Is the wheel turning?

A book was launched recently at Oxford Book Store, Park Street, in Kolkata. It has been written by Mithu Chakraborti, and it is titled Anatomy of Misery, Part 1: Men's Misery. It was reported in yesterday's edition of The Telegraph, the article ticklishly titled 'Recentring Suffering'. As the writer said, 'I think it is... important to recognise the societal and emotional pressures faced by men... their emotional needs are seldom taken into consideration'. Hear, hear!

 I should like every one of my readers to go through the entire article for themselves (The Telegraph, August 5, 2026, t2, p.5), but I want to quote some lines from it here. The reporter says 'The book, structured as a work of narrative non-fiction and popular psychology (whatever that means - SC), comprises twelve interconnected stories. In these, a multitude of men find themselves facing various conflicts owing to the stereotypical expectations and  burdens inflicted upon them by a ... culture that does not acknowledge men's need for emotional support and expression. Themes of men's loneliness, emotional isolation, domestic abuse (so at last some people are  beginning to admit that men are abused too, ha ha ha!-SC), the pressures of being a provider and the personal costs incurred by men in a society that expects them to be silent are the focus of these stories'. Oindrila Dutt, arts curator and one of the guests at the book launch, added, 'This book reminds us that it is high time for us to extend equal consideration for men's and women's miseries in society (good to hear that such equality, it is now being admitted, was not accorded for a long time! - SC). It is a crucial reminder that we need to address the pressures faced by men who have been betrayed (so now we can openly say that we are often betrayed too, huh? - SC), but sadly think that they are at fault.' 

Well, AT LAST!  Countless generations of men, many of them nice, good, responsible, hardworking, honorable men, have worked, suffered and died in silence because they had always been told that men do not, must not, admit and lament and ask for amelioration of their suffering (I keep remembering Harihar Ray in Pather Panchali, along with many other such characters real and fictional). My generation suffered a double whammy - the rise of a particularly sick, strident, one-eyed, obsessive 'feminism' that screamed at us all our lives that it is only women's 'right' (for want of a better word) to suffer and whine about their suffering, and to keep on pillorizing us men for all of it being our fault, no matter how many of us tried, however hard, to make life good and happy for them: if some men are awful, every one of us must bear the guilt and go through life hanging our heads in shame, while being completely shouted down and blithely ignored if we sometimes mumbled 'Well, we suffer too, you know, and it is not always our fault; maybe we deserve a little attention and sympathy and consideration sometimes, too?'

But let that be. One human lifespan is too small against the backdrop of history to notice much significant change anyway, and maybe the wheel is turning the right way already before my eyes? I wrote not too long ago about a woman who is vigorously running a Men's Rights Association, and here is another woman who has written a book like this. Maybe I shall see some change for the better before I die? Maybe some women will again begin to say that men are equally human too, and women can be bad humans too, or at least have a lot of faults and failings which they should do something about? Maybe, God willing, some more women will even begin to think, like Ms. Chakraborti, that we men have been getting a raw deal for a nastily long time, and say so in public for all to hear?

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.]   

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.

How time flies!

I am reading a book written by my great grandfather on my mother's side, the doctor (the others of my male ancestors of that generation I have never seen, not even my father's father. There was a self-made tycoon among them, my mother's maternal grandfather, but that's a story for another day). It is a novel based on his hospital days. I have mentioned him at least twice before (here's one). More and more he sounds to me like a Bengali A.J. Cronin. But that was not what I set out to write here.

It is mid-February. The laziest time of the year for me, because all classes have shut down prior to the annual examinations. This is when I have the most free time, and this is when I let it wander most guiltlessly. So it has been for a long time now. Lately I have been thinking about my lineage: all the generations I have seen. It is my belief that we are all very complicated and unique admixtures of the genes of many generations of ancestors; there is hardly anything about the 'me' in me that is completely new. I am sure, for example, that if you take my father and my dadu out of me, there will be virtually nothing left (oh, tiny bits and pieces of some much older ancestors, maybe). Anyway, the thing that I am musing over is that I have seen six successive generations of living people now. The oldest were my dadu's parents, then my grandparents, then there were my parents' generation, then mine, then my daughter's and now their children are being born: you can see me cradling the newest arrival in the vast extended family I have created; he is all of three months. Today's parents are being very late about it, so they will be lucky if they live long enough to see five generations. It has also been a very communicative family, so, besides everything I have read and seen about the world, I have witnessed living history for close to a hundred and fifty years. 

The most remarkable thing about this lived experience is that, unlike most people around me - especially those of my own generation and those up to twenty years younger - I do not believe that either the world or the people in it have really changed very much within the last two or three decades. Technology hoopla?  That doctor was using anesthesia and watching movies a century ago, and they had already invented the telephone, the aeroplane, radio and TV,  atomic bombs and computers before my grandpa was middle aged. Wars? They lived through two world wars; today we see firecrackers and skirmishes in Gaza and Ukraine. Women plying their wiles and men cheating or swooning over them? That sort of thing was old hat millennia ago. So was 'corruption' in politics and dirty tricks in business, so was mass unemployment and pathetic pay packets for the vast majority (brush up on your Chander Pahar and Jana Aranya). They survived horrible famines and epidemics; these days we are traumatized by CoVid, which, when the madness was all over, confirmed that the mortality rate stayed at no more than one per cent, regardless of what we did or didn't to 'contain' it. We have vastly more people and motor vehicles around; that's one big thing that has changed, certainly, but even around 1900 so many writers were talking about India's teeming millions, and today, even the 'poor', at least in cities, are on the whole better clothed and fed than when I was a child. 

That is one big reason, coupled with my own jadedness, why I find the world so increasingly tiresome and boring. Two things have definitely changed for the worse: people on the whole have become far weaker both in body and mind, far more easily dissatisfied and frustrated, far less willing and able to fight adversity despite having much more than their ancestors dreamt of  (some important lesson to be learnt here?), and good manners in public have almost vanished, at least in this country, at least in urban areas. Maybe folks are much more honest in expressing what they truly think and feel, which is a good thing, but couldn't that be done less loudly, less hurtfully, less crudely?

It is nearly two decades since I wrote a post here titled 'The world we are making for our children'. I have been reminded forcefully of it since this child was born (Koushik and Priyanka's son, born in November). What a world he has been born in, sadly; how much he must struggle to find some peace and joy in it! I am also reminded of the terrible poem 'Prayer before birth' by Louis MacNeice. May this child and his generation therefore carry my blessings, and may those blessings be of some slight worth. People like me tried in very tiny ways to make the world a little better: I think most of us failed, and in any case, we are now too tired and timid and weak to do more.

Good prospects?

All my life I have seen and heard that India, overall, is in a bad way ('e deshtar kichhu hobe na' , this country has no future, is something I have heard as a lifelong refrain among moderately educated people in the middle class, which, some observers say, is being crushed anyway). Well, maybe that's true, but at my age I have stopped putting all the blame squarely on our politicians, regardless of their party affiliation and professed ideology. Several reasons why.

