Is the wheel turning?

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

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

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

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

The Pope on AI, and ranking countries

The current Pope, Leo XIV (an American and by training a mathematician, so not exactly science- and tech illiterate), has just released an encyclical (open letter to all people of goodwill) warning against the rapid and, to many, overwhelming and frightening rise of AI: see this news report. I shall not comment on any part of it right now, but I shall be glad if there is a discussion here on his various prescriptions for the future development and control of AI - before we, human beings, are actually overwhelmed and cast aside (that is a prospect  at least as old as the Frankenstein story, and looks ever more likely to come true within a generation or two). It is interesting to note that giant-tech honchos were beside him as he spoke, including, notably, one of the chief officers of Anthropic. I shall be eagerly waiting for responses: what sort of Brave New World are we shaping? And shall we be able to handle it?

Also, in today's newspaper, I read that the UN has come forward with a newly designed complex and multi-dimensional measure of the progress and wealth of nations - meant to replace the many-decades long narrow focus on GDP as a catch-all; see this and this. It has been drawn up by an expert panel of fourteen, headed by the well-known Indian origin economist Kaushik Basu. Now it has been agreed among the majority of economists for a long time that GDP and its rate of growth by itself is a very unsatisfactory index of real human progress and welfare (even if you consider only 'real' and per capita incomes, and factor in purchasing power parity corrections), because it ignores too many important things, like the degree of wealth- and income inequalities, the sustainability (environmental effects) of the kind of growth we are pursuing, the contents  of the basket of goods and services that we keep producing (more guns count for as much as more healthcare drugs, more roads as much as more cars, in purely financial terms), the actual quality of life that the majority of people enjoy (safety, green living spaces, gender equality, long term health security, type of education), etc. etc. So experts have been searching for better ways to measure things for a long time. However, the problem has been that most 'alternatives' fail to provide a different and much better picture of reality: the same UN's Human Development Index, based on a weighted average of three metrics, per capita income, literacy levels and life expectancy, very closely mimics the GDP figures, in the sense that ranking countries by their per capita GDP alone shows nearly the same list of countries in the same order as the HDI does, whether you look for the ten most 'developed' countries or the ten most backward ones.

On the other hand, taking too many metrics into consideration might make the measurements much more subjective/biased and much less dependable/broadly acceptable than a simple ranking based on GDP alone, as the critics of the new measure have already pointed out. So how best to measure which country is really most advanced, and how much more than others? Would anyone like a discussion on this issue?

Finally for now, any comments on episode 5 of my poetry podcast series on Spotify?

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!

Tired and brooding at the end of March

The last week has been hectic for a staid and increasingly easygoing person like me. First I made a sudden two-day trip to Kolkata to watch a play in which a dear old boy was playing the role of Satyajit Ray's Feluda (first stage production ever), and he asked me up on stage during the curtain call to felicitate me as his childhood Feluda and current Sidhu Jyatha (look up Shoumo Banerjee on Instagram): it was as heartwarming as it was embarrassing. Then a rushed visit to the local police station with all sorts of documents for passport-renewal related verification - but a very nice experience for a change, swift, helpful and polite. Then a three-day admission routine for the incoming batches, followed by my mother's IOL implantation surgery yesterday, which seems to have gone smoothly, God be thanked. I hasten to add that my usual classes have been continuing side by side. So I am currently fagged out and can't get enough of sleep. Mercifully, Pupu and Swarnava have been here since Saturday to give me support and company. The admissions have been to my satisfaction on the whole, but I must say that the majority of parents are growing simultaneously sillier and more distracted and more entitled with every passing year (the current generation is the one I taught in the early and mid-1990s). Some day I am going to write at length about all the many different kinds of cartoons I have seen, but I am getting more and more exasperated, and will have to stop pretty soon, or put the entire admission procedure online.

