Swimming after Covid

My hopes of a mild summer after a year when it rained every month were cruelly dashed in early March. Summer came early and ferociously this year. For the last month it has been blazing, with the temperature having soared beyond 40⁰ C in early April. And there has been no respite: not a single nor’wester rainstorm has arrived yet to cool us briefly off. There was a day recently when it was actually hotter in Durgapur than in Delhi.

 I last went swimming in 2019. Then Covid struck, and the pool was closed for two whole years. I knew that it has opened this season over a month ago, but – call it old age, or the irritation of having to drive 24 km through increasingly dense and erratic traffic every time or just plain lost habit – despite knowing that I would love a dip, I had been postponing a visit endlessly, until today. This morning I went, and enjoyed myself just as much as I had hoped. God bless them for reopening the pool. They have opened a new one much closer at hand, but I found it to be rather small and overcrowded, so I haven’t tried it out yet. I wish there were one in every large neighbourhood. If I were really rich, an all-year, full sized, personal pool would be something I should definitely indulge on…

 A lot of people seem to be awaiting a fourth wave of Covid with what can only be called ghoulish excitement, and sound truly disappointed that though the infection numbers are very slightly rising once more, as in January, the death toll is almost insignificant. Let us see whether God gives them their kind of satisfaction! I for one am delighted that countrywide there are no takers for the booster dose of the vaccine, and most people are not wearing masks unless compelled. Madness must be called by its proper name and laid to rest sooner or later.

Rainy, lazy January evening

I have been forced to suspend my offline classes again after a continuous session of six months. I hope this won’t last very long.

It’s strange weather for January. The cold vanished a few days ago. Since yesterday the sky has been overcast. It started drizzling this afternoon, which turned into quite a shower as evening descended. Three hours later it is still drizzling. That, combined with the closure of markets, has left the streets silent and deserted. I hope the sun will come out tomorrow, and a strong chill return.

Having marked some homework and posted some lessons and exercises online, I am now left at a loose end. Been watching silly James Bond and Jason Bourne movies and listening to stories on YouTube; now I am trying Jai Bhim. A very important and much neglected issue: I wish they had made a better movie out of it. Some are born to deep delight, and some are born to endless night... that is probably more true about India than anywhere else on earth.

Oh, I forgot to mention this earlier: The Nutmeg’s Curse has turned me off Amitav Ghosh. He doth protest too much these days, and he is becoming something of a Luddite. Technology harnessed to commerce in the service of west-dominated capitalism has indeed done immeasurable harm to mankind and the environment, which calls for urgent and wide-ranging corrections, but a) he has forgotten that China and India have decided to follow the same path as the west now, so flogging that old dead horse doesn’t cut much ice any more, b) it is because of all the rich rewards of that same system that he is able to live the life he leads and write the kind of books he does for a worldwide audience, and c) he seems to be suggesting, though not in so many words, that going back to Stone Age minimalism will solve all our problems, which is a position too absurd even to waste time demolishing.

On the other hand, Madhulika Liddle’s Garden of Heaven charmed me. It is historical fiction based on Delhi over a two hundred year period, from the invasion of Muhammad Ghori to that of Timur, and she has promised three more books in a series, which I shall eagerly wait for. Her collaboration with her historian sister has borne very rich fruit!

As I have said before, I often re-visit some of my old posts. I recently looked up The world we are making for our children. It was written nearly fifteen years ago. How would you comment on it now?

All you who sleep tonight with lonely hearts, here’s love to you.

P.S., January 12: Corrigendum and apology after having watched Jai Bhim:

It was too important a film for me to have carped about the cinematic aspects. I am deeply ashamed that, informed as I consider myself to be, I had not heard of Justice Chandru till now. It takes my breath away to think that such men have been alive and working in my own lifetime. He is the sort of man that I would automatically stand up and bow to when he enters my room, and never address as anything less than 'Sir'. Maybe that is why India still works, and maybe there is hope for us yet. Do please listen to his interview here, and don't miss out a single word of it. 

I am glad I am writing this on Vivekananda's birthday. I am also thinking of Dr. Ambedkar.

Ranchi, Netarhat, Ajodhya Hills

Having avoided the Christmas-New Year tourist rush, I set off on another road trip on Monday the 3rd January. As usual, young Firoz was at the wheel, and this time both Swarnava and Koushik gave me company. This is the evening of Friday the 7th, and we have just come back home after a most satisfactory, 1100-plus km journey.

We had planned out the trip only vaguely, not being sure when and where we would be stopped and turned back during this freshly-rising Covid wave. In fact, our CM had announced on Sunday afternoon that tighter restrictions would come into force from the 3rd itself, including closure of schools (not that they had every properly opened!) and tourist hotspots. The only given was – seeing that the interstate border was open – that we would eventually drop off Swarnava at his BIT Mesra campus. We had a smooth and leisurely trip to Ranchi, stopping off to lunch at Hotel Rajdhani – the same place where we had eaten back in February 2019 – and visit the Jonha Falls, a picturesque spot from where we had to hurry away, no thanks to a picnic party which was playing raucous music at ear-splitting volume (typical Indians ‘enjoying’ themselves, all health- and environmental concerns be damned). The road via Purulia is in excellent condition though spattered with speedbreaker bumps till Jhalda, and then fine again after a while. We reached Ranchi in the afternoon and checked into the ‘International Guest House’ at BIT, which offers excellent lodgings for the price. Swarnava showed us proudly around the huge and lush green campus. That first night was pretty cold, but we managed to sleep well.

The next morning we headed for Netarhat. Again, the road was good to excellent except for a longish stretch before and after Lohardaga. Shortly after Bishunpur we started climbing up a hill road through dense forest. It was my car’s first ever hill trip, and it went beautifully. We checked into Jharkhand Tourism’s Hotel Prabhat Vihar, where a friend had booked me the best rooms a week beforehand. It was fine, though I found it a tad overpriced: you can get everything you want in the same hotel much more cheaply, or in one of the numerous hotels/guest houses/homestays nearby. They only checked my vaccination certificate, considering that enough to cover all four! We spent the afternoon seeing the local sights, including the most remarkable feature of a sal forest within two km of the pine woods at Koyel View Point, and rounding it off with a lovely view at Sunset Point, which, alas, gradually became too crowded and noisy for my liking. At dawn next day we had a glorious view of the sunrise, which is the hotel’s USP. It got too crowded again for about forty minutes, because scores of tourists came over from all the other accommodations – I wish our hotel charged non boarders for the privilege…

Everybody agreed that the Netarhat trip was perfect, and for me it was the culmination of a nearly fifty-year wait. Wednesday’s leisurely drive was to Mccluskiegunj, about which I had heard some good reviews, but though the drive itself was most enjoyable, we all found the sleepy little town devoid of interest and no good place to stay either – Gulmohur Lodge could only offer very cold rooms and no food because the cook had run away, while Rana’s Country Cottage behaved most strangely, turning us away because ‘they were not taking in boarders owing to the Covid scourge’, though only the previous day they had offered accommodation over the phone. Don’t be taken in by the reviews you read online. So we decided, after seeing the ribbon-thin Degadegi river (whose sand, according to some dubious looking locals, had magical healing properties) we decided to drive back to Ranchi. There we finally left Swarnava after coffee and snacks and a little photo session, then checked into a room at a very ordinary but adequate Oyo certified hotel off the highway a furlong from the BIT junction. End of Wednesday’s travels. That night I took a sleeping pill to fight off both Koushik and Firoz snoring sonorously around me.

