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?

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?

How time flies!

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

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

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

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

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

Shattered Lands: book review

Sam Dalrymple, following in his famous father William's footsteps, shows considerable promise with his first book of becoming another erudite yet highly readable historian. He is apparently a very proud young man too: though he has thanked his dad and mum for their valuable and constant support, not once have they been mentioned by name anywhere in the book or even in the blurbs! And he too believes that weaving together archival research with private correspondence and interviews with old people who can narrate gripping stories from personal experience makes the best kind of book when you are writing recent history.

Shattered Lands, a story of how, with the rather hasty dissolution of the vast British Empire through the middle of the 20th century, the Raj era 'India' underwent five partitions (yes, five, starting with the separation of Burma in 1937, then the Arab Protectorates governed from Bombay, then the Great Partition of 1947, followed by the messy integration of 550-odd princely states, mostly with India and a few with Pakistan, and finally, the breakup of Pakistan leading to the blood-soaked birth of Bangladesh in 1971) is truly a monumental and admirable work. I cannot do justice to it in a short review, so, as I wrote at the end of my little essay on William D's 2016 book Nine Lives, I shall instead urge the reader to read it. This essay, rather, would pick up for comment only a few things that particularly stirred my interest.

To start with, I had heard quite a bit about the great post-partition exodus from Burma (which the writer calls the Long March) from my own elders, so reading that part was like re-living history, though I did not know that the Burma chapter, too, was so violent and complicated - that, for one thing, the Rohingya problem is certainly not a recent phenomenon as so many of us used to imagine. And frankly, I didn't know that, had the dice rolled otherwise, countries like Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE might just have been part of India still, making us one of the biggest oil producing nations in the world (no harm in fantasizing)! As for the princely states' story, sad and tumultuous as it was, can it be lumped together with the 'partition' narratives? The author evidently feels some sympathy for the princes who gradually lost everything, including all that was rich and good about their olde-worlde culture, especially seeing that some of them had actually helped in diverse small ways to hasten the departure of the British and joined the newly independent countries with remarkable alacrity (barring a few like Junagadh, Travancore, Kashmir and Hyderabad) - but in my opinion they had lived an archaic and hugely parasitic lifestyle for too long, and they should feel lucky they were not treated like the old aristocracy in Russia and China. Many of their descendants seem to have done very well for themselves in business, politics, and the world of the arts and letters; few are begging for alms on railway platforms.

As for the last two partitions, a very great deal has been said and written about them since the day I read Freedom at Midnight, so it is to the writer's credit that I still found it engrossing: it will certainly be of great educational value to any reader below 40 who does not have a degree in south Asian history. What can I say of any moment? I was moved, yet again, to visualize all the loss and suffering and shame and grief and destitution and death brought wantonly upon so many tens of millions of people who had no hand in shaping their destinies - actually beggars the imagination - who were mere pawns on a chessboard, being shifted around by tired, greedy, venal, vengeful politicians and bureaucrats in a hurry, who revelled in playing God. And so much, sadly, depended on mere accident and whimsy (like Mountbatten's inexplicable haste to transfer power, and his later lament that had he known Jinnah would be dead within the year, he would have never gone ahead with the partition plan). 

All this happened because of the haphazard and rapid dissolution of the British Empire. I recently heard Jeffrey Sachs making the off the cuff remark somewhere that almost all the lingering problems around the world created over the last 300 years can be traced back to the interference of the British. But, given how fractious and complex and violent  an admixture of races, languages, religions, castes, communities and kingdoms this enormous territory from Aden to Singapore was, perhaps it was only the relatively even-handed rod and whip and love of order imposed by the British that briefly held it together in a kind of grudging peace - though that idea has been endlessly mocked and reviled for more than a century now? Maybe if the British had only been a little more farsighted, a little less bullheaded, a little more committed to the welfare of their subjects and slow but continuous devolution of power, an incredible amount of human suffering could have been avoided? (by the way, I stand corrected on one crucial matter: there were great famines in south Asia even after independence, the responsibility for which, unlike in 1943, simply cannot be laid at the door of the Raj). Maybe that is what the Moderates in the early Indian Congress had wanted all along, and precisely for this reason, besides the fear that the newly freed lands would quickly revert to the chaotic late-medieval darkness they had just begun to emerge from? This paragraph, by the way, is purely my personal reflection, not something hinted (except maybe subliminally) at by Dalrymple himself.