March has been gentle on the whole, weatherwise - let's see what kind of summer is awaiting us this time round. I can't say as much for geopolitics, given the insane 'war' (quotes put in deliberately) going on in the Middle East, and its terribly upsetting effects on everything, from cooking gas availability to the massive and continuing slide in the stock market, probably to be followed by a huge car fuel-price hike. I am nowhere close to going hungry to bed, but I certainly can't say I am feeling safely and comfortably off. And the most traumatic elections in ages are scheduled for April: traumatic if, like me, you feel like an utterly beleagured Bengali, that is. The time to write at length on why I am feeling that way has not yet come, but it will. This much, though, I shall say now: I am remembering Harshavardhan ranged against King Sasanka, Gandhi against Subhas, and even Nehru against Bidhan Roy - it is all about the Hindi heartland trying to obliterate Bengali culture and asmita for good, so it is a very great pity that so many Bengalis can't see that any more, blinded as they are by a combination of historical ignorance, self-loathing, pure opportunistic greed, religious hatred and anti-incumbency. So, though I am eagerly looking forward to some very good things happening on the family front soon, I have no idea how this year is going to end for Indians as a whole and Bengalis in particular among them. I wish everyone well except those who are motivated by stupidity, greed, fear and malice. Nothing good ever came from that awful combination...

Meanwhile, this blog, continuously updated, will be twenty years old this July. Those (perhaps few) who have been attentive readers for years together, I beg to tell me in comments why they have stuck to it for so long.

My YouTube story podcasts on the channel Goppoguchchho (also accessible if you simply type in 'Suvro Sir') has come to an end - for now. I shall be doing other things next, on Spotify. Look out for the links given here in coming weeks.

One last observation: after going gung ho for social media and digital classrooms, many advanced countries, beginning with Australia, Finland and Denmark are now applying reverse gear and putting stern restrictions on those efforts, while India, in the name of 'catching up with the world', is going precisely down the disastrous path those countries took ten to fifteen years ago and suffered heavily in consequence. Shall we never learn that whatever the white man does is not necessarily right, good and urgent?

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.

A big landmark reached

Last weekend of November approaching. As in every year for almost a quarter century, I am closing off the outgoing batches of students. Today was the last time I took two successive classes: for the next four months I shall no longer have to do an afternoon class, so I can sleep or sometimes watch movies every day, and go travelling much oftener, because from next week, I shall have two successive days off every week: something deliciously anticipated for a very, very long time, because I have never had a single day off every week for as long as I can remember! This was the last time I did four simultaneous class 10 batches. The number of batches has been halved. I shall now well and truly be at least half-retired. Oh my goodness; now that I am finally high and dry, I cannot imagine how I stuck to this work routine for so long. And I am infinitely thankful to a very high power that gave me the health, the energy, the determination and the opportunity to do it. It has been hard, but I shall be most dishonest if I did not admit that there have been many compensations - being my own master, teaching my own style, fixing my own holidays, working from home since long before WFH became a thing.

Tanmoy in faraway New Zealand, ICSE 1994 batch, one of the very few old boys who have  kept continuously in touch, will be happy to know that I have been playing his 'Suvro-da' podcast on YouTube to all the outgoing batches, just to tell them, 'This is how some students still remember me', and wondering aloud how many of them will do the same, if any. Of course, by the time they are Tanmoy's age, I shall have been long gone. I am already telling my currently-juniormost (class 8) batch that theirs might just be the very last batch that I teach. Let us see.

No man can see very far into the future, not his own, not his family's, not his country's, not the world's. At 16, I had wondered in writing what things might look like at the turn of the century, when I would be 37 (year 2000 CE); twenty five years have passed after that landmark, and I am still carrying on. My oldest student is 63; the first one who came to study with me here in Durgapur will be 54 this year. One of the greatest sources of pride for me is that I can vibe so easily and well with teenagers still: one student, now 52, whose daughter never wants to miss one of my classes, recently asked me 'How do you do it?' But yes, for numerous reasons, many of which I have written about before, I am getting a trifle tired and bored and less hopeful for them, so it is indeed high time that I slowed down and reduced the workload with the aim of going entirely post-economic within a few more years, God willing. Then I can sit back and watch the fun of a new generation being 'educated' by AI! And maybe turning most of my attention to raising my own grandchildren in the time that is left to me.

