Goodbye and thank you, Gloria

Gloria Steinem passed away on September 02. I wanted to pay my respects to her. Tonight it’s too late for me to stay up much longer, but I shall post this much already. This is my way of reminding myself that the rest of what I wanted to say must be written soon. The rest of you who can’t tell her from Eve might Google her up before coming back here.

(September 09): I have always been deeply persuaded by the women’s liberation movement as long as they fought against all the ugliest and stupidest kinds of oppression and deprivation, and as long as they fought for real freedom, equality and justice, especially for the poorest and least educated among them. I have read, and read about, some of the great feminists, from the time of Sita and Draupadi through Mary Wollstonecraft and J.S. Mill to Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan, along with many contemporary Indian stalwarts, some of whom I have written about with admiration and respect, not to say awe, here. Gloria Steinem was among the truly great. She left us at 92, so she was at her fighting best long before today’s young adult feminists were born, and I deeply regret that so many of them neither know about the likes of her nor about how much of their now-taken-for-granted freedoms and privileges they owe to the bitter lifelong struggles of women such as  she. She was still writing about burning issues at 90: what energy, what conviction! Though she had a low opinion of marriage and never had children, she lived a full and vigorous life, and never hated or despised men: indeed, as my newspaper obituary (The Telegraph, Sept. 04, p. 2) says, ‘she led a glittering social life and enjoyed relationships with many high-voltage men’. Also, ‘even as she personified the women’s movement, (she) defied the stereotype of women’s libbers as sexless, humourless and dateless’.      

Some of my dearest grown up female ex-students have told me that feminism today has turned into something far less honest, a far more selfish, vicious, opportunistic thing; it is (to many) no longer about freedom, equality, friendship and cooperation between the sexes any more. I have seen something of this with my own eyes, in the lives of many people around me. To a great extent, a lot of ‘feminists’ today seem to be trying very hard to prove merely that they can be just as bad, and given a chance, just as oppressive, exploitative and unfair as the worst of men can be. Some of them are quite unaware about it, and many are in furious denial. Given a different role of the dice, I’d have loved to have had a chat with Gloria about what she thought about it in the last days of her life, and whether she was just a little bit disillusioned.

I didn’t write much in detail about her life and works, but if this post makes some readers curious, I shall urge them to read up at least the Wikipedia articles about her.

P.S.: My own views on women and their rights were written down in 1995: see this. Over the last thirty odd years, I have grown sadder and less hopeful, but those views remain substantially unchanged.

P.P.S., Sept. 15: I just found out that Ms. Steinem's last interview, titled Famous Last Words, recorded not long before her death, has just been released on Netflix. 

Sukumar Chandra: a great doctor

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

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

ক্লান্তি আমার ক্ষমা করো প্রভু। 

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

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

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

The Fifteen: book review

Thanks to Swarnava and Pupu, I am engrossed in and being edified by a recently published book titled The Fifteen, which offers short, well-researched biographical sketches of the fifteen extraordinary women who played highly significant roles in framing the Indian Constitution between 1946 and '49. Remember, they were only 15 in a Constituent Assembly of 299 members (ultimately only 11 of them remained, and 284 in total signed the final Document) - all the others were males. Moreover, six of these fifteen were Bengalis, and all were deeply influenced by Tagore and Gandhi. Says a lot about many things, doesn't it? In a desperately poor, mostly illiterate and superstitious, rigidly orthodox, ferociously patriarchal society torn apart by civil war and massive two-way migration, it was a miracle that fifteen such could at all be found, though: highly educated, intelligent, self-confident, self-assertive, idealistic and patriotic women who looked many generations into the future while imagining the India of their dreams and left their own indelible stamp on the new nation state on the basis of which so many others both female and male have been building, with varying degrees of success, over the last eight decades. While paying my deepest respects to these women, I frankly admit that their stories take my breath away, especially when I compare their characters and achievements with those of the three latest generations of women I have lived alongside: a huge number of whom have no idea and don't care two hoots about how much they owe to these fiery pioneers for the often lazy, wasteful, dissolute, entitled and pointless, if not utterly selfish and vicious lives they are allowed to live today.

Among these, I already knew something of the works of Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Sarojini Naidu (nee Chatterjee) and Vijay Lakshmi Pandit. It is a pity I knew hardly anything about Ammu Swaminathan, mother extraordinaire of Dr. Captain Lakshmi Sehgal of INA fame and sister of the redoubtable Mrinalini Sarabhai (as I become surer and surer with age, it's genes plus the first five years of upbringing that determine virtually everything, apart from who holds your hand in your youth!), or about Annie Mascarene, Begum Qudsia Rasul and Dakshayani Velayadhun (the only Christian, Muslim and Dalit woman members respectively), and too little about the likes of Renuka Ray and Sucheta Kripalani. I could wax eloquent and write reams in praise of each of these, ruing my unforgiveable ignorance of details for so long - but I choose here to write about one who has impressed me most: the following paragraphs should elucidate why.

All these women, by the way, were born to some kind of privilege: either they were born to rich and/or progressive parents, or married to highly supportive men, or they were high caste, or at least they had the benefit of a good education, which 99.9% of women in those days were denied. At the same time,  the point is that they worked to make better lives for the common woman and man, not just for themselves or their own little elite circles, and every one of them had to fight almost lifelong against all kinds of unfair obstacles and prejudices, often of the meanest sort which make me cringe in shame (like women cannot be doctors, poets or lawyers) yet they never soured up or gave up - I wish I myself could have remained so positive minded, so hopeful at my age. Anyway, as I was saying, my heroine of choice from this book happens to be Durgabai Deshmukh (1909-1981). What I find fascinating, nay, incredible, is that a girl born in those days, with all her social and familial handicaps, could know her mind so well even before she had outgrown childhood, rejecting her 'arranged' marriage at age eight (and persuading her in-laws' family at 15 that the marriage was impossible, so the man could and should marry someone else), setting up a girls' school at age 12, working for the the Congress party and refusing no less a personage than Jawaharlal Nehru himself at age 14 because he did not have a valid ticket for entry to an important meeting, and she had been tasked to refuse entry to all such arrivals (the modern 'advanced generation' child would not dream of dealing with even someone as trivial as her school headmistress that way, and recently two parents informed me that their girl children, of exactly the same age, cannot come to my class any more, because in the afternoons, they, the parents, would be at work, and such 'infants' cannot possibly dream of coming over on their own - though the fact remains that literally thousands like them have done so for close to four decades now!) My God, she even outstrips Abigail Adams and Rani Rashmoni, about whom I have written gushingly in this same blog long ago...