First of all, from a spiritual point of view, I am not a very deep believer in western ideas about the infinite perfectibility of man and the human condition. No matter how much 'progress' we try to bring about by political, commercial and technological means, our 'solutions' only create more and new problems, and also, there are many problems that simply do not have a cure. You have to learn how to deal with life with the least possible stress and suffering: no one can make a world that is nice for everyone. Hence all my concern with the spiritual path.

Secondly, politics has always been called merely 'the art of the possible', and there are strict limits to what is possible and achievable by politicians, even if they are very well-intentioned, public spirited, committed and energetic (which most are not!). You simply cannot improve whole societies very much against their will, at least not in the short or medium term. Besides, in broadly (loosely) democratic societies, politicians, elected by the people, must necessarily reflect the people's common tastes, habits and predilections - thus India cannot be made a quiet, peaceful, orderly, cleanliness- and hard work- and honesty loving society, because too many people would find that unbearable. 

Thirdly, from the history of the world over the last few hundred years, ever since different sorts of 'progressive' governments started coming to power, we have seen that no matter how much they try, great inequalities of income, wealth and opportunity will continue to exist in every society. When some kinds of old privileges and privileged classes are weakened or removed (such as feudal lords and priests, or business tycoons and technocrats), they are invariably replaced by new ones (like the apparatchiki and 'princelings' in officially communist countries, or the new scheduled caste- and female elites in contemporary India, who have taken full advantage of affirmative action laws and insist that their pampered progeny should go on getting the same). Some countries are more just and fair in some eras than others, of course, but it is a matter of sheer luck where and to whom one is born, and one will enjoy or suffer much accordingly for no merit or fault of one's own.

Finally, in India at least, we as a people broadly speaking do not want much change, no matter which section of society we belong to. Children become very much like their parents, and the old underprivileged, as soon as they are a little better off, start imitating their earlier 'superiors' in their likes and dislikes. So any big change is likely to be brought about only piecemeal, in firefighting fashion, provoked by extraneous shocks - such as foreign conquest or economic crisis (as the reforms of 1991 were compelled by the economic crisis that preceded them). Well, I am an Indian myself, by genes, tradition, education and experience, so I have always hated the idea of revolutions anyway, convinced that revolution devours its own children, and causes too much harm along with too little good. So I must resign myself to gradualism (slavery was abolished after thousands of years, after all, and women did finally get the vote and right to property), keep faith in democratic socialism (which is why I regard Zohran Mamdani as a true wunderkind and wish him the best of luck) and, to stop myself from becoming a tired and cynical old man like Kedar Chatujjye in Parashuram's stories, put the rest of my trust in God. There will not be much change for the better in my time, of that I am sure, and I worry that things might get worse in my children's time.

P.S., Nov. 17: Good to see that this blog is now being regularly read in all inhabited continents!

What's your work/life balance?

There has been a lot of chatter lately on - where else - social media about how important the idea of work/life balance is, and how relevant it is to being 'successful' in life. GenZ appears to be particularly interested. 'There should be only four-day, thirty hour work weeks for all', some are clamouring, while others want you to work 90 hours or more. 

I found the discussion rather pointless, not because there is anything wrong with the idea itself, but the fact that most people who are offering strong opinions seem to have forgotten that this is a very, very personal thing, and there is no one-size-fits-all prescription that could work for everybody, no matter what every 'influencer' seems to think. This is not to say that I don't have a very definite opinion about it myself (and I have held firmly to it since long before the first GenZ kid was born); it only means that I should not want to impose it on anybody, just so long as they don't want to impose theirs on me.

There appears to me to be several different categories of people with definite opinions on the subject, depending on their psychological orientation and their own life experience. 

There are first, the workaholic millionaires and billionaires, who proudly ascribe all their worldly success to their working non-stop, virtually until they drop dead. I admire some of them, especially if they are doing something meaningful and still at it into their eighties and nineties (Bernie Sanders, Clint Eastwood, Sir David Attenborough), but of course I don't see eye to eye with them. Firstly, it is not true that you have to be a slogger in order to become very rich - a lot of people have done so by inheriting fortunes or winning lotteries or getting lucky at the stock market or only occasionally producing masterpieces of art and scientific inventions and so on. Secondly, most sloggers still die poor - witness all the labourers and farmers throughout history: that's a sad fact, but life gives very few people a fair deal. Thirdly, it's dangerous: I know, and have heard of, far too many people who have actually dropped dead or become invalids early in life through over-exertion. And fourthly, it all applies to only a very narrow band of (ignorant? unconscious? silly?) people who limit their whole idea of 'success' to making money, not even thinking of keeping time aside to the necessity of enjoying that money (what will I do with a vast fortune if I cannot eat and sleep and travel and rest all I want, maintain good health for a long time, have good conversations and read a lot of good books, watch a lot of excellent movies, listen to a lot of fine music, be at the side of loved ones when they need me?). I find them pitiable at best and disgusting at worst, no matter how much money they have. Besides, it's usually their wives and children who get all the fun...

Secondly, there are the rascally tycoons who want you - the miserable plodder who keeps his nose to the grind to earn at best a modest middle-class living with no long-term security - to go on working harder and harder so that you have no life left to live, and their vast piles of  filthy lucre can grow larger and larger. Without mincing words, they are vermin, true enemies of the people; keep a long list of their names for the time when the Revolution comes.

Thirdly, there are people who are caught in soul-drying, dead end, seemingly pointless jobs (usually ill-paying to boot) - I'm sure I can put thousands of jobs in that category - and find even a 9 to 5, six days a week schedule suffocating and increasingly intolerable: if they are too timid or unable to find better alternatives, I shall only sympathize with them, not advise them to work more. Those who enjoy the work they are doing will automatically work hard: you don't have to tell them; sometimes you should tell them instead to slow down and smell the flowers.

Fourthly, there are people who are inveterate shirkers, bone lazy, people who hate the very idea of having to work. Unfortunately - in this country at least - there are far too many of them, and they can only be whipped into working at all, so in this case all my sympathy is reserved for the managers who must keep slave-driving them. Their ideal work/life 'balance', after all, would be, if possible, sleep all through the day when they are not chatting or revelling or getting stone drunk, while daddy or mummy or the wife keeps slogging to put food on the table...

Even those who in their youth are working hard and doing well, materially speaking, need occasionally to hear a word of caution: don't work so hard at your job that time flies by and many of the most important responsibilities, such as raising children well and attending well to old parents, are not properly taken care of. And if you have worked hard and saved well throughout your adult life, the work/life balance should tilt further and further towards enjoying your leisure and fulfilling many of your long-held dreams - if you have anything like a decent pension, going on making more money in your old age is a sad frittering away of all the opportunities that life throws at you.

You could think of a few more types, but I think I have made my point: the same formula does not suit everybody; we are not identical and simple robots. Some readers, I can visualize, will scratch their heads and say 'I didn't think so much about it!' Exactly. That is why it is not good to dwell too long on social media 'debates': better learn to think and decide for yourself. It's your life.