Those who have just left, click this link to find out what I wrote to the students who left in 2009: imagine - they are 31/32 years old now!

It goes without saying that any ex student, however young or old, who happens to read this post and feels nostalgic, is most welcome to write down his or her own thoughts as a comment on this.

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.

Civic sense? In India?!

In its October 27th edition, The Telegraph of Calcutta carried an editorial titled Stubborn Stain, covering the highlights of the first ever survey of civic behavioral attitudes in this country, and ranking the states according to how they fared overall. The survey was carried out by India Today. Look up this link before it vanishes. 

The subject of the survey has always been close to my heart, and I have written again and again here, much more scathingly than the editorial writer does. I have very firmly held since I just stepped out of teenage that in order to ever truly become a 'developed' nation, India should concentrate far more on educating and policing a civic-minded citizenry, and not just obsess with capital accumulation, technological advancement and administrative efficiency. Next to the monstrous burden of overpopulation, it is a pervasive lack of good manners and civic sense at every social stratum  that has been holding us back all along (we steal mugs from train washrooms and towels from posh hotels with equal insouciance, so for heaven's sake don't blame it all on 'lack of education'), and it is so hardwired into our genes (or social tradition for choice) that only the rare individual is different from the herd, and suffers tremendously in an atmosphere where virtually everybody is rude, noisy, aggressive, shameless, grasping, ostentatious about power and money, and completely uncaring about social responsibility of any kind. Most certainly the kind of 'education' we give our children does not even aim to make good citizens, regardless of which social background they come from. In fact, mummy cares only that her son may get ahead in life, and is actually delighted if the neighbour's son falls behind!

The survey is based on responses given by 9000-odd citizens from 21 states and one Union Territory. They were questioned about their attitudes to all kinds of unsocial (not to say anti-social) behaviour, from ugly gender-attitudes and public littering to open urination to flouting traffic rules, jumping queues and 'enjoying' themselves regardless of all the noise pollution they cause (I wish they had asked a question about cheating in exams). I am sure that if a hundred times more respondents had been quizzed, the findings would only have been more strongly reinforced. India is, overall, a very ill-mannered country, very difficult and even dangerous to live in: but there are wide variations among states. I am glad, and a little surprised, to see that West Bengal ranks pretty high on the list, i.e., reasonably well-behaved - as compared only to other Indians, mind you. Knowing WB as well as I do, I could only roll my eyes thinking about how bad things must be in the states which ranked lowest.

Two questions arise - two questions that every  minister, MP, MLA and city councillor should think about as much as every parent and school headmaster and examination board: a) why are good manners and civic sense important, nay essential for national progress, and b) how can we ensure that future generations will grow up much better in these respects than their parents and grandparents?

The answer to the first question is so startlingly, embarrassingly simple that most people just don't get it (though many of them have PhDs). Virtually all of us, except the most deluded and perverted, want others to treat us well, right? - keep appointments on time, check our exam answer scripts mindfully and honestly, give us just the right medical treatment without trying to fleece us, not  push us aside in queues, not make us the victims of their road rage, not insult and humiliate and hurt our womenfolk, not overburden our streets with garbage and worse, not steal whatever valuables we leave behind in a moment of forgetfulness, not disrespect our privacy and right to peace and quiet, not insult or threaten us when we have done them no harm... etc etc? Well, why on earth can't we see that if we don't give that kind of courtesy and consideration to others, we have no right to expect the same from them? And if this most important of all social lessons is not drummed early and daily into children's heads by parents and primary school teachers, how on earth can we expect them to grow up into anything better than civic nuisances and menaces, with their conception of their 'right' to ignore and offend and discomfit and hurt others increasing in proportion with the rise of their self-perceived 'importance' (I am the local dada with fifty goons under my command/ I am a doctor-IITian-IPS-MP/I am a cricket- or movie superstar/ Do you know how rich my father is? That is all the licence I need to misbehave, that is what democracy means to me).