Still a child, she became a translator for Gandhiji whenever he visited the South. She quickly picked up some Tamil and a lot of Hindi, and actually became a Hindi teacher to hundreds (she was then all of 13). She learned English only in her early twenties. She refused all donations from tycoons of the stature of Jamnalal Bajaj except for books. She was jailed again and again, and actually asked to be housed with the lowest grade of prisoners, just to find out how badly they were treated. She graduated in political science, and then became a qualified lawyer at age 22. At 37, she was elected to the Constituent Assembly - if not the likes of her, then who? She argued forcefully on countless burning issues (read the book), and moved more than 750 amendments. Born into Telugu, coached excellently in Hindi, she fought for Hindusthani to be made the national language, considering the propagation of Hindi 'a serious obstacle to the growth of the provincial languages and a provincial culture', and that 'the narrative to turn Hindi above all other languages was embittering the feelings of the non-Hindi speaking people': Amit Shah, will you please note? She fought for Constitutional protection of the Fundamental Rights of citizens,  for lowering the age criterion for qualifying for a seat in the Rajya Sabha, arguing that being older doesn't necessarily mean wiser, and for a reformed Hindu Code Bill which would guarantee shares of daughters in their fathers' property. In the early days of free India, she served in very high and responsible positions in the Planning Commission and the Central Social Welfare Board, and also won numerous national and international awards, including the Padma Bibhushan. She prepared the first report of the National Education Policy for Women. Her marriage to C.D. Deshmukh, the first Indian Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, was a huge success. She died in his arms, as she had always longed to, and the loving and respectful tribute he paid to her in the book My Durgabai, is something that could be the dream of millions of smart, cool, modern-day women.

And this was just one of those fifteen stars. The rest I leave to the reader who buys and devours the book because I recommended it. I end with a sigh: why haven't I met such women in such a long and inquisitive life? I wish someone would write a book about 15 women who have worked wonders to improve India since 1947... and I shall still lament that I haven't had the good fortune to sit at the feet of any of them. Some females asked with reference to this blog many years ago about me... 'Does he respect only strong and determined and socially beneficent women'? Yes, guilty as accused. It's the same way I think about men, you see... all the rest, just making a living, raising families, thinking of nothing beyond the animal appetites of themselves and their families, I have always sneered at as polluters of the world... they eat, shit, breathe out carbon dioxide, preen over their cars, phones and kids' marks in school, grow old, sick, die and are quickly forgotten even by their own families within twenty years at most. What do they matter? And why should I 'respect' them... just because they look human? Since when did respect become so cheap?

[The Fifteen, by Angelica Aribam and Akash Satyawali, Hachette India 2024, pp. 310, Rs. 371 on Amazon]

Saibal Biswas

I mentioned Saibal in my January 2025 post titled Kanha, Paradise. I am proud to call Saibal my friend. That is not an expression I use lightly.

When he first came to see me, more than two decades ago (I am ashamed I cannot remember the exact year), he came as the representative of a multinational bank, on a business tour aimed at finding new customers upcountry. He was introduced by his junior, Sayan, who was a good friend of a then-beloved ex student, and had grown close to me. I was attracted by Saibal's manner of starting the conversation - so warm, so amiable, yet so professional. I was listening so closely to him, and he was behaving so much like a regular person, that it took me some time to notice that his right hand was missing. No one discussed or even mentioned the fact, and of course I am too reserved a person to put such questions to an almost-stranger.

Gradually our friendship deepened. There came a time when he came over again, to announce that he had quit his bank job and started up an investment company of his own, specializing in mutual funds (this was a time when MFs had just begun to catch the public attention), and I became, I think, one of his early clients. I remember him asking me 'Suvroda, do you want to get rich quick?' I was a little taken aback, then said smilingly that I had no such dream. He said, 'Good, then you will be the kind of customer I am looking for. If you can invest slowly but regularly, I promise to give you a good nest egg to retire comfortably on in two decades' time, give or take a few years'. And he seems to have kept his promise. Besides my own sustained hard work and saving habit, it is thanks to Saibal alone, outside my family that is, that I am today as safe financially as any middle class man in India can be.

His company has grown apace, just as have my savings. Last I checked, they have 7000 plus clients and are managing assets close to a thousand crore rupees (may that grow to 5000 in my lifetime!). Two decades are a long time, and lots of things, good and bad, happen to everybody within that kind of time span. I have been no exception. I have needed substantial sums of money urgently at least three times, and I have got literally perfect within-the-day service every time. Saibal's good friend and colleague Samrat has become the kind of 'relationship manager' that you can usually only dream of in this day and age. I only wonder how they can instantly and so satisfactorily respond to a relatively small-time client like me day in, day out, for years and years without fail. Talk about responsibility, efficiency and commitment...

Over the years, I got to know more and more about Saibal, in little bits and pieces at a time, and the more I learnt, the stronger my admiration for him became. He had had a decent urban educated middle class upbringing, albeit with the usual difficulties and disappointments. Then disaster struck. Shortly after he had settled down in that bank job and started courting a colleague, there was a freak road accident while he was travelling with some friends to a picnic spot in a bus, and his right hand was nearly severed. It was a miracle that he survived the journey back to a hospital in the city. The hand was amputated. 