My own education via YouTube

Having become a content creator (storyteller) on YouTube, I am using the app much more frequently than before. And it is becoming quite an education, in the sense that I am learning - to my great edification - that lots of people, including young people, are thinking and saying a lot of good and necessary things, and, going by the stats (though number of views, I fear, doesn't say much about whether the viewers actually listen to, or watch, the whole show, let alone being affected by them), many people are being impacted, too. 

For instance, I just watched a nine-minute movie called Delivery Boy. Short as it is, it draws attention to how hard hundreds of thousands of people are working around us for a pittance, and how we hardly notice them, taking them for unthinking, unfeeling drudges, hardly better than pack animals or robots, and yet they are humans just like us, with the same needs, desires, weaknesses, and ability to feel hurt and sympathy - sometimes more so than many of us. The director also draws attention to how many parasites live idle, slothful, irresponsible lives feeding on these unfortunates - notice the wife and son briefly shown halfway through the movie: but such parasites are to be found in every family, not only in those of the badly off. While as a socialist by conviction I believe that no able bodied man or woman should eat without working at least between the ages of twenty and sixty, I also believe every man, even a driver or delivery boy or janitor deserves a modicum of attention, compassion and courtesy - and no man deserves slavish admiration or wide-eyed deference merely because he has made a pile of money. Next time someone delivers a package, don't forget to give him (or her) a tip and a kind word if you consider yourself a civilized human being, and at least stop flattering yourself that you are a vastly superior somebody. It's the same message you will find here.

Meanwhile Akash Banerjee aka Deshbhakt has uploaded his gawaar swag part 2 video. It is people of the sort he has marked out that are giving India a bad name all over the world, and making the more decent among us cringe with shame. I am asking every reader to reflect whether s/he, while travelling abroad, has done something to shame us, imagining that they are being 'cool' and street smart, or simply that they are entitled to being ill-mannered because they have recently made some money. Being loud and aggressive, dishonest and abusive and in-your-face, whether inside India or abroad, only shows you up for what you are, a boor, a bad advertisement for the country. I only wish that our celebrities, including our top political leaders, would hammer this message over and over again through every available channel of public propaganda.

And then there was the video where the speaker was talking about how Japan - materially and socially speaking one of the most advanced nations in the world - is increasingly becoming a 'low desire society', in the sense that people there, even young people, are no longer very ambitious in a worldly sense, they are increasingly indifferent to the consumer culture, they save rather than buy things unless they are essential, many of them are more and more content with living with and by themselves according to minimalist ideals. Many experts, says the presenter, are worrying that this might be a major social disease, and/or harbinger of a great economic crisis (how will business and industry keep running if people in the mass stop buying new things all the time?), but is it really so? Haven't our great spiritual teachers been urging us for thousands of years to control our greed, and to learn to be comfortable with ourselves, inside our (enriched) minds? Aren't the modern environmentalists saying exactly the same thing? And what sort of sick economy is it that enslaves people into working and consuming all the time, not that they might be safe and healthy and happy but so that the economy might keep running (and the fat cat businessmen keep getting fatter still)? Given that Japan has already attained some of the highest living conditions in the world - stable to declining population, very high per capita income, very little extreme poverty, excellent public, security and welfare services, universal education, an orderly and peaceful society and so on, why shouldn't they now say 'Enough... from now on we shall take increased income not in terms of goods to buy but in terms of leisure and freedom to pursue hobbies we really like to engage in'? Shouldn't that be every nation's goal? That is what Dr. Goobie, the bright neurosurgeon who quit his job at the peak of his career decided for himself in America, too - that the whole system is corrupt and rotten, designed to exploit the vast majority of people by making them run the rat race forever, and the only sane option is to step off the treadmill when you have got just enough. And, as I have been repeating over and over, one needs the deepest sort of education to realize that one does not really need much from the material and social world to live a truly good life. It has been well said that the rich man is not he who has much but he who wants little. I hope this post, and all the links I have provided here, would set many people thinking along those lines before it is too late, for them and for the planet.

... alas, this is what, instead, we are currently doing in India. The only correction I would offer the presenter here is that it's not Gen Z which is alone to blame: many of their dads and moms are doing it too. In fact, I am convinced it is the parents who infected them with the disease. I am sorry, readers, that this video is in Bangla, but do listen, even if you don't understand the language very well.

AI rising, NI sinking

I still read The Telegraph of Calcutta daily, despite all the fluff and the garbage, and today the same paper carried two very, very thought-provoking, disturbing reports. One is that the new Pope, Leo XIV (a mathematics scholar, too!), in his first public audience, has identified AI as one of the greatest contemporary threats to 'human dignity, justice and labour'. Go back to the post titled The Life of the Spirit (first part), where I quoted Stephen Hawking gloomily forecasting the threat to civilization posed by AI. The very highest, keenest, most informed minds from  the worlds of science and spirituality now agree on this, as do humble I, while schoolteachers, journalists, engineers (at least a section of them) and tech entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley are going gaga over how rapidly technology is advancing, and what a golden age it is about to usher in for humankind. Bears thinking about, doesn't it? Keeps reminding me about Tagore's Muktodhara and Roktokorobi, and movies like Wall-E and the Matrix series.

The other was a recent interview of Shashi Tharoor, who has acquired a cult following as a user of 'sophisticated' English. In reply to a question, he said that more worrying to him than the rapidly diminishing power of communication among people (at least linguistic communication) in the age of Whatsapp and Instagram is the equally rapidly diminishing power of comprehension: people no longer have the intelligence, common sense, knowledge, wisdom or patience to reflect and understand anything that is nuanced, ambivalent, multi-layered in meaning: everything has to be reduced into simple binaries, right or wrong, good or bad, true or false, at the comic book level: whether it is about Gandhi deserving respect or Germany deserving all the blame for World War I or Trump being God or the Devil incarnate. I quote Tharoor: "... there have been studies demonstrating that today's young people are not able to engage with complex texts and in-depth reading. And this is really worrying... because unless one reads in depth, one is not able to gain very complicated ideas. You are then dealing with superficial ideas expressed in simple terms, which are very short... and that can really make you far more susceptible to propaganda... because you simply don't have the background and the complexity to understand that the issue is more complicated than they are describing, that there are actually more nuances and elements in it... that is really worrying".

I can only vouch for how absolutely right he is. I have been giving vocabulary and comprehension exercises to thousands over nearly four decades, and I have seen the precipitous decline in average mental capacity. I can also see, from the contents of syllabi and public examinations, how there is a concerted, global enterprise of deliberately dumbing down people by the hundreds of millions, so that they can grow up to become only drudges and mindless, undiscriminating consumers/publicizers of worthless goods and political propaganda: that alone is science or history which The Great Leader and his billionaire-techie friends say it is. AI  rapidly rising, NI rapidly sinking... I shudder to think of the world in the making.

The life of the spirit, part four

Now, to answer the questions that I myself raised at the end of the last post on this subject.

Materially speaking, I had a difficult early life, though we were never exactly poor, made harder still because in my mid-teens we abruptly fell on hard times, and then there was a long struggle before I was comfortably off again and reasonably secure in an Indian urban middle class sense. That should be kept in mind if one is to appreciate what I am going to say in the following paragraphs.