The answer to the second question derives directly from the first. If our rulers, thought leaders and parents took the matter as seriously as it deserves, they would arrive at a consensus over two things at once: a) that 'education', from now on, must mean above and beyond everything else a training in good manners and consideration for others (and parents must be held to be just as culpable if things go wrong as everybody else in charge of youth), and b) the laws, and the way people are policed must be reasonably, democratically made, but rigidly implemented without fear or favour, with the elite (meaning everyone from prime minister to headmaster to parents at home) setting examples by humbly obeying the laws and paying the penalties for breaking them exactly like all ordinary folks (remember Rishi Sunak quietly paying a traffic fine to a humble police constable? Can we even imagine an Indian PM doing the same? I have heard that when there is a railway accident in Japan, the chairman of the railways publicly apologizes and resigns. In India, we at most suspend or dismiss a poor signalman. Maybe that's the most important reason why we have accidents so much more often than in Japan?). That is the only way a real democracy can survive and flourish. Otherwise, we shall implode sooner or later, when everybody, frustrated beyond toleration, begins to take the law into their own hands, and society dissolves rapidly into anarchy, to be followed inevitably by some sort of tyranny.

I can vouch that all my life most of my suffering, other than from illness, has come from people treating me rudely, cheating me or trying to push me aside from getting my dues. The worst consequence of this is that even the individual who is instinctively quiet, shy and gentle gets a raw deal, until he is forced to become harsh and pushy and threatening himself. That, to a large extent, is my life story. I wish it were otherwise: I was not born that way, and I am not proud that so many people have learnt to fear and avoid my tongue-lashing. A soft bodied animal has to grow a hard and prickly shell for self-preservation. 

Let me end with a little story. I was standing in front of a bank manager as though I had nothing else to do that whole day, waiting for him to sign me off with a new cheque book (in those days you couldn't get these things done online). The fellow, well aware that a customer was standing in front of him (with a large picture of Gandhiji on the wall behind saying 'The customer is God'), was chatting away merrily on the phone about utter trifles with some family member. He didn't have the courtesy even to ask me to sit down, let alone ask me what I needed. Familiar experience for many readers, isn't it? Finally, exasperated (and since I was running out of time for doing all the other chores scheduled for that morning), I cleared my throat and said, rather loudly I'm afraid, 'Excuse me, my name is Suvro Chatterjee, known as Suvro Sir, can I...?' Believe it or not, the man jumped out of his seat, cut the phone line, ran around his table to pull out a chair for me, and bleated, 'Ehe Sir, agey bolben toh' (So sorry, why didn't you say so earlier?') and yelled to some peon to bring me tea. My job was done in five minutes. The reason for the magical transformation? He had apparently registered his son's (or daughter's) name for admission to my class the next year, but never met me in person. So that's how we decide whom to behave well with. As for whom to ignore or grind under the heel, we all know how we decide that, don't we?

As I said before, knowing India as I do, I am very cynical about whether we shall ever reach true democratic civilization. But I am sure glad that some people are at least taking the trouble to bring these issues out in the open. It's not just me any more.

What's your work/life balance?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Troubling ruminations

Driving recently through Kolkata, I saw a touching sign right in front of the main gate of Fort William (newly named Vijay Durg): 'Want to do something for a soldier? Be an Indian worth fighting for.' I was reminded of the truly great who have lived and died before us so that our country might be free, prosperous and glorious, and I sadly wondered how many of us today would qualify. How many of you - I am asking all except the most blindly selfish and perverted - could honestly look at yourself in the mirror and say confidently 'I am an Indian worth fighting (and dying) for'? I know I could not ask or expect any Indian to do so much for me...