There followed trauma, shock, deep, prolonged depression and disorientation. Then there came climbing back the long road to recovery and reconstruction of life. As he himself says, he had to re-learn everything from scratch, everything from how to write with his left hand to tying his shoelaces with a single hand. He freely acknowledges that for all his zest for life, his strength of mind, his fixity of purpose, that rehabilitation would have been very difficult if not impossible without the steadfast, patient, uncomplaining, deeply empathetic support of his gem of a wife (my pronaam, Kulbeer ma'am) and a few true friends and supportive, enthusiastic colleagues. Then came the worst part of the story: his job turned sour, not only because of the demands of profit-hungry, customer-indifferent bosses but because too many decision makers were hesitant about entrusting a 'handicapped' man with the kind of bigger responsibilities that he craved and knew he could handle. So, approaching his mid-thirties, he crossed the second giant challenge of his life: to quit his salaried job and plunge into the maelstrom of the business world. His team worked long and hard, intelligently and determinedly. The rest is history.

Now at long last Saibal has told his own story in a little book titled Hand of God: one hand, infinite dreams. For anyone teenaged or older, it is truly inspirational without the slightest exaggeration. As Saibal says (read the book), he has now made all the money he really needed, his son is doing very well and is the pride and joy of his life, he knows peace and rest. And yet, he is still crazy about wildlife and travelling and football, and is still running his business hands-on, though for him now money making is most firmly secondary to the satisfaction that comes from knowing that he has earned the trust of so many customers, and he is, as we speak, being of enormous help to many of them in their hour of need, whether they need money or sympathy or expert advice. He also has some ambition to join politics, because he believes we need activists in the ring, so to speak, who want to work hard in order to make life in India much more congenial for people with disabilities than he has found it to be for most of his working life. I wish him Godspeed, and though my remaining aims in life are far more private and humble, so that I could never be someone like him, I have no hesitation is declaring that he ranks very high among my living heroes. Thank you for having become so much more than my money manager, Saibal.

P.S.: Saibal also speaks on TV (I last heard him on CNBC) and writes financial advisory columns for newspapers like ABP. He has always been telling me 'Dada, it is not how much you invest but how long and how regularly you do so that matters more, so tell your grown up students to start young; put them in touch with me'. You can contact him at his company website.

Gandhi

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was assassinated on this day in 1948.

He was much reviled and  criticised in his own time, but also, of course, revered all over India and the world as very few people have ever been. Then he was nearly forgotten, except for all sorts of tokenism, such as this day being declared Martyr's Day, he being nicknamed Father of the Nation, his face adorning all currency notes, and liquor sales being banned countrywide on his birthday. Lage Raho Munnabhai said it all. 

About forty years after the assassination, I reviewed Professor Amlan Dutta's book, The Gandhian Way, for The Telegraph of Calcutta. I remember writing 'lo, the tide of times has brought him back in fashion!'

Three and a half decades more have passed since that review. On the threshold of old age, I can see that today Gandhi is being remembered more to be abused and ridiculed than otherwise, and some people are trying to elevate his assassin to the status of a different kind of national hero.

I have thought about Gandhi all my life, and I shall write a longish essay here putting down some of the things I have thought. Keep coming back.

A few thought-starters...

Most of the people who revile Gandhi in the crudest terms these days have one thing in common: they have not read a single book by him or about him written by any literate, informed and civilized author. Their 'opinions', such as they are, are drawn straight from social media, supplied by others as stupid, ignorant and bigoted (or driven by vested interests) as they themselves are. My way of dealing with them: ignore, in toto. In many situations, silence is golden.

It is little known that this apostle of non-violence categorically said that if he were given a choice between a violent man and a coward, he would choose the first without second thought, because the violent man has potential for self-improvement, civilizationally speaking, but the coward does not. And on this, he and his bete noire Winston Churchill were completely agreed: courage is the mother of all virtues. As for his own courage, it is again little known that he was awarded a medal for extraordinary bravery when serving as an ambulance driver during the Boer War, while Hitler, that supreme preacher of 'macho' violence, ran away when the police fired upon a procession that he was leading before he came to power. And he faced down blood-crazed mobs unarmed and virtually alone in his last days.

He was already a very famous man respected and admired by many for his peaceful, and to a great extent successful, struggle for the rights of coloured people in South Africa, before he returned to India and plunged into her politics in 1915.

He was the kind of man that the rulers of the greatest empire in history deferred to whenever he declared that he would stop eating if some serious political demand of his were not met, so great was the public upheaval they feared in case he died. This in a country where the vast majority lived on the brink of starvation and famine almost all the time. I have wondered all my life how he did it: and that too in a world without the internet and twitter!

He was an ardent environmentalist long before Rachel Carson wrote her seminal book, and a votary of 'sustainable development' long before that became a fancy catchword. Now the wise and rich and fashionable are taking to bicycles again, drinking tea from designer earthen cups, wearing handloom fabrics, eating all kinds of 'organic' food and learning to renew, recycle and re-use.

He was a grassroots fighter for better public hygiene and dissolution of caste barriers who did much more than most armchair revolutionaries fighting for those same things ever did in their lives. Those who are curious should read about these things.

He tried very hard to find a via media between the two rampant and intensely hostile ideologies of his day, capitalism and communism, because he knew that neither could benefit the mass of mankind in the long run in any comprehensive way, both being fundamentally and inevitably destructive, driven as they were by greed, fear, jealousy and hate. That he did not succeed was not his failure, just as it was not Christ's - it simply means that mankind is not ready to realize their dreams.

