A lament for English... going, going, gone

As I have said here and aloud to many face to face, the English language has been one of the deepest and most abiding loves of my life.

I started early, and read widely and well. There was a time when, partly for professional reasons and partly out of just the hunger for learning and fascination with history and literature, I read as far back as King Alfred's Domesday Book and the great legend of Beowulf (late first millennium CE - they had to be read from heavily annotated texts, and read like a foreign language, so different was English then), proceeded through Chaucer, when English was becoming faintly recognisable, then Shakespeare and the King James Bible, when it was becoming 'modern' as scholars call it, through the days of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, Ruskin, Dickens, Wilde, Hardy, Shaw, Wells, Chesterton right into the middle of the 20th century, when absolutely first rate writers became so numerous and wrote magnificently in so many different genres from adventure thrillers and mystery stories to psychological studies and grand fantasy that merely making a list of all of them that I can remember having read and been deeply influenced by would be an exhausting business, and there would be no point to it anyway. So that is how I came to learn English, the English that I love, admire, respect, and have spent a lifetime teaching thousands at high school level and college, some of them quite extraordinarily gifted minds, while ceaselessly polishing up my own grasp of it. And that English, to my great chagrin and despair, is being rapidly debauched, mutilated and impoverished at a breathtaking pace of late, right in front of my eyes. This post is to express my resultant helpless anguish.

The degeneration is happening at many levels simultaneously. Lots of people, not just high-school goers and not just in India, cannot distinguish between its and it's any more, or there and their. They use articles and prepositions randomly, as the fancy chooses them (I have seen the same person writing different from in one place and different than or different to a few paragraphs later). Tenses have taken on a life of their own, and people drift quite unconsciously between them in the same sentence (His father was dead, who says that...), and so it is with number, so it seems quite alright to many people to write 'The mobile phone is a very useful invention, they have made life easier'. Use of capital letters has become equally meaningless and random, and sensible paragraph division a lost art, except perhaps if you are a diplomat or lawyer, when such things still matter, though I am not sure how much longer, when Presidents post crude and semi-literate stuff on twitter in the name of policy announcements. Most people cannot distinguish between shall and will any more, nor what difference there is between, say, advice and advise. 'The Americans don't know and don't care, so why should we?', seems to be the commonest defence, the next in popularity being 'We are too busy to mind such things' (though Churchill in his seventies was not, he did not have a word processor to help him write, and he was merely fighting a world war on the side, while Michelangelo long before him said 'Trifles lead to perfection, and perfection is not a trifle'). Third comes the accusation that we who still insist on such fine points are 'elitist' (as if that is a wholly bad thing, as if the same should be said about people who insist on washing their hands before and after meals) or mere martinets, even 'grammar Nazis' (if only such people knew what the ideals and methods of real Nazis were!) 

I mentioned crudeness in the last paragraph. Both literature and cinema have descended to the coarsest vulgarity as if that is now the norm, using cuss words and wanton abuse where they serve no purpose at all except to make the still-civilized reader/viewer cringe with disgust. Is it meant to reflect the current social reality in most English speaking countries? Well then, thank God I won't ever have to visit them. But why do we here in India, by some yardsticks the third largest English speaking country in the world, frantically emulate the worst that we can find in the US and UK? Even fifty years ago lots of writers wrote most engagingly, elegantly and memorably without ever having to sink to the level of the drunk in the gutter - when a character in a P.G. Wodehouse novel mentions how his old nurse insists on his wearing his 'warm woollies' (meaning thick underwear), his friend, a male, clears his throat and says 'Keep it clean...we are gentlemen here'. And centuries before Wodehouse, the Church taught that using swear words was a sin against man and God. Where have all the gentlemen gone, and how, for God's sake, is that a sign of progress? Why on earth is the only kind of humour that most people now understand is locker room- and toilet humour?

I have many other kinds of complaints - after all, I have been keeping track for decades  - but for now let me touch upon just a few more: the absolutely unnecessary introduction of new 'buzz words', indicating a general amnesia that lots of fine words to express the same fact or feeling or idea already exist, the sickening overuse of a handful of currently catchy words though lots of (often better, more apposite and precise) synonyms exist, and the utterly gross and stupid alteration of the meanings of existing words (meanings which have stayed firm and stable for many generations) just because a lot of tweens and teens find them 'cool', and lots of adults, including teachers and journalists, even in their fifties and sixties, are imitating them in a pathetic attempt to stay 'cool, relevant, in touch' (with ignorant and silly babies!). So 'brain rot' suddenly became the 'word of the year', to mention just one expression that belongs to the first category; great and incredible and amazing and stunning from the second (most people these days cannot write without superlatives to express utterly common, mundane and highly forgettable experiences). But the worst of all belong to the third category. He'll likely eat, they now say; only a generation ago (and even among some literate people today), that would have been 'He is likely to eat', and what happened to probably and presumably or 'in all likelihood'? Now you always need to do something, not must do or should do, or ought to do. These days they 'revert' to you, when they mean 'reply'; to revert has always meant to return to an original position or situation. It's his call, they say: why not 'decision'? And nobody criticizes or upbraids or rebukes or takes to task anybody any more, they only 'call out' people: what do they do, I wonder, when they hear that 'the army has been called out to restore order in the streets'? We don't have chairmen or chairpersons any more, only chairs; I wonder how soon they will start saying 'The milk has delivered the milk'? They write could've and must've, though these coinages are unpronounceable, quite unlike 'I've' and 'they've', but who will drum that into pinhead philistines? I'm good, they say, when nobody asked them to give themselves a character certificate: what was wrong with I'm fine or I'm alright, I'm okay? Most people don't understand the once-crucial difference between house and home (even the banks give you home loans now, not house-building loans). Overturn has been replaced by upend, as if it has acquired a bad odour, and the police question multiple suspects these days, not many or several or a lot of (ask any math teacher what multiple really means). When profits rise, they say 'going north', while plunging or falling or plummeting profits, which is BAD, is being called going south - though I have heard that many Australians resent the connotation. 