We had earlier planned to visit Bodh Gaya next, but that would be risking another border crossing, and in any case all ‘religious places’ had been closed, so there was no point going to a place where the monasteries were the only real attractions. So we headed back towards West Bengal on Thursday morning, and drove up Ajodhya Hill. Having taken a room at a guest house of one of our state government departments which Koushik’s father had booked for us, we drove around the locale, visiting the Upper and Lower Dam and notably the ‘Marble Lake’(a miniature version of the famed Marble Rocks at Jabbalpur) before calling it a day.

We turned in early on Thursday night and got up lateish on Friday morning, because the strain of early mornings had begun to tell on all three of us. Then we drove down to Mukutmanipur, where, strangely, they told us at the Sonajhuri government resort that every cottage and room was booked, though the place looked deserted, with not a car in sight except ours. There was no boat ride, because Koushik is scared of open water, and the park as well as the dam were off limits, so after a hearty lunch we headed back for home.

The highlights of this trip were a) the several lovely drives through forested roads, b) the good eating, sometimes at expensive joints and sometimes at roadside inns, and c) the delightful no-holds-barred, hours-long addas. And for me the best reward was being repeatedly reassured that everybody had enjoyed himself to his heart’s content. I know this much about myself by now: nothing pleases me more than pleasing people whom I like!

God willing, I shall go on travelling like this for as long as I live.

[Come back for some photos in a day or two]

See the previous post in connection with Covid:

A month ago, the daily new infection rate in India was around 5,000; today it has soared to 117,000. Yet the death rate remains stuck at exactly the same level – between 200 and 400 (today’s count is 302, and I am sure if you probe a little deeper, you will find that a large proportion of those were elderly people with high co-morbidities). Children are not seriously affected in any significant numbers. Only deliberately blind or stupid people can help drawing the only obvious conclusion – namely that this latest ‘Omicron’ scare is a load of hogwash; the infection rate seems to have skyrocketed only because the government encouraged, media-hyped scare has sent vast numbers (mostly ‘educated’ people, alas!), who would never have bothered otherwise, with no symptoms or malaise whatsoever, scurrying to get themselves tested. By now it should be quite, quite clear to all but the brainwashed that the whole thing is politically motivated, and driven by all those who have hugely benefited from the nearly-two year old panic, from the billionaires who run online communication platforms and edtech and pharma and IT companies to the millions who have been drawing salaries from home without doing any work worth the name. It was most telling that though I saw thousands and interacted with scores of people during this five-day trip, the only two who sounded ‘deeply concerned’ about the wildfire spread of the virus were people with assured salaries…

As for school closures, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, chief scientist at the World Health Organization, said only two days ago that 'schools should be the last to close and first to open'. Obviously we don't pay any attention to 'experts' unless their advice suits our pet prejudices. And in India, at least, just about everybody seems to be happy to see the schools stay closed.

End of a dreary year

31st December, and the year is closing with the dark shadow of something called Omicron looming over us. A ‘tsunami’ of Covid, the so-called third wave, is about to crash over our heads, say the experts. Mercifully, even the experts believe that this wave will be of very short duration, maybe only a few weeks. I am only taking heart from the latest numbers. Over the last week, the number of new daily infections in Delhi has surged from 40-50 to 1300+, yet the daily death rate has remained constant for more than a month at 0-1 (today’s number is zero). Countrywide, over the same period, the infection rate has doubled, while the death rate has remained the same, or dropped slightly (today it was 220, while even a few days ago it was nudging 400). Make of that what you will.

I wish almost everyone – meaning everyone who has not made hay on a monstrous scale in the time of the pandemic – a much happier New Year. May divine wrath consume the other kind. I like to console myself with Holy Scripture: ‘The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small’.

There is a private diary in which I have been scribbling what I consider important events in my life every year since I went to school, meaning 1969. I wonder what my entries for 2021 would be?

Long-time readers, I should very much like to hear from you about your expectations from the new year.

Open the schools, repetition

I should like to keep on record that for the first time since March 22, 2020, a news item saying that there have been disastrous losses in learning skills among schoolchildren has made it to the top of the front page of a major national newspaper: see this link. In case it vanishes from the website after a while, I am going to post a photo of the item below, too.

The survey speaks of the damage done to underprivileged children, but I can vouch from my own daily teaching experience how much harm has been done to the most privileged section too, dawdling at home, playing video games while online 'teaching' is going on or attending 'classes' from restaurants or shopping malls, taking tests only in MCQ format with textbooks open in from of them or parents dictating from the side (and being allowed an hour to answer what should take only fifteen minutes), even below-average pupils being routinely given 80%-plus marks, etc etc... I should like everyone to read the very last line of the report: 'online lessons cannot pass off as meaningful education for any child'. I concur entirely, and I speak from some knowledge and experience.

End of August note

I am delighted to see that the fund to save Shyamali Das from cancer has attracted more than Rs. 200,000 so far. Once more, I am deeply grateful to all ex students and friends who responded generously to my plea.

This is the last day of August, so I have been able to conduct offline classes for two months straight. Barring Kerala, Covid infection rates – and much more significantly, mortality rates – have gone down sharply and stayed down everywhere for more than two months now, so I am hoping that all restrictions will be gradually removed countrywide, and even if the third wave comes and goes, it will be mild and of very short duration.

For some reason, August has dragged ever since my daughter went back. I hope September will go faster. One more month, and I shall be able to look forward to a long and pleasant winter once more.