Given the still very strong Anglo-American hegemony on scholarship, coupled with the ignorance and/or unconcern of the subcontinent's post independence rulers, too little is known across the world, even by educated people, about the titanic upheavals and traumas repeatedly suffered by the two-fifths of the human population that inhabits this part of the globe, whose after effects still continue to confuse and vitiate our contemporary political reality powerfully. As I read about the man whose citizenship was forcibly changed three times, dark forebodings about our present government's maniacal urge to get rid of all 'infiltrators' kept troubling my mind. Let me mention just one more thing about which I had heard but little in all these years: that the Bangladesh war was not just over language just as it was not over religion; that modern Bangladesh has insisted on officially forgetting and suppressing the fact that several non-Bengali languages still somehow survive in that country (Rakhine and  Kokborok and Chakma and even Chatgaiyya, which is not considered Bengali!), and that, contrary to popular mythology, the Mukti Bahini guerrillas did not exactly cover themselves with glory during the war of liberation - the horrible atrocities committed by the Pakistani army and their Razakars upon non-combatants were only much bigger in scale, that's all. No wonder so much long-simmering anger against the beneficiaries of the liberation has been coming to the surface in recent times... last but not the least, I found it most pitiable to read that so many people, arbitrarily separated by new and sudden borders, have found themselves to be permanently stateless, not just poor labourers, petty shopkeepers and marginal farmers but here and there a minor royal as well.

Having heaped so much praise, I hope I have earned the right to do a little bit of nitpicking. Too much sympathy has been shown for the likes of Jinnah and Patel, I think, given that they eventually acted so undemocratically, arbitrarily, covertly and violently, against so many of their supposedly 'own' people. And why should it be insinuated that the facts that actually very few British Indian soldiers joined the Azad Hind Fauz and that some of them turned renegades and criminals in later years show up Subhas Bose's inspirational power and leadership quality in a poor light? Wasn't he all along fighting almost impossible odds? And then there are howlers and typos scattered across 430-plus pages which could have easily been corrected with a little more careful editing. A man called Halvidar (not Havildar) Singh? The state of Dungarpur spelt Durgarpur? A temple in south India whose accumulated wealth, estimated at $22 billion, is thousands of times richer than the Vatican?! How do you describe a spring morning in the Kashmir Valley when the Pakistani irregulars were about to attack unless you were there yourself, or you cite some reliable source? How is a British Intelligence file 'secret' if you have been given access to it in order to write a book for public consumption? How do you make a statement like 'Indian intelligence had been working with East Bengali nationalists for a decade at this point' (29 April 1971, when the Indian Army was given direct orders to help the Mukti Bahini) - page 379 - without quoting an authentic official statement? And lastly, I wouldn't be as shocked as the partition researcher who, while talking to a teenaged cold drink seller in Dhaka, realized that he knew nothing about the partition(s) or even the Mukti Juddho and found it odd that an Indian could speak in Bengali: I guess you can find millions of young Indians, too, who know nothing about our history from, say, 1905 to 1971, and so will happily believe whatever poisonous garbage they are fed by the current rulers. As the wag said, 'The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history', and that 'history is only a fable that is generally agreed upon'. Also, alas, I can bet my shirt that such people would never read a book like this anyway.

This little bit of criticism is not meant to deride or devalue Dalrymple's work, only to suggest how it could be improved, and thereby made more reliable and valuable. I wish the author every success with his future endeavours, and shall look forward to reading his next book.

Many thanks, Rajdeep and Aveek, for urging me to read this book.

P.S.: A very angrily critical review can be found here.

[Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, by Sam Dalrymple, Harper Collins 2025]

Bye bye to 2025

It is 24th December. Just a week left of the year. Time again to look back... and ahead. This has been on the whole a good year for me: sort of quiet, no big bad news, travelling around quite a bit, welcoming a newborn into my extended family of old boys, watching my daughter become a well-rounded working cum family woman, blessed with the companionship of old favourites who have stayed by my side for years, slowly learning to relax in the sunset of my life. This has also been my storytelling year. I have been posting a story a week on YouTube (now linked to my Instagram and Facebook accounts) since April, and I shall continue for at least a full year: that will be a repertoire worth leaving behind. Also, within a few months this blog will be twenty years old, and I am proud, because I know for a fact that few people in this age stick to writing as a non-commercial activity for that long; indeed, most bloggers give up after a year, because they have nothing more to say. Other than teaching for a living and bringing up my daughter, this has been the longest single project of my life. Someday, Pupu says, parts of this blog can be culled to make a traditional book. It has truly been a labour of love.

2026 is going to be a busy and difficult year for lots of people. There will be the Assembly polls in West Bengal, with the BJP getting more and more desperate to throw out the current regime. Globally, the AI bubble is likely to burst, sending shockwaves through stock markets all over the world, and the climate crisis is going to grow steadily worse, along with the worldwide reaction against immigrants - Americans against Indians as much as Indians against 'Bangladeshis' (I am not going into the right and wrong of it here, but I have been predicting this for three decades and more). So also technology mania and the onward march of elected autocracies wedded to the most short-sighted kinds of populism (the Roman emperors kept the masses happy with bread and circuses - just read plentiful junk food, non-stop festivals and social media feeds: no substantial difference). Low level white collar jobs will continue to become ever scarcer, more ill paid and less secure. Economic inequality of the worst kind will keep becoming ever more acute. Language will continue to be debased until people are hardly able to figure out what others are saying, creating problems everywhere from workplace to family place and funplace. Nutcases of all sorts, from vegans to those who insist on unisex toilets, will become ever more strident. But also, countless people will go on quietly doing useful things they do because they love doing them, from nursing patients to teaching kids to gardening and making music, and all kinds of pushback against nutters will also build up steam. If my health and finances permit, it will be an interesting scenario to sit back and watch from the sidelines, sometimes to laugh at and sometimes to grimace over. It has been a fairly tough life, and if God gives me a fairly comfortable retirement for a few years (not too many, please!) I shall be quite content.

Thinking about all the old boys and girls who have taken a lot of my time, attention and love and at some point vanished completely from my life with not so much as a by your leave, I was suddenly reminded of something that an economics professor remarked in class while talking about Nehruvian socialism: 'He loved humanity but hated people'. Supposing that were true, at my time of life I see nothing wrong or cynical about that attitude; rather, I deeply understand. If you know enough of the best things in human beings, you cannot help loving humanity, but individual people are most usually so flawed (to put it very nicely) that, even if you don't hate them, you cannot bring yourself to love them: unless you are the kind of divine fool who would forgive even those who crucify you.

I have become fascinated with a website titled History.com - visit it and you will find out why, in case you have any interest in the past. Also, a most interesting fledgling venture that an old boy has been talking about and is involved with: see the website truecompanion.co (not dot com). Right now, I am almost through a six part web series titled Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on trial on Netflix. And over the next three days I am going to have my fill of feel-good Christmas movies. Merry Christmas, all: God give you peace, rest and warmth.

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.

Good prospects?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's your work/life balance?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My own education via YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

Recent stimuli for my brain

Thanks to Indranil Panigrahi, one of my favourite old boys who have kept continuously in touch since leaving school nearly three decades ago, I came across a wonderful article in The Statesman about what 'scroll culture' is doing to us. It is so cogent, comprehensive and articulate about the issue, and so accurate about the diagnosis ('we are not addicted to content, we are addicted to not being left alone with ourselves') and agrees so well with all that I have myself observed, felt and concluded that I need not add a single line to it. I shall only urge my readers not to scroll away 'for later', but read it now, attentively, reflectively and to good purpose - perhaps to redirect their own lives a little better, if nothing else. It makes a painful and eerie contrast with what all the gurus (literary, management-, fitness-oriented and religious) are telling us to do: happiness, health, higher performance at work, becoming better people overall, in short, real success in life, demands that you find time for yourself, learn to be comfortable alone, focus, increase your attention span (and retentive capacity), cut out the clutter inside and out, and STOP SCROLLING (or at least slow down)! Please do read: you will be doing yourself a huge favour!