They reference a book or article today, they don't 'refer to', and they critique books, not criticize them any more - as though criticize has come to mean merely find fault with, or abuse. They ask you to 'grab' a deal, a coffee, an umbrella, though only a generation or two ago mothers and grandmothers taught that 'grabbing' anything is bad manners unless you are in a dire emergency; it indicates impatience, pushiness and generally poor upbringing. Verbs and adjectives are being turned into nouns right and left: eat healthy, they say, not eat healthy food, 'live young', and this is our ask (not query or question), keep track of your spends (not expenses), a five minute read, not 'it will take you five minutes to read', let me have a think (depth of idiocy!) instead of let me (just) think! 'Like' is everywhere, so He was running like there would be no tomorrow', not 'as if there would be no tomorrow'. The original use of 'like' was to compare two dissimilar things (it's called a simile, you ignoramuses), as in 'My love is like a red, red rose'. Then there are juvenile (moronic?) abbreviations, like prepping for preparing, vacay for vacation, b'day for birthday, invite for invitation. Recently I asked for a demonstration at a car showroom, and the salesboy didn't know what I was talking about: I had to explain that what I wanted was, in his pidgin, called 'demo'.

Journalists are a special class of vandals. They use 'in' words fundamentally to fit their column centimeters, did you know that? So a court 'bins' a petition, not rejects, the opposition 'flays' or 'slams' the government (how many still know what a ghastly thing 'flaying' was, and that you slam doors, not people?), a debater 'destroys' her opponent when the reporter intends to say that she merely scored a point. They write "I have been asked 'to not say' that I lied", not 'I have been asked not to say...'. they take books off of the table (what is that 'of' doing there?), and 'My mom is visiting with my grandma' (why 'with'?). And they can only write about older people and newer inventions these days: they have forgotten that words like old and new exist, and that 'less' and 'lesser' mean quite different things.

Then there is the weird caricature of the meanings of existing words. So a meeting is called 'brilliant' because nice food was served, a fine piece of engineering becomes 'insane', a gooey cake is called 'decadent', a clever idea is called 'wicked', and beautiful natural scenery is called 'sick'! How am I going to use these words in their proper, original senses and expect to be understood? There was a character in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass which pompously declared 'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less'. Written 150 years ago, and no longer amusing. When enough people start talking like that, the most fundamental purpose of language - to make ourselves understood (and perhaps sympathized with) - will be lost. We might as well go back to grunting, squealing, croaking and roaring like our Stone Age ancestors, after tens of thousands of years of trying to become slightly more civilized. Most thanks, I guess, to 'advanced technology', also called social media, where the blind follow the blind and the stupidest lead from the front.

Yes, I know that lots of language 'experts' are comfortable with these changes, because 'languages evolve' (evolution, if you understood it, idiots, is a process that is supposed to be so slow that it would make glaciers look like they are running!) and the vast majority of lay people are too ignorant, lazy, unfocused and indifferent about quality to care. Fine, but in today's world experts are a dime a dozen, and I don't have to identify with the great unwashed masses to prove my democratic credentials; on issues such as these, I am definitely not an egalitarian, and proud to be that way. As my best students have always known, I am neither a rigid puritan nor a dyed in the wool traditionalist, but I am a conservative, certainly, in the best sense of the word: a conservative is one who is knowledgeable enough, and caring enough, to believe that there are things so valuable that they deserve to be conserved, for the good of humankind and all future generations, as much as for my own sanity and self-respect. So I refuse to go along with every passing fad, usages which become all the rage and vanish without a trace within a decade or two. Any reader who is not absolutely illiterate and older than thirty, reflect on what has happened to the word 'awesome' which was considered an absolutely indispensable adjective just twenty years ago! Nobody says 'My son scraping through a school test was awesome' any more, but I can still use the word in the old original sense, 'Reinhold Messner performed the awesome feat of climbing Mount Everest alone and without oxygen'. Think about it.

P.S., Dec. 20:Others are worrying about it, too. Read this newspaper article before they remove it from the Net.

On AI again

It so happens that I am getting worried, and I do NOT think I am worrying needlessly.

One thing to remember: mankind invented everything that has really helped in the march of civilization - including language, the wheel, the knife, the light bulb, spectacles and the water closet, built everything from the pyramids to the Taj Mahal to the hydrogen bomb, went to the moon, decoded the DNA code and made possible in vitro fertilization, besides all the most wonderful works of art, music and literature, without AI - so what life changing things is AI likely to do for us hereafter? What sort of people are they who actually believe this nonsense and are helping it to spread?

Without AI but still with computers loaded with grammar- and spelling checkers, book editors and journalists write shoddily, pages filled with typos these days as they wouldn't have dreamt of doing even fifty years ago. Is AI likely to improve on this consequence of universal mental decay? (I read in today's newspaper that the IMD had 'forecasted' an 'anamoly' - I kid you not). These people still have jobs only because 99.99% of their readers are as unmindful or ignorant as they are.

I found out yesterday that the staff at my nearby drugstore in Kolkata (part of a major countrywide chain) cannot locate particular items on their shelves without checking for them on their 'systems' - whereas my old friend the chemist in Durgapur knows exactly where every one of his wares is. How will 'AI' help the former kind in keeping their jobs a little longer? And with or without AI, one of the insurance companies I used to be a customer of has been lately reminding me to update my KYC, oblivious of the fact that I closed my account with them more than a year ago - obviously their 'system' has not been updated because some (human) idiot behind the computers forgot to do his job on time: will AI really help them, and keep them from bothering me for nothing?

I don't understand all the current rage for integrating AI with just about everything: they are advertising AI-empowered TV, air conditioners and fans already; how much longer before we are sold AI-powered cakes and burgers? As for the supposed urgent need for 'integrating' AI in the classroom at all levels from school to university, exactly what does it mean? Think of a boy in high school (and remember I have been a professionally successful teacher for forty odd years): he must use his mind, and that in a disciplined, rigorous, prolonged, attentive fashion whether he wants to learn a language, mathematics or chemistry, right? He can at most be helped or hindered depending on whether his teachers are informed and skilled and wise at their work or duds. If the teacher can't teach well and the student cannot or does not want to learn, there will be no learning. Are there any two ways about it? How exactly will AI help to achieve that goal faster and better? Meanwhile, I can vouch from my own very recent classroom experience that a few of my students - actually, the stupidest of them, meaning those who cannot even understand why they are coming to me in the first place - have already 'integrated' AI into their work long before the bureaucrats and school boards have drawn up their plans. One boy, whom I caught out because he was using words in his answers which were far beyond his ken confessed that he was using the summary of the comprehension passage that ChatGPT had made for him, because the original was 'too much' for him to grasp. And I hear that PhD scholars are doing virtually the same thing simply because they cannot write basic prose any more. Is that a prevision of the near future? Why not shut down this whole thing called education once and for all, then?

