Thoughts for Teachers' Day

Prestige and dignity, pride and respect

[This is a long one again: don’t read if you are “busy”!]

These words have great and genuinely respectable meanings in many a context. Yet they have been so widely abused – and taken advantage of – in every culture and every age that in lots of cynical eyes they have become quite meaningless, or worse.

As I see it, certain ideals and institutions, and individuals who have stuck to and upheld these ideals and institutions, often at great personal risk or cost (sometimes life itself) gradually acquire prestige, meaning respect amounting to awe. It often takes a very long time to acquire that kind of prestige and the labours of many great and dedicated men (Sir James Murray’s lifetime labour gave the Oxford Dictionary its prestige, men like Drake and Nelson gave it to the British navy, and Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts and a few others together gave it to the American presidency); it can easily take centuries. So it is with the office of the Pope – still at least halfheartedly believed by millions to be the living representative of Christ on earth, even after two millennia of turmoil, corruption, cruelty, base compromise with earthly lords and interests, bureaucratic intrigue and apathy, and all the challenges from critics, including purveyors of other religions, godless scientists and communists. So with organizations like the Royal Society. So with the world’s oldest extant universities. So with the Shaolin temple in the sphere of the martial arts, or cordon bleu chefs in the world of gastronomy, or the Rolls Royce when it comes to cars, or Lloyd’s Register in the world of marine insurance and underwriting, or The Times of London when we are talking about newspapers. Prestige comes from a reputation for old, established quality of an unusually high order, quality long sustained in the face of harsh and diverse challenges; a quality which may be moral or spiritual, academic or practical, but quality nevertheless. Prestige means also that the very name of an institution, organisation or title is widely assumed to be a guarantor of quality, so the ‘customer’ (whether he be a seeker of knowledge, luxury or glory) may be assured that he is buying into a good thing without having to do too much fact-finding for himself; he also hopes some of that prestige will rub off on him – my doctorate is from such a great university, I am a priest of such a hoary religion, I drive only the best cars and dine at the best restaurants, so others less fortunate and less distinguished will look up to me and perchance envy me.

If it is admitted that beyond air, water, food and sex what men most want is a certain sense of identity, and since prestige gives identity as nothing else does (not even raw money or power), it follows that men will pay a very heavy price to acquire some prestige in their chosen walks of life: so countless scholars and monks are perfectly happy to live materially poor lives in great universities and abbeys, and so many soldiers were willing to die fighting for Alexander and Caesar and Napoleon. At a much baser level, crooked businessmen, once they have made their sordid piles, spend so much to buy seats in legislatures and the boards of great charities, while they wives spend little fortunes on ‘designer’ clothes, jewellery and cosmetics. This is the unfortunate, not to say pathetic side of prestige: unworthy people go to such absurd lengths to acquire the prestige that they neither deserve nor can really win for themselves (who cares about a page three wife except a handful of other page three wives?) – some folks pierce and maim their bodies to ‘look good’ according to local and current convention (I may not be a mentionable warrior, but at least I wear the right kind of costume and affect the right degree of snootiness!); some buy all kinds of junk they don’t need because it helps them to ‘identify’ with the celebrity icons who endorse said goods in TV advertisements, others try all they can to bend the rules which prevent them from joining institutions where they really have no place – in the process ever so slowly diluting the very standards on which the prestige of the organisation depends, until, if they are not careful, these organisations wake up one fine morning to find out that their old glory has faded away, leaving not a wrack behind. Thus have great empires vanished, and so also churches and universities and commercial marques. It is this way that the civil services in India have lost much of their sheen, and I can predict that the rate at which the great institutions of higher learning in Britain are signing up young morons from backward countries if their rich dads can pay full tuition is digging their own graves: the whole world will sneer at once-prestigious British universities fifty years from now. ‘Dwarfs in giants’ robes’ are bound to degrade every office and institution they swarm into. A few more like the present incumbent and the prestige of the White House is going to hit rock bottom!

One other thing that I should mention about prestige is that its signs and yardsticks are highly culture-specific, to the extent that what is very prestigious in one country or locale or peer group can sound meaningless or bizarre in another. Think of punks attending a conference of physicists, think of formula one racing stars visiting a venerable temple in Puri to watch some great religious function. A mere doorman might not let a samurai warrior from an ancient family into the hallowed portals of Wall Street, and the absolute dictator of one country might be subjected to a humiliating body search by lowly customs officials of another. They say only footballers have any real prestige in Brazil, and only baseball stars and tycoons in the United States. Jagjivan Ram, for two decades the second or third most powerful person in Indira Gandhi’s cabinet and an enormously rich man, was heard to lament that no blue-blooded Brahmin would marry his daughter, an ‘untouchable’. This is perhaps why the truly wise man does not believe in and stand on prestige at all: he is like a child, a citizen of the universe, and nothing that human beings can say or do can glorify him or insult him – with Shakespeare, he laughs and says ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’ If he has any dignity at all, his is the simple, unassailable dignity of the mendicant sage; he is one who calls every man his brother and no man his master. To my mind, no man who has become less than that deserves the tribute of both mind and heart, regardless of his age, his titles, degrees, rank, wealth or power: these are but baubles that we all need to outgrow, but one in ten million can. India once worshipped such men: our standards have fallen greatly of late, even as our wealth has multiplied and technical ‘experts’ proliferated.

So that brings us to the idea of dignity. It means a sense of self-possession and self-worth that does not depend too much on others’ recognition, and a serenity of temperament and solemnity of manner that stems from that sense. Most children are born undignified – they tumble in the dust and get into scrapes and lick the same ice-cream and yell and make faces with utter self-abandon, and laugh shrilly over it (we have heard of very young children with a remarkable air of dignity too, but they are rare, and make their peers uncomfortable and their elders worried, lest they should become weird prodigies or renounce the world or go just plain mad). As we grow, we learn to acquire at least a modicum of dignity by simply watching and imitating our supposed betters – older siblings, parents, teachers, bosses. With most of us, this does not take us very far; learning by imitating without understanding and personal appreciation has not been called ‘aping’ for nothing. It merely makes us warped, less natural and spontaneous and lively and interesting than we might have been, and hypocritical. I have seen far too many people either making a fetish of dignity, so that form becomes much more important than substance: mediocre schoolteachers insist that a boy who asks too many questions is being ‘disrespectful’ rather than clever, and so many ‘high level meetings’ everywhere involve nothing more than dozing and gorging delicacies and making polite noises at the appropriate places in the course of utterly boring and endless speeches – or throwing all dignity to the winds the moment they are sure that some guardian is not looking over their shoulders (they call it ‘letting your hair down’ or ‘unwinding’, and they do it by acting like demented chimpanzees at parties and picnics and festivals, supposedly because it helps in ‘socializing’ and de-stressing every now and then. My point is, if the ‘pressure’ of keeping up an artificial façade of dignity is so stressful, why keep up pretences so assiduously? Especially since, as I strongly suspect, the pressure, when released, makes people feel a desperate urge to misbehave while making up for ‘lost time’?) I believe that up to a point the Americans have done the world a great service by greatly cutting down on the need for such stilted, archaic forms of enforced dignity everywhere, from the home circle to universities, senates, churches and clubs. They might have gone a bit too far in the other direction – but about that more later.