He was a man who could draw and retain the deepest reverence of the most diverse of men, such as Sardar Patel and Rajagopalachari, Tagore and Subhas Bose. Englishmen like Elmhirst and Andrews worshipped him. Mountbatten said he felt like an errant schoolboy before an irate headmaster in his presence. Albert Einstein said of him that generations to come would scarce believe that such a one as he ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth; on hearing of his death Bernard Shaw remarked that the assassination proved that in this world it is still 'too dangerous to be too good'. Charlie Chaplin, who in his autobiography claimed that Gandhi had left him unmoved, was nevertheless deeply enough impressed to make a movie as scathing about industrial capitalism as Modern Times: if that is not Gandhian in spirit through and through, I don't know what is. Nehru in his first Independence Day speech referred to him as 'the greatest man of our generation', and at his death mourned, 'the light has gone out of our lives'. And - to my mind an indispensable part of the character of a truly great man - he had an exquisite sense of humour, often directed against himself. So he excused his lack of 'sufficient' clothing when he was meeting the King-Emperor in London with the quip, 'The King was wearing enough for both of us'; so he said, when someone praised him as a saint, 'If you knew how hard it is to be a saint, you would pity me, not envy me'; so he called his bullock cart his 'Ox-ford', and it was he who uttered what I regard as the single most devastating put-down in history - when asked what he thought about western civilization, he shot back 'That would be a good idea'!

He was a man who insisted lifelong that he was a devout Hindu, yet he did more than any other nationally-prominent Hindu to accommodate Muslims in peace and friendship; he was a devotee of Christ, and he was quite clear that in matters of faith, he would be guided by his own reason and conscience rather than any hoary creed. He sang the Ram Dhun modified in his own idiosyncratic way, and dreamt of re-establishing Ram Rajya. That was of course a pipe dream like any such other, and many of us could not live with many of his tenets, but look at what kind of Ram Rajya many people are hell-bent on establishing today, and compare with his ideas, and decide for yourself.

I must also hasten to point out that, though he was oft reviled as a prime representative of 'eastern orthodoxy', in his love of individualism and personal moral responsibility, in his insistence on the need of the aesthetic and spiritual in human life, in his passionate attachment to the need for democratic local self-government as opposed to centralized power and so on, he was inspired much more by western idealists, to wit philosopher/author/reformers like Tolstoy, Ruskin and Thoreau, as well as the American model of federal government, than most people know these days.

I was reading up on Dr. Bindheshwar Pathak, the founder of the Sulabh Shouchalaya movement who lived in the post-Gandhian era but was profoundly inspired by Gandhi, and died only last year. He is the kind of man, like Kailash Satyarthi, that we the educated elite of India hate to know about and would like to pretend didn't exist, because with their life's work they, like Gandhi, showed up our abiding shames to the world, such as that until very lately millions of 'inferior' people traditionally cleared human wastes for their superiors in this 'great' country, and tens of millions of children were bonded to, and ruined by, the practice of child labour so that we could live in cheap comfort as a matter of 'entitlement'. We never mention these people to our children as inspiring success stories, as distinct from cricketers, movie stars and billionaire businessmen.

I also wonder about how much we have changed, diminished as a thinking species since his time. It seems, judging by both the social media 'debates' and most of the commentaries on the regular mass media, that we cannot make layered, nuanced, balanced, well-informed judgments about 'great' people any more. To mention just one example, most people nowadays, even 'educated' ones, cannot understand how Gandhi and Tagore could have so deeply respected each other despite having so many, so very marked differences. We simply want every judgment to be a clear case of black and white, 'good' and 'bad', as if we are living in a fairy tale for children; we cannot begin to imagine that the greater the man, the more complicated, even contradictory he is likely to be, and our judgment of him must be calibrated, finessed accordingly. So it is entirely possible for me to be profoundly respectful and full of awe about Gandhi while at the same time sadly shaking my head at (what I think to be -) his many eccentricities, follies and mistakes. But abuse him, never, for at least three good reasons: the sun doesn't care if a billion candles abuse him; the man did and attempted to do enough good things to make for ten thousand 'successful' lives on the scale of ordinary human beings, and abuse merely shows me up as a vulgar and ignorant idiot.

So the last thought for now, unless there are comments which stimulate further thinking: I wonder how Gandhi would have dealt with India today?

Gandhi Jayanti

It is Gandhi Jayanti today.

As always, some scholarly and thoughtful people have been discussing his importance, his relevance, his wisdom or otherwise in the media. I thought I might scribble a few lines myself.

There are some problems with discussing such men these days – even with supposedly educated people, especially if they are below forty. First, many of them believe that nobody should be called a ‘great’ man: great men do not exist. It goes without saying that I believe them to be, in the Dalai Lama’s favourite word, ‘foolish’. Secondly, however stupid this might sound, many actually believe that a man cannot be great unless he is rich: so Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are great men (to be forgotten within a decade, of course), but it would take ‘boring’ explanation to justify the same tag about, say, Newton or Mozart or Lincoln or Tagore. Third, you do not have to know anything to have strong opinions about any man. And finally, that people, including great men, come in clear black and white – so one was either a genius or an idiot, either a ‘good’ man or ‘bad’, did only harm or only good. This monumental imbecility, this inability to form nuanced opinions based carefully on a great deal of (often contradictory-) facts and reasoning which was once associated with children in primary school is now so common even among post-graduates that I often hesitate to take the trouble to put my own thoughts in writing: why  bother? Still…

To remind my readers, it was a man of the stature of Tagore who titled Gandhi ‘Mahatma’, Subhas Bose first called him ‘Father of the Nation’, Einstein said future generations will scarce believe that such a man really existed, Bernard Shaw said his assassination confirmed the belief that in this world it is always too dangerous to be too good. How deeply Charlie Chaplin was affected by Gandhi’s views on industrial civilization is unforgettably portrayed in his movie Modern Times. Yet – and to my mind most remarkably – none of these men, themselves geniuses of the highest order, blindly hero-worshipped him. Indeed they openly, publicly, sharply disagreed with many of his ideas, sometimes even going so far as to rebuke him or regret his intransigence. Only, in the gentlest, most respectful language, because, being great themselves, they knew deep within that they were talking about, or to, a very, very great man.