In the same connection and context, I have begun to read a 2021 book called Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anna Lembke about how the entire economy and society have become geared to providing (and consuming) non-stop excitement, and how damaging that can be to all of us. I shall reserve judgment until I have finished the book, but I think the good doctor is saying a lot of things I have been saying myself for donkey's years. See, for example, this blogpost written fourteen years ago. Only recently a grown-up ex student complimented me on having put 'treasures' on this blog. That reminds me to exhort new visitors once more to explore older content here, not just stick to the home page...

On the other hand, there are rather strange visitors here sometimes. Someone who hides behind the sobriquet 'Mirror' has recently commented on one of my posts ('Why have I become so unsocial?') that my writing is 'too serious'. I have not said anything beyond 'thank you' in my reply, but some of my other readers might want to respond at greater length. Also, some organization has left a comment (which I have not put up for obvious reasons) offering to buy customers for my storytelling channel on YouTube. I am sure they themselves have lots of customers. To me, it only shows how desperate and  pathetic people can get! No, I am not taking up their offer. It only makes me thankful that I have lived a good life and made a decent living without having to sink to such depths looking for either paying students or non-paying listeners.

Another passing remark on the passing weather: it has been a low-temperature but horribly muggy July. It is drizzling even as I write. I love the rains (and the greens they bring), but the constant sweating becomes a bother and bore after a while. So also the proliferation of all sort of insects. The only silver lining is the hope that we might have a good winter with so much water underground. 

Oh, and I must mention this: many thanks to young Pratyush Pan (a most unusual sort of engineer) for coaxing me to watch the new movie Heads of State on Amazon Prime. It is a masala movie with a good mix-up of hilarity, 'action', wisecracks and some deep thoughts; childish, really, but wonderfully entertaining even for an old geezer like me. I especially liked the idea of a Black British Prime Minister teaming up with a covert agent whose role is played by an Indian actress (Priyanka Chopra). That's healthy multiculturalism for you. I also liked the PM's constant digs at the American President - who is brash, silly, but brave with a heart of gold, over the gross American penchant for hyperventing (catchy taglines, noisy but brainless slogans, wild exaggerations as part of normal speech) which, alas, through the internet, too dominated by American tech platforms, is spreading rapidly worldwide. I am glad about the pushback. Are you listening, Google and Meta?

I think I have given the serious reader (yes, I love seriousness more and more!) enough food for thought and engagement, so bye for now.

AI brilliance for my YouTube story

Something laughably stupid happened only the other day while I was experimenting with AI (Meta/Llama). I asked it to draw me a cartoon of a monster rising out of the ground to swallow a Russian peasant. This was meant to go with the latest story I was planning to tell on my YouTube channel. I didn't like the first effort, so I asked it to modify the picture: show fertile land, not a desert; make the monster appear as if it is rising up from the land, make the peasant middle-aged, not old, and so on. Every effort was more ridiculous than the previous one. One actually gave the monster the face of an old man, presumably AI's idea of what a Russian peasant looks like - though why it thought that would fit the bill is beyond me. 

Anyway, I gave up trying after that, and decided to use the first one, despite not being happy with it. You can see the result here. While you are at it, don't forget to listen to the story right till the end: it's a good one, and very thought-provoking.

Accidents and happier things

My heartfelt condolences for all those families who were bereaved by the catastrophic Air India Dreamliner crash in Ahmedabad on 12th June. May God give them strength to bear up and cope with their tragic loss, and may the souls of the departed rest in peace. This accident hits very close to home, because my older sister, who served with Air India till very recently, flew hundreds of times on the same aeroplane. And as the whole world knows by now, one man walked away from the flaming wreckage virtually unscathed. As we the devout like to say, raakhe Hari maare ke (who can slay the man whom God protects?). Remember the child who came back from the tsunami in Thailand back in 2004? A Jewish rabbi said only the other day in connection with the plane crash that it's not ultimately the technology and the pilots who save and kill, it's an infinitely greater power above. Even atheists should take time to reflect that in that attitude to life one may find a kind of solace and peace that no other philosophy has ever provided. It's the same attitude that helps best to stay calm before a major surgical operation, and every time your beloved child leaves home.