Two very helpful things happened to me early on that made it much easier to cope with worldly life than it is for most people of my class. One, I became intensely and empathetically aware of extreme poverty around me, which made bearing my own cross, such as it was, a relative breeze because I had made a habit of counting my blessings constantly, as few people do. Two, I learnt early to define my own real (worldly) needs clearly and definitively. There were things that were essential, things that were nice to have or do but not really necessary for my physical and mental wellbeing, and things that were most definitely unwanted, distasteful, harmful to my health, pocket and peace. Interestingly, that set of values has never altered much, only more and more items have by themselves moved from the second category to the last. I must add a third thing here upon reflection: ever growing contempt and lack of pity for people who waste their lives endlessly chasing the things in the second and third categories. Here is an illustrative though not exhaustive list of things in my three categories.

In the first were things like living in my own house, a fixed and moderate work routine, a bit of regular leisure, occasional holidays to travel in, lots of reading and watching movies and writing, not having to kowtow to society and bosses at the workplace, much ‘quality time’ to give to my daughter (and now mother), money enough to fulfill every basic need of the family, including education, healthcare, insurance and saving for old age, and much scope for adda with likeminded people. Through economy, diligence, persistence and God’s grace I have achieved all that, though some of it took time (so what? Only makes the achievements sweeter).

In the second category came things like swimming round the year, going frequently to beautiful places abroad, savouring haute cuisine now and then, becoming ‘famous’ for my work, living in a much cleaner, quieter, greener, more orderly place with a much more temperate climate and suchlike. I have enjoyed a bit of all that, and I hanker less and less for them with the passage of years, except perhaps for the last.

In the third category come all the things that most people around me run after all through life – everything from high scores in examinations to fancy weddings and regular parties at posh hotels and constantly replaced fashionable clothes, shopping for and flaunting branded goods of all kinds, obsessing over looks, counting ‘likes’ on social media and, above all, doing things simply because ‘everybody’ around them is doing the same, from watching cricket on TV to going on pilgrimages to seeking a job in Bangalore or Umrica. I have tasted most such things, found all of them unnecessary or downright silly and annoying after a bit, so I stopped wanting these things for myself early on, nor do I want them for my daughter. As I said earlier, I feel only contempt and complete lack of pity for the ‘sufferings’ of such people, because they have brought all that suffering – from severe indebtedness to poor health, perpetual frustration, jealousy, discontent and depression – upon themselves. Tagore describes them with these words: ami joto bhaar joraye phelechhi/ sokoli hoyechhe bojha (I have entangled myself with a burden which is hard to carry).

Many sad and bad things have happened to me, and will continue to happen, yet I have walked through my life with on the whole much less angst and misery than most. Tell me, reader, can you see how being ‘spiritual’ has helped me all along the way, or do I have to spell it out even further?

And this was only the passive aspect of being spiritual – not being affected overmuch by the ways of the world. I would not have ventured to write such a long and involved series of essays unless I was sure there was a positive side also – being able to ‘enjoy’ this worldly life (despite always having known that ‘Life is sorrow’) much more than the average individual because I have been spiritual for most of my life: at least since I started praying every night in kindergarten. That is what I shall briefly touch upon next.

To begin with, I have had immense pleasure, while at the same time acquiring knowledge of every kind, from reading all my life (I always say that 90% of all I know came from outside syllabi and textbooks), and listening to music. The same goes for writing, and I have been writing stuff since I was a pre-teen. I have greatly enjoyed the gift of laughter, and thousands of ex-students will vouch that I have shared it with them. I have been a good listener to more people than I can remember or count, and, as I have found out for myself, good listeners are desperately needed and very hard to find. These things in turn have hugely helped in my professional work; even more so the fact that through endless drudgery, disappointment and frustration (so many people simply can’t or won’t learn), I have been able to regard my work as a calling and not just a means of livelihood. I fear I would have burnt out much sooner otherwise: teaching is not everyone’s cup of tea.

I have found time for lots of sleep, which, as the Bard famously wrote, ‘knits up the ravelled sleeve of care’, as also walked tens of thousands of kilometers, and while I am infinitely thankful for it, I congratulate myself that I could do it because I could determinedly cut off all kinds of distractions and silly engagements all along. I have eaten a lot of good food without falling ill, simply because I never overindulged my palate. I have trained myself not to be too unhappy about all the things that I supposedly wanted and did not get in this lifetime – and lo! it turned out by and by that I never really wanted those things very much after all, only imagined for a while that I did, from a particular girl to a particular job (hence the prayer ‘not my will, O Lord, but Thy will be done’ has become ever more profoundly meaningful). I have learned to bear pain and sorrow and loss without making too much fuss, especially in the traditionally prescribed demonstrative way. I no longer expect much by way of lasting love and companionship from human beings. This has been particularly hard to learn and accept, because I was born deeply emotional and expectant with a very long memory, but now it is well learnt: all I have to remind myself whenever I feel bad is that people are weak and confused and changeable, they like to cheat themselves and pretend what they do not feel, so anyone who is looking for true love simply must turn to either fairy tales or to God. I am sure that both for myself and my loved ones, death, if it comes at the end of a decently long life and without too much pain and shame and dragging along, should be welcomed with open arms. And, finally, that life only makes sense if one spends the largest part of it looking for That Which Stands Beyond – see Come to God, the last chapter of my book (and that was written more than twenty years ago, when I was far from being an old man).

All this is what I have tried and found out and benefited from through my pursuit of spirituality as I understand it. Yoga and pranayam, mantras and wondering about God have filled the interstices, in case you haven’t noticed. Though I have not once claimed that they are essential and primary, the reflective reader will perhaps realize that in a very fundamental sense, they are. Also, as some of my best readers have pointed out, I have said most of these things here and there in a scattered way in numerous blogposts, so in a sense I am saying nothing new. Indeed, there is nothing new about the pursuit of spirituality: all that needs to be said has been said countless times over thousands of years. The point is to help people understand how important, necessary and life-changing it can be if they can see its urgent relevance in the here and now. If I get to know that I have helped half a dozen people to see it, my life’s work will have been well done.

By the way, I am delighted that this series of essays has brought back an old favourite post of mine, The worship of the wealthy, into the most-read list. I should have liked many more people to read up the post titled Socialism calling, part two, also.

Beyond this point, I should like to field questions, if there are any. Otherwise, I think I have now written enough on this subject.