And also meanwhile, the head of Google's AI development division is warning today's teenagers in school to prepare to handle AI in order to stay relevant in the job market 10-15 years from now. Others of his ilk are confidently (and apparently gleefully-) predicting job losses by the hundreds of millions, tens of millions of college graduates among them. So what kind of jobs will remain? A few thousand AI geeks, and maybe those whose work cannot be taken away by AI? Cooks and nurses, fish vendors and farmers and washermen, for example, since sufficiently skilled and versatile robots have turned out to be prohibitively expensive, if at all technically feasible? And maybe a few real teachers, serving those who still really want to learn something and know that real learning of anything involves close face to face human interaction, whether that be kung fu or literature?

And do the tech wizards really think that the hundreds of millions who lose their jobs in their youth (or never find any) are going to take it lying down?

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.

Life-changing movies

I have not written about movies for a long time. It is widely held that some books and movies are life-changing, though in these times, I doubt whether those who make such remarks about any movie or book even understand what that really means, or actually mean it - for more than a day or two - let alone remember their own remarks a couple of years down the line.

I am of course the sort of person who hates the habit of perpetually talking in empty hyperbole (an exclamation like that every sight, every event, every person, every ice cream is 'amazing' makes me want to puke), but some books and movies have been indeed life-changing, or at least deeply thought-provoking, in a very long term, even permanent sense. I shall briefly discuss only two such movies here. Strange to say, I watched both when I was halfway through adulthood, not in teenage, when minds are typically much more impressionable.

One was a subtitled version of the 1950 Japanese classic Rashomon directed by Kurosawa. It shows how incredibly difficult the job of a judge is (and terribly pertinent to all our lives, for aren't we compulsively judging people and being judged all the time, despite Christ's timeless admonition?) One crime has been committed, and there are several eye-witnesses, who, while deposing before the court, insist that all them are telling the unembellished, unvarnished truth (and there is no pressing reason to suppose that anybody is, not at least deliberately and wickedly), yet they tell such very sharply different stories that it is almost entirely impossible for the judge to make up his mind 'beyond all reasonable doubt', which modern jurisprudence insists upon, and pass a serious and definitive sentence: the tension and conflict is resolved in a rather bizarre way, which I shall urge you to find out for yourself.

The other, also a classic now, is the 1957 American work 12 angry men, directed by Sidney Lumet (re-made in colour, 1997: not quite so impressive). It can be, in the opinion of countless people, especially today, when most have never mentally matured beyond 12 and would rather watch mindless action flicks, a very 'boring' movie to watch: 12 jurymen sitting around a table and arguing out for hours a case where their unanimous verdict can send a young, alleged murderer to death row. It starts with 11 of them quickly voting in support of the execution, and almost ends when there is just one man holding out, and one man tenaciously, desperately teasing out the real reason for his almost maniacal recalcitrance - turns out he wants all delinquent kids to suffer and die because his own son cruelly 'betrayed' him and broke his heart. It is a triumph of the power of the will on the one hand, and a deeply disturbing and moving study of the tortuous, passionate, self-deluding, often utterly illogical ways in which human minds actually work. From witch trials to pogroms and genocidal attempts, much can be thoroughly and forever understood if you really absorb the movie into your bones.

What I have taken from these great works is the lesson that I should always be ready to admit - first and foremost to myself - that I may be wrong, I may have done wrong, and that I should therefore be deeply, permanently sorry, meaning that I shall NEVER repeat my mistakes and wrongs. But also an equally valuable lesson: that I need not heed any human's judgment of me too seriously - because much of the time they are venting their own prejudices, trying to rationalise their own failures and weaknesses, covering up their own guilt and shame and inadequacies, and fulminating against someone that is not really me. As the poet said, and those lines are becoming more and more pertinent in my life with every passing year '' 'tis God shall repay/ I am safer so".

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?

Aashray for Animals

With reference to the baby dog that I wrote about in the last post, my heart aches to write that I am now quite unsure about whether I shall be able to save its life at long distance. Too many ifs and buts... whether they will feed him regularly as I have instructed, whether they will keep watch on that damaged leg, whether the poor baby can take it all. I ran around quite a bit to find out about medicines to give it, then was told that I am not allowed to send liquids by courier or post. I can only pray that those hotel people are going to feed it daily for a while, at least. I have little hope that they will take the trouble to find the medicines and administer them regularly ... if it dies, I shall forever hold myself at least partially responsible. Believe me, it's not a nice thought to think. Anybody have any ideas, or contacts at or near Bodh Gaya whom I can beg to help?

Searching desperately for help online while still in Bodh Gaya, I learnt about Durgapur Aashray for animals, an NGO based in DSP township, Durgapur (19/20, Vivekananda Road, A-Zone). Their work, as described through Google and Facebook, seemed wonderful, but I wanted to see  the shelter for myself before taking a major decision. So I visited them  on Thursday the 26th. And by God, even at this age, I can say that it was a life-changing experience. My faith in humankind has been very powerfully renewed. Good people do exist, though they are sadly few and far between.

Mrs. Chaitali Roy and her family (along with a few dedicated young friends) have given themselves heart and soul to rescuing seriously injured and sick animals - mainly dogs - and giving them food, medical care and a loving home. I very quickly made friends with several of the furry inmates. The situation was as heart-rending as it was heartwarming, paradoxical though that may sound. There was one dog with its front legs permanently broken and stuck skywards, which crawls around on its belly; several are semi-paralysed, and several run around on only three legs, or the front two, their behinds supported on wheels in a frame. But all of them seemed full of life, and quite clearly not miserable or moribund. The organisation regularly arranges for all sorts of medical and surgical procedures too, such as curing dermatitis and acute malnutrition as well as sewing up wounds, restoring prolapsed uteruses and removing ghastly tumours which are potentially fatal if left untreated, besides running a programme of spaying and neutering young animals, so that they do not keep breeding indiscriminately, leading to accidents of all sorts to themselves and humans alike: a problem which has grown increasingly acute all over this country, ever since governments stopped regular culling and sterilizing drives.