Well, that, in a nutshell, is my own position. A very great man, yet, alas, deeply flawed in ways that affected all of south Asia, maybe even the whole world. I believe I know too little about him, but what I definitely know would still fill a small book: I am not going to attempt that here. However, let me mention a few things at least.

I regard him with awe for the way he personified his own ideal of the life of plain living, high thinking and intense, unrelenting activity. I admire his views on environmental guardianship, which were two or three generations ahead of his time. I still wonder at his incredible charisma and organizational ability that long before the age of the internet, and without guns and goons and mind-numbing propaganda, in a land where the vast majority could not read newspapers, he could make the largest ever mass political movements in human history happen, which inspired so many other leaders in so many other countries. I almost worship his ability to go it alone whenever he found too few followers to rally around. I could go on, but interested readers should at least reflect on these few things.

I have remained very ambivalent about many things he did or said, including his attempts to find a perfectly non-coercive marriage between the best of capitalism and socialism, and his prescriptions for ideal womanhood, for instance, which sound too stultifying and demeaning to me, yet at the same time encouraging women to become ‘modern’ in many senses of the word, from getting an education to taking active part in politics. Again, I could lengthen the list considerably.

I believe some of his views had truly tragic consequences on a vast scale. I shall mention only two here: not throwing his whole weight behind Subhas Bose when it could have made a huge difference to undivided India, and refusing to believe that there was anything like a problem of overpopulation.

Let there be a renewed debate. And I shall urge everyone I know to read Nathuram Godse’s Why I killed Gandhi, just as I urge every history-minded person to read Mein Kampf. Only, let them read much, much more, and ask many more questions, before they start forming and airing their ‘opinions’. Right now, most people below forty know, like Munnabhai, only that Gandhi’s is the face we see on all our currency notes, and we are not allowed to sell or buy liquor on his birthday.  Of late, I have even been hearing that Gandhi – of all people! – was responsible for the partition of India. That is the situation that needs to change.

Jai Hind. Fears and tributes

I am a patriot, but alas, I never learnt to be a nationalist. 

You can look up what I have always thought of and prayed for India in earlier blogposts, such as My India, My mother is sixty and Free India is sixty five today.

This Independence Day, maybe simply because I am older and much more weary, I stay gloomily, apprehensively quiet.

To turn to more cheerful things, look up this new documentary on one of my lifetime heroes, James Herriot. I shall be delighted if that leads some readers to pick up one or two of his wonderful books...  

Rest in peace, doctor

Our family doctor, Paramananda Bhattacharjee, passed away a few days ago. He was about 74, had been undergoing treatment for cancer for years, and had been very depressed and fearful throughout the Covid scare. He had not been attending his chamber for a long time, and we had slowly fallen out of touch, though I had tried to keep track of how he was doing. Alas, none in his family bothered to let me know so that I could say a last goodbye in time, though they live virtually next door, and I am sure they all knew how much he meant to me…

He and our family went back more than forty years, since before he got married, and now his two sons are grown up. We and he owed too many mutual favours to count. I shall always remain grateful for everything he did for me. Though he was an excellent physician – I have always held that his power of diagnosis was near miraculous – he was more like a wise and respected elder brother to me than a doctor. When I say his death leaves behind a vacuum which will be hard to fill, I am not mouthing an empty platitude. May his soul hear me, and rest in peace. It is hard that I had to hear of his passing from casual neighbourhood chatter, and it will hurt for all the years I live.

Thank you, Sir

Mr. A. R. Parameswaran, revered mathematics teacher to three generations, including mine at St. Xavier’s Durgapur, passed away on the 26th of December. He must have been close to ninety.

He was one of those teachers to whom I personally owe a lifelong debt. I was his pupil in class 5, all the way back in 1974. From him I learnt how a stern disciplinarian of the old school can also be great fun. I am sure some of the best attributes I have acquired, used and benefited from as a teacher I learnt from him. He cured me forever, with a single tongue-lashing, of the bad habit of misspelling common words, and it was thanks to him that I can still, at my age, do mental arithmetic much faster than most smart kids I deal with. He had a mild heart attack and quit the school job early. His older son, Ramchandra, was one of my gang of close friends in school and junior college (what they call plus-two), and we stayed in touch off and on through the decades. Sir settled down with Madam in his house half a kilometer from mine, and happily continued to coach hordes of young pupils in his idiosyncratic style.

Ages later, when he was an old man and my daughter went up to class five, I sent her to his tuition – this despite my being strongly against sending children to tutors as a rule, and despite my very low opinion of most tutors I know. I was not mistaken. Sir took her under his wing, and she spent four very happy years with him; though she never grew to like math, he managed to cure her fear of it. He had been an instructor in the Air Force once upon a time, and often and again he urged her to become a doctor and join the military: we are sorry that we couldn’t make him happy that way. It was he, too, who told her about why he smeared his forehead with ash every day; he, too, was probably one of those who gave her an abiding love of dogs. 

My daughter outgrew her nest and flew away, but Sir and I remained in touch off and on. He was an incredibly proud, self-reliant and active man far into his old age. He toyed with the idea of going back to his home state Kerala, but eventually decided against it. I was saddened to hear that Madam was becoming increasingly bedridden, and that there was nothing I could do to help. Also, that Sir had finally given up tutoring and wasn’t too happy about it. I shall remember that lesson long after I have stopped needing to teach for a living, in case I survive that long.