Some people are by nature or through long habit more dignified than others. Some occupations require more dignity than others – doctors, lawyers and teachers are not supposed to be noisy and frivolous and irresponsible; nor are high officials of state and soldiers parading in public on important occasions. When people who by nature or upbringing are not suited to such jobs get in nevertheless they can make life difficult for their colleagues and superiors, and earn great contempt even if they are not booted out (imagine someone with the temperament of a video jockey becoming a banker): though a great deal of eccentricity, which is often lack of conventional dignity by another name, is forgiven to someone possessed of exceptional talents, someone like Mozart or Richard Feynman or Charles Wingate. People are supposed to become more dignified with age everywhere still, and most do, though this is at least in part a covering up of the very sad (and undignified) fact that they are growing weak and slowing down in both body and mind – and in most countries the young are taught and expected to defer to the dignified old. I haven’t been able to make up my mind about whether this is a good thing or not. I have read that in very primitive times most people died young, and the few who got to be old and feeble were simply left to freeze in the cold or be devoured by wolves and vultures: now that is a horrible thing to think of, and in these comparatively civilized times we cannot deal with the old like that; besides there are far too many old folks in all ‘advanced’ countries now to deal with in such cavalier fashion – they have money and hold too many votes, and ever so slowly they are forcing law and society to accommodate their special needs (there are now veterans’ Olympics, and a store in Germany caters only to people above sixty). But is it right for the young to listen to and obey the old too much, just because they are old and ‘dignified’?

I believe that Americans discovered a century ago that the old hold up progress through timidity and by insisting too much on blind obedience and old conventions, so they as a nation threw these virtues to the winds – and look, it has certainly helped them advance in every sphere of life, from politics to technology to global cultural domination through the airwaves! In the process, the old there have got a rather raw deal: they grow lonely and helpless as old folks do everywhere, and do not even have the compensation of being revered and obeyed. As a result elderly people in America (and their imitators throughout the world) are now desperately trying to cling to the image of youthfulness for as long as they can, and a multibillion dollar industry of ‘anti-ageing’ cosmetics and sauna baths, sanatoriums, vitalizer drugs, silicone implants, botox injections and plastic surgery has sprouted to cater to their needs: if you stand back and watch thoughtfully, doesn’t it look terribly undignified? If all these gimmicks can make you look and feel young a little longer that’s fine (if they don’t bankrupt you!) but what can you say when you see middle-aged mothers competing with their teenage daughters in flaunting sex appeal, or people in their 60s and 70s still meddling in their grown-up children’s affairs to feel important and needed (as millions of middle class parents in India are doing right now)? Why shouldn’t people have the moral right and courage to acknowledge they are old and enjoy to the full all the advantages that old age brings: lightened family burdens, the end of the rat race for marks, promotions, bigger pay packets and social status, the joy of bringing up grandchildren, leisure to cultivate all the hobbies one never had the time and money for before, the freedom and poise needed to turn one’s attention to those things which all great religions have called the higher or ultimate goals of life – charity, art, peace of mind, salvation of the soul? There’s something terribly wrong with a civilization which has robbed old people of their dignity in this fashion, forcing them to count their days in useless idleness and pitying themselves until they can be thrown into the garbage bin.

Here’s another thought. In India – perhaps because we have been slaves of someone or the other for a thousand years – we confuse conceit (ahamkar) too easily and commonly with dignity (self-respect) and pride (gaurav), which stems only from great achievements. A truly dignified person will not boast of petty achievements (or things which are not even achievements – like good looks or one’s father’s money or connections) and throw his weight about with his subordinates (pupils, juniors at the office, wife, poor people); at the same time he will not cheat in examinations, vandalize public property, take bribes right and left, use foul language among friends and grovel before superiors as though his life depends on it. Alas, that is precisely what most of us do, and quite unselfconsciously too: in fact we get very angry when someone points out that it is uncouth. This is one of the many things about the Indian social psyche that disgusts me, and I am quite convinced that next to the problem of overpopulation, this is the single greatest stumbling block to our national progress. We neither care to know the limits on our own behaviour that dignity demands, nor are we ready to acknowledge the rights of others that the same dignity requires we acknowledge (once upon a time there was a name for it: noblesse oblige) – we all believe that if I am ‘somebody’, the rules do not apply to me. If you think about it, a nation with so much conceit and so little pride and dignity cannot progress, because it has never taken pains to understand the true meaning of progress at all. A nation can only progress when it encourages lots of people to put the right kind of dignity above physical security, immediate convenience, peer approval and material comforts, and a nation can be said to have progressed only when the humblest peon and maidservant and shopkeeper is guaranteed a minimum of personal dignity which cannot be violated by the highest in the land, while those who hold the reins of power have also learnt to behave with the dignity appropriate to their exalted offices; the kind of dignity that Tagore spoke of so eloquently in Rajarshi. 2,300 years after Plato, such philosopher-kings are still very much the exception rather than the rule. Our hoi polloi have never been educated in that sense (I know a lot of hoi polloi with MBAs and PhDs), and our leaders say they are always too busy to pay attention to niceties. And yet so many Indians with eyes to see with go to ‘advanced’ countries only to gush over how it is precisely an attention to niceties that separates them from us in every walk of life!

What have we been taught about ‘respect’ in India? We have been trained to confuse respect with the deference and servility to authority figures (father, husband, teachers, thanedaars, netas, employers…) that stems out of fear: we have been told that no matter how much we might dislike them, or how obviously wrong they might be or unreasonable their demands might be, we had better obey them silently, for it’s always ‘or else…!’ So, generation after generation, we have gone through the motions of being ‘respectful’ to our ‘betters’ (usually males, parents, people who are older, people of ‘higher’ castes or of the dominant religion, people holding superior office), often for no other reason than that they happen to hold the whip hand over us, though most of us like to pretend that we obey because ‘they always know better what is good for us’. This has had some really terrible consequences.