They are running a full house, and new animals in pathetic condition keep turning up at their door all the time, besides the ones they continually pick up from the roadside. They often have to turn away animals in desperate need simply because they can no longer cope with more (and for that, as I read on the net, they are abused by people who would themselves, I am sure, never raise a finger to help in any substantial way). They very badly need more resources - space, volunteers, money, everything. 'What can I do to help?' I asked, after making an initial donation (note, I raised the question: Mrs. Roy never mentioned money before I did). She told me that some people do help now and then; but it is far from enough. Simply feeding that many animals daily and adequately costs nearly Rs. 60,000 a month, leaving aside everything else they do, and it was quite evident that they are not rich, idle people indulging a whim. 

So I am begging - that's right, begging - all my friends, acquaintances, students, their parents and every reader - to start a campaign at least to raise funds for this organization, even if we can't do anything else. I myself have vowed to give something every month. Do please first visit their Facebook page (Aashray for Animals), watch some of the videos, 'follow' them, then click a few buttons on your phone. You can send money to the following bank account

Account Name: Durgapur Aashray for Animals, Account number: 919010042770523 (Axis Bank), IFSC: UTIB0000213,

or you can send it via Google Pay/PayTM/Phone Pe at the number: 9609600920.

Please donate with a loving soul and an open hand. And please spread the word around in your own circles ... the more help that comes, the more lives will be saved, the more sufferers lifted out of misery.

Now here are a few photos I took there

Household concerns, cosmic vibes

So another admission session is more or less over, and I am all set to start yet one more seven-days-a-week work season again, which lasts till the end of November. I am wishing myself luck! This year I am a little extra bucked up, because the ICSE Council has prescribed Julius Caesar after a very long hiatus: 2011, in fact, was the last year they tested candidates on that text. I did JC myself for ICSE back in '79, started teaching with it, and now I guess I am going to retire with it. Nice: I like closure.

It's been raining off and on over this last fortnight, quite unlike in 2022, lowering the temperature briefly but repeatedly as it tries to soar beyond 37 Celsius, which makes life miserable. Last night, from latest inputs over the phone, I learnt that it was raining more or less simultaneously in Kolkata, Durgapur, Ranchi and Delhi. Don't know about the rest of the country. I love the rains.

Just finished watching the first episode titled Chasing Starlight of a new Netflix series called Our Universe, with Morgan Freeman doing the voiceover. Nothing factually new to me, but the commentary woven in with striking visuals - some real life, some special effects - was delicious to watch. Everything ultimately lives on and dies of starlight: that is the theme that runs through the narrative. The sun's energy absorbed by the grass, eaten by wildebeest in the millions, turns into vital energy in the mitochondria of Wa Chini the cheetah and her cubs on the vast plains of Serengeti Wildlife Reserve. They could have, of course, completed the circle by pointing out how Wa Chini when she dies will be eaten by bacteria and turn into soil, while that eternal indestructible energy is released back into the cosmos, to take new shapes again. They might also have pointed out that it is the same starlight which powers the worst of disasters, like hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. So it has been for the last three and half billion years, so it will continue for a few billion more. 

One cannot, unless one is emotionally very dull, help going all mystical over this. If at all any aspect of Nature has to be worshipped, it has got to be the sun, for it powers everything that we call reality - a true god, certainly (though not, I think, God). Hence jawakusum sankashang kashyapeyang mahadyuting... How strange that some of our rishis fairly anticipated much of the whole process purely through superficial (but long and methodical-) observation and meditation thousands of years ago: all our recent physics and chemistry and biology with their equations and tables, microscopes and telescopes and spectroscopes have only helped to fill in and confirm the details. 

But this is not where thought stops. What came before and after the sun, what before and after the universe itself? Oh, okay, the sun will explode into a Red Giant, then collapse meekly into an insignificant White Dwarf after a while, but modern science currently stops - indeed, prohibits asking such questions beyond the speculative Big Bang and Big Crunch: you cannot ask such questions about the Great Beyond, because space and time and causation themselves stop meaning anything beyond those singularities. However, Man will NEVER stop asking. And so some have suggested that there is God, from whom everything came and into whom (or which) everything dissolves: only to be recreated over and over again. So God is immanent in Nature, and yet above, beyond and infinitely greater than Nature: indeed, many religions have called identifying Nature with God, despite her vastness, power and complexity, the ultimate blasphemy. That is where the poet and the seer takes over: through a riddle, in the end, sagacity must go.

That is when the bhakta implores tuhu kaise Madhav, kaho tuhu moye (Tell me what You are, Lord) and only the Upanishadic sage and Sri Ramakrishna have said, 'I have seen the effulgent Being beyond death, the darkness and the void...' Who knows better?

And yet, and yet, the greatest of all miracles of creation is Man himself, for, so lately emerged from  animal  ancestry (if the scientists have got the story right) he alone wonders, and imagines, and creates, and keeps on changing the Reality around himself, not always wisely and well, but relentlessly, burning with the Promethean fire. Just a few thousand years - less than a blip on the cosmic scale - and he has gone from the Stone Age to the age of atomic reactors, computers, space exploration and artificial intelligence. So agonizing and insufferable, this existence, but all our wisest men have rightly claimed that of all births this is the most wonderful of all...

Oh my God, values again?

The importance of values, the need for value education, the persistent lament about the gradual demise of values, the very sharply different sets of values that seem to clash constantly all over the world… these are issues that have exercised my mind constantly, and I have written off and on about them, even here on this blog (see, for example, Moral Science, Values, prices, incomes and Indian values are coming). The discussions are forever interesting, but the solutions seem to be forever elusive.

Why?

Well, I have found some answers to the ‘why’, at least. It all begins, it seems to me, with what men want out of life in this world.