The life of the spirit, part three

The quest for a (more) spiritual life will be meaningless and uninteresting to three kinds of people. There are, first, those (many hundred millions, alas, still) who are so poor that the mere quotidian struggle to keep their heads above water usually takes up all their time and energy (and yet, even they often indulge in painting, dancing, music, storytelling and religious rituals – witness the flourishing arts of our tribals. Food for much thought). Then there are those who are not fully human at all, even if they are fairly well off (no insult intended, but that’s the way a vast proportion of people are, quite content with endlessly pursuing only the animal impulses – eat, sleep, breed, fight and preen: especially more and more common among our relatively well off, ‘educated’ urban middle classes. Food for much thought again!), and those who are so happily engaged with worldly pursuits (whether it be business or government or scientific research or something like that) that they don’t need or have time for anything else. But a caveat: some members of even the second category feel the sudden and urgent need for spirituality, especially when they are badly shaken up by some or other kind of unexpected trauma or begin to grow old, tired and sick; and even those who belong to the last category might gradually begin to realize how badly things are going for the world as a consequence of the way humankind is living (waste, pollution, climate change, extreme inequality, increasing infantilization of culture, collapse of civilized manners and so on), and wonder whether or not they need to make drastic changes simply to survive for any significant length of time as a flourishing species. In that sense this kind of public thinking should not be irrelevant or uninteresting for anybody.

Also recall that I wrote before about ‘the cravings of the spirit’. By which I mean that there is some very deep and powerful urge in many if not most people to seek satisfactions of the sort that are not strictly sensual and material; not passively ‘consumed’ (as in watching  TV or Instagram Reels), not ‘profitable’ in the lazy, contemporary, narrowly commercial sense. The love of literature, art, music, sport and the pursuit of knowledge for their own sake is the example that is most accessible to the understanding here: so is a common housewife’s desire to keep her house tidy and pretty, to the extent that she does it for her own aesthetic pleasure, not to make her neighbours jealous. There are others, even in this day and age, who pursue ideals of justice and equity and love (even for animals and plants) with the same doggedness, with no significant personal ‘returns’. We know of countless people who have found deep and abiding satisfaction in such things even if they have not brought money or power or fame (most great artists and scientists were like that until very recently, historically speaking); indeed, they often had to give up the lure of the ‘safe and comfortable’ life and actively court hardship, ridicule, isolation and even physical danger in the relentless pursuit of their ideals. So many scientists have died without ever reaping the just rewards of their labour and talent; so many artists have found recognition only after death. There is much talk about ‘motivation’ today (and most motivational speakers cannot imagine what to ‘motivate’ you about except how to become rich and famous quickly without much risk and effort!) – what sort of ‘motivation’ urged such people on, do you think, unless it were the goading of the spirit?

So, spirituality – as I have been labouring to underscore – is not essentially about God and gurus and mantras and pilgrimages to ‘holy’ places and special codes of dressing and eating and so forth. But yes, spirituality is most definitely about becoming a) less material minded, b) less bothered about what the herd is doing, c) more comfortable, even happy, with silence and solitude, d) more willing to cut out endless distractions (get off social media, turn off your phone, grow a distaste for partying!), e) more interested in finding out what you really want most out of life (you can’t have everything – if you love to sleep, or if you are forever suffering from FOMO, becoming a billionaire should not be one of your goals), and f) more determined to focus on things that really matter to you.

This last is about learning to meditate. Again, as I have learnt from a lifetime of teaching and keep telling my pupils, meditation is all about stilling your mind and focusing on the task at hand, and that need not have anything to do with God and all that stuff. People have traffic accidents, quarrel over trifles, forget what they learnt only weeks or months ago, cannot long maintain exercise and diet regimens, make stupid mistakes in examinations and idiotic investments, simply because they cannot decide on and focus on their priorities. The spiritual mind is the habitually meditative mind, and the meditative mind is a calm, firm, well-sorted, focused mind. To some it comes instinctively, even from childhood, but a lot of people can learn to become like that through long and earnest practice. Therein lies hope, therein lies my motivation for writing in this vein…

Two questions are likely to arise at this point: a) have you tried it yourself? and b) what have you got from it? So the next installment is going to be of a very personal nature, trying to answer those questions.

The life of the spirit, part two

The little I have learnt about spiritualism in this lifetime is that you must begin by going through the steps listed below:

Accept that pain, loss, failure, sickness, disillusionment, frustration and death are inevitable – for everybody (The Buddha’s First Noble Truth was ‘Life is suffering’. Anyone who claims otherwise is a fool or a charlatan).

Accept that they cannot be ‘cured’, ‘solved’ or avoided by any sane worldly means. The wisest and kindest man can at best show you how to lessen that suffering.

Accept that the more you confuse ‘having fun’ or being ‘successful’ with joy or happiness (in the Sanskrit sense of ananda, bliss, which absolutely insists on a lot of resignation, acceptance, self-control, moderation in all things, tolerance of things you consider ‘bad’ and quietness of mind/spirit/soul), the more desperately you chase wealth/power/social status and fame in the hope that these things will save you from unhappiness, the more frantically you try to lengthen life and therefore fear death above all things, the more unhappy you will become.

Realize that you are much more a mind than a body, even if you do not understand (or refuse to accept) that you are something even higher and less explainable in material terms – a spirit or soul. You feel everything, even pleasure and pain, ultimately with your mind, not any part of your body (when the body-mind connection is turned off, as under anesthesia, you feel no pain even if your hand is amputated!). Being spiritual does not have to be learned from priests, monks and gurus – ask any great sportsman and s/he will tell you that the wonders they achieve is ultimately with their minds; they have only trained their bodies with endless hard work and patience and discipline to do what the mind tells the body to do. Being spiritual is an experience that can come from doing anything you do with love and respect and attention – whether it be cooking or surgery or gardening or mathematics or teaching; it is understanding that the mind appreciates beautiful music or lovely scenery, the gadgets you use to access them hardly matter, the money you have spent on your widescreen TV or home theatre or DSLR camera is a trivial and inconsequential thing, essentially money wasted. Newton did not have an electronic calculator, Michelangelo and Mozart did not have Meta or Gemini at their elbows to help them create immortal masterpieces; Wordsworth needed only an appreciative mind to exult in the beauty of the bank of daffodils.

The Great Masters of Living (E.F. Schumacher’s phrase) both in the east and west were always right – as one of our holy books pithily puts it, trying to achieve satisfaction by indulging your sense pleasures more and more is just as stupid and futile as trying to douse a fire by pouring ghee on it. Human greed knows no limits: give a single man the entire planet, and all he will say is ‘Only one planet?’ Check with Elon Musk. Of course poverty is bad, but cultivation of self-control and learning to be happy as soon as our most basic material needs are satisfied is absolutely essential for everyone to find a modicum of contentment with life and the planet to continue to be liveable for long (everyone needs and deserves a decent roof overhead, no one needs a palace; everyone needs to eat, no one needs to gorge at five star eateries; a bicycle may be a need as a luxury limousine is not; limitless uncontrolled growth in any part of the body is a cancer, and so is the chimera of perpetual economic growth). As soon as the basic needs are satisfied – and to do that one needs to exert one’s fullest efforts to curb the seven deadly sins inside his mind – one must, if one wants to survive with the least possible unhappiness, turn to satisfying more and more the cravings of the spirit, and even to do that, one must consciously and assiduously cultivate (to use Buddhist teaching again, though I have read the very same injunctions in every major religion) the virtues of karuna, maitri, upeksha and mudita: compassion, friendship, equanimity and joy in the joy of others.