But I have a scientifically curious mind, too, and as some people may know, I have been an aircraft buff all my life: even as a teenager I could identify 'planes by the sound of their engines overhead, and reel off data about engine power and thrust to weight ratio and camber and angle of attack and yawing, rolling, pitching, banking and stalling speed and so on and so forth, so I simply cannot square what happened (unlike the Boeing 737 Max disaster a few years ago) with the fact that the machine was not very old, in good shape, had fairly recently undergone a thorough re-check for serious faults, and the pilot was a very experienced hand. Why were the flaps fully withdrawn while the landing gear had still not retracted, when just about anyone who knows anything about planes would swear that no sane pilot is likely ever to do that even by 'mistake' seconds after takeoff? And all this speculation about simultaneous loss of power in both engines, that is so, so unthinkably improbable that it strains credulity and goads one to start thinking superstitiously again... I am eagerly waiting for the final investigation report, and to know what the experts are going to do about it. And I shall still depend on the knowledge that statistically speaking, air travel remains the safest way to travel (but no, there is no special protective magic attached to seat number 11A, all you idiots).

Alas, instinctive socialist (and rational) man that I am, many disturbing thoughts come to my mind. Why do we make so much more fuss when people die in aircraft accidents than on trains, buses or on the road (more than 15,000 died on state and national highways alone last year); why do 26 terrorist victims manage to grab so much more attention, grief and outrage than, say, the 10,000 (at least) who died in the Odisha super cyclone of 1999? Isn't it only because air accidents involve well-off, well-connected, highly articulate, rich and super rich people? In this connection, remember that governments announce much larger compensation for aircraft-accident victims, too...

Meanwhile, moving on to a less morbid subject, here is a link to a Youtube video that might help lots of people - especially young people who have just begun to earn a living: it's about how to manage your finances wisely. Serious listeners will find that the speaker talks about 'spirituality' (!) in the same vein as I have been writing about the 'life of the spirit'. Paradoxically enough, having a spiritual orientation helps a great deal to make (and keep) money, and it has become increasingly necessary in an age when the whole world is provoking you to go in the opposite direction!

Strange 'monsoon' again: the first few showers gave a bit of relief from the heat, but since then the rain laden winds have moved up northwards, so Assam and North Bengal are already seeing their first floods, while we in the south are sweltering still. Oddly enough, the temperatures are much lower than what usually happens in mid-June, rarely going above 36 Celsius, but the humidity is oppressive (so it 'feels like' we are in the mid-forties), and the nights are too warm for comfort. The Met office says this is going to be a rainy week again: let's see if they get it right.

A Marwari old boy made my day yesterday by asking me to recommend some good fiction. Maybe it's time Bengalis started learning about culture from them!

I am already itching to make up plans for running away from Durga pujo again. I wish I could find a couple of good travel companions: it seems most of my favourites will be busy during that time this year. 

I wish I could get some encouraging and constructive feedback about the stories I am telling on YouTube, there on my channel or here. It would be of great help, believe me.

I am happy to report that the pipe I am smoking with a herbal (non-tobacco) mixture has been a good decision. And I am soon going to buy a pram - after 28 years - for the child of a dear old boy who is expecting a baby. Brings back glowing old memories!

Well, that's enough musing for now. I'll be back soon.

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?

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.

End-March diary entry

February and March went off with reasonably balmy weather on the whole this time, thanks to the unseasonal but very welcome drizzles last week. This weekend is predicted to be hot again, but that is only to be expected. If we are lucky, we might have some more rainy spells, as it happens in some years, so that we might be spared long weeks of relentless heat from April to July.

My admission season is practically over, though a few more will probably keep trickling in. From April onwards, it will be full season again, but for the first time in more than a quarter century, the workload will still be much lighter, only four days a week with two classes a day. I will have much more time to get post-lunch naps than ever before. Who says there are no perks to getting old? SRK anxiously declares ‘I’m not old’ and has to jump about monkey-fashion on stage to stay cool and relevant. Poor chap. I am proud and glad that I am old. So who’s winning?

So many things are coming full circle in the fullness of time. Many of my most beloved youngsters are getting married and having children of their own, and helping me to relive wonderful memories. And while I am still working for my keep, I can regard my earnings more and more as a nice pension rather than a huge and frightening responsibility. I can get more quirky and cranky with impunity – my inner circle will indulgently bear with it and forgive, and how many of those outside give me a wide berth will matter less and less with every passing year.