Here is an article in my newspaper today written by a professor of economic law detailing how the present Union government of India has quietly shelved its electoral promises to reduce inequality, corruption and nepotism in the business world, and has in fact made a very sharp and unrepentant about-turn in policy. I hope the ordinary voter will begin to take note and understand what is going on. It is true that over the last forty years economic policy worldwide has chiefly helped the rich to get ever richer, and the best that can be said for India is that it has chosen to be no different. Allowing the ultra rich to get ever richer is the surest and quickest road to all-round development – that is the belief that has come back with a vengeance after nearly a century. A middle class which fattens on the crumbs thrown off the dinner tables of the plutocracy (personified by the engineer or journalist who earns in a month a fraction of what the owner/CEO’s daughter spends in one night’s party) will continue to cheer as long as it is not squeezed too hard, and the poor can go to blazes. Until another revolution comes, I guess. Viscerally against violence and committed to the middle path as I am, I sometimes cannot help feeling that cutting off a few thousand heads might not be too big a price to pay in order to return to some semblance of civilization, as long as they are only the heads of the dirty rich…

Here is another article from the same newspaper which pretends to be amazed to find out that major IT and computer tech companies are recruiting talent from liberal arts backgrounds. I can only go ‘hee hee hee’, and remind you of a post I wrote almost a decade ago, Engineer or bust.

For God's sake, open the schools!

I should like to request frequent visitors to look up my other blog occasionally. Believe me, all of you will find something to smile over (thoughtfully) – and to many of you a different, unexpected side of my character will be revealed. That poor blog is neglected, partly because the paucity of visits and comments discourages me from posting too often.

There is, thank God, a (very slow, hesitant) start with reopening schools across the country. Many states, including UP, are apparently going to open up with senior classes from August 16. There is also a still-soft chorus, but daily growing louder, that all the other states follow suit, quickly. I read in today’s paper that a class 12 student (obviously prompted by his parents) in Delhi has filed a petition with the Supreme Court to urge the governments to reopen schools, saying that not only have millions of children suffered enormous academic losses since March 2020 owing to the endless shutdown, but are struggling with very disturbing and maybe irremediable mental health issues (a grim reality I can personally witness among my own pupils). This request is now being echoed everywhere, even from very high places. However, our own state government is still dragging its feet, almost unwilling to deal with the issue at all (‘we’ll think about it after pujo’). For heaven’s sake, why?

Surely one can no longer believe that children’s lives will be put at great risk if they start going to school? They are going everywhere – from crowded shopping malls to tourist spots and wedding feasts, their parents who go out to work are bringing home the infection, and nothing is happening to them, but they will die of Covid if they go to school? Contrary to all the evidence from all corners of the world, seeing that most other countries have kept schools open almost throughout the year? Why on earth can’t schools be opened tentatively but right now, the way I (and tens of thousands of tutors around the country) have done, ready to be closed down at a day’s notice if the infection graph starts soaring again? Can’t the authorities still realize the horrible damage* being done? Does it really need to be spelt out? Why after Durga pujo, still more than a month and a half away?

One thing should be remembered: barring the most benighted, no child in India goes to school any more with the expectation of being ‘educated’. They attend because a fairly old custom says they have to, and because they have to sit for examinations, and, most importantly, because they can socialize with their peers and get some outdoor exercise and extra-curricular activity. Most of their learning, such as it is, happens at home, by themselves and with the help of private tutors. We have been trying to ignore this open secret, this elephant in the room, for far too long. Bring them back to school so that they can get a reasonably healthy childhood, period.

Here is a link to an article suggesting why some other people think, just like me, that the real reason for the indefinitely prolonged shutdown is something very sinister, or at least very sad.

*This article reports a study which has tried to estimate the kind of damage that has already been done. (Alas, the reporter herself cannot spell. I hope the reader is observant enough to find out the howlers. Remember: spelling is the most basic proof of literacy).

A month of normal classes

It is the last day of July today, and I am happy to report that the god of Covid has let me take a full month of classes offline. Meanwhile infections and fatalities countrywide have sharply declined to reach a sort of plateau (and curiously, just two states, Kerala and Maharashtra, account for more than half of all new recorded infections now, while, if the official data are anywhere near the truth, UP and Delhi have reached herd immunity – nothing else explains the vanishingly low figures over the last month), and in West Bengal, the rate of new daily infections has fallen from around 20,000 to the 600-850 range, while deaths are now being counted in single digits.

So now we are waiting for the much-feared third wave. Experts are sharply divided over a) whether it will happen at all, b) when it will start rising (earliest likely end-August, but could strike as late as October, they say), and c) whether or not it will be as damaging as the second wave, or a little less or much less so.

As for myself, I am actually praying that it may strike and go away soon – because I am almost sure that once the third wave is gone, especially if it is mild, neither the authorities nor the general public will be held back from doing everything normally again for fear of likely fourth, fifth, sixth… nineteenth waves. As I have endlessly reiterated since March 2020, Covid will never ‘go away’, it can only become as insignificant an issue as influenza – the greatest mass killer a hundred years ago – has become now. Whether that will finally lead to reopening of our schools and colleges, I won’t lay a wager, because I am now deeply suspicious about whether we Indians, students, teachers, parents, government and all businessmen making money hand over fist from ‘online education’ at all want things to go back to normal or not. I cannot begin to say how grateful I am to Providence that my daughter’s essential formal education ended just before the pandemic struck.

I have told all my own students and their parents that I shall continue to keep a sharp watch on official numbers as well as local events, and go online again for a while if the situation so demands, but unless I make a public announcement to that effect, they should all know that offline classes are going on as usual, with infection-related safety protocols in place. I am waiting for the second dose of the vaccine in mid-September, and I hope that once it is done, I can travel freely around the country again. 

A lot is happening

What do Elon Musk, the Taliban and rigid Gandhians have in common? They do not believe there has been a population explosion over the last century; rather, they are afraid that the world is on the verge of being depopulated. Well, Musk is a nut (you don’t believe nuts can become hugely successful in a worldly way? You have obviously never heard of Howard Hughes and Adolf Hitler): he believes that we must procreate much more rapidly because ‘Mars needs us’, whatever that means. The Taliban are much saner in comparison, they only want an endless supply of suicidal mujahideen. And Gandhi taught his followers there can never be too many people around, because ‘God gave each man only one mouth to feed but two hands to work with’. Evidently no one ever explained to him the iron law of diminishing returns when you have to work with several productive factors in fixed supply, like land and fresh water and nature’s capacity to recycle toxic substances, when one factor (namely population) keeps increasing to monstrous levels (almost nothing to one billion 1800 years; one billion to nearly 8, the next two hundred years only). I wonder how Musk at least would feel if he were forced to live in, say, a one-room accommodation in Dharavi slum without a private toilet and able only to visit a government hospital when he is sick, or to sit for some job entrance examination where millions fight over a few hundred vacancies…

Manoj Jha, RJD member of the Rajya Sabha and a professor at Delhi University, singlehandedly and greatly raised the prestige of Parliament as the ultimate representative of the people on Tuesday the 21^st July by delivering an eight-minute apology (maafinama) to the entire country for the untold misery and loss visited upon us during the long pandemic, blaming all governments since Independence for the pathetic situation we find ourselves in today (attention to public health and emergency management has NEVER been a priority to any government at the Centre). I hope his speech will percolate deep and wide into the public mind, and go down in history. I wish even a single member of the ruling party attending the session had the guts, the honesty and the empathy with his voters to applaud. Jha was not even singling out their Supreme Leader for dereliction of duty!