Which led to another but related train of thought: why, when we even at all bother to tell our children about our great men and women, do we invariably mention only those who are all long dead: why only the Tagores, Vivekanandas, Gandhis, Bagha Jatins and the like? Haven't so many Indians devoted their lives in the post-independence era to improving the lot of their fellow countrymen in myriad important ways? Why do we (the older generations, who are supposed to 'teach' youngsters what matters and what does not) gush endlessly instead about cricketers and film stars and people who, in one way or the other, are busy making fortunes, often contributing very little, if anything at all, to national welfare and progress? Jagdeep Chhokar's recent death stirred these thoughts - and I am sure most 'educated' Indians would have to ask Google who he was and what he did. I could reel off so many such names without having to consult any notebook or encyclopedia: (ICS) Sukumar Sen, Aruna Roy, Ela Bhatt, Sunita Narain, Bindhyeshwari Pathak, Kailash Satyarthi, P. Sainath, Harsh Mander, M. C. Mehta, Subhas Dutta, Chandi Prasad Bhatt, Bittu Sahgal, Arunachalam Muruganantham and countless others I have read and heard about, but are not 'famous' enough to be accessed via the internet. I know for a fact that most of my readers would merely gape and secretly admit never having heard of them. If we have failed to instill some ideals, some vision in our young, if we have never told them what sort of people really deserve to be respected, why do we eternally lament that our country is going to the dogs, or boast that it is doing great only because a few people are becoming billionaires every year and we can rub our weak neighbours' noses in the dirt now and then? It is obviously because we have taught our young that there is nothing to life beyond getting a nondescript job and shopping and being idly 'entertained' and preening before friends and relatives for as long as we can! What could be more pathetic for a whole nation?

A little economic gnyaan here for those who are interested, in connection with the lately much tomtommed claim that India is now the 'fastest growing major economy', which has recently become the fourth (or fifth) largest in the world. 1) It all depends on how much you can trust the source of the figures, and the government, which provides most of the data, is not the most trustworthy source of such things! 2) There was a massive fall of GDP/national income during the COViD-induced decline, so the rebound looks much healthier than it actually is - to a large extent we are merely catching up with the pre-2020 (pre-GST, pre demonetization-) years, and it remains to be seen how long this growth spurt will continue, 3) Mere GDP figures mean very little, because a. increase of production of literally anything adds to GDP, guns, drugs, luxury resorts as much as food and schools and hospitals for the poor, b. how the GDP is shared out matters far more when it is a question of overall welfare: if a tiny minority siphons off most of the benefits of growth, as is currently the case, the average Indian remains in a bad way, even if you completely forget the poorest 300 million, c. the moment you look at per capita income instead of the total, given the gigantic population, India still remains one of the poorest countries in the world, and is likely to remain so for decades to come (so comparing our situation with Japan, population 124 million, or Germany, population 84 million, whom we have just narrowly 'beaten', makes us look very conceited as well as silly), d. on many globally respected and trusted indices, such as the UN HDI, the World Hunger Index, the Corruption index, the gender-equality index and so on, India still ranks among the lowest, as anyone can check for oneself. All this is not to deride or deny whatever India has actually achieved since independence (and that's a lot), but to insist that we should all accept we have a long way to go before we can truly become Viksit Bharat, and along the way we have to correct many defects and make a lot of course corrections if we ever want to reach that goal: merely boasting about certain things and denying certain others and trying to shut up everyone who points out what we really need to do is not the best way ahead.

A status update on my YouTube channel where I am telling a new story every week: it seems I have acquired a loyal and regular following of listeners, but the number is still very small (around 150-200, I should think), considering the number of subscribers, and the number of people who know me (just count the number of ex students along with their family members, and it will come to several tens of thousands, I should think). Maybe it's because I am not spending money on 'buying' listeners, as apparently most YouTubers do? But since I don't plan to do that, this core group of listeners, if they really want me to keep going, should work a little more to spread the word around among their own friends and relatives, especially parents, uncles, aunts and grandparents. If every one of you lets ten people know, and nudge them a bit, at least two or three will start listening, and very soon that will have a cascading effect, and give me a great morale booster. Otherwise, as my daughter has said, the one solid good thing that is happening is that I am building up a repertoire of audio stories that more than one family member will keep listening to years after I am gone! But then, sooner rather than later I am going to lose steam and cry 'enough'...