Most people, even those who are not poor and sincerely looking for directions to a better life, will throw up their hands in despair already at this point: ‘It’s too much, too different from everything we have been taught, too hard, we just can’t do it!’ See what I meant in the last post about our basic philosophical orientation having gone seriously wrong since at least five hundred years ago? In the middle ages – at least in Europe, and Europe has been teaching the rest of the world everything for many centuries now – they tilted too far in the other direction: religion got a vice like grip on the human mind, and taught that everything about life on this earth was sick and bad and transient, so we should wallow in the muck while we live and wait for all our rewards in ‘heaven’. And then we decided to create ‘heaven on earth’ with war weapons, large industries, advertising, global trade and big government along with democratic and socialistic ideals steadily being turned into laws to make a better world. I shall insist once again at this point that much good has certainly been achieved by such means – I most definitely do not want to go back and live in the world of a thousand years ago in any country. But now we have reached a critical juncture; as a 20^th century philosopher put it, we have a choice only between the Buddha and the Bomb. If we in the mass cannot learn to become at least a little more spiritual, I frankly think we are doomed.

And yet I have hope, if only very slight. It arises when I see and hear about so many people searching and asking questions, even after having a lot of conventional fun and achieving a lot of worldly success, when I see attendance at meditation classes swelling, when I hear of the minimalist movement attracting more and more experimenters in many countries, when I learn about people backpacking and travelling around the world on shoestring budgets and greatly enjoying the experience, when I read about very big businessmen and politicians acknowledging in rare candid moments that things are going badly wrong in every sphere of life, when I see the technocratic approach spawning a hundred new problems as it solves ten old ones, when I meet reasonably happy people much more often among the relatively poor than in my own social class…

Turn inwards. I shall end this part of the continuing series by quoting some of my favourite lines from a very revered Hindu text, Adi Shankaracharya’s Mohmudgar:

Satsangatwe nissangatwam/ nissangatwe nirmohatwam/ nirmohatwe nishchalatatwam/ nishchalatatwe jivan mukti.

From associating with good people you learn to be glad with solitude/ from solitude you learn to lose illusions/ from losing illusions you become still* inside/ from stillness comes true freedom.

*A footnote: In early (Hinayana) Buddhism, a spiritually enlightened person was called ‘Thera’, derived from the Sanskrit ‘sthira’, meaning still.

The life of the spirit

In a now already famous remark made not long before he died, Professor Stephen Hawking said he believed the rise of AI would spell the end of ‘civilization as we know it’.

Perhaps that might be indeed how we are doomed to go – in The Time Machine fashion, or in its more ‘updated’ versions, as in the Blade Runner and Matrix series of movies. Or perhaps some vast, benign, globe-girdling nonhuman super intelligence is going to preserve and protect us far into the very dim and distant future, the way many of Bradbury’s and Asimov’s best stories tell us things might turn out. Preserve and protect us ‘for our own good’, as farmers preserve and protect herds of sheep. ‘Civilization as we know it’ destroyed by our own hyper-creative cleverness. Mercifully (very selfishly speaking), I shall not be around to witness that ‘heaven’.

Otherwise… otherwise, from all I have understood about the human mind and human condition from my lifelong study of history, politics, war, economics, environmental science, psychology, literature and religion along with my own experience of ‘real’ life, I believe we can survive and thrive indefinitely, with or without much aid or dread from AI, by our own efforts, but we must change our concerns and priorities far more drastically than most present-day thinkers can imagine.

For too long – at least since the dawn of the European Renaissance – we have thought of changing and improving the outside world. And indeed, with the help of increasingly more powerful technology and organization, we have changed and even ‘improved’ things beyond the wildest dreams of even most kings in pre-Renaissance days. The common man enjoys far more freedoms and rights today and a far higher ‘standard of living’ than were available to all but kings and emperors (even kings and emperors didn’t have anesthesia or twitter) for all of history before the last two hundred years.  And yet, if we call that progress, we simply cannot deny the facts that it is the same idea of progress that has brought in its train imperialism and monstrous colonial exploitation, gigantic world wars, massive permanent unemployment and inequality and poverty amidst plenty, impending environmental catastrophe, and a global pandemic of ‘diseases of the rich’, from obesity to depression to maniacal road rage to perpetual distraction and endless thrill seeking, to mention a small handful of appalling, seemingly unavoidable troubles, or obstacles to human happiness as I prefer to think about them. I believe the root of this conundrum is that our basic philosophical orientation – in the mass, that is – became seriously wrong after the middle ages.

Combined with a deeply settling and widely spreading conviction (which philosophers have long named materialism) that this world of sensual phenomena and things is all there is, and that this one body, one life, is all we have (to be ‘enjoyed’ to the fullest as long as we have it), and increasing conceit that natural resources are infinite, only waiting passively to be exploited, and that ever advancing technology can fix every problem (even those of ageing and loneliness!), humankind became ever more obsessed with the single problem of amassing and consuming ‘wealth’ (again, understood in purely material terms). And as they wished, so it happened, especially since the Industrial Revolution got going – though already 200 years ago a poet was warning ‘ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay.’ By the mid-20th  century, increasing the annual gross domestic product became the sole real religion, nay mania, of every significant country. On top of material engineering, the vast and ghastly experiments with socialism – the idea that society could be engineered like dead materials so cleverly that poverty and inequality (in Marxist philosophy the sole real problems we have ever faced: absolutely childish incomprehension of that infinitely complex thing called human psychology) could be forever abolished and instantly heaven would be recreated on earth – taught us, at least a few of us, that life was not so simple, and the cost of tampering too much with nature, both that outside and that inside us, was unaffordable. The alarm bells started ringing by the 1970s, with warnings like ‘The Limits to Growth’ and concepts like ‘spaceship earth’ and books like The Affluent Society and Greed is not enough, Globalization and its discontents,  Doughnut Economics and Capital in the 21st century coming to widespread attention, coupled with fear of sudden and total nuclear annihilation.

And yet, how did we respond? Worldwide, we maniacally accelerated the pursuit of economic growth, at the cost of every other major concern, having convinced ourselves that if things were indeed going very badly with the majority everywhere, the one and only panacea lay in even more rapid and relentless growth (hand in hand with cure-all technology). There is no serious search for alternatives, at least among the movers and shakers of the world, for better ways of shaping and facing the future, even now, with a quarter of the 21st century already behind us. Even though there are more fat people around us than hungry ones for the first time in history, more well-off people complaining of frustrated, aimless, boring, empty lives than have ever existed before, more evidence of rapid environmental damage with every passing year, more danger of catastrophic wars again, we cannot begin to think that there are very many things which are very wrong with ourselves that we desperately need to change, and urgently too. This is what I have observed over all my adult life, since the early 1980s.

Not that there aren’t people around who have been telling us what we need to do; they have always been around. By them, I mean the religious people, the people who keep telling us to give greater attention and a bigger role to the spiritual dimension of our lives. And I start immediately by clearing the decks – I deny legitimacy to every religious guru who is trying to aggrandize and enrich himself by peddling soothing or tantalizing mumbo jumbo, every doctrine which ultimately encourages stupidity and fanaticism and goads its followers to start behaving like some sort of Elect, divinely authorized to belittle, hurt and destroy followers of all other belief systems. To avoid much repetition while clarifying my ideas about a healthy spiritual life, I shall draw the reader’s attention to at least two old blogposts, My views on religion: a summary to begin with, and Socialism calling, part two. It would help if you read up those two essays before continuing with this one.