Our current CJI, it seems, has taken several bulls by the horns by calling the sedition law a colonial hangover and promising to examine its Constitutional validity and relevance. In this context, I would like to note, like Jha, that no government since 1947 has thought fit to remove it from the statute books, for reasons that should be obvious! (the Supreme Court has also recently expressed deep consternation that our entire hospital sector is being run like corporate business, geared only to maximize profits, all ideas of rendering an essential social service be damned).

Meanwhile, recent sero-surveys have indicated that close to two-thirds of our population may have developed antibodies to Covid – which means we are close to herd immunity – and even Dr. Randeep Guleria, director of AIIMS Delhi, a committed and passionate doomsayer since early last year, has now gone on record saying it is high time that schools and colleges were reopened. Will India soon become the only major country in the world where they will be kept indefinitely closed? And will any half-sane person claim that that will be another feather in our national cap?

Here in West Bengal we have created history of sorts by declaring that 79 Madhyamik candidates have jointly stood first (with 599 marks out of 600!!) and not one of the many lakhs failed. Go figure. It terrifies me to think of what kind of future awaits these hapless youngsters, especially in the job market.

All kinds of unconnected musing brought me back to reflect upon the life and death of Harihar Ray, the indigent itinerant priest who was father to Apu in Pather Panchali, and died ‘unhonoured, unsung’ and virtually unwept in Varanasi, far away from his native Nischindipur. In this age of absolutely virulent and vicious insistence on reverse caste- and gender entitlement, there are still good men, poor Brahmins, who live simple, honest, hardworking lives, quietly doing the humble best they can for their wives and children until they drop dead, and they vanish without even a public eulogy: who cares? Not even their own families for very long: Apu neither shed tears nor remembered by the time he got married. While all around us we can see the most privileged (and often worthless-) children of  SC, ST and OBC folks who have already got the best of all possible worlds – father IAS, mother successful surgeon, luxury accommodation, fancy cars, five star dinners, holidays abroad – and still getting every kind of unearned advantage from school to college to jobs and even seats in legislatures, so much so that getting at least an OBC certificate through fair means or foul has become one of the fastest ways to social advancement for hundreds of thousands, and then being resentful whenever anybody even insinuates that they got it all because they were born in a lucky time, because their ancestors were badly treated, sometimes many generations ago… many years ago certain expert committees urged the government to cut out this ‘creamy layer’ at least from all such entitlements, and the CPI(M) alone among all political parties has always insisted that affirmative action should be based solely on the criteria of economic and educational deprivation, but no one has ever bothered to take them up in any meaningful way. And one last question: why should someone, who has been allowed to get through school on much easier terms than his peers, continue to get similar advantages through college and in the job market? By greatly relaxing entry requirements for our future doctors, teachers, judges and civil servants, are we benefiting the nation in any way at all?

Our sins and follies are deep, old and toxic.

Mid-July already!

This month the blog became fifteen years old. A long, long time to keep writing a public diary. My current students were just being born then, those who were students then were hardly mature enough to take serious interest in what I wrote – and some who were already old-timers then have now reached the age when they can begin to appreciate and agree with a lot of things I have been writing in the light of their own lived experience, things that strongly irked them when in their callow youth they read such things for the first time. To top it all, I myself keenly enjoy reading a lot of old posts, and seeing some of them surfacing on the most-read list after ages when I had myself forgotten about them (such as the one titled Hunger, tycoons and little girls and another, A gem of a wit).

A decision that is likely to affect the future of all humankind profoundly in the coming decades has been taken very recently by the European Union in a typically no-fuss way: that their governments are going to work together to reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2030, the long term goal being to become the first carbon neutral continent by mid-century. I hope they largely succeed, and that the rest of the world, India, China and the USA in particular, follow their lead, for the sake of all our children and grandchildren. A slightly more important issue than the launch of another iPhone model, or another rich man’s toy to make a jaunt into near-space.

Something very nice and something heartbreaking happened to me recently. An old girl visited along with her husband after ages (I wish she had brought her 16-month old along). She was thrilled to bits that I recognized her at first glance, and true to her old bubbly self kept us regaled with her infectious, voluble enthusiasm for the entire duration of her visit, assuring me that literally everybody around her, from shoshurbaari to colleagues and bosses, have been bored to tears over the last decade with stories about her Suvro-Sir. If so many people have such good and strong memories, why don’t they share more with me, and keep more in touch, for God’s sake? – and a 14-year old, obviously gone cranky with endless staying at home for more than a year, hanged himself in a silly spur of the moment urge to scare his mother recently. The distraught parents came to see me, dissolving into tears which I could only watch helplessly: what comfort can one offer to those so devastated? It only brought back horrid memories, other children, similar disasters. These parents agreed entirely with me that millions of children should not be locked up indefinitely at home like animals in cages for fear of a disease. People didn’t do that even when world wars were going on for years! But who is listening, and how many more young lives would have to be sacrificed so that they could be ‘protected’ from the pandemic? I am sure that while suicide is not a very common thing, literally tens of thousands of young and not so young people are going slowly mad, but nobody has even seriously begun to count…

I have been lately reflecting on how many ‘things’ came into our lives and went away soon, like video cassette recorders and CDs and phone booths. Many so-called hi-tech innovations, such as contact lenses, which were already available in my youth, never really caught on. On the other hand, especially given the lack of public transport and maybe a little more health consciousness among the rich, bicycles seem to be making a big comeback. And ordinary people’s clothes have hardly changed over my lifetime, except that more mothers wear jeans and T shirts these days, while their daughters wear more or less the same; hardly any can be seen in shorts after they are twelve. As for men, time seems to have stopped after 1980! I see the same media-managed mania over cricket and Durga pujo as it used to be forty years ago, and people go just as crazy over getting married (though marriages are going sour ever more quickly) as always. So much for the opinion that ‘everything has changed sooo much!’ (some of you might like to look up an old post titled Change resistant, am I?)

I am reading a new book called Murder at the mushaira by Raza Mir that Pupu has given me to try. I don’t know how good a whodunit it will prove to be (I shall have the Muzaffar Jang mysteries to compare with) but it is interesting because the poet Mirza Ghalib is the Sherlock Holmes here, and the author wonderfully recreates the social atmosphere of Delhi on the eve of the 1857 revolt.

One thing I would like to report with great contentment is that parents of students are on the whole behaving far more decently, deferentially than they used to twenty years or more ago. Is it because I have mellowed (and become more unwilling to engage in needless talk), or that the parents are much younger than me now, or that the collective weight of good opinions has finally outweighed the bad?