For one thing, the slave who cringes and grovels at his master’s feet obviously desires nothing better than to cheat or hurt the master, or at least to see him cheated and hurt, whenever he’s sure he can get away with it. So we easily forget and even abuse our old parents or at least wish to be rid of them (they are no longer ‘masters’, you see, and deep in our subconscious there’s this intense desire to get a bit of our own back, sick as that sounds). So we call someone mad who insists that we should take pride in our work and do it well even if the master is not breathing down our necks. So servants rob and murder and rape masters and mistresses so often. So we eagerly speak ill of our teachers/bosses behind their backs (the ‘masters’ have to make do with mere make-believe of ‘respect’, though many of them are bitterly aware that the slaves would gladly dance over their graves!) At the same time, we believe that, while our masters have a right to grind us under their heels, we have an equal right to deal with those ‘below’ us the same way – so, despite our vaunted self-identity as a ‘democratic’ society, we still think that parents ought to get away with every kind of child abuse short of murder; witness also the way teachers and senior officers talk down to students and subordinates; see how the disgusting practice called ‘ragging’ flourishes on our college campuses, or look at the heartless high-handedness with which our bureaucrats deal with people who queue up before them for everything from pensions to driving licenses, passports and ration cards: they are not government functionaries getting paid for doing their jobs well, but petty feudal lords doling out favours out of the largeness of their hearts – unless, of course, you are a mafia boss with deep pockets, a reputation for violence and powerful political godfathers – in which case they seldom make a mistake about who should fall at whose feet! (this, by the way, is why I tell all my pupils never to give me gifts or touch my feet unless they personally and strongly feel like doing it).

Real respect, like real pride, is very rare in this country. A housewife who, despite poverty and a backbreaking workload, always manages to keep the house neat and beautiful has legitimate reason for pride; so also the man who has never cheated or flattered or bribed anybody for favours and yet has succeeded in making a decent livelihood. Someone who has truly mastered a musical instrument or a language can likewise be proud of herself (I have met very few ‘educated’ Indians in my life who can write one page of elegant English quickly before my eyes without making a single mistake of spelling, grammar, syntax, idiom or choice of words; the same goes for their native tongues these days). I don’t need to speak of great social workers, or lame men who climb mountains – they have every reason to be proud. Modesty suits only the saint and the non-achiever. Now if you look around, you will see that very few people you know personally have done anything at all to be proud about: we’ve just got some degrees and found nondescript middle-level jobs, and are now just making a living from day to day like millions of others. Unable to be proud, we have conveniently forgotten to be proud, or decided it’s not necessary! And things keep getting worse…notice that these days we admire nothing but money (no matter how it has been made), nor can boast of anything but (well, marks in childhood and money after we have grown up). And even our admiration is little more than envy, our boasting only a desperate effort to hide from the voice constantly mocking us inside ‘you’re a nobody after all!’ This is why we love so much to speak ill of others, this is why we are so sensitive about what people are saying about us (anybody with low self-esteem is bound to be touchy that way), this is why we cannot bear to hear somebody being spoken well of: not being capable of giving respect ourselves, we insist that if someone is showing respect to somebody, it cannot be anything but sycophancy. Why should you respect anyone who can neither threaten you nor do you favours?

All this has been with us since time immemorial; the pity is that it refuses to go away. But I wish to end with something that is a relatively recent (and ghastly) development. Of late, now that we are getting used to living in a somewhat more permissive atmosphere, our young (without having given up most of the bad attitudes outlined above) have decided that since we no longer have to show people respect out of fear, we must go about being deliberately rude and cruel just to show how liberated and smart we have become. Look at how they shriek and scream ‘for fun’ in school these days, how they jostle the elderly in the malls, how they talk back to some old man who ‘dares’ to give them a bit of advice against littering or driving rashly, how they scoff at the idea that they might wish an old ex-teacher ‘Good morning ma’am, how do you do?’, how young wives these days think it is their ‘right’ to abuse their husbands at the drop of a hat. Some of my grown-up ex-students and strangers their age, much junior to me, start mails to me with ‘Suvro’ or 'Hi Suvro' or even ‘Hey Suvro’, forgetting that Indian/Bengali civility demands that they should address me as ‘Dear Sir’, or ‘Dear Mr. Chatterjee’, or at least ‘Dear Suvroda’. When I cut the line, or tell them to buzz off, they rarely acknowledge their lapse in manners and apologise; instead they insist they can’t see they have done anything wrong; or even declare that they hadn’t thought I could mind: ‘you’re so conventional!’ (don’t they do that sort of thing all the time in the US of A?). If I ask them whether they habitually address their fathers or fathers’ friends that way, they prefer not to answer. All things about tradition are neither silly nor obsolete; manners were invented to make social intercourse a better experience than a dogfight, especially to protect the weaker, the quieter, and the more decent among us. I wonder how the brash teenagers and twenty-somethings of today would feel in 2050, when they can no longer afford to be so aggressive and devil-may-care, when their grown-up children and folks their children’s age tell them night and day where they can shove their instinctive longing for a bit of dignity and respect. I hope they relish the experience.

BLINK!

I am reading a remarkable book right now, given me by my clever and thoughtful pupil Supra, and I thought I should write up a few paragraphs about it. It’s called blink (by Malcolm Gladwell, 2005, Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Co., US $15.99). Its thesis, racily written and backed up by a great agglomeration of research findings, as such American books usually are, is that ‘thin-slicing’ of experience matters far more in human decision making than we know or believe – whether we are selling cars, or sizing up battlefield situations, or figuring out which of our patients are most likely to have a heart attack soon, or differentiating between fake and genuine works of art, our subconscious minds, working behind a ‘locked door’, make decisions in the blink of an eye, on the basis of extremely quick first-impressions, and those are the decisions which we often try to rationalize afterwards with all kinds of carefully-sifted evidence and closely-reasoned argument.

The author insists that it is by and large a good thing that most of us can do this ‘thin-slicing’, and do it fairly well: otherwise, in the swift hurly-burly of life, when a thousand quick decisions have to be taken and there’s no time to do ‘proper’ research and detailed analysis of pros and cons (such as slamming the brakes a few seconds before there is a traffic pileup ahead of you because ‘something’ warned you things were about to go wrong), we simply wouldn’t have survived. If some of us want to call this ‘intuition’, the author only wants us not to think that we are talking hocus-pocus about ‘supernatural’ powers: a well-developed intuition is only an ability to make very prompt judgments on the basis of long-accumulated, well-digested experience which is not always available to the conscious mind for instant processing. I am reminded of having read how hunters and commandos claim to have acquired a keenly-honed intuition on the basis of long and often costly experience; and Asimov wrote long ago that while great scientific ideas come far more often to the trained mind than to the layman, the trained scientist owes far more to sudden flashes of intuition than is commonly supposed. The author also acknowledges that some people have far keener intuitions than others: that is one reason they excel in their chosen fields of work (sharp stockbrokers, like brilliant generals, often find it very hard to explain in step-by-step logical terms what exactly made them decide on doing the things that brought them glory, victory or a big fortune).