On Sunday the 22nd December I met ’Chandra on the street. He had flown over in a hurry from the US upon hearing that Sir was in critical care, following almost total kidney failure. It was good to see, however, that Madam was up and about, and taking things stoically. It was while I was away in Delhi that an ex student rang me up to tell me that Sir was no more, and this evening ’Chandra called me with an invitation to the sraddh ceremony.

I do not, of course, attend such things as a matter of principle, but, Sir, my thoughts will be with you. Thank you for everything, and may your soul rest in peace. They don’t make teachers like you any more. Maybe they don’t even want such teachers any more. But some of us will remain eternally thankful and grateful.

Mid-December notes

Glad to see that Tales from bygone days has been visited by a lot of people, probably because I provided a link in a recent post. There is a part two, too, you know. And talking of old posts, you might look up Moral Science, which was a subject we were discussing in class recently again. I am always surprised to see how old these posts have become, and how absolutely topical they have still remained!

This is playing out as one of the strangest winters in living memory. It’s December 14 today, yet the maximum temperature is showing no signs of dropping below 25 Celsius, nor the minimum below 14-15. Which means it’s comfortable enough, but far from a respectable winter. The sky is cloudy almost every day, but without any precipitation, so I almost feel jealous to hear that it has rained heavily in Delhi, while Kashmir is all snowbound.

Another year is now drawing swiftly to a close. These days whole years seem to pass in the twinkling of an eye. I am coasting towards (voluntary-) retirement, and the only thing that excites me about the future is the prospect of grandchildren.

I am also more than a little curious about how this state will gear up for the forthcoming Assembly elections over the next year. More and more the biggest question that looms over India is whether the democratic dispensation laid down by our Constitution makers will survive the increasingly frequent, violent and reckless assaults on it. Given that our entire body politic, including the ‘educated’ class, has become so uninterested in laws and rules, in decision making through informed and rational debate, in ideals like moderation, patience and decency, I have, I believe, grave cause for disquiet. The best I can console myself with is that I have spent the largest part of my adult, active, participative life already, and henceforth I shall withdraw more and more into the role of a passive observer, avoiding trouble as far as I can. A man can fight only so many battles in one lifetime.

It has occurred to me that at least a few people read my blog only to stoke their own fires of jealousy and impotent hatred, God knows why. I shall not do them the undeserved honour of taking cognizance of their individual identities, leave alone the ‘opinions’ they harbour in their sick little brains: my only advice to them is, stop visiting! You get one chance to be stupidly, ignorantly, pointlessly abusive anyway – then you are blocked off for good. I write here only for my own pleasure, and perchance for a few who enjoy what I write. The rest don’t count, nor ever will.

A boy who became an ex-student only a year ago and keeps dropping in was complaining this very evening how very disgusted he feels to hear his friends and slightly-seniors using abusive language constantly, compulsively, unthinkingly, regardless of company. There may still be, I reflected, some cause for hope. I wish our prime minister, while lecturing the country on why it is essential and important to be clean, thought it fit to insist that to be clean in the language one uses is an integral part of overall cleanliness…

I am reading Madam Justice Leila Seth’s autobiography, On Balance. I like to read about strong characters among women who were also big achievers without being rabid feminists, and Ms. Seth, who was not only India’s first woman Chief Justice of a High Court but a very successful mother who brought up three brilliant children, including writer Vikram, fits that bill eminently. I am barely halfway through the book, and I may write about it in detail afterwards, but right now I’d like to note I was bemused to learn about how she happened to name her second son, because it brought back memories of how we named our daughter. Did I tell you that story?

My publisher informs me that all through the year, To My Daughter has been selling slowly, but steadily. Reason for good cheer! All those who write long and earnest questions to me via email, I urge them strongly, buy that book and read it. You will find many of your questions answered, and in any case I can’t keep repeating myself for every newcomer who has become interested in me and my writing lately. That is one of the main reasons why I wrote that book sixteen years ago.

Another eight days, and my work will be over for this year. Yay!

P.S., Dec. 18: The Met. department got it absolutely right this time. As predicted, the sky is clear and blue today, the sun is mild, the wind is cold, and the water feels frozen. Winter, at last, is here.   

Abhijit Banerjee honoured

I read in today's newspaper that Dr. Abhijit Banerjee, professor of Economics at MIT, ex-Presidency College, JNU and Harvard, has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. 

Those who are curious might want to look up my review of his seminal book on this blog, written two years ago.

I smiled quietly to myself, recalling that nearly a decade and a half before Professor Md. Yunus won the Nobel, I had told my pupils about his prospects too, when few people in India - leave alone this town I live in - had even heard about him.

P.S., October 20: I was intrigued to learn from Banerjee's interview to my newspaper today that during the Eisenhower era in the USA marginal income taxes were as high (on the super-rich, that is)  as 95%, a time when America and indeed all western nations were nevertheless growing very fast, mind you, and even under Nixon's conservative administration, 70%. Dr. Banerjee was laughing cynically that somehow the populace at large, rich and poor alike, seems to have forgotten this historical fact, and convinced themselves that marginal tax rates above 40% are sure to spell disaster for any economy! Something I didn't know, and something which very strongly bolsters my arguments on behalf of socialism, though Abhijit underscores the fact that no communist made those laws in the US! At the same time, I strongly agree with Dr. Banerjee that a new-era socialism must focus strongly on pragmatic, efficiently-achievable goals rather than any kind of woolly idealism, which invariably breeds both incompetence and tyranny.

Madam Sheila Dikshit, RIP

One of India's strongest women for decades yet quiet and self-effacing, Ms. Dikshit, three times CM of Delhi (who should have returned to the seat once more), has just passed away. She was exactly my father's age. Here is the obituary that India Today has posted.