July already. Half a year since I last went travelling. How I wish that things would get back to normal soon…

Monsoon post

This June was one of the rainiest in living memory. I wish that it wasn’t so perpetually sultry despite so much water falling from the skies!

I recently took the first dose of the Covid vaccine. The biggest motivating factor for me was the rumour going around that in a few months’ time inter-state travel might be allowed only to those who have been fully vaccinated. I am also hoping that, with all states now on high alert, a large proportion of the population already immunized through direct infection and an ever growing number being vaccinated, the third wave, if and when it comes, will only be a ripple, and after that Covid will be finally forgotten. The best sign would be schools and colleges reopening for all, and the online-education nonsense (you doubt me? Consider this: how would you like to be operated upon by a surgeon who has only learnt his craft online?) laid to rest once and for all.

A number of ex students stranded in Durgapur since March 2020 (mostly male, it goes without saying) have kept me alive and sane all through by turning up for adda sessions every other day, and going out wandering with me along the highways, sometimes on bikes and sometimes in cars. They insist I have done the same for them. They range between 16 and 35 years of age. Lately we have had some wonderful picnics together at home, my mother happily included, with all of them pitching in with the cooking – my contribution being paying for most of it and being hugely appreciative of all their efforts.

I am watching Ray on Netflix right now, episode by episode, there being four of them. I most definitely thought that the first one was vastly inferior in every sense to Satyajit Ray’s original short story, but I shall reserve detailed comment until I have watched the lot.

In connection with what I wrote in the last post about improving our democracy, I am delighted to see that no less august a personage than the current Chief Justice of India seems to hold exactly the same views: mere periodic polls are not an adequate safeguard against tyranny (in the name of the majority) – see this news report about his recent speech.

Father's Day, Covid, rain, gender roles, politics

So I don’t regard Father’s Day as anything very special to celebrate, but for once it felt good to see that from Google to The Telegraph t2, they have all decided that, to be just about politically correct, they should make a fuss about it, at least this year.

(I started the sentence with a meaningless ‘so’ just to see what it looks and sounds like, since it is currently all the rage among teenagers worldwide – and yes, it’s completely stupid, not ‘cool’,  just as I thought: if any of my young students are reading this, beware).

I watched the movie called Fatherhood which has just been put up (or ‘dropped’ if you like) on Netflix. It helped me re-live those glorious years when Pupu was growing up, and it’s mostly silly mush, and it turned out fine in the end because the director wanted it to, but, to all who have just become fathers or are going to be soon, one quiet word of advice from a father with long hindsight: don’t overdo the ‘The world exists to please you… you are uniquely special … I am dedicated single mindedly to the task of making you feel right and good all the time’ stuff. It doesn’t do much to build up their psyches healthily, and eventually hurts them more than if they had been brought up to know, from a very early age, that the world does not revolve around them. A bit of hardship and self-reliance (both mental and physical) and taking responsibility and acquaintance with some of the badness and unfairness in the world and knowledge of whatever little badness exists within themselves cannot do them harm. If you really have their long-term interest at heart, I mean to say. Personally I believe I have done fairly above average as a father, but remember, I have closely watched thousands growing up, and I can’t say that most doting fathers I see are doing very well.

By now, as with every other family, almost everyone in mine has had a brush with Covid. Both sadly and mercifully, only a cousin my own age has died so far, and she had advanced cancer anyway. I hope, if anybody else has to be taken, it will be me, and may the young ones be spared.

We have been having a very rainy June. These last few days, it’s been overcast all day, and rather than the air conditioner going full blast, I have actually had to turn off the overhead fan at night. It’s probably a big depression passing over us, and once it clears up, I am afraid to think how muggy it’s going to be in July (but hilsa is going to be a lot cheaper than usual for some time, I hear!) That’s when I am planning to reopen classes once more, ready to shut them down for a while again if the numbers start shooting up a few months down the line. That’s the way we shall probably be going on for another long year…

One thing about the marketplaces in my town that has struck me as odd for a long time is that, while many fish vendors are women, hardly any vegetable seller is. I think it’s more or less the same everywhere, even in the big cities. Is it just a coincidence or an accident that has become stereotyped, or does anyone know any specific reason why?

Observing and musing upon the way our governments have been (mal-) functioning and bickering (states and Centre) over the last few years, I think I can say a few things without prejudice. It is said that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. From that point of view, I wish that three things would happen sooner or later: a) that people would vote much more on the basis of what the government has actually done for them that directly and intimately affects their lives, rather than going by glorious promises of one or other kind of utopia; b) that elected representatives of the people at all levels, MPs and MLAs included, can be recalled by the voters at any time, depending on their perceived performance or non-performance as public servants (as I hear they can be in some countries), and c) that India become a much more federal polity, leaving most of the powers of day to day governance in the hands of state governments. Given how vast our state populations are (some of them are much bigger than many countries!) and how diverse the peoples, I think, given the incessant and increasing tensions and conflicts between the state- and Union governments, that is the only way to keep many bits and pieces of what we still know as India from flying apart. I worry very much that that is a distinct possibility now, and anything but unimaginable; it happened to the Maurya and Mughal empires when they tried to tighten the screws too hard, and something as big and powerful as the Soviet Union not only collapsed but vanished from the map, remember.

Good to see that I have had 750,000+ page views by now. The million views milestone is now almost within sight!

Lockdown again, and the corruption of English

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee declared a sudden lockdown starting Sunday the 15th May after repeatedly saying that she did not want to do it. Perhaps, given the dire Covid situation in the state, her hand was forced, but for once I am really upset with her, because she did it almost as suddenly as the PM had done it countrywide last year, and at that time she and many other opposition leaders had strenuously criticized him for bringing untold hardship and misery quite unnecessarily upon the lives of millions of people, particularly poor migrant workers who were left stranded and near-destitute. Photos on TV and in the papers, showing vast numbers of working people scrambling into buses and trains to go home all through Saturday bore witness to a repetition of the same unnecessary travails visited upon ordinary people again. Why on earth couldn’t they give at least a three-day notice before clamping down? Wouldn’t last-minute crowding in bazaars and transport actually help to accelerate the spread of the contagion? (Actually I have the same question about reducing the number of trains and shopping hours – but neither ‘experts’ nor leaders listen to the voice of common sense any more.)

Pupu says it is raining in Delhi, and the weather has turned pleasant. I am happy for her, and a little jealous too, because it’s sweltering heat in these parts, even while we wait for updates on a probable cyclone coming up from the Bay of Bengal.