I myself endorse the thesis to a great extent: as a private tutor who has to depend on a very flighty group of ‘customers’ who are very unsure of what they want from me, I have always known that whether I can keep my family in gravy depends a very great deal on what sort of first impression I make on new batches every year. Which is why, after so many years, I still worry quite a bit about ‘getting it just right from the first word to the last’ in the first class. Of course there are always pupils who later claim that I gradually ‘grew on them’ as the classes progressed, but I know that if I have to retain ninety percent of the group that turned up on the first day, I cannot afford even tiny mistakes in giving the kind of first impression I want to give – with most people (even those who follow the herd) the first impression can often be the last! It might all seem like spontaneous fun on the receiving end, but believe me, an enormous amount of cool and hardheaded planning, self-correcting, self-monitoring and practice has gone into shaping the ‘final product’.

What is most alarming about the author’s thesis is that we often can, and do, go hopelessly wrong in making such snap judgments, too, and it leads to untold woe and injustice. That happens because, alas, our unconscious minds are crammed with all sorts of prejudices and fixed ideas which are simply not true nor fair. Thus it seems to be a fact that tall men seem to have an unbeatable advantage when it comes to the selection of CEOs of large business corporations: no matter how silly or unbelievable or just plain wrong it sounds, a short man (or a woman!), however sharp and highly qualified, has the whole world’s deeply-ingrained bias against him/her (a leader is expected to have a domineering physical presence, and height is supposed to facilitate that greatly). This is apparently a statistical fact – so, in case you are thinking of Alexander or Napoleon or Vidyasagar or Sachin Tendulkar, remind yourself that these are truly exceptional people: how many such have you personally encountered? We are talking about the average MBA-type here (tall men with MBAs can be duds, of course: hence so many bad CEOs who drag their bottom lines down!) Likewise, the fact that a musician, first selected as brilliant when only heard by a great Philharmonic Orchestra, was rejected as soon as they saw that it was a woman, or the fact that far more black men get convicted with all kinds of crime than white men do in the US, despite the latter having the same weight of evidence against them, is due to the very unfortunate reality that typical judges and juries are still very heavily biased against women and blacks (woe betide the short and black woman!). And this sad reality is not altered by the fact that most of those judges and juries might be consciously very nice people, and very strongly not just profess but believe in the most liberal, egalitarian social values – we are talking subconscious minds here.

Gladwell, therefore, neither praises high-speed intuitive decision-making as the right thing to do in all situations, nor does he lament that its problems cannot be handled and cured, or at least ameliorated. Our biases against black men or women, for instance, which slow down our performances in all Implicit Association Tests (he says go to www.implicit.harvard.edu and take a test for yourself) are greatly weakened if we are asked to look at pictures of famous and great blacks or women for a while before sitting for the tests – ergo, it is highly recommended that social arrangements be gradually so re-organised that people in important decision-making positions first get a great deal of close first-hand exposure to nice and clever blacks and women and black women, so that those unconscious biases slowly fade. And since the bosses of the Munich Philharmonic chose both rightly and fairly when a screen prevented them from seeing that the musician was female, it is highly recommended that judges and juries do not get to see the accused, lest their unconscious biases get a chance to wreak havoc with sane judgments! It is this kind of practical solutions that appeal greatly to Gladwell – he is, after all, an American. Think how much harder it would be to bring about such social changes in a country like India, where our biases are not only explicit (every would-be bride who wants a good match had better be fair-complexioned), but most of us are still far from feeling guilty about them!

And finally, Gladwell suggests (with a doff of the hat at Freud) that all the mass of extant research seems to indicate that, contrary to popular wisdom, the big decisions – which require processing a great number of variables and juggling a great many facts – are best left to the subconscious, while the minor decisions in life (do I want a chocolate sundae right now?) can be dealt with in the best traditions of slow and careful analytical thinking. He tells people that the knowledge provided by this book should make us more aware that we could very often be wrong (shades of Russell!), and that should make us more forgiving towards those who cannot consciously help being wrong (that would have warmed Jesus’ heart). He also warns that having too much information at one’s fingertips can actually be disastrous instead of a great help to wise decision making, by making us both complacent and confused: that, says Gladwell, is precisely why the vast US military/intelligence apparatus, with all their superdooper technology and mathematical models, got their prognostication of the ongoing war in Iraq so horribly wrong!

Try the book. For some people, especially those still under 30, it could be a life-changing experience.

'Stay hungry, stay foolish'!

A disturbing thought struck me recently – do people get the impression from my blog that I am a dour, gloomy, irritable sort of person who never smiles and hates to see people smile, and who never talks lightheartedly about not-too-serious things? God forbid. Those who have known me up close are aware that while I do hate people who are frivolous and giggly all the time and have a poor taste in jokes, it would be wrong to think that I am a sourpuss. And, to put it in a great man’s inimitable words, I am not serious only when I am solemn!

Actually, I have found the world so gloomy a place as things are that I have not only tried my best to find all the laughter I could, but tried to share it around with everyone I know. So all my ex-students with good memories will remember, I am sure, how much and how often they laughed in my classes – with me, never at me – even while we were getting serious and important things done. My life and psyche have not been moulded by glum philosophers and moral policemen. Indeed, I have always been partial to the ‘laughing philosophers’, from Jabaali to Socrates to Voltaire and Sri Ramakrishna and Galbraith. And I wouldn’t have been the man I am without a lot of wonderful books of romance in the Treasure Island mould, or without the Charlie Chaplin movies and the P.G. Wodehouse books and all the lovely comic books from around the world, including Tintin and Asterix and what have you. In fact, the more boyish the better (without being crude and silly, of course): I loved Archie and his Riverdale High School gang when I was in high school myself, and, thumbing through a set that a current pupil has kindly left with me, I found that I can enjoy them just as much today, though I am 45 now, with a daughter stepping into teenage, and much white in my beard!

And I have been naughty enough, too: I was never a goody-goody mama’s boy, I have not grown into the kind of man that mama’s boys grow into, and I am proud of it. That makes a lot of people either look askance at me (‘he’s a bad man, beware!’), or imagine that I have never managed to ‘grow up’. Some people, indeed, think that it is possible to be both at the same time.

The fact is that the vast majority of grown-ups made me sick or filled me with contempt even when I was a boy, and that feeling did not change one whit as I grew up myself, and got to know a lot of grown-ups first hand, including a huge number of ‘important’ grown-ups in exalted places (remember I was a journalist once, and visited ministers and corporate honchos and filmstars as a matter of course). I found their ignorance monumental (one old fool asked me in a very patronizing tone when I was 13 which author was my favourite, expecting me to say Enid Blyton I suppose, and when I said ‘Bertrand Russell’, it shut him up for good for the rest of the evening); their conversation banal (hardly anything beyond neighbourhood gossip, petty office politics, chronic diseases, clothes/gizmos they have bought and the marks/salaries being brought home by their children); their prejudices idiotic (if everyone I know is putting his son through the Joint Entrance, I must ensure my son does the same/ if you criticize Indian politics you must be a Pakistan-sympathiser/ if you are a Bengali you must go gaga over cricket and Durga-pujo…); their morals utterly elastic except when they are lecturing their children or subordinates (it’s okay to lech when nobody’s likely to beat you up), their charity and imagination non-existent (cite the example of any great man or woman and they say oder kotha alaada – they’re different), and their tendency to make a virtue of spinelessness for the sake of a ‘safe’ passage through life (the boss is always right) disgusting.