There are those who simply wanted happiness, have given up on it, and believe that from birth to death life is an endless, nerve-wracking struggle with the dice loaded against them; there is no lasting joy and peace and safety and comfort to be found here, so they make religions out of stoic acceptance and renunciation – which at least lightens the burden somewhat – and looking forward to a good afterlife. I belong, increasingly with advancing age, to the group that is convinced that, though early suicide is not a healthy idea, it is bad to want to live too long, and if you can look forward to something better after death or at least a peaceful extinction, why not? We can certainly assert pretty strongly that neither great scientific advancement nor great expansion of material luxuries nor vast social-engineering experiments such as those in early 20th century Russia and China have made human beings happier on the whole; maybe the very idea of creating paradise on earth will always be naïve and self-defeating. There are some people who will be able to find happiness in the midst of chaos and suffering and horror, but they will always be the lucky few: you cannot really make philosophies on their basis. There will always, as well, be some people whom nothing can make happy, not even the latest available psychiatric therapies. And of course, there will always be people who keep fooling themselves that they are happy – you have only to think of drug-sodden party animals the world over. The less thought wasted on them the better: they would have mattered not at all, socially speaking, if they had not wasted scarce resources on a huge scale and set very bad examples for the gullible young of successive generations to follow.

It is true that the average man or woman, if they can think at all, will aver that they do want to be happy above all else. It is also true that most great philosophies, some of them thousands of years old, have agreed that, besides trying to cope better and better with natural calamities (as science has helped us to do to some extent), happiness can come only from trying to control our worst impulses – the seven deadly sins – and being nice to our fellow humans, or at least tolerant and forgiving and helpful wherever possible. But if there has been so much agreement among the philosophers, why has it been so difficult to instill and spread those values among all humanity? – I think one part of the answer lies in the fact that our worst instincts are so deeply hardwired into the genes that most people find it impossible to do as directed, even if they have become civilized enough to pay lip service to those ideals (how many can, or like, to meditate and give in charity and not abuse power to assert authority regularly? How many monks and nuns, even?). Another part is that we limit our loftiest ideals to people ‘like us’ – so slaves or women or blacks or children or Jews or the very poor do not deserve to be treated according to the same standards. Alas, the deprived sooner or later rise in revolt and fight back, bringing in their train more and more unhappiness (the oppressed have a habit of turning oppressor). So it has always been, at least over the last few thousand years. Maybe more toleration and understanding and mutual goodwill is slowly spreading worldwide at last, but I am not too hopeful: certainly not for the next two or three generations.

Yet another part is that far too many people – and that includes lots of ‘educated’ ones and people in power – are fundamentally and incurably stupid, in the sense that they simply cannot see that in others’ welfare very often lies their own, at least in the longer run. So we shall all happily cheat one another all the time in the course of all kinds of transactions (including keeping promises), never realizing that we are ultimately creating a society where nobody can really trust anybody else, and that would be a nightmare for all. Without going as far as Dickens or Schiller or Russell, I shall say from my own experience that sheer stupidity has always been a far bigger factor in making or keeping people unhappy than is intellectually admitted… look at Duryodhan, or America in Vietnam or Afghanistan, or the broad failure of the cooperative movement in industry and agriculture everywhere.

The last part – or what I would call the last for now – is that while dominant values, wherever preached, generally tell everyone to ‘be good’, there is a lot of silliness combined with hypocrisy and impracticality mixed up with the good advice for those at the receiving end to take them seriously, or be able to live up to them for any length of time. Think of schools telling girls and boys ‘don’t think about the opposite sex’, or parents lecturing children about ‘studying all the time’ or godmen telling us we cannot go to heaven if we eat such and such kinds of ‘impure’ food, and you will get what I mean.

Things get far more intractable when we take into account the fact that lots of people – highly influential people, too – don’t seem to want to be happy at all, leave alone let others be happy. One very wise man has said ‘Men can tolerate a great deal of unhappiness, especially the unhappiness of others’, another has said ‘Who wants to be happy? Only the Englishman does’, yet others have variously said that the true goal of life should be not happiness but fame, glory, money, or power, and indeed, demonstrated how earnest they were by not only ruining their own lives in pursuit of those goals but those of enormous numbers of others, too (remember all the would-be world conquerors from Sargon to Hitler; all the numberless people who have died early and nasty deaths in their desperate hurry to become super-rich).  Given such obstructions, even the most highly enlightened people down the ages have discovered that it is not easy to make the mass of their fellow men happy: Confucius and Socrates and the Buddha tried, and the results are there for all to see.

I personally think – generalizing from the entire range of my adult experience, which is forty years long now – that these are dark ages, speaking in terms of values that those below forty have learnt and are learning. This is not to say that I look nostalgically back to any mythical Golden Age in the past: the moment I remember slavery and witch hunts and torture as widespread and socially sanctioned entertainment such idiocy goes out the window. There has never been a golden age. But every age has its own sickness, and ours consists of a combination of four diseases: perpetual distraction, laziness as an aspiration, obsession with self-assertion (as opposed to self-improvement) and slavering worship of wealth. The moment anybody starts talking about lost values, I try to figure out quickly whether s/he, from whatever I know about her or him, is afflicted by even one of the four: if I am sure that is the case, I know that there is no point in furthering the discussion; let the physician heal himself first. But of this I am now sure – it is really a waste of time arguing how important values are when everything ‘bad’ that is happening all around us, from the epidemic of dirty language to soft porn masquerading as modelling and music and acting, to vast business scams that make overnight billionaires to marriages breaking up right and left, schoolchildren cheating in examinations, judges being bought, college graduates being unable to spell, women learning to be just as badly behaved as the men they profess to despise, ‘depressed’ teenagers committing suicide because their phones have been taken away, rampant pollution and destruction of the natural environment… everything, everything stems from the fact that those four ‘values’ have become all but pervasive, no matter how much people deny it, how many contrarian sermons are delivered from the pulpits, how many papers are published from the universities, how many psychiatrists bemoan the epidemic of things like ADHD, and how many silly proto-dictators try to rein in the spreading madness by harping ever more frantically on the need for discipline, duty and higher loyalties like those to nation or religion.

Is there a cure? I don’t know. As one of my gurus said, it is important to spell out the problem even if I cannot offer a sensible solution for it. May better people try.

Which way are we going, then? God alone knows … or, as one of the Upanishads says, ‘maybe even He does not know’!

Two long, swift, arduous but most rewarding decades

Ten years ago on this very day, I put up an exultant post, announcing that I had finished a whole decade of teaching at home with no salaried job on the side, no advertising, and no organizational support whatsoever, corporate, social or political, yet I had managed to do well enough for myself, certainly by Indian middle class standards. It was a moment of celebration well earned. 