I have been feeling increasingly sick of watching my fellow human beings scrabbling just to ‘make a living’ lifelong, whether they are earning thousands or millions, hurting and cheating one another shamefully in the process, badly damaging and uglifying everything around them (forests turned into shopping malls, oceans turned into vast lifeless dumping grounds for waste), and yet lamenting all the time that they can find neither peace nor happiness. This is not an old man’s plaint: I started feeling like that in my teens, and even those blogposts mentioned above are many years old. A very thoughtful, observant and sensitive ex student in his early twenties recently remarked that while old men have always cribbed about present times, it is a novel phenomenon that many people even of his age are now feeling the same. Nice and clever people cannot find even folks of their own age to have meaningful conversations with, cannot trust that everyone will not let them down or betray them when they are tested. Things are going from bad to worse … that is not an illusion.

So, to turn into more ‘spiritual’, less harmful persons, what do we need to do? Most certainly not what a lot of people are doing right now – celebrating ever more puja-s with ever more gusto, relying more and more on once-supposedly obsolete and silly myths and superstitions and talismans, going more on pilgrimages like tourists, abusing and growing more violent against those of other faiths: all this comes from being actively ir-religious, from being driven by those same deep evil instincts, fear, greed, envy, hatred, malice, the lust for recognition (power and status, however trivial and transient) that drive us (almost everyone from billionaire and dictator to the man in the street), forever insecure and discontented, in the material sphere of life. To be spiritual is to be inwardly directed, and simultaneously to live in a way that is the least burdensome on people and nature all around us. Where the outside world is concerned, we need to become nicer to others – more gentle, more honest, more considerate, more charitable, more friendly as far as possible – that is something we need today far more than law and technology to make the outside world a better place to live in. John Lennon sang a very anti-religious song titled Imagine many years ago. Imagine how wonderful the world would be if most people behaved with one another as I have described above. And the really bad thing is that there are still lots of good but sad and lonely people around, of all ages, but they never get a fair chance to live a good life only because they are being constantly cheated, humiliated, shoved around and left behind by the bad lot. But I insist that even dealing better with the outside world first calls for changing ourselves inside.

Before going any further, a disclaimer. I do NOT consider myself a very spiritually evolved person (certainly not yet) as compared to the true Great Masters down the ages, from the Buddha to Sri Ramakrishna. And yet, I do believe that if most people realized at least the very little I have realized in this lifetime and put that realization into practice, they would certainly be less unhappy, and the world would certainly be a much better place to live in – if not heaven on earth. But to give a better shape to what I understand by a spiritual life, let me break this essay up at this point and beg the reader to wait for part two. It goes without saying that intelligent comments, even in the form of earnest questions, would make it easier for me to write it.

Thoughts on life and peace of mind

I discovered this little gem of advice decades ago in an almirah in Father Gilson's library (I shall never call it by any other name), in the days when I was in charge. The words are not mine, and I don't know whose they are. Doesn't matter: it is the words which are valuable, not the source. They have helped me greatly to navigate through life. I post it here in the hope that they would be of similar use to a few others. Needless to say, comments and queries of a thoughtful nature would be welcome.

I am happy to see that the post titled The worship of the wealthy, written back in 2007, has come back into the most-read list after ages. Based on something written in 1915, it is more relevant than ever in 2024. 

A special thanks to Swarnavo Sinha for his recent comment on my last blogpost, because it has set me wondering, and I am waiting for some clarification.

I recently finished watching the entire  Young Sheldon series on Amazon Prime, and I can declare that I enjoyed it far more than The Big Bang Theory, which is, after all, not much more than slapstick for the most part.

A woman for men!

Thanks to my daughter, I have discovered Ms. Nandini Bhattacharya on the internet - a woman in today's world, today's India, who, without denying that many women are still harassed, oppressed and exploited, speaks up stridently (and factually) for men! I didn't dream of finding someone like that in my lifetime. Here is one of her interviews. As she herself often says, lots of so-called feminists hate her, but she gets a lot of support from people too, and not only from men. More power to her elbow. I shall not comment here, but I wish more and more people would not only take note of her, listen to her, be persuaded by her but help her cause. If some men fought long and hard for women's well-deserved and long-denied rights (to wit Rammohun Roy and Vidyasagar), maybe it was high time that some women started defending (decent) men, especially since some men have been undeservingly getting a lot of bad press and worse for too long now. 

P.S.: Those of my readers who don't understand Bengali well, please do still try to listen to her with attention.

Worry... but don't worry too much!

I was deeply interested in, and enthusiastic about, science and technology in my high school and college days. I have observed that the older I grow, the more tired and bored I become about them. 

Oh, there are older people than me who are constantly 'excited' about the constant march of technology - Tim Cook and Bill Gates prominently among them - but that is very easy to understand: they expect, with very good reason, to  benefit greatly, materially from it in the short and medium run. I would probably have pretended to have been the same in their place (and privately admitted that I hated it, as Michael Jackson is alleged to have hated pop music!) Millions of others pretend to do the same, simply because they believe they have no other way to make a living. In the context of my present ruminations, they don't count. What I think about the constant 'progress' of technology I have written in passing in numerous posts, most notably in Technology in a demented age. Read it, slowly and thoughtfully.

It irks and upsets me no end when I read teenagers, asked to describe the world they imagine twenty years from now, writing almost exclusively about how much more spectacular progress technology will have made by then. Then I forgive, telling myself 'They have no idea of anything better, anything greater, anything more desirable. Neither do their parents and teachers, so why blame them?'

I, on the other hand, dream more and more of a world where people would be nicer, kinder, more considerate towards one another, and at the same time (one cannot happen without the other) less materialistic, less grasping, less selfish, less full of insecurity and fear and jealousy and greed and fascination with novelty for novelty's sake. There is no other way to make a better world - of that I am now convinced beyond persuasion. Without that, ever growing wealth and ever advancing technology is bound to make an ever ghastlier, less liveable world. God knows I have known and heard and even met a lot of clever men ... it is for good men that, like old Diogenes, I have been looking for all my life. I am lucky indeed that I have actually met a few.We too easily forget.

In connection with the last three comments on my last post... Subhanjan was saying wistfully how nice it would have been if all my writing could be digitally preserved for wide circulation. I smiled to myself. Most of it is digitally preserved anyway, on this blog, isn't it? And it has already seen nearly a million page views while I am still alive! As for wide dissemination, I don't really care. It's not how many people read, but how much they understand, and appreciate, and remember, and apply in their own lives. Besides, who says you need digital technology for wide dissemination? There was a carpenter's son two thousand years ago who spoke to a mere handful of mostly illiterate peasants and shepherds about making a better world. One or two remembered, and wrote some of his words down. Few other men have had a deeper, wider, greater impact on humankind, and few, once touched, have been able to forget. That's 'influencer' for you.