I also learnt that the best of men have been fond of children, and almost childlike in their simplicity and open-mindedness – Tagore was, Einstein was, Steven Spielberg has ascribed his endless fecundity with ideas to the notion that he has never quite managed to grow up (see also what Freud said about children vs. adults: it’s a fixture at the bottom of this blog) – and I was content. I agree with Saint-Exupery (of The Little Prince fame) that grown-ups are as a rule thickheaded: you should never discuss really serious things with them. Which is why I decided long ago that I would rather forever stay in the company of children than grow old with people who will never make me either happy or wise. And lo! I find I haven’t made a bad bargain after all. Most of the people who have not given me their company have done me a favour – judging by all I know of them – and the people whom I deal with remain forever young, fresh, and, relatively speaking, free: people who can perchance still be moulded into a finer shape.

My only sorrow today is that the current flock of youngsters are willy-nilly bracketing me, perhaps out of sheer force of habit, with all the other dry, boring, pretentious oldies they know (maybe I can’t blame them? Both my wife and daughter say that all my classmates whom they happen to see these days talk and act and look as though they could be my uncles!). I wish they’d give me a chance. And my only nightmare is that, despite everything that I can do to keep the doors of their minds open, and the gears whirring busily, most of them ossify into the kind of adults who have gone before them! I cannot tell you how many interesting teenage boys and girls have become conventional dullards before my eyes now that they are in their thirties.

“And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour we rot and rot/ and thereby hangs a tale”, said Shakespeare. Quite right, too: no one can escape the scythe of the Great Reaper. But why do so many of us grow old so soon by desperately copying everything our elders have done wrong?

Whither happiness?

Some of us are happy more or less all the time. Some are too busy or unused to thinking to bother about whether they are happy or not. Some brood over it all the time, and cannot figure out why they feel unhappy despite there not being obvious and pressing reasons for unhappiness. Of late I have been interacting with some people who are contemporaries or senior ex-students, and they have all been thinking of this happiness issue – one thing that is common to all of them, I notice, is that they are rather bewildered that they cannot feel happy enough as they reach or approach middle-age, despite having done everything right: becoming engineers and managers, for instance, and then settling in the US, and getting married at the ‘right’ time to the ‘right’ sort of person (as parents and society dictate), and raising children who are not handicapped in any serious way. So they have got me thinking (again, I might add: I did a lot of thinking about it once upon a time).

It may be a good idea to list a few things which, taken together, can, or at least ought to, make us happy – or at least prevent sudden strong bouts of unhappiness. I think that, under normal circumstances (not in Hitler’s Germany or Afghanistan right now), the following list should suffice:

· Sustained good health,
· A good wife and a cheerful hearth,
· An adequate income,
· Enjoying one’s work,
· A few relaxing and enjoyable hobbies,
· A few people who make it known that they are grateful to you for favours received,
· A habit of counting one’s blessings every day,
· Having a few good things to look forward to – such as the coming of grandchildren,
· Keeping company with people who are less fortunate, and avoiding the company of people far richer and snootier,
· Not socializing with people who have nothing to say except share gossip and scandal, and compare their lot with yours,
· Not regretting things that have been (this is really hard! – so many people my age, of both sexes, are finding it so difficult to accept that they are not perky and pretty teenagers any more),
· Knowing that one is leaving behind a few things that will last – such as a successful business, or a book that has become famous, or a pretty garden, or a legion of successful students, or a widely-accepted scientific theory…
· Cultivating two invaluable virtues that the Buddha taught: upeksha (equanimity over good fortune and bad) and mudita (pleasure over the good fortune of others).

You can be just plain lucky, but my opinion is that most of us have to work on all the items listed above. Sustained good health, for instance, depends a great deal on disciplined habits in connection with food, sleep and exercise which most of us avoid until it is too late; and daydreaming about how happy you could have been if you had a good wife is fine, but most of us find it a bitter pill to swallow when it is suggested that how good a wife you get depends a great deal on how good you have tried to be to her! Enjoying your work is not very likely if you are stuck with something that your parents forced you into twenty years ago. And as for having an ‘adequate’ income: remember that unless one learns contentment, a billion dollars a year is sure to keep you unhappy. Most of the unhappy people that I talk to have nice houses if not palaces to live in, at least one car, and go holidaying at least once a year, to Kashmir or Kerala if not to Singapore, Dubai or the French Riviera! And too many of them eat far too much.

One thing that I have definitely learnt is that the ability to draw happiness out of life decreases as one grows richer, at least up to the middle-class level; I meet happy rickshaw-pullers and maidservants far more often than happy doctors, engineers and managers, though the latter freely admit that they are now much better-off than they were in childhood. This certainly needs thinking about. Yet another thing is that most people stay unhappy all their lives because they could never figure out once and for all what exactly they wanted out of life, and what they could easily have done without!

If one is able to put a check beside almost all of the above, and one is still unhappy, one needs to analyse oneself closely to figure out whether it is because one enjoys being that way – one may be a habitual melancholic (dukkhobilashi in Bengali). And if one cannot put a check beside most of them, one needs to ask oneself what one is doing wrong, and what one needs to change to make things better. Change your wife, change your vocation, change your place of residence, change your set of friends – or get rid of friends more or less entirely? … and don’t tell me ‘it’s easier said than done’, because I have made many of those changes in my own life, and am happier for it.

Finally, if you can’t make those changes despite knowing that you should, you are a weak character: you deserve to be unhappy, so stop whining!

Reading (or re-reading) some good books can certainly help. Have you tried Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness lately?

[I shall be glad to answer questions on this – though not rhetorical ones, it goes without saying. Many readers have been telling me they don’t ‘dare’ to write comments here. That’s sad, because commenting does not require you to be a know-all: asking questions and sharing experiences is commenting, too!]

Olympics, Bindra, "yeh dil maange more"!

Like I hope most of my fellow-Indians, I am prouder and happier than I can say that Abhinav Bindra has ended our 108-year long gold-medal drought at the Olympics. I can only wish him the very best of things that life has to offer, along with my thanks and my gratitude.

However (alas, I always think of 'however'!):

1) I wish and pray and daydream that we might get a few more medals yet at Beijing,

2) I rue the fact that we shall probably never (at least in my lifetime) as a nation climb to those dizzying heights where we can be called among the five best sporting nations in the world - and never stop blaming the government for it!