One other thing, a subject I keep harping on from time to time: I miss the long and absorbing debates I used to have with a lot of people here over things that I had written. There are blogposts which garnered 60-plus comments: now I consider myself lucky if I get five or six (and often those who are keenest and have the most spare time to comment are those who hate me blindly, whatever their reasons are!) Most of my decent, informed, thoughtful readers, whether they are in their twenties or fifties, apparently no longer 'have time'. Now that is a mindless canard if ever there was one, as everyone secretly knows but is ashamed to admit. We lack time a) only for those things which we do not seriously consider to be a priority, or b) because we are perpetually distracted by trivia, whether that be attending parties or quarrelling with the spouse or scrolling endlessly through Instagram. So I am urging the best of my readers, one more time: PLEASE engage. Otherwise, I am nearing twenty years of non-stop writing here, and I might soon decide that it's time to call it a day.

Finally, for those who find this blog 'too serious', do look up my other blog. And those strange few who think I treat my ex students like toilet paper, I should beg them with folded hands to come and meet me and let me know what I ever did to make them feel so bad (because I do have a lot of beloved ex students who think quite the opposite about me), so that I can most sincerely beg forgiveness for having hurt them - provided they can convince me I hurt them absolutely without any valid reason. But to all the rest, who merely burn with helpless anger and jealousy every time they visit my blog (the root cause being, I think, that I have found the kind of freedom and peace with self-respect and financial solvency which they will never get, because they don't deserve it) my request, repeated ad nauseam, is 'Please stop reading!' I am not going to change my ways and views because of folks like you, so you are wasting your time. And calling your betters names doesn't harm them, it merely shows you up for what you are. You hide behind pseudonyms and don't dare deal with me face to face, so you belong to the trash can.

Crore+ salaries, golden eggs and such things

 

The Telegraph reported on July 26 that the director of IIT Kharagpur, addressing a meeting of parents in the context of repeated cases of suicide among students, has requested them not to put unbearable expectational pressure of a material sort on their wards - forget about Rs. 1-crore starting salary packages, he has urged them, face reality. See the above picture.

I am glad that he has pointed out the case of Sundar Pichai, and added that Pichai studied metallurgical engineering at IIT (followed by an MBA, which does NOT call for a prior engineering degree). I should like to stress here that Pichai's case well illustrates the fact that to become the CEO of a giant IT company, you do not need even a degree in IT or computer science. Digest that, ignorant parents and starry-eyed youngsters!

I only wish the learned director had spoken out loudly about how so many colleges (and plus-two level tutors/cram shops) are duping both parents and children with fairy tales about those multi-crore salary packages. They are just pie in the sky, folks, and, even if they exist, your chances of landing one of them are about just as good as winning a major lottery or becoming an IPL team captain. Look at your parents' earnings, kids, even after working for 20 to 30 years. Also ask them how many people they know who get salaries of crores a year (and have your parents actually seen the pay-slips of those who claim they do, or are they gullible enough to believe everyone who claims they do?). Then learn to live with the drab, humble reality. Otherwise, the bodies are simply going to pile up higher, as rosy dreams are shattered by the time you have spent one or two years in college, and you have found out how hard it is to live and work and thrive in the real world, and your  'mental health' cannot bear the terrible shock of the sudden let-down after so many years of fantasizing.

Ironic that I, who have warned thousands of kids merely against such suicidal daydreaming, have managed to earn a reputation in my town as the tutor who is a bad man because he urges his students against such greed and stupidity, whether it is theirs or their parents'! But of course, my karma is being recorded at a far higher level than the public's, and I am content.

Right now, you can find the news item if you click on this link, but I don't know how long they maintain them in their archives.

This and that

Good to see that many old posts are coming back into the most-read list again. I wonder, though, why A most frightening prospect, written about the fake and dangerous Anna Hazare-led 'anti-corruption' campaign, written long ago, has been recently occupying the top slot for quite some time at a stretch!