Tanmoy was feeling sad about pompous, overbearing know-it-alls. Remember, Tanmoy, it has been well said that silence is golden, not chatter. 'Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexatious to the spirit'. And all our wise men down the ages have insisted on 'satsang' - the company of decent folks - as second best only to nihsang ... learning to be quietly, contentedly alone with oneself. 

As for the young man who asked about the future of language in the age of artificial intelligence, I shall reserve comment, beyond pointing out that artificial intelligence is a gross misnomer: there is no 'intelligence' about a computer program that merely bulldozes at eye-watering speed through millions of pages written by human beings, picks up a few phrases here, a few lines there, a memorable paragraph or two, and patches them together into something apparently new and meaningful but actually no better than a very sophisticated version of mindless cut and paste. I don't know about language, but that is anything but literature. No AI will ever write a decent book, because - and every real reader knows this - a book can be born only from deeply felt human experience, and/or deeply visualized human imagination, which only other humans can truly appreciate. 

Voters in prams?

I read something preposterous (and I am not in the habit of using such strong words casually) in my newspaper yesterday - some 'scholar' has suggested that the voting age should be reduced to six, and some journalist has found it worthwhile to write about it. Now mine is, I know, just a voice crying in the wilderness, but let it go on record that I was one of the vast, silent majority (I am sure) who were appalled by the idea. 

But before I explain why, let me remind every one of my present and would-be readers that I have never shared the currently prevalent parental attitude that children are babies, and ought to be babied, for as long as possible - at least till they are in the mid-twenties. I should also like to re-assert that I have always believed children can grow up and become mature much sooner than most of today's parents think, if only they are allowed to take responsibility early on, and learn from their (often painful-) mistakes, and that I know children in earlier times grew up much faster - some of the greatest men and women of yesteryears were far stronger, cleverer, wiser and bolder adults at 16 or 18 and fending for themselves, even ruling and teaching nations, before they were 18 - Adi Shankaracharya, Akbar the Great, Abigail Adams, Michael Faraday, Charles Dickens, Lincoln, Rani Lakshmibai, Vidyasagar, to name a very tiny few,  and there is also the quote from Sigmund Freud which is a fixture at the bottom of my blogpost; but I also believe that people can remain irresponsible imbeciles well into middle age if they are brought up badly, and the world around me has filled up with such people. When folks in their thirties and forties still behave like silly and spoilt children these days (I have written again and again about this), give children as young as six the right to vote?! Why not commit mass suicide right away?

Let me first talk about the children I have dealt with all my life - the 14 to 18 age group in middle and upper middle class, small-town India. If anything, the mollycoddling, and consequent infantilization, has consistently worsened over my working lifetime. Combine that with 'education' reduced to mere cramming for examinations, with an obsessive focus on the sciences and mathematics to the near-total neglect of and contempt for social studies (civics, history, economics, geography, sociology, psychology, literature and scripture), has brought up two successive generations of mind-numbed robots, fit only for low end technical and service jobs and a totally selfish, narrowly focused materialistic and asocial, spiritually directionless lifestyle, 'guided' first by parents as clueless as themselves and for the rest of their lives by superstition, advertisements and 'what others are doing', whether it is a question of whom to marry or buying a car. The children I have been handling over the last twenty years and more often cannot shut my gate when they enter, have to be told to flush after using the washroom, have never touched a book or a newspaper because all that is 'outside the syllabus', score pathetically on impromptu quizzes, cannot write even a halfway decent 350-word essay on any subject, casually use foul language and do not know of any brand of humour more sophisticated than the toilet kind ... I could go on forever. They are glued to their mobile phones, playing inane games or scrolling through idiotic social media posts when they are not yelling at cricketers on TV or gorging at feasts of one kind or the other. Their attention span can be measured in seconds, and their knowledge of the past rarely goes back to more than a decade, so everything from the world wars to the Mahabharata is prehistory, even Pele and Michael Jackson and Harry Potter are now old and 'uncool' (a college goer recently asked why they were making a fuss over a little bald old man wrapped in a bed sheet. The reference was to Gandhi). 

Of course every now and then I encounter a child far superior to the rest, in terms of intelligence, empathy, GK, power of coherent thinking and expression ... a tiny few even impress me. But these are truly exceptions (as the great men and women I listed above were), and a democracy does not work on the strength of rare exceptions, remember. It is the average wisdom of the voting masses, such as it is, that directs the destiny of the country. And as a very general rule, the younger they are, the stupider and less concerned they are about matters political - that has been my experience as a teacher all through. Unless they are given that sort of education right from very early childhood which makes for good citizens rather than (at best) efficient doctors and engineers. Which means not only will our curricula have to be revised almost beyond recognition but we have to bring up an entire new generation of children (along with their parents!) who are socially well-informed and strongly civic minded. And even then, bring the voting age down to six?! The author of the article says whether we bring it down to 6 or 13 is a mere detail. Obviously he has never actually handled children, especially in the mass, so he has no idea that an enormous change comes over a person between 6 and 13, and then again between 13 and 21, as every sane adult will agree (are there many such left any more, by the way? I wonder... especially since I read only this morning about someone who has done a PhD on the Sociological Impact of the Eyes of Amitabh Bachchan. I kid you not: Srijit Mukherjee has said this in a newspaper interview), and then again between 21 and 35, during which time most ordinary people at last realize what life is all about, and what kinds of limitations we must all live with, and what working for a living and taking responsibility for others means. 

While we were discussing this article, one old boy reminded me that when they were attending my classes, they once had a debate about what should be the lowest age for calling anybody an adult, and they finally agreed by vote that the minimum, under present conditions, should be 25. This they decided when they were themselves only 15, but (and I take considerable pride in claiming some credit for this) becoming increasingly aware of their shortcomings as social beings. Whereas this journalist says that denying primary or middle school children the vote is yet another 'patriarchal ploy' to maintain the status quo. Well, imagine six year-olds voting. By what criteria are they likely to choose their leaders? ... who has promised to abolish homework, or who has offered a lifelong free supply of lollipops?

And these infants, claims the scholar and the fawning journalist, are apparently far more informed and concerned about issues like climate change and human rights and the future of civilization than their older fellow citizens, so if they are allowed to vote, radical improvements will come about in the way we are governed and the way we live. Witness, they say, the apparently enormous change for the better brought about by Greta Thunberg. Well, I am sure the very young (meaning all those currently between 10 and 18) have either never heard of her or entirely forgotten her long ago: to today's children, ten years is a lifetime. And in any case, has Greta Thunberg effected the slightest change in the ways of the world? Honestly? Where Gandhi couldn't, after a long lifetime of titanic effort involving the participation of tens of millions of people (in the flesh, suffering, not as internet warriors relaxed on sofas in air conditioned bedrooms with Coke and popcorn at their elbows)? Are we burning less fossil fuels and throwing off less plastic and wasting less water than on the day when she started skipping school in order to 'change the world'? As Jesus could have told her - because he was not an infant - it isn't all that easy. 

God help us.