3) One newspaper that I read reported this morning that an sms message currently doing the rounds reads "Abhinav Bindra is the real AB; the rest are all forgettable". Very typically Indian, that: as soon as one of us does something good and great, we need to forget everything that others have done, and we imagine that praising someone requires insulting someone else! (and that saying something like that makes me sound clever - though I might be a complete nonentity in comparison with all the ABs I know...)

Wise and Otherwise, by Sudha Murty

I had written in an earlier blogpost that I had become smitten with Sudha Murty ever since my daughter bought her little book How I taught my grandmother to read and other stories (for those who might not know, she is not only the wife of IT-tycoon Narayan Murty but a scholar, a teacher, a writer, a social worker and a philanthropist – a most remarkable woman in her own right). I had heard about another book, more ‘for adults’, which several people I like had urged me to try. I have just finished reading Wise and Otherwise: A Salute to Life (revised edition, Penguin India, 2006, Rs. 150). Here is my take on the book. I loved reading it for a variety of reasons, to wit:

· Her great regard for teachers, her enthusiasm as a teacher, and her great sadness that so many teachers are a shame to their professions these days.
· Her insistence, from vivid personal experience (which tally very greatly with my own), that people can be cheats, liars and frauds, and disgustingly greedy and ill-mannered, regardless of whether they are rich or poor.
· …that so many supposedly educated adults like to show off their possessions and attainments so childishly, and even invent them when there’s not enough truth available.
· …that people in our country are so eager to take credit for others’ work, and so loth to give credit where it is due.
· Her assertion that decency and wisdom and courage are far more likely to be found among ‘backward’ people (including women, tribals, children, old men and the very poor) than among the elite and privileged.
· Her love of books, her wide education outside the confines of computer science, in which she has specialized, and her candid admission that programming is no big deal – any intelligent hardworker can pick up a new language in a few months’ time (p. 163)
· Her admiration for charitable people, especially those who give silently, and her joy at having been of some help to some people in great need or distress.
· Her horror about how pitifully women are very often treated in this country, her sadness about the fact that far too many women accept their plight instead of fighting, her praise for those who do fight and change things for themselves and others.
· Her disgust for average ‘society’ women, and her scorn for all mothers who think that mollycoddling their children and being completely blind to the dignity and needs of everybody outside the family is both normal and good.
· Her awareness that her great wealth is a blessing – because regardless of how talented you are and how hard you work, things outside your control (luck if you will) determine how wealthy and famous you will become.
· Her earnestness about wanting to believe that though things are in a bad shape in this country, ‘it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness’.

That’s twelve items: enough, I am sure, to show that I have begun to like and admire this woman hugely. As she has said herself about someone in her book, I pray that her tribe may increase, and that she may enjoy a very long, healthy, happy life full of the kind of activity she loves. Indeed, I cannot praise her any higher than by saying that I wish I had met and befriended one woman like her in my whole life.

Now that I guess I have earned the right to crib a bit, here goes:

· I find it hard to believe that she, with her level of education and experience, took so long (she claims twenty years) to find out some unpleasant or tragic-comic realities about people in the IT-sector in India. If she isn’t right in the heart of it, who is? How could she have been so blind and so naïve?
· That she had to live to be middle-aged, and go to Sweden physically, to find out that the Scandinavian countries are where women are most respected, safest, and most free. I have known that, merely by reading books, since I was a teenager.
· I wonder how she travels around incognito so easily (as she has claimed she does, again and again…). I am not even remotely as rich and famous as she is, yet I cannot go anywhere in the town where I live without drawing a lot of unwanted attention!
· While agreeing that the old have always complained about how the young are going to the dogs for as long as we can look back in history, I cannot agree with the glowing impression she has sought to convey about how well-informed, clever and wise today’s youngsters are through a conversation that she once supposedly had with her teenage son. Given the kind of extraordinary parents he has, I don’t find it impossible to admit that he might have a very wise head on his shoulders, but – drawing on my 27-year long experience as a teacher myself – I will assert that such a youngster is rare indeed. Far from talking the way he did about such a serious subject (‘what do you think are the three most important revolutions or ideas of the 20th century?’), most young people in their mid-teens whom I coach simply gape foolishly at me or try to make themselves invisible among their friends when I ask them to speak extempore on even such ‘easy’ subjects like ‘my favourite fictional hero’ (it happened this very evening).
· Ms. Murty sounds sunny enough at the beginning as befits the writer who is trying to make her readers think positive and feel good, but her mood grows darker as one ploughs through the book, for indeed, any sensitive, intelligent and caring human being cannot help feeling increasingly tired, frustrated and even sick of all the badness, crudeness, pettiness and shamelessness one encounters at every turn in life in contemporary India (and behind a façade of culture, too!) – no matter how hard and often she tries to remind herself and us that we must never grow blind to whatever little goodness there is. This is especially the lot of people who try to do some good to others merely because they feel compelled to do so. People envy you and curse you even as they greedily take whatever you can give them. In Madam Murty’s case, her great wealth, I suppose, serves both to attract a lot of such bad vibes as well as to cushion her from them somewhat: not being endowed with even a tiny fraction of her wealth, power and fame, I have perforce had to decide to put a rein on the good that I try to do the world, having been cheated and badmouthed by beneficiaries far too often, and constantly to remind myself that even if I do good to anybody, it must be purely for the good of my own soul, not with the remotest expectation of remembrance and gratitude (the reader may care to hark back to my two previous posts, 'Living Selfishly', and 'Living Selfishly, part two')!
· I can empathize very well when she sadly muses on how much vile trash she gets via snail mail and email every day. I wonder, though, why she self-flagellates: surely she can afford one secretary who will just see to it that no garbage reaches Madam’s eyes?
· Considering all the true but nasty things that she has said about a lot of ‘successful’ professional people, the page-three sort of people and politicians, I wonder how popular Madam Murty has made herself, even in the circles in which she and her husband perforce have to move! The book has sold 30,000 copies so far, says the blurb on the back: I wish it might sell a hundred times more. It should be made required reading for all teachers and politicians in this country, and for all parents who claim to be educated.

I could have added a few things, I suppose, but let it go. I have read the book closely, and I would urge all my readers to do the same. And then reflect on what India really needs to dream reasonably of becoming a great nation someday. Madam Murty, at least, is clear enough that merely a bit more of technology and capital and ‘management skills’ won’t do it.

Finally, a word of thanks to Subhanjan Sengupta for making the book available to me. It is nice old boys like him who keep open the mental doors and windows of a lazy home-bird like me.

How to comment, argue, disagree

I found the following very helpful link on the Net today. It's a great little primer on how civilised argumentative discourse ought to proceed:
http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

I hope all those who wish to comment on my blog would read up that essay first!