I have been musing anew on how we are abusing and mangling the English language, especially in America and in this country (where we combine plain ignorance with awkward Indianisms and a desperation to ape Americans to make a strange ugly caricature of English), to which both the print media and the increasingly influential ‘social’ media contribute mightily. Once upon a time, we have heard our fathers say, people read newspapers like The Statesman or The Hindu to pick up tips on how to write English well: these days I use newspapers in class to give exercises to my pupils, picking out as many mistakes and examples of stilted or unidiomatic usage as they can. Adults develop bad habits, and children, not knowing any better, pick them up. So these days they are all ‘reverting back’ instead of ‘replying’; they write b’day and vacay and prep because they think it makes them sound ‘cool’ (rather than smart or elegant: such words have been forgotten); journos throw around stupid words like ‘Opposition slams government’, ‘Minister flays opposition’ without bothering to know what ‘slam’ and 'flay' mean, just as they write ‘heads will roll’ when they merely mean that some people will be removed from their posts. I was amazed to see someone recently using the expression ‘heart rending’, having long ago accepted with a sigh that everybody keeps writing ‘heart wrenching’ instead, simply because they have never learnt the right word. They are always ‘calling out’ someone or the other these days, simply because Americans no longer know the word ‘criticize’, and 'taking a call' when they could simply 'decide', writing 'to not be' instead of 'not to be' because Americans have forgotten the right syntax. How many non sub-editors know that that species of animal habitually uses stupid abbreviations merely out of laziness, or merely because they are concerned with fitting a headline within a given number of column centimetres? – hence suddenly, in the race to vaccinate all humankind, ‘jab’ has become a synonym for ‘injection’. If only they knew how much a jab with a needle hurts, and how gently some medics or their assistants can give you injections if they know their job! Some people are even saying 'sick' when they mean wonderful!... and I read this gem in my newspaper this very morning, a high government official listing all the steps they are going to take if the situation ‘gets deteriorated’ any further (not ‘deteriorates’, as any literate person would say).

But there is much worse around us. I have said this again and again: I have always despised people who confuse independence of thought and speech with vulgar abuse of language, and now, at my age, I firmly draw the line at the foul-mouthed: I shall NOT give them their time of day. I am convinced that it is a civilisational thing, and spouting dirty words right and left without cause or provocation merely means you have an empty or twisted mind incapable of either good taste or reasoned and informed thought (perhaps you were never taught any better, but that’s bad luck for you); therefore there is nothing human about you other than your looks, and I shall deal with you accordingly. Netflix, in the name of spreading ‘freedom of expression’ (but obviously actually only to increase TRP ratings by pandering to the great unwashed – many of whom drive BMWs these days), has been particularly guilty of encouraging this pandemic of filth, so I was delighted to watch, in three movies currently showing there, two starring Denzel Washington (Roman J. Israel Esq. and Two Guns) and one called The Kingdom about FBI agents carrying out a lightning investigative raid in Saudi Arabia, where lead characters pointedly berated others for using gutter language. Perhaps the worst perpetrators are finally getting sick and tired of their own excesses! I’ll keep my fingers crossed. Are you listening, Ms. J. K. Rowling? I stopped reading you after the first Robert Galbraith book, and this is why. If you want to find out how absorbing adventure-thriller-mystery books can be written in perfectly clean and mellifluous language, books that a lot of educated adults have greatly enjoyed too, you might like to read up the Harry Potter series.

In fact, it is a wonder that there are still a lot of decent, soft spoken, polite people around, and they keep pleasantly surprising me now and then. I have told this story in my class over and over again: a senior police officer (and they are supposed to be especially foul-mouthed, as portrayed by Prosenjit in Baishey Srabon) had come to pick his daughter up from my tuition, and at the end of the class I strolled out to have a word with him. He had been talking into the wireless, but the moment he saw me approaching he hurriedly got out of the car, despite my urging him to stay put, saying ‘ami garite boshe thakbo ar apni mashtarmoshai hoye baire dariye kotha bolben eta ghor obhodrota hoye jabe Sir’ (it would be grossly discourteous for me to talk with you from inside the car while you, a teacher, are standing outside’)! God bless such folks. I hope the children grow up learning from the right kind of parents. This is not elitism, it is a cry from the heart to put the claims of civilization above the primordial slime…

Navigating the stormy waters

Against the backdrop of thousands of high-level experts spouting wisdom and advice on the unfolding Covid scenario, the only reason I dare to open my mouth now and then is the fact that since they are saying so many contradictory things, all of them cannot be simultaneously right, whereas many, or even most, can be simultaneously wrong. In any case, these days I open my mouth (or rather, scribble on my blog) more to raise honest questions than to offer opinions or knowledge of any kind. Maybe they are questions only a simple-minded commoner would ask. For instance:

The Covid numbers (both new infections and deaths) remained very high all through December to early March, in just one state, Maharashtra, when those numbers were low and declining everywhere else – why did nobody notice, and why wasn’t it decided to isolate that one state almost completely from the rest of the country for a while, the way they did with Wuhan province in China, knowing that otherwise the contagion was bound to spread out like wildfire sooner or later across the rest of the country and make it virtually unmanageable?

Another question: The number of new infections has been surging in Kerala throughout this last month, but the (reported-) death rate has been very, very low (yesterday’s figures were new infections 37290 and 79 deaths, which works out to less than a fourth of one per cent, while they are respectively just around half a per cent in West Bengal and around three per cent in Delhi). How have they managed to keep the mortality rate so low, or have they just been very lucky?

Third question: why are they not building safe houses/quarantine centres in all hotspots on a war footing (literally, with army help if need be) to take off the pressure on hospitals? And why are the central and state governments still shamelessly bickering over the urgency and procedurality of rapid expansion of vaccine production facilities when so many lives are so obviously at stake? Indeed, why isn’t there rapidly mounting public anger over this issue?

To turn my mind to less morbid things – since I cannot move about at will, I am enjoying vicarious travelling via the internet as much as possible. One series on Amazon Prime, called Highway on my plate, took me around many beautiful familiar places in Uttarakhand and Himachal. It’s a series that focuses on eateries on the way, from tucked away resorts serving exotic delicacies to roadside dhabas dishing up tried and tested, plain but cheap and mouth-watering fare, something sure to gladden a foodie’s heart. I am no trencherman myself, but I love watching people eating to their heart’s content.

Locked up at home, my daughter, who has been coaching youngsters since she was a child herself, has started teaching online in a small way and enjoying it. Who knows but a career is in the making? I didn’t know in the early eighties that this would become a lifetime’s work! Another way we are trying to make the ongoing nightmare bearable is dreaming dreams of doing things we like together someday, one of which is, if we can, setting up one of those little resorts in unspoilt remote locations in the mountains, places that would attract only the sort of committed traveler who is gladly willing to forgo sundry urban conveniences, from electricity to piped hot water to internet connection in the rooms for the sake of communing with nature far from the madding crowds… a subsidized dispensary, a primary school and a local women’s self-help group perhaps tagged along. If we can find a generous sponsor with deep pockets, maybe.