She showed that you can be traditional yet very modern and progressive. She showed that you can be a firm go-getter with a suave touch. I don't think she ever had much truck with firebrand feminists, yet she proved that a woman of mettle can make her way in a man's world: it's only the good for nothings with huge senses of unearned entitlement who whine and rant. She showed that even in India, a land of ingrates and inveterate fault-finders with very short memories, some few people can leave marks that everyone salutes, friend and foe alike. She deserved the PM's chair far more than lots of others who have sat on it or aspired to it.

I admired and respected her. India needs far more like her, in every field, but politics most of all. I cannot pay a greater tribute than saying publicly that among contemporary Indians, I have put her on my list of ideals for my daughter for a very long time...

Sardarji singing shyamasangeet

Gurujit/Gurjit Singh from Durgapur has become a music sensation on the Zee Bangla Saregama TV show. I have just been listening, alongwith my mother, to his rendition of Ramprosad's famous song

মন রে কৃষিকাজ জাননা ,

এমন মানবজমিন রইলো পতিত 

আবাদ করলে ফলতো সোনা। ...

Wonderful. Here you can listen to him singing another very well-known shyamasangeet number, 

আমার সাধ না মিটিল আশা না পুরিলো 

সকলি ফুরায়ে যায় মা।  

Young Gurujit apparently lives somewhere close by. I hope to meet him someday. It is people like him who keep me abidingly in love with India, despite all the horror, ugliness, vulgarity and triviality that I have seen.

I wonder whether they think deeply about the lyrics as they sing?

Readers interested in my taste in this matter are welcome to look up an old post titled Ah, music!

Debts, and food for wonder

I often think of the people who do a lot for me – for a price, yet they have become reliable long-time friends. Maybe they are the only ones who will actually miss me when I am gone.

There is our family doctor. I have known him for nearly four decades now. Suffice it to say that our debt to him cannot be repaid, though we have tried very hard, and I seriously fear the day when he will no longer be around. Doctors I have known aplenty, but I know no one who can ever fill his shoes for us.

Manikda, the doctor’s compounder, is someone much more than that for us, and his friend Shibu, the man who goes around collecting blood samples from door to door when tests are in order. There’s Mayadi who has been cooking for me for years, and Parvati, the slightly retarded young woman who has been cleaning the house for a long time, too. There is Sanjeeb the mishtiwallah, a good friend to chat with whenever his busy schedule allows him a few minutes of breathing time, and who was one of the first to cheer me unstintedly when I gave up my last salaried job – ‘Suvroda, you will be much better off now, you’ll see!’ There is Tapas, who takes care of all my needs that in any way connect to computers, and still goes around on a decrepit bicycle, though I know a thousand morons not worth his shoelaces who ride snazzy bikes at half his age. There is Firoz, the first driver who is likely to become a friend too, though I still don’t know him as well as I’d like to, reticent man that he is. There’s Mrinalda, who has been filing my income tax returns for a quarter century now, and Saibal, who kindly manages my investment portfolio though I am really too small fry for him to bother.

Ram Asan Singh the newspaperman has been a fixture for a long time now, and Baikuntho, who started off as a plumber and has become a man-for-all-seasons general contractor, someone I call up whether I want a new water heater or the wc flush is not working or the house needs to be repainted. Arvind the grocer is someone who is always there for me, and Indrajit who runs the cigarette-and-coffee stall. There are my favourite greengrocers and fishmongers and barbers. Not to forget Bhola, who has been binding my books and doing my photocopies and sundry other chores for more than twenty years now. With each of these I have a story to tell…

Funnily also, some such people who have enjoyed my custom have never become friends, or dropped off after a while, sometimes after decades of knowing me. I shall never figure out why, but I have not tried to find out. No point in naming them.

Then there are so many people who come to my door, either to ask for charity or to sell odds and ends – like brooms and boxes of incense sticks – who always make me wonder: why do they stick to it? Does it ensure a halfway decent living? Not all of them look hungry and desperate, either. Someday I really must sit down with them and ask them to tell me more about their lives. If so many people can make do with so little, materially speaking, why does this disease of running endlessly after more money afflict so many others?

There, I have said it at age 53 – it’s a disease. And the fact that, like tapeworm or snoring or obesity, it affects a very large fraction of the human population does not make it one bit less so. It’s a very bad world which passes off encouragement to such diseased people as ‘development’ and ‘progress’. Some day, when we are all much more civilized and sensible, we might think of progress in terms of making life easier for good, nice, hardworking people who are not greedy pigs and have real, harmless interests to pursue: interests which are not constantly manufactured by the advertizing industry.

The turning of the year

2016 was a year of deaths in my family. I lost three seniors, one of them very very dear to me.

Like most other recent years, this one was full of sound and fury, signifying very little (iPhone 7 launched!!!). One of the most important developments – for those who are educated and care for both science and nature – happened very quietly at the very end of the year: China has officially declared that it is going to ban the ivory trade in 2017.

The most interesting thing I have learnt about Donald Trump so far is that he does not use email. This is all of a piece with several related items of data I have gleaned and remembered over the years: a) that Mother Teresa built up a great organisation and ran a very tight ship till her last breath without a computer, b) that Oprah Winfrey bought a PC only after she was a multi-billionaire, c) that Bill Gates keeps all his most sensitive documents in hardcopy, d) that following the snooping-over-the-Net scandal, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has ordered all the most sensitive government papers to be manually typewritten, e) that employees in France have just won a 'right to disconnect', f) that Raymond Reddington of The Blacklist fame is, like Trump, a smug dinosaur who has lived through the so-called communication revolution with huge success, without having an email, Skype, Facebook, Whatsapp or Twitter account. Considering the size of my internet footprint, I am already ashamed, and I shall want my daughter to keep this in mind while negotiating the brave new world. It makes me glad that she is very wary of the PayTM kind of stuff, and tells me she doesn’t miss it one bit.