Solzhenitsyn, and an obituary

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (of The Gulag Archipelago fame) died yesterday. Here is a link to an obituary that I liked:

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/john_mark_reynolds/2008/08/solzhenitsyn_the_prophet.html

Those who are serious readers themselves and know me and broadly agree with my values will, I'm sure, have no difficulty in figuring out why I liked the essay.

China, India, Chindia?!...

When I was in class seven (already an avid reader of newspapers) Mao Ze Dong, the ‘Great Helmsman’ who had transformed China and in the process become certainly among the ten most important men of the 20th century (for better or for worse) died at a ripe old age. His proteges, most prominently Deng Xiao Bing, who collectively stepped into his shoes, promptly launched that vast and ancient nation on a course of reforms, which, though they preferred to call it incrementalism or gradualism – no more than a bit of timely and much-needed tinkering with the system Mao had put in place – took the world’s breath away over the next three decades. They called it ‘market socialism’: a system whereby politically they would continue to be ruled by a single party wedded to a pretty rigid ideology of centralised socialist dictatorship, while economically they would loosen up, capitalist-fashion, to harness the energies of a ‘hundred million entrepreneurs’, the advantages of every kind of modern technology, and the disciplined hard work of the most gigantic labour force in the world. Their determined and single-minded aim was to increase the gross national product by leaps and bounds. I shall not, right now, go into the politico-economic nitty-gritties, nor all the social costs that had to be (or were alleged by all kinds of detractors to be) paid. What mattered to those who mattered in China was to set a sizzling pace of overall growth for the span of an entire generation or more: and they did it. By 2000, the United States (like most other rich countries) was swamped with cheap, good-quality Chinese imports of every description, from dolls to computer hardware: some said US soldiers went to war wearing uniforms stitched in Shanghai, and more sophisticated observers muttered that China was buying up large and precious chunks of the US economy itself with its incredible horde of trade-surplus dollars! Meanwhile, glittering cities of chrome-and-steel skyscrapers, along with vast new powerplants, canals, highways, airports and ports are coming up all over China like mushrooms in wet weather: recent visitors can hardly recognise the country they last saw thirty years ago.

Within the last couple of years, according to some estimates, China has become the second largest economy in the world (though, because of the gigantic population, her per-capita income is still far below that of the US, leave alone the really rich tiny countries like Liechtenstein); she is the world’s largest producer of steel, the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, probably the largest market for expensive cars and snazzy mobile phones; she has the world’s largest army (more than twice the size of the US army) which, though technologically more comparable with ours than the American, is also modernising at breakneck pace (it is said they already have pretty accurate nuclear-tipped ICBMs which can hit west-coast US cities across the Pacific if ever the need arises); she is rapidly emerging as one of the largest aid-dispensers in the world (most prominently in Africa), having learnt that aid is the best way not only to open up trade which is highly advantageous to her, but to win pliant allies, or at least neutrals – which is already showing up in the way the US is continuously losing ground to her whenever there is voting in the UN General Assembly. Her hunger and zest for growth is still undimmed, and many of the best scholars around the world are predicting that she will outstrip the US to become the largest economy of all within the next twenty years. God knows what will happen to us all then, and the world as we knew it!

While China’s miraculous emergence as a global giant (‘The Dragon Awakes!’) has caused first disbelief, then awe and fear and an incredible amount of criticism from both within and without – “she’ll be the death of us all with so much pollution!/ she’s making a hundred thousand tycoons and grinding several hundred million into the dust in the process – Karl Marx must be turning in his grave!/look at what horrors she has unleashed in Tibet and what more horrors she is winking at in Darfur, Sudan!/God help America and the western way of living, democracy, human rights and all/ Don’t forget Tiananmen Square and the Falun Gong!…” it seems, from the writing of more keen and sober observers, that an enormous number of ordinary Chinese are not only participating more or less willingly in the continuing miracle but are very proud of their ever-growing global stature, and would like it to keep on growing, no matter what.

The following links are only two of the many score that I have read in the last few months:

‘China’s new intelligentsia’
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10078

‘Inside the Dragon’
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/05/china/journey/hessler-text

The former is an article in the March 2008 issue of a British thinking-man’s magazine about contemporary Chinese intellectuals, who, it seems on the whole, are not about to overthrow the system they live in at all. They are (unlike ours!) almost unanimous – in this day of globalisation (western-style) and dissolving national borders – in their desire to see China emerge as a confident and vigorous new superpower on the world’s stage. Internally, though they argue and bicker a lot (there’s apparently much more space for dissent, at least among educated and non-violent circles, than many west-aligned people would like to believe), they seem to be agreed, too, that the system only needs more tinkering, sometimes a little towards the right (dismantle all remnants of the public sector), sometime a little to the left (spread the social security net much wider, care more for the environment). The second link is to an article in the May 2008 issue of National Geographic magazine – itself a phenomenon I can’t remember seeing ever before, a whole issue, every page of it, devoted to the developments in just one country!

China has been going flat out over the last few years to make such a grand and perfect spectacle of the Olympic Games she’s going to host this year (beginning about a week from now) that the rest of the world might remember her emergence dead-centre of the spotlight for a long time to come. All the magazines I see, Nat Geo and Reader’s Digest included, are full of it; apparently China is not only prepared to dazzle the world with spanking-clean modern cities and the most ultra-sophisticated security and highspeed transport systems and sports stadiums but is also determined to sweep the medals tally ahead of all the rest (nobody doubts that she’ll have the second-largest tally at least: the former Olympics have seen to that).

All this makes me proud as an Asian (it is certainly high time, historically speaking, that the Anglo-Saxon hegemony on global economics and culture was broken), and glad for the Chinese people, but rather sad when I turn back to look at my own country (I shall, at this point, ask the patient reader to read, or re-read, the little essay titled My India earlier on this blog: just type it into the search bar on the right, please). I know everything’s not all right with China, not everything that she’s doing is worthy of admiration. I know that someone of the stature of Amartya Sen believes that we Indians ought to be proud of two very great achievements: despite our grinding poverty, enormous disparities, repeated wars and widespread illiteracy, we – unlike China – have succeeded in avoiding giant famines and in preseving democracy, and I don’t entirely disagree with him. I know that India’s own brand of reforms started 13 years after China’s, and that we too have been growing at a pretty fast clip of late – indeed, many of the developments I can see all around me, from the proliferation of cellphones to ever-worsening traffic snarls on the roads to better clothes for the urban working class to increasing obesity and heart-disease among the rich and upper-middle classes, it’s all pretty much like what’s happening in China. And yet, and yet…