The CBSE's latest brainwave is giving board examination candidates two chances a year instead of one to get the scores they want. Ostensibly to reduce further the 'stress' (chaap, as Bengalis call it)  that the kids find unbearable these days. That too makes me wonder - how did we and our ancestors for several generations cope so quietly (without severe 'mental health issues'), when syllabi were far bigger, questions much tougher, marks given far more stingily, and everybody knew that only a genuinely bright few would do really well (and also that exam scores have very little predictive power about how successful a person would become in later material life)? The situation sits very uncomfortably with the competing idea that everybody 'needs' an education to do well in life, and everybody 'deserves' an education, everybody wants an education, and like all good things in life, it is a difficult attribute to acquire - it was never supposed to be a leisurely fun ride at parental expense for 18 to 20 years. As I remarked once not very long ago, why not drop this farce, this gigantic hypocrisy once and for all, and simply abolish mass education  beyond class 8 - seeing that, as everybody actually knows, 95% of jobs don't need much real education anyway? In any case, we do not respect and admire truly educated people any longer, do we? - it is only people with some sort of low- or high level technical skill (code writers and surgeons, for example) who are now called educated.

A good education, among many other vital things, would have made people more polite, gentle, courteous and considerate towards one another - because they would like to have the same good things in return. Who can deny, then, that we live in an increasingly uncivilized world, where 'educated' people (and that includes people who influence large numbers - politicians, writers, filmmakers and so on) care less and less about such niceties; indeed, have come to believe that crude vulgarity, needless aggression and callousness about other people's legitimate feelings are what makes you 'smart, cool and trendy'? These days I actually marvel at youngsters and their parents who can talk civilly, and still believe that good manners matter. Perhaps, like me, they are a dying breed, and perhaps, soon, things are going to take a turn towards the dark past, when all of us will have to carry weapons again (or bodyguards skilled with weapons) to protect not only our physical safety but dignity too? It pains me that I was born quiet, mild and self-effacing, but I have had to make myself a brash and harsh person on the outside (those who know me well know how different I am at heart), simply to survive in this sick, ugly social environment with head held high: most people give me a wide berth simply because I have painstakingly built a reputation for giving back worse than I get. Most people in this town who think and speak ill of me have learnt to do so carefully behind my back. Says much more about them than about me, if only they had the wits to figure that out!

[A happy coincidence: my daughter just sent me this YouTube video on a very popular channel (Deshbhakt) that talks about the same issue and pulls no punches. I am glad that some 'influencers' are saying exactly the same things that I do, the same way. Interested readers may also look up my 2019 post titled Guttersnipes]

I recently watched a 2023 movie called One Life featuring Sir Nicholas Winton (the elderly Winton played by Anthony Hopkins) who, too, saved a lot of (young) Jewish lives just before the Holocaust began. So actually quite a few people were strongly enough moved by their consciences to do just that, not just Oscar Schindler or Chiune Sugihara or Goering's brother. One lives and learns. I was also excited about the fourth season of the Panchayat series dropping on Amazon Prime, but judging by the first three episodes, I think I am going to be disappointed. And I read The Secret Keeper of Jaipur, a sort of sequel to The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi. A well-written mystery thriller, starring the same central character, but it doesn't tug at the heart strings as the former did.

This has been a rather long-drawn out June. Glad it's ending today. Funny monsoon going on: drizzling every day, but hardly any strong showers, and horribly muggy. I wonder what July has in store for us.

I was musing over how the English language has become impoverished (poor, for readers below forty), desiccated (dried up) and coarse over my lifetime. One of those things that hurt, because I have loved them so deeply. I have written in passing about this before, but it deserves a longer post of its own. So maybe next time. 

An ex student currently preparing for next year's UPSC exams brought me a list of the kind of topics on which they have to write compulsory thousand-word essays. Most of them, I was tickled to find, were right up my street, the kind of essays I have enjoyed writing all my life, the sort I have written again and again here on this blog. Maybe I'll try my hand at penning my thoughts on one or two of them here, just for the fun of it (yes, people have very different ideas of fun. I wouldn't be caught dead at a rock concert, a fashion show or on the galleries at a cricket match).

