharat would be a nightmare, a prison for all self-respecting Indians to live in. The government knows perfectly well that they are not all anti-national, foreign funded agents sent over to destabilize this country – who benefits from spreading and believing that sort of childish, paranoid nonsense? What they are asking for might be silly or superficial (does anyone seriously believe that simply dismissing a certain minister will magically and overnight clean out the Augean stable that our education system has become?), what they are doing and the way they are doing it might seem unwarranted or misguided or excessive to many (to think that way is also a democratic right, as long as we do not impose our views with brutal force), but to imagine that repression and suppression by obduracy, callousness and police action is the solution is to invite disaster. No man, no party, no government, no philosophy has a monopoly of truth and righteousness and patriotism, because humans are simply not built that way. That is why democracy has been called the art of muddling through: even it does not guarantee the best outcomes, it at least ensures that slow reforms for the better through dialogue and compromise are brought about with the least harm to the many. Any government which tries to simply silence and choke the voice of peaceful dissent is inviting trouble, if not catastrophe, for themselves, and if we are unlucky, for the whole country. I am neither unpatriotic nor anti-democratic, just a very humble man still proud to be Indian, and it is as such that I appeal to the government of the day: please listen to the protestors, do not hurt them, accept some of their demands, acknowledge your mistakes (there is no shame in that) and correct them to the best of your ability: that is what will work best for you and for ‘we the people’ in the long run. Doing the opposite, I repeat, is courting disaster. It has happened again and again before. As a wise but cynical man sadly said, ‘The only thing we learn from history is that we never learn anything from history’. 

[P.S., July 26: I uploaded this post yesterday afternoon, and in the evening I learnt that the protest movement has been called off, because the government has accepted three demands: that the minister shall resign, all FIRs against the protesters will be withdrawn, and the families of the students who have committed suicide will be financially compensated (!). Well, if the protesters are happy, then as far as I am concerned, there is nothing more to be said.]   

After twenty years

I started writing this blog on July 08, 2006. Which means that I have been writing continuously here for twenty years now, and this is my 825th post. Twenty whole years of writing! The contents would certainly make a fairly fat book. I am the sort of man who doesn't quickly give up what he starts doing, but even I had not imagined that I would keep at it for twenty years. That's half or more of a man's entire working life. Those who had just passed school in 2006 are family men and women in their late thirties now; those in their twenties who started reading this blog then must be pushing fifty! My little girl was ten years old then, now she is thirty, and busy living her own life. Is there anybody who has been reading this blog continuously right from the beginning and still visits it now and then? I would certainly like to say congratulations and thank you...

I have had a lot of interesting debates and conversations here, too, so thanks to all who participated. I have revealed a great deal of my mind and life here as I have passed through the prime of life into old age. Of course, do not imagine that you know everything about me even if you have been a regular long-time reader. As Tagore said, you will not find the poet in his poems. I have by preference shown the happier side of my life and the sunnier part of my mind here, if only to avoid burdening my reader with the weight and gloom of my own sorrows, fears, losses and disillusionments, of which, like every other human being, I have had aplenty. That is because it has been my lifelong desire to ease the travails of living for a few people if I can through my work, and not to make it more irksome by inflicting my own complaints on them. At worst, maybe a hint of melancholy and tiredness may have crept into some of my writing, for which I sincerely apologize: I wish I could have sounded cheerier without pretending to be what I am not. Also, despite talking and writing so much, I have always been at heart a very private sort of person - unlike most young denizens of the age of social media, I keep very personal (and usually painful) things for the most intimate circle, to which few belong, many have dropped out from, and thousands never came into.

I don't know how much longer I shall keep going. Without specific requests, I often feel at a loss for things to write these days. Also, as I frequently say myself, I am growing old, and weary, and no longer quite sure whether my writing matters to people. Why do people work at all? As I have always believed, unless it is under some sort of external compulsion, it is either for love or money. This was never a money making proposition, so obviously I did it for love: love of the written word, love of many things that I have seen, felt and enjoyed, love of the idea that perhaps I was influencing some people's lives in a good way. Now, I am not so sure that that love endures, or will endure much longer. Other than working as a teacher in my own house, I have, unsocial being that I am, have led a withdrawn life for ages, and perhaps a time is coming when I shall withdraw some more, limiting my human interactions to face to face conversations with those who keep visiting me at home. Maybe I have shared enough with the vast faceless public already? 

One good thing that I have just noticed: even when I am not attending to the blog, the number of pageviews keeps on climbing, and more and more older stuff has been coming into the most-read list (right now, the post titled Ingratitude and Karma is on the top of the list. Interesting). Unless I am much mistaken, that means a lot of people still remember the blog and are still curious to explore beyond the home page. Cheers to them, but also a lament: why can't you write in comments that will energize me to engage? Hundreds and hundreds of posts on such a huge diversity of subjects, and nobody finds anything to say?

Browsing through several dozen posts written over these last twenty years, I felt a sense of unreality. I was running a family then, working seven days a week non-stop for months at a stretch, reading so much, frequently going travelling, counselling so many people outside of my classes, dealing with all kinds of emergencies... where did I find the time in between all that to keep writing so much? And I hear so many people saying that they 'have no time' for any kind of serious (mental) work, not even reading, let alone writing! I myself have lost a lot of readers to two things: jobs and marriage. Of course, I never married and never worked for a living. Isn't it a really funny world? 

They say every grown man has a story - is a story. Well, I have told a large part of my story here. Not earthshaking, not maybe very educative or moving, but perhaps it will have significantly affected, even touched, a few people. That should be enough. In my own life, I have met many 'ordinary' people who have deeply instructive and memorable stories to tell, if only they are encouraged a bit (remember I once wrote the memoir of a roadside phuchkawallah). Mine may not be the most trivial of them. Some may remember. Otherwise, like everybody else, I shall soon pass, not only from this world but from everyone's minds. So what? And what would be unique about it? I just learnt in class two days ago that teenagers of today haven't heard of Sir Don Bradman!

Lately I have been enjoying myself enjoying old TV series now available for free on YouTube: specifically Mind your language and Blandings (yes, the Wodehouse creation). Try them sometime. Wonderful things for those who admire wit and genuine humour of the educated and civilized sort rather than what passes for comedy today. Also, regaling myself watching the 'vlogs' of young bike riders who go gallivanting across the length and breadth of India: so relaxing and interesting if you can do it from the safety and comfort of your bedroom, ten or twenty minutes at a time, spending virtually no money at all, and they give you drone's-eye view scenery, too! Science ka kya marvel!

A gentle nudge: do listen to my story collection on YouTube and the growing series of poetry podcasts on Spotify (in both cases you need to search only for 'Suvro Sir') and tell me what you think about them, here if you like. And if you do, please write more than a one-liner. 

So much for now.