First of all, our growth is far too slow and sporadic; at this rate, leave alone the US, we don’t have a hope of catching up with China within the next 25 years, if we ever do. Second, the growth is, I believe, far more uneven than in China: so our rural sector (where two-thirds of our people still live) is seriously languishing, our infrastructure (roads, water supply, sanitation, housing, power, transport) is incredibly inadequate and creaking with age and lack of maintenance; we are miles behind China in this regard, leave alone the fully ‘developed’ countries, and as Manmohan Singh himself worries (but seems to be unable to do much about!), that could choke off our growth too soon, besides the fact that it keeps the vast majority of us permanently condemned to a very poor quality of life. Other than a few sectors (such as IT – which is too dependent on the health and whims of western economies, and too small to take the burden of the entire economy on its shoulders), too many areas have hardly seen progress of any kind. We boast of a handful of IITs, and half our population remains functionally illiterate. In the fields of military power and sports, the less said about us the better; in terms of new products, patents and theories, India (despite its millions "studying science" in high school) has hardly contributed anything at all to the world of science – our pathetic submission to the US’s dictates via the recent nuclear treaty, for instance, would be an open admission that our 50-year long nuclear ‘research’ has been a farce, we cannot build N-power plants without American help, virtually all our cellphones and car engines have been designed or even manufactured abroad, and I haven’t seen a computer using an operating system developed in India yet, or high-grade surgical instruments designed and made in India for that matter. As for the number of Indian scientists from India who win high acclaim for original papers published in the world's top peer-reviewed journals, compared to our population-size and our endless boasting, ha ha ha!

But far worse than mere techno-economic achievements (or lack of them) I believe where we have really fallen behind with little hope of redemption is that, unlike Japan earlier and China now, we neither have a national will to greatness nor any faith that we could do anything by ourselves. Everything from baseball caps to slang to textbooks to popular music tunes to machinery must be begged, borrowed, copied or bought from the west; the only things we are determined to preserve are the very things about our tradition that hold us back: religious bigotry, casteism, superstition, cheating the public to benefit the family (or, even more narrowly, just me!), allergy to regular, disciplined and meticulous work, unwillingness to take the slightest of risks, whether as individuals or as organisations, and complete lack of shame about everything we are bad at (punctuality, cleanliness and good manners, to name just three). Even if we are sometimes painfully conscious of our myriad shortcomings, we happily pin them all on ‘corrupt’ politicians (as if they don’t reflect us, as if they are found only in India), and dream and pray that we, or at least our children, may escape for a better life to America (I hear millions of Chinese have done that too, but then they keep ploughing back far bigger investments into their mother country than our huge Indian NRI community has ever felt like doing, though they too are very well-off indeed). I had a hope of seeing India taking a place at the high table of the world’s leaders in my lifetime: that hope is growing fainter with every passing year. To be a world leader it isn’t enough to be rich, or even to be (militarily) powerful, you must have something to give to the world, to teach, to be admired for. What have we got? In the first of the two articles I read that today’s Chinese intellectuals are dredging their ancient classics and sages (that would mean everything from the Tao te Ching to Confucius, Mencius, Lao Tse and Sun Tzu) for every pearl of wisdom they can find: how many young educated Indians could teach foreigners a thing or two from books like the Dhammapada, the Mahabharat, the Arthashastra, the Brahmasamhita or Abhignyan Shakuntalam?

And finally, there’s a bit of worry, or even fear, nagging at the back of my mind. China has never liked India – not, at least, since we gave shelter to the Dalai Lama in 1959, and India has been suspicious and uneasy about China’s real intentions ever since our military humiliation at their hands in 1962. Publicly top leaders on both sides keep saying they are keen on building bridges, and of course it would be a wonderful thing if China and India (along with Russia, too, perhaps) join hands to counterbalance the overwhelming might and influence of the west and create a really effective UNO – that would be the biggest step on the road to the ultimate desideratum of all, a truly fair and good world government for the benefit of all mankind! But idealistic dreams do not realpolitik make. China has always favoured Pakistan as a geopolitical counterpoise to India; she is making no secret of her desire to hem us in and keep us confined with her giant armed might, unable to spread our influence wide; she is publicly unhappy about any moves we make to cosy up to the US. In her bid for world dominion, she will probably do anything in her power to keep us from emerging into a rival, even a peaceful one. And the fact that we are falling so far behind in the race for prosperity, power, self-confidence and glory does not augur well for us at all! Merely having a lot of fat Indians going around in jeans, chewing gum, listening to hard metal rock on iPods, mall-crawling and saying ‘yo man, cool rags!’ to one another when they meet is not going to help us catch up with anyone.

The Bucket List

First movie review

The Bucket List

[Director: Rob Reiner, Writer: Justin Zakham. Released in the US: 11.01. 08. Edward Cole played by Jack Nicholson, Carter Chambers played by Morgan Freeman, ‘Thomas’ played by Sean Hayes. Distributed by Warner Brothers.]

Two old men have got cancer. One is an irascible, egotistical and lonely white billionaire (Edward), divorced several times with an estranged grown-up daughter, the other a firm but quiet black man, a very sharp, very well-read car mechanic who has missed out on college and struggled all his life to give his wife and children the kind of decent middle-class lifestyle he had missed growing up in (Carter). They share the same hospital room while they are undergoing surgery and follow-up chemotherapy. It so happens that Edward owns the hospital. Eventually they are both told they are condemned men, with six months, maybe a year to live. The relationship starts off unpromisingly, but it evolves into something a little less than friendship, a little more than mere nodding acquaintances. Carter had drawn up a ‘bucket list’ - of things he would like to do before he kicked the bucket (this was before he knew his days were numbered). Edward chances to find and read it, and his imagination is fired. He proposes to Carter not only a sudden close friendship but an idea: let’s live it up, doing all the things we had never thought of doing, or thought and laughed away, together, in the little time left to us, and with the vast fortune I have at my disposal (‘it’s all I’ve got!’). There are many things they agree upon, sometimes after a little dithering and bickering: going skydiving, racing the cars of their dreams, and visiting the great tourist hotspots around the world – lording it about in Cole’s private jet, his faithful factotum always in tow, staying and dining in the best places, even pretty and bright young girls at hand, should they be needed. Along the way they have such arguments about God, life, family, love, religion and death, and help each other out in such little but terribly important ways that, although they temporarily cut short the trip and part in a huff (more anger on Edward’s part than on Carter’s), they both realise that they have found something precious and rare in the relationship. While Edward enjoys full remission, Carter has a stroke the very night he has been happily reconciled with his family. The cancer has reached his brain, and despite the best medical efforts and most earnest prayers, he dies on the operating table. But he had fulfilled one of his last wishes on the bucket list before that, ‘laugh until I cry’ (having proved to Edward that he can be a fool!), and he had been smiling contentedly at his wife of 45 years when he was wheeled into the OT, so I guess we might say he was happy when he died.

Carter had left a letter for Edward whose message the latter couldn’t ignore, and so he swallowed his pride and fear and attempted a reconciliation with his daughter. It worked like a charm, and he got to fulfil one of his bucket list