I also want to write a longish essay about our own Didi, because I admire her so much as a human being, if only I wasn't afraid that, as is people's wont these days, they would immediately brand me a 'sycophant' and a blind TMC supporter, neither of which I am. (Indeed, from a very dispassionate, rational, educated point of view, I actually wish that party to lose power next time round: three successive tenures at the helm of government is quite enough; after that, every party and ideology grows incompetent, smug and corrupt to the core). What a stupid and vulgar world it has become, where praise for the deserving without vested interest has become so suspect, yet shameless flattery flourishes...

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?

Blogs, books and YouTube

 I am jotting down several passing ideas here before they fly away:

Seventeen years ago I wrote a post titled 'Forty five and counting'. I should have written one headed 'Sixty and still counting' in 2023, but I somehow forgot. Maybe I'll make up for it when I am sixty five, if I am still around and capable of thinking and writing!

I just learned that there are still elders in our town who are feeding their teenage children or grandchildren the old chestnut that 'If you work hard through school and college, you will have a good, assured and cushy career ever afterwards.' Who says only kids believe in fairy tales?

That old post called 'Lust Stories' is now beginning to irritate me. It was meant to be a sober review of a four-part movie which dealt - pretty soberly on the whole, can't even be called soft porn - with the issue of contemporary sexuality and related problems in India. It stays perpetually high on the most read list, for an absurd reason, as my Google search history recently informed me: many people stumble upon it while randomly searching for smut! I don't want to delete the post for good, but someone please tell me what else I can do about it.

I do wish that those who are enjoying my weekly storytelling on YouTube would write longer and more articulate comments (somehow just 'Great story Sir!' sounds very flat and unfulfilling), and spread the word among relatives and friends. I am glad to note that a few of my pupils' parents have become regular and appreciative listeners already. I shall be delighted to get advice about how to spread my reach beyond the immediate circle of students and ex students. Viewers are also welcome to suggest what they would like to hear next, as long as they don't repeat books and authors who have been done to death already.

I was going through posts written years ago, and I am beginning to wonder that I have written so much for so long on so many serious subjects. Besides raising a child and teaching for more than four decades, I shall definitely remember writing this blog as the most important thing I did with my life. How much it benefited others I shall leave my readers to decide.

Coming to books, I read something wonderful recently: The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King, which tells about a young female assistant (and gradually friend) that Sherlock Holmes finds in his advancing years, someone who is both his intellectual equal and on his side (unlike Moriarty), and who first trains under him then starts solving cases with him. The book was written in 1994 - strange that I didn't come across it for so long (thanks once again, Pupu)! - and it evolved into a 20-volume series. It was pure delight to read it: find out why for yourself. But maybe I shall not read the succeeding volumes: I don't want to contemplate Holmes growing increasingly rusty and senile. Healthy bit of feminism there, too - though the author has been most ahistorical in ascribing King Henry VIII's inability to have a legitimate son to his alleged syphilis (Henry did actually have more than one son), and it is a trifle rich to hear the girl saying to herself 'What do men know about driving?' while herself driving like a crazy drunk, barely avoiding serious accidents.

Tailpiece: I don't know whether I should be writing this - these days people are being hauled away by the police for less - but I greatly enjoyed listening to Avay Shukla's interview by Karan Thapar on YouTube today. Mr. Shukla, a retired IAS officer and popular blogger, has written in a recently published book that India is turning into a land of duffers. Look him up on Wikipedia, and watch the interview if you care and dare.

I end for now by asking my most favourite old boys and girls a very important question. Suppose I entirely stop giving private tuition to high-school goers at 65, what would be the best thing for me to do next? And how can you help me do it? I am asking very seriously, mind you, because it is about how I can most enjoy the dusk of my life.

AI rising, NI sinking

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

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

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

The life of the spirit, part four

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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