Thanks to Bibhas, I came across a vlog called ‘Goobie and Doobie’ on YouTube recently, made by a ‘loser’, a successful and high-earning Japanese-American neurosurgeon who gave up that life to be, in his own words, an unemployed wanderer, nature blogger, lay philosopher and ‘happy for the first time in his life’. A real life instance of The Monk who sold his Ferrari. I have grown very fond of him very quickly. More power to his elbow. Try it sometime if you have a much bigger attention span than the typical under-40.

I am reading the last of the Maisie Dobbs series, knowing, sadly, that the author has decided never to add to the list. I had grown very fond of Maisie, and immersed in her life. Recently, also, I read a book called Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel, that was truly very interesting – the early part of the Ramayana written from the perspective of someone who has a strongly feminist perspective and is also one of the least remembered or most reviled (a difficult to achieve combination!) characters in the epic. Strongly recommended, though not quite as lyrical and mellifluous as Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Palace of Illusions.

Thanks to Google photos, I recently discovered that a lot of people who broke off the connection with me long ago still keep sneakily looking up my blog. I wonder what keeps bringing them back, when they have ostensibly lost all interest in keeping in touch with me? A guilty conscience, secret admiration, sheer perverseness, or just endless time to kill?

On the government going after ‘comedians’ who mock and provoke the powers that be – because this issue has been much in the news lately – as a moderate conservative with very reasoned and firm views over a lifetime, I am very much in favour of free speech, but I strongly dislike grown up people who confuse freedom with licence: toilet humour is NOT an essential part of freedom of speech, it is actually very unhealthy for the future of society and civilization, especially if it becomes the only kind of humour that people enjoy. Crudeness, loud vulgarity and abuse are no good or essential part of ‘criticism’; never have been. Let the comedians learn a little about what good and effective comedy as well as criticism can be and should be. Their ‘responsibility’ to democracy does not end with making the great unwashed masses titter along.

I am sad to see that despite repeated requests here, so few have ‘found the time’ to leave behind a few fond recollections about their time with me (the link for the relevant Google form is given on the top of the right hand column here – but if you are reading this on a phone, you have to visit the web version). Conversely, I am very happy to see that several old posts have come back into the most-read list – it means that some people, instead of merely visiting the home page, are actively exploring this blog. I am sure they will not be disappointed with things they find; in fact, some of them might wonder that Sir said these things already so many years ago! Especially when it comes to books, videos and movies, I shall be glad to hear some thank you-s from those who enjoyed my recommendations.

The life of the spirit, part three

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

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

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

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

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

First update of 2025

I haven't written for a month for four reasons: a) not much of great interest is 'happening' in my life at the moment ('no news is good news'!), b) I was waiting for a lot of people to read the last two posts, c) I was expecting many more people to engage in a debate/dialogue with me on the subject - probably the most interesting and important subject in the world, in my view, to all but those who live essentially animal lives. Otherwise, I want to bore neither myself nor uninterested or superficial readers, and d) I did not want to divert already distracted readers by writing on entirely unrelated themes.

However, a little personal update might not be frowned upon. I have been languorously enjoying the mild and fleeting winter, and reading up several books simultaneously. Of them, two have been most absorbing and highly recommended: Abyakto (Unspoken) in Bangla by Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose, a more-than-100-year-old classic of scientific literature, and The Golden Road by William Dalrymple, though I am afraid the latter has gone a little overboard towards the end, and seems to be parroting the BJP line about how India is soon going to reclaim its grand position as a Vishwaguru. Even if that happens, it will take two or three more generations to achieve it. Also, I am going to live it up before summer sets in, with two long trips already planned over the next month and a bit more.

Special thanks to Bibhas of the ICSE 2002 batch for inundating me with thought provoking books, essays and videos. Such old boys are a rare find, and interacting with them is always 'a feast of reason and a flow of soul.' And special prayers for Swarnava: he will know why.

One more repetition: I shall be glad to hear from more and more old boys through this blog. Several of them have visited and/or called to warm the cockles of my heart over the last six months.

Donald Trump is being inaugurated just about now. God help us all.