Ten more years have passed since that day. My daughter is now grown up, my savings have swelled, my reputation remains intact despite the countless, endless, vicious and mean assaults on it, and having even survived the two-year long pandemic scare, I am still going strong, operating on the same large scale and relentless pace as I started after leaving that schoolmaster's 14-year long job twenty years ago. Only sensible, thoughtful, experienced and sympathetic working people in their forties at least will begin to appreciate how lucky I have been (though I prefer to ascribe it to God's grace), and also how much nose-to-the-grind hard work it has taken. Only the very lazy and very greedy and very stupid can envy me.

At this remove, and at this age, one acquires poise and perspective, even if he did not get them much earlier in life. All through my working life, despite all odds, difficulties, setbacks, rebuffs and disappointments - believe me, there have been many! - I have tried obstinately to stick to certain principles, and given my strong likes and dislikes very high priority. So I left the prospect of a university job, though more than well-qualified for it, because I wouldn't kowtow to ignorant political masters nor bribe my way through, and there was hardly any other way you could get a college lecturer's job. I gave up a possibly lucrative career in medicine simply because hospitals, as they existed in the 1980s, turned me off and I knew I wouldn't survive them. I quit journalism not only because it paid very poorly in those days but it had begun to stink (the stench is unbearable today, so thank God I chose rightly!) I didn't get through the national civil service exams, despite having done very well in them - and over the last forty years I have met numberless bureaucrats who were most evidently far less well endowed than I was and yet managed to get in, and now, after a lifetime's experience, I have very strong doubts whether I'd have hated the job and managed to survive in that stultifying atmosphere, so I  have no regrets. I got job offers from better schools, private colleges, publishing houses and national newspapers which I casually chucked up because by that time I was well settled ploughing my own furrow. I similarly gave the go-by to admissions in several foreign universities because I had by then decided it was too late to venture on entirely new experiments. I quit the school job because I had no intention of serving under an overbearing idiot where they could not even afford to pay me a decent salary. I have tried startup ventures several times over the last quarter century trying to spread my wings countrywide, with no success, but on that one I have not given up hope yet, because now that my daughter is of working age and showing a strong predilection to take up my baton, and literally everyone has access to the internet, things might at last work out in my old age as I had planned in my youth...

Today, approaching sixty (official retirement age for government servants, but teachers and doctors and lawyers never need to retire as long as they can continue working), I have not slowed down very much, but I am becoming more and more choosy, because I can afford to, and there is nothing left for me to prove. I have not managed to become rich or powerful or even famous (except in my own small town where I have been working for 35 years straight), but I am certainly better off, physically, financially, domestically and socially, than probably 90% of my compatriots. No man should ask for more. I can also look back and smile contemptuously at all the wise men and women who cautioned me decades ago that I was heading for disaster by living so proudly and willfully, and bring untold sorrow and suffering upon those who were dependent on me. My advice to the young: most of your elders are actually stupid, uninformed, lazy cowards, so don't order your life by their advice, learn early to be your own man or woman; 'heart within and God overhead'. The other way lies slavery and frustration all life long.

I am now a story, like it or hate it. My kind of life can be lived, and enjoyed, cocking a snook at all the conventional wisdom they throw at you, even in India. And trust me, I have enjoyed myself much more, in many more different ways, than most middle class adults can, except in their wild dreams. 

I have also learnt a great deal indeed about the whole educational system in India, with all its flaws and disgusting drawbacks. Let me mention a few of them here. 1) Not everybody wants an education, nor can be educated. 2) We have made a hash of education at all levels by blindly equating it with examination scores and degrees. 3) Most teachers are hopeless; at best they don't help you, at worst they confuse you and waste your time. 4) Some are born bright and eager to be educated; they are a joy to teach. Some others are not so bright, but they are earnest and willing to work hard: they are the only ones a teacher can help to grow. 5) Education is rapidly becoming a commercial product, and things are going to get worse very fast before a sharp reaction sets in: I wonder if I shall see that within my own lifetime. 6) As a very great teacher - trained by Tagore himself - warned me at the very early stages of my career, the key to good teaching is simply this: 'If you must teach Jack Latin, you must love Jack as well as Latin'. Very simple, very hard to do, especially when you have to deal with hordes of little horrors all your life. 7) Most children, if they are to be educated, have to be rescued from the mindless misguidance of their parents. Etc etc (a whole lifetime's lessons can hardly be compressed into one paragraph!)

What lies ahead, I still wonder... for me, for India, for humanity? But for myself, I can vouch that it has been a good career on the whole, and looking back, I wouldn't have exchanged it for anything else. I started teaching my peers, and here I am teaching the children of my older students and grandchildren of my colleagues. What a journey!

Could India have developed differently, and much faster?

The current excitement over the ‘Amrit Mahotsav’ marking the 75th year of our Independence has set me thinking about how much India has achieved since 1947 (I am the last to belittle all the magnificent achievements against what had once seemed insurmountable odds), where we have failed – often dismally, if not tragically – whether we could have done better, and how we can still change courses sharply in order to see a far stronger, healthier, more civilized India that we can be much more proud of  by 2047.

India has at least a hundred million intellectuals, especially highly concentrated in Bengal, if you include the sort who dominate the conversation at roadside tea stalls, TV quarrels (I hesitate to exalt them with the title of debates) and op-ed pages in regional newspapers. I shall not let myself forget that every one of them knows vastly more about the answers to the above questions than mere me, and is absolutely confident that s/he is right. Also, it will constantly echo at the back of mind as I write this essay that, as some famous man observed, whatever you say about India, the opposite can be asserted with equal authority by your interlocutor, if he is sufficiently informed and cunning. However, I believe, too, that fifty years of concentrated reading, observing, thinking, teaching, writing and debating has qualified me to contribute my mite to the argument.