After the six-month dry spell, we have been getting a lot of rain, even heavy rain, over the last ten days or so, and I am really, really thrilled, because this is very out of season. The garden looks very lush again, at least for now, and for a brief spell it is comfortable to go for walks. I hope we get a little more of this good thing before the monsoon arrives. The heavy spell is of course more than a month and a half away.

My dear old boy Swarnava Mitra the budding physicist-cum-mystery story writer, bored to tears with enforced idleness just like old Sir, has taken it upon himself to brush up my trigonometry and coordinate geometry preliminary to taking on the calculus, which I loved and handled with ease once upon a time long ago. It is all coming back very quickly, but how soon before I get tired of working out problems and throw in the towel, I don’t know. It will be a test of my teacher’s patience, cunning and skill, too, so wish him luck. And I have decided to get my grasp of French back. There too I am making swift progress – I covered nineteen lessons in two days, which I hear is longer than the beginner’s course that Alliance Française is offering these days, and it has been child’s play, but it makes me sad that I am not living among native Frenchmen, because in that ambience I’d have been fluently swearing and joking and singing and philosophizing in French again within three months at the most.

So that’s an update, just to reassure my best readers that I am neither dead nor brain-dead, yet. Fingers crossed till we can see light at the end of this long tunnel again.

Elections and lockdowns

My mother and I did our citizens’ duty today by going over to vote for the highly fraught state Assembly elections. I don’t take that ‘duty’ very seriously though: I’d have run away if I had seen a crowd, quiet or unruly. The heat was bad enough. I have been wondering for many years now why the polls cannot be held during the most comfortable months and why, in a land and age when so many things are being done by so many people constantly over the internet, facilities have still not been created whereby people can vote from the safety and comfort of their homes. I also never stop reflecting over the irony that the same neo-liberal thinkers who tell you, while teaching economics according to their favourite (and utterly fantastical-) ‘perfect competition’ model that your choices, as one consumer among hundreds of millions, count for nothing at all, turn around and solemnly assure you how important your single vote is!

The Covid scare is back with a vengeance, alas, and, after a straight six-month offline run, I have had to temporarily shut my classes down again, heaven knows for how long this time round. I have sworn that I shall not comment any more on this now-sickening issue (pun intended) any more until it is well and truly behind us, but I shall say that this ‘second wave’ was entirely man-made and hence avoidable – and when I say ‘man-’ I blame the governments at the state and central levels only partly. So many hundred million people need not have started partying and attending political meetings and religious fairs as though there would be no tomorrow as soon as the first wave started receding. As I keep saying wearily, I see only opposite kinds of madness pitted against one another all around me…

I am stuck at home, I cannot even go off to swim, the summer is roasting us, and there is no hope on the horizon of going travelling anywhere anytime soon. Talk about vegetating. How I miss the cool hills and scent of pine and snow in the air! It’s been two years since I had my last glimpse of the Himalayas.

My daughter is stuck in Delhi under lockdown, which they keep extending, though it should have become clear to the meanest intelligence that lockdowns don’t work, at least not any more – look at Maharashtra, where the daily tally of new infections, according to government sources, has remained more or less the same despite the whole state having been shut down for more than ten days now. And I suppose it will be West Bengal’s turn soon, as soon as a new government has settled in. Heaven knows how we are all going to carry on. Financial distress as well as mental health problems are spreading like wildfire, but there is too little attention and concern about them yet…

I wish all my favourite ex students, scattered all around the country and abroad, the best of health and spirits. I hope we shall prevail, and I know most of us will.

Meditations on death and dying, part three if you like

I was very tired at the end of secondary school, because I had suffered such a nasty, brooding childhood, and had read so much (it takes my breath away to see how little the vast majority of ‘educated’ people have read by age 16 these days, but maybe it’s good they haven’t…), and had grown up so achingly lonely and misunderstood.

Then came eight years in Kolkata. Went through high school, college and university; broke my heart over a love affair that was doomed from the start, had a very bitter disillusionment and rejection inside the family, read vastly more than anyone I knew, had more than a little brush with the working world, suffered the ghastliest of physical pain over and over again (look up memoirs of things like how a friend cut out a festering carbuncle with scissors and forceps with no anesthetic beyond ice and alcohol), discovered how utterly unsympathetic and downright nasty so many people could be, fell seriously ill, was thrown off the ladder of career advancement by a soulless fate, and came back to my home town. I was more tired than I could have believed I could be eight years ago. I had no idea how I could get on with life.

Life picked me up and got me that schoolmaster’s job. Then for a while it was roses and sunshine, though there were dark patches enough in between. I found a calling, and gave my heart and soul to it. It brought me rich rewards, in many forms. Despite much angst and heartburns and nasty unexpected turns of fortune every now and then, it was on the whole a wonderful time. For a while, I forgot the tiredness and bitterness and sense of futility aching in my bones.

And then my daughter was born. No, it was as if I was born anew, and truly, ‘bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven’. It was as if I had finally found what I had been longing for with all my being all those barren years behind me without knowing it: not religion, not politics, not socializing, not philosophy, not money-making, not romance, but the sheer, unadulterated, all-fulfilling joy of bringing up a child.

Two decades and a half have rolled by since then again. So many thousand pupils have passed through my classes in the meantime: so many have adored me and gushed over me, then forgotten me or remembered only to badmouth me. So many small and major cataclysms in the family, including yet more heartbreaks, and bringing home the parents I had thought I had lost forever, gradually losing my most loved ones including my lifelong dogsbody, my grandfather then my father, and watching my mother slowly growing old. My wife and daughter leaving the family hearth and moving farther and farther away, not just bodily but in mind and soul. I keep on ploughing my lonely furrow still, mostly because there’s not much else that I am good at, and it at least keeps me sane. These last years have been merely slogging away, pulling the oars relentlessly towards a dimly visible shore that now often seems like a mirage, knowing more and more that the world grows increasingly boring, repetitive and unrewarding, and eventually it will come down to dragging on mere bodily survival; ‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’. Only hoping it won’t drag too long. Some people are so lucky; they are still working like a horse according to their old, old routine when they just drop down and die. Well, I do at least hope that it would be only a matter of days or weeks, not months or years. So you can treat this post as the third installment of my Meditations on death and dying… not everyone, at least at my age, and having lived the way I have, is afraid of dying as such. Which is why I feel like throwing up, in this pandemic context, that so many people, even much older than me or with parents who have long passed three score years and ten, are wetting their pants to think that they or those close to them might die off soon.