The year ended blissfully in my daughter’s company, finishing off the Star Wars saga among other things. I have been privileged to read a lot of good books and watch some good movies recently. Sherlock Holmes season 4 episode 1 was a shocker, though I had become rather bored with the series earlier. Now I must carry on and find out how Holmes/Cumberbatch ‘saves John Watson’, as per Mary’s last wish. And what on earth are the two of them going to do with little Rosamund? Julian Rathbone’s sequel to A Very English Agent, called Birth of a Nation, was a rollicking good yarn: I am eagerly awaiting the third book in the series. Charlie/Eddie Bosham has become one of my great favourites among literary characters now.

A very moving book I read recently was The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony, and once more I must admit I am ashamed that I did not know of a conservationist of his stature till now. Do read up on him and his beloved elephants on the Net; you will find a wealth of interesting information, including the amazing (yes, I meant that word) story of how they came to mourn for him at the Reserve Lodge after he died, tragically, at age 61 of a heart attack. The anecdote about how his beloved bull Mnumzane had to be put down when he needn’t have moved me to tears, and these days that takes some doing. Anthony would have been delighted to hear about the news from China.

Reading Anthony brought back to mind an old and dear love: Gerald Durrell. Much as I now admire Anthony, who wrote ‘To me the only good cage is an empty cage’, I agree, for I believe very good reasons, with Gerry, that without zoos most animals would soon become extinct: therefore zoos must stay, only they must be far better built and managed, as he showed us how. It drove me to look up the website of the love of Gerry’s life, the Jersey Wildlife Trust that he set up, and that is now (fittingly) named Durrell Wildlife Park. I also read up about his (second-) wife, the scientist Lee Wilson, who married Gerry specifically because he had a zoo of his own, and now runs it in his loving memory – as Francoise runs Lawrence’s dream come true, The Thula Thula Wildlife Reserve in South Africa. It is heartbreaking indeed to learn that few youngsters these days read as wonderful a classic as My Family and other Animals, and that the Trust is once again having money problems. I don’t feel charitable about too many things these days, but if I had pots of money I know where much of that would have gone…

Jayalalithaa, adieu

Puratchi Thalaivi, Amma, Selvi Jayalalithaa has died at age 68. The whole of Tamil Nadu is apparently in shock, and 26 people have already died on receiving the news. Mourning on this scale was apparently last seen when M. G. Ramachandran, her mentor in both filmdom and politics as well as erstwhile chief minister, passed away in 1987. 'She attracted a level of support that verged on the bizarre', says the BBC obituary. Bengalis might also read this article.

I have lived a long time, so I cannot deny that I had read and heard a lot about her, but I must candidly admit that in the last 24 hours I learnt much more than I did before. She was apparently a diversely talented woman – a child prodigy at dance, a much above average student, a superstar on the celluloid screen, very different from all her political colleagues from down south because she could hold her own in Parliament with aplomb in English (besides being able to quote the likes of Chanakya fluently in Sanskrit), a lover of books, much hurt and abused in the course of her rise to power (and she was always very proud that unlike most Asian women leaders, she had done it virtually all on her own), the only chief minister who was disqualified and briefly went to jail, but one who came back again and again to rule in unabashedly despotic and lavishly self-indulgent style, who became more and more fiercely reclusive as she kept growing old, accused of extreme corruption and shameless populism yet successful not only in winning and keeping the passionate adoration of millions but in taking (or at least keeping) her state to nearly the top of the list in terms of literacy, prosperity and order… truly, the stuff of legends quite out of keeping with the age! What does that teach us about India? 

I wish Sonia Gandhi, Mayavati and Mamata Banerjee would take a few leaves out of her book. And her life is one more confirmation of several things I have said, namely that a) vast numbers of voters do not mind ‘corruption’ and self-aggrandizement as long as the leader can ‘deliver’, both in terms of personal charisma and worldly lollies, b) populism* pays, especially in a poor country, so long as you don’t bankrupt the exchequer, c) every politician is not ‘uneducated’ compared to the average engineer, and d) women with energy, talent, grit and clear goals are neither objected to nor thwarted from rising to the top by this so-called male-dominated society. So if most women want to whine instead, they shouldn’t expect much sympathy. Feminists might chew this over. This is what I have taught my daughter anyway.

P.S., Dec. 08: *And maybe it wasn't 'populism' in the pejorative sense that word is normally used. I just read this extract from a recent book by Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze.

P.P.S., Jan 08, 2017: I also read this article in today's newspaper. And I wish India had more Chief Ministers like that.

Deepavali

When my younger sister was growing up, there was a retired gentleman in the neighbourhood who ran a monimela for them in the local park, a children’s self-recreational community, and thanks to his long and untiring efforts many of them not only enjoyed engaging in a lot of healthy communal activities – from picnics to Saraswati pujo to Holi – but developed lifelong friendships. Indeed, my sister married one of the kids she grew up playing with. So here’s remembering Mukti Banerjee with deep regard and thanks: he was one of the most socially valuable human beings I have met in this town.

I had social instincts of the same sort, and I wished very badly that my daughter would enjoy the inestimable benefits of such socializing during her growing-up years. Alas, no father can give his daughter everything he wants to, and I couldn’t give her the experience that I would have liked. There was no Mr. Banerjee around in her childhood years, and the parents of her generation of kids did their damnedest to prevent them from making friends. Let’s bypass that subject: it’s too unsavoury to discuss. But I tried everything I could. So on Kali pujo/Deepavali nights, I have been calling over current and old boys every year to have fun together with lights and rangoli and fireworks and snacks. This year too the tradition has been maintained, but this was the first time in twenty years that Pupu was not with me, and it felt strange, though the children enjoyed themselves as always before. I wonder what the years ahead have in store – until grandchildren come.