I believe that, despite having a dazzling galaxy of great leaders at the helm when we set out to fulfill our tryst with destiny, we set our priorities wrong. To my mind, industrialization with the latest technology, setting up a chain of institutes of ‘higher’ education focusing on science and tech and medicine and law and accounting, establishing nuclear-and space research centres, building up a huge military machine, encouraging the proliferation of vast urban conurbations, carving up the states along linguistic lines, grappling with the ever brooding menace of casteism, fighting extreme left inspired terrorism – all these things might have been necessary and desirable, but they could have waited a few decades. Four things that should have been given the very highest priority right from the start are 1) fostering universal respect for the rule of law, to which every man from the highest in the land would have been as subservient as the lowest, regardless of differences in age, gender, education, wealth, social position, caste, religion, language and native place, 2) drastic control of population growth, so that the 300 million in 1947 could not have reached the monstrous and almost completely unmanageable level of 1400 million today, 3) complete removal of absolute poverty, with programmes focused on redistributing a very large chunk of national income and wealth from the richest ten per cent to the poorest, 4) universal free basic education for all children up to the age of 14 or 16, coupled with a 25-30 year long project that would have ensured a secondary school level education or its equivalent to all adults between 18 and 50 who had never attended formal school, the primary aim of this education being to make good citizens rather than those preparing to go on to making ‘paying’ careers for themselves.

Reflect on this quietly, attentively, for a considerable length of time. Wouldn’t you be persuaded to agree that if the four above criteria could have been met, say, by 1977, and only after that we unleashed full democracy and (state monitored-) capitalism, then within the next 45 years we might have actually surpassed China on every index of progress, including freedom and overall material prosperity by now? And who would argue that that would have been a bad thing?

Is this a pipe dream, something that could never have been achieved? I do not think so. Let me explain categorically why.

Napoleon made  fun of the British (half-seriously, actually with admiration), saying ‘They are a strange race. They make their own laws, and they are mortally afraid of breaking those laws’. As I said, from the lowest to the highest in the land. Churchill suffered a landslide electoral defeat after having steered Britain successfully through the Second World War, and relinquished office without demur. As someone observed, if there were popular elections in the Soviet Union at that time and Stalin lost, it would not even have occurred to him that he should relinquish office – he would instead simply have had several hundred thousand contrarian voters shot or sent to the gulags. And Jerome K. Jerome wrote (in Three Men on the Bummel) that the Germans were far more law-abiding than the British! At a much less exalted level, I personally know a rich and well connected middle aged lady who plucked a flower in a London park despite being aware that it was strictly prohibited, and was politely but promptly hauled away to the nearest police station to pay a fine and have her name and photograph recorded: her husband, knowing how the system worked, did not raise a finger to ‘save’ her. Suppose this had been imposed in India right from day one: MPs and MLAs and even local councillors would not have dared to behave like demi-gods (I won’t even mention CMs and PMs), and no one, bar none, could have avoided a hefty fine and at least a night in the lockup if he had dared to challenge a policeman over an obvious case of breaking some law by shouting ‘jaanta hai mai kaun hun?’ (or ‘…mera baap kaun hai?’) Would that have helped to make India a better place, and governance much easier, or not? Why did we spread among the elite as well among the masses the pernicious idea that our newly acquired freedom meant that from now on everybody could do as he pleased, cheat and hurt anyone he pleased as much as he pleased on his road to power and pelf as long as he had the right connections, and public safety, decency and welfare be damned?

To the population question next. Consider this: if we had been able to achieve the degree of development that we have already done, in terms of overall national income and social infrastructure (roads, schools, houses, hospitals), to name just two major indices with a population which had stabilized at about one-third of the present number, wouldn’t we have been vastly better off already? (the simplest of arithmetic would tell you that our per capita income would have been three times its current value, which would have placed us comfortably among the middle income countries of the world, rather than still among the poorest!) And isn’t it an unarguable fact that we have left far too many problems – from jobs to availability of the most essential commodities to pollution to caste wars – to fester and grow steadily worse and insoluble simply because the sheer number of people scrabbling for a bare sustenance, at which level no moral or legal bars can stop them from doing what they do, from stealing to rioting to cheating and fighting for more and more ‘reservations’, has grown relentlessly larger over the decades? It would have taken so little of concerted and well-meaning effort, really: significant material rewards for birth control to the poorest, who would have grasped them with both hands, combined with mild punitive measures for parents who have more than two children (withdrawal of ration cards and tax concessions, no permission to stand for elections, things like that): no draconian measures, and some thousand crores of rupees spent – we have spent vastly bigger amounts on prestige projects galore, and are still doing so! – which would have rewarded us by creating scope for much easier governance and faster economic growth later on, and brought back the investment many hundredfold. Even as I write this I am reminded of the German poet lamenting ‘against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain’…

To come to the third point now. This is truly tragic, because we started off by promising ourselves via the Constitution, and our first prime minister reiterating in his first and most famous speech to the newly free nation, to make the removal of extreme, centuries-old poverty, which reduced millions of human beings to the level of neglected and abused beasts, our highest and first priority. Then we lost our way. I shall not go into the very vexed question of apportioning blame – I have heard about every kind of panacea, including turning India into a communist or military dictatorship, and learnt how silly they are – but the fact remains that after ‘developing’ for 75 years, India is still home to almost half the total number of extremely poor people in the world (meaning, by World Bank standards, those who have to survive on less than two US dollars a day). Anybody who dares claim, despite knowing this terribly shameful fact, that after all we should take note of all the other kinds of ‘advancement’ India has made, is one who has either never known or seen such poverty first hand or simply doesn’t care, because he knows that he and his family and kin will never be affected by it. Could extreme poverty have been removed early? I believe yes. True, India between 1947 and 1977 remained overall a very poor nation, but if you take note of the top ten per cent (and even more so, the top 1%), there were a lot of obscenely rich people around even then, from business tycoons to ex maharajas to film stars and the mahants who ran the biggest temples, and if a stern government – say, cast in the Scandinavian model – had taxed away much of their wealth to feed, clothe, house, heal and educate the poorest, I believe the worst of material misery would have become a thing of the past by 1977, though it is true that the rich would have had to wait much longer to live in palaces, drive luxury limousines, go holidaying on the Riviera, deck their wives in gold and send off their children to greener pastures in phoren lands. Our ruling elite, from Nehru to Jyoti Basu, for all their fancy rhetoric, didn’t bother to pay attention, because they simply didn’t care, and the masses never really had a voice: that’s all. Sad, because today those vast unwashed masses are eating away so much of our resources through their incessant demands on the national purse (look at the intense competition going on among our state governments to launch ever more lavish ‘welfare’ projects to buy the next vote) that there are virtually no resources left for anything more worthwhile, from building infrastructure to supplying the military with new age arms and technologies! (our mainstay  fighter aircraft is still the forty-plus year old MiG 21, the ‘flying coffin’ – one air force chief has publicly complained that no one would drive a forty year old car – and the government, according to a now-retired army chief, cannot afford more than ten days’ ammunition for his soldiers in case of a full scale war).

