One more pujo past

I have a diary where I have been writing down all the significant events of my life, year on year, since 1969 – the year I was admitted to kindergarten. Makes interesting reading, if only to me, because the long list often reminds me of things that I had forgotten, or at least forgotten the exact years when they happened. Now that it is October, I have begun to wonder what I should write about this year. It’s important to think ahead, because I write down only those things which will seem to matter, say, thirty years later. Not that I am planning to hang around for another thirty years…

Well, yet another pujo is behind me as of today, Bijoya Dashami. Hopefully the honking of an endless stream of cars will stop from tomorrow. I spent part of this pujo in Kolkata, in a very silent neighbourhood (such things still exist!), so I am on the whole thankful. Missed the usual holiday trip owing to unavailability of train tickets, but had a fun birthday party instead, which several people young and old and close to me happily attended.

The winter, as I noted, is coming. My most favourite of all the stories I have written, as my best readers know, is If winter comes. So this time is one of great anticipation for me – the long night’s sleep, sitting out in the garden in the mellow sunshine and shivery breeze, the good food, the several holiday trips, the light work schedule, old boys (and the very occasional –girl) dropping in for a chat, they all work together to make it a delightful time. Of late my creaky bones and COPD combined with all the dust in the air have made things a tad less enjoyable, but still.

I have been playing with AI of late. I made it create a picture of mine with a shock of wavy hair, and it was hilarious: made me look at least twenty years younger, and rather intriguing, if I say so myself. Next, it suggested that I try creating a Roman-style statue of myself, and that worked interestingly too, not least because the inscription and the books and temple it used for background was its own doing, based on all that it had seen and read on the internet. Fun can take so many forms! AI is going to make the biggest change in the way humans live since the invention of mechanical engines, that’s for sure: if we handle it without self- destructing.

Another batch of students will be leaving in a matter of weeks. This was a good one: I’ll miss them for a while. And this is always the time of year when I begin to wonder how much longer I can, or even want to, go on like this.

This is precisely the type of writing that I call ‘musing’. No one has to read it; as I have often said before, I write primarily for my own pleasure. No one needs to respond to it, but of course I shall be glad to have some empathy (not sympathy, mind you: I never needed that). And that tiny number of sick people who write in only to say, in a great variety of ways, ‘I hate you’, rest assured that I never see your ‘comments’, because after anyone like that sends two or three inane, stupid and vulgar messages, I mark them as ‘spam’, and thereafter I never even get to see them at all. Enjoy spitting upwards, if you can actually enjoy that, knowing that your deepest desire, namely that I acknowledge your existence, will never be fulfilled.