Greatest lesson learnt from this sojourn on earth: most people don’t care for us for what we are, and the very few who do are not understood, let alone appreciated. The mother of an ex student, now pushing fifty, recently communicated to me, after complete silence for nearly a  decade, saying she wanted moral and spiritual counselling from me, because, to quote her, I am different from everybody else she has met in her whole life. In very polite terms, I told her to buzz off: I am too old to get involved. She should have asked twenty five years ago.

If there is something called an afterlife, not a return to this world, please God.

Pandemic, indeed!

Ten times more people died prematurely in India owing to pollution-related health issues in 2019 than fell victim to the so-called coronavirus epidemic this year. Remind me: was anything shut down nationwide for any length of time to avoid that scourge?

Look up this link before it is taken off the Net.

CoViD: sane voices making themselves heard

These lockdown diaries of mine will make good reading once the nightmare is far behind us. A vast number of people are going to giggle sheepishly to remember how wildly they had panicked; many will be deeply offended if they are even reminded. I hope my readers will recall that I took and maintained a consistent stance all through: the basic message was, don’t panic and over-react; that will do none of us any good.

I can see with the passage of every month that most of the things I said right from the beginning have come true. I shall not repeat them here: those who read really attentively will remember; others can simply scroll down and read the older posts, or re-read them.

For now, I shall offer two more links. One, to a video interview (dated August 01) of a very prominent doctor (epidemiologist and sometime head of CMC Vellore, one of our most iconic hospitals), offering ‘good news’. The other, to a news item in today's paper saying that various health groups and academics have been asking the central government to make public not just data relating to coronavirus infections and deaths, but to all deaths that have happened since March. It should be obvious to the meanest intelligence that if the government adopted a conscious policy of making people aware of what a vast number of people die daily of completely non-Covid related causes, and kept hammering on those data every day, the countrywide panic would subside within a month. As to why they are not doing it yet is anybody’s guess.

Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain!

A recent sero-survey (testing for antibodies) conducted by ICMR has indicated that up to 4.5 million residents of Delhi may have been infected by the novel coronavirus already (35 times more than the roughly 125,000 who have been found coronavirus positive through swab tests), shown no symptoms, suffered not even mildly, and recovered on their own without seeing a doctor. This is corroborated by the findings of a private patho lab, Thyrocare, which indicates that 180 million Indians may have already acquired natural immunity through infection and recovery. Which seems to confirm what I guessed in an earlier post: that Indians have a high degree of natural immunity to the virus. (by the way, if 180 million have been infected and the total death toll is about 28,000, work out the vanishingly small mortality rate yourself. Heart attacks, cancer and traffic accidents kill vastly more people, but the whole country, politicians and doctors included, have simply forgotten!)

In the same vein, the chief secretary to the West Bengal government said only a few days ago that we should remember there are currently only about 660 critical cases in a population close to 100 million in this state: hardly a justification for mass panic.

In my own town, the newspapers, local word of mouth news as well as my Aarogya Setu app says that the number of people currently diagnosed as infected within the last month keeps oscillating between 30 and 37 – two or three are being freshly infected every day, two or three are recovering daily, there has not been a single mortality in four months. And yet, what people are saying is ki bhoyonkor byapar hochchhe (what a disaster is unfolding)!

If such vast numbers have been infected already and recovered with nothing more than mild symptoms or none at all, that should be cause for good cheer and a rising tidal wave of renewed confidence, right? If not one person has died of this disease in my town in four months, while a so-called pandemic has been raging countrywide, it should be more so, right? And if the infection is spreading yet causing so little harm while widening the net of immune people, that should boost our morale, shouldn’t it? So why is the reverse happening? Just what is causing the rising tide of panic?

Very much to the point, my mother, who has been teaching science for fifty years and is one of the sanest and calmest people I have ever met, has been laughing to see that a lot of ‘educated adults’ who are desperately waiting either for ‘herd immunity’ or for a miracle vaccine to emerge have no idea at all that ‘herd immunity’ requires the infection to spread as fast as possible, nor that vaccination actually means infecting you deliberately with a (mild) dose of the virus so that your immune system can develop a resistance to it. Make of that what you will. Meanwhile, we have resigned ourselves to long-persisting mass madness. As a student wisely said, we who survive and return to a normal life should remember for the rest of our lives that this was the greatest panic-demic we have seen, not a pandemic!

P.S., July 23: You really must look up this latest post on my other blog.

A prayer for my grandchildren

There was an Isaac Asimov science fiction story which spoke about a time in the future when technology had ‘advanced’ so much that people had stopped going out of doors into the open entirely. Every house, every building in the city was equipped with a very sophisticated contraption colloquially called a ‘door’, on which you pressed some buttons and you were instantly transported, ‘Beam us up, Scotty’ fashion, from one hermetically sealed, completely sanitized, closed environment – such as your own house – to another, whether it be your school, office, a shopping mall, a friend’s house or a hospital. It goes without saying that there were no parks any more, and nobody dreamt of going to an open-air theatre or stadium. This had been going on for several generations, until people had quite forgotten what the outside was like: all that remained in their minds was an intense horror based upon vague myths about how poisonous, how polluted, how mortally dangerous the great outdoors were.

Now there was this little boy who was sick and tired of living indoors all the time, until his mummy thought he was seriously unhinged, and got a number of doctors to try and cure him, but all in vain. Then one day a tutor came to teach him at home. This man was a poet, a dreamer, someone who knew a lot of history (as distinct from myths) – naturally, someone most people thought was more than a little crazy. By and by he persuaded the little boy that not only was it possible and none too dangerous to venture outdoors physically, without using the ‘door’, but it could actually be a wonderful adventure. So one day when mummy was not around, the two of them actually did the unthinkable. To his unspeakable delight, the little boy found out the wonder and thrill of sunshine and wind and rain and butterflies and birdsong and running  about barefoot in the grass, and realized what he had been missing for so long, thanks to the ‘wisdom’ of his ancestors, and all the ‘progress’ that mankind had made.

In another story written in the same vein, the same Asimov wrote presciently about children learning everything alone at home from robot teachers, to wit, computers, and communicating with other children, even close neighbours, mostly by telephone. Until, while doing a history lesson, one little boy found out and told his dearest friend about places called ‘schools’ that existed in very ancient times, where teachers were human beings with all their quirks, comical faults, pathetic follies and a few loveable qualities, where hundreds of children went together and made friends, played pranks and games, laughed and shared meals and did so many other things together. The two little boys sigh over the knowledge, and over the fun their ancestors used to have in the process of getting educated. That is the name of the story, The fun they had.

If my blessings count for anything, my grandchildren will not miss out on all that fun. Ever. 

P.S., June 29: Imagine, the young smart-alecks among my readers, especially those who think the world has 'advanced' greatly in the last twenty years, that these stories were written more than half a century ago!