So we come to the last point. Education. The one thing about which almost everybody who knows me will admit that I know a thing or two. Nothing shows how elitist and undemocratic India’s governments have always been – no point carping about whether the Congress was a little better or the Janata governments or the BJP – than how we have neglected basic education in favour of the ‘higher’ version. From Finland to Japan to New Zealand, I have learnt enough about the most ‘advanced’ countries of the world to be sure that they have done just the opposite, and prospered that way. And yet the Father of the Nation had wanted otherwise. He insisted so hard and so long that the requirement that the State shall provide universal free education up to the age of 14 was enshrined in the Constitution as a Directive Principle of State Policy, but then it was quietly and by near common consent forgotten. Why did he ask for it, and why was it forgotten?

To explain how I have understood him, I must be forgiven for a little dissertation on the side here. Do read it with the foreknowledge that I have not only read extensively about the right purposes and methods of education but personally taught at all levels from primary school to post graduate students of many disciplines for more than half a lifetime, while continuously reflecting on our real job all through.

To start with, then, the greatest authorities in both the east and west, from Russell to Vivekananda, have always given far more importance to school education rather than what passes for ‘higher’ education. There must be a very good reason for that. A schooling for at least ten years is essential for everybody, whereas only a tiny minority in every country goes for higher education, because they neither understand the need for it nor want it, nor have the aptitude for it nor can afford it (the vast majority of the millions in highly subsidized Indian colleges, whatever they are formally ‘studying’, are actually just killing time and scraping through exams somehow until they can get a job. This is an open secret. In any case, no country needs millions of new doctors or lawyers or engineers or historians or mathematicians every year – if some country, such as ours, is still churning them out, there is something very seriously wrong with the system).

Secondly, we must be very clear-eyed about why a certain period of schooling for everyone is needed, what it should seek and hope to achieve.

One very noble and desirable purpose of education is, certainly, nurturing the original creative urges of people born highly talented in every field. Two things, however, must be remembered in this context: one, that people like Mozart and Michelangelo and Lincoln and Tagore are so energetic, focused and self-directed that they do not really need a formal schooling, and that a formal schooling is actually often irrelevant, unnecessary, a burden and a bore to them, and may actually thwart and dampen their finest innate talents; two, the present day schooling system, which is designed for very average people working as teachers in a bureaucratic setup and dealing with vast numbers of pupils who are born and destined to be very average adults, is simply not capable of handling geniuses, so the less time, thought and money that is wasted on this goal the better – as most geniuses have shown, they can make their way through life very well on their own.

Two other, much more practical aims of universal schooling are a) to make good citizens of the future (reasonable, fairly well informed, non violent, polite, cooperative and law-abiding people, as long as the laws are obviously designed to serve the greatest good), and b) to give everybody some saleable skills that they can make a decent living with later on. Now I agree entirely with Gandhiji’s view (and not his alone) that ten years of sincere and intelligent schooling is quite enough to achieve both the above purposes (a certain small section will be found to be simply uneducable – how they can be dealt with is beyond the scope of this essay). Remember, indeed, that the best results for (a) can be achieved only when you start with very young children – I have always maintained that it is stupid to introduce a course in ethics to MBA students – and 90% of jobs in adult life do not need any ‘education’ beyond ten years of good schooling followed by a few months of technical training, whether you think of a shopping mall supervisor or optician or petrol pump manager or bank teller or policeman or low level IT worker (I say this last on Sudha Murty’s authority). It is a shameful waste of national resources to ‘educate’ millions of youngsters who will turn up in those professions in how to read Shakespeare or do integral calculus, or how the Krebs cycle works in your body cells or how plants and animals are classified in the Linnaean system. If millions of parents still send their children to college, they do so firstly because they associate a college degree with a silly thing called ‘status’ (which nobody really believes in anyway), or because the unemployment situation is so bad that they keep hoping that more degrees will finally fetch their children some halfway respectable job (and are then horrified to hear that a crane driver in some places earns far more than their ‘engineer’ children!), or because they are simply too ashamed to admit publicly that their children are really unemployed, when they have the option of calling them ‘students’ instead. But the long and short of it is that if 90% of youngsters could be employed after ten years of schooling and at most a year of professional training, not only millions of families but the whole nation would have benefited hugely (just think of lafungas on motorbikes posing a menace on the roads and their female counterparts burning their parents’ money at restaurants and beauty parlours and you will get what I am driving at).

Education has one more purpose: to give people a much wider appreciation of life and its treasures, by means of all the precious products of civilization, namely literature, art, music, sport – not its horribly caricatured professional version but sports for pleasure and comradeship – justice, true spirituality and so on. This is so neglected in our country that I have often been heard to say that if many people do manage to become educated in India, they do so not due to but in spite of the schooling they have received, so I shall not belabour the point here.

Finally, the fact that this kind of universal basic education has not happened in India, I am convinced, is because of the very deeply elitist (partly casteist, partly sexist, partly economic) bias built into the Indian system of governance right from the start, in open defiance of that famous Directive Principle in our Constitution. Perhaps if Ambedkar or Subhas Bose had been at the helm at the start things would have been very different today – or perhaps they would have been assassinated! In any case, the fact that it has not happened very largely explains why India is so backward still, for all its IITs and IIMs, and why our ‘educated’ population’s highest dream remains to run away to Umrica or failing that, to work for an MNC. As Tagore wrote: poschatey rekhechho jaare, sey tomare poschate tanichhe… the one whom you have shoved behind you keeps pulling you backwards.

Now think: if you broadly agree with this thesis, wouldn’t you also agree that if just these four things had been achieved by 1977, India would have found it far easier to race ahead on the road to progress thereafter, and been in a far more admirable position today?

[I deliberately wrote this essay to mark the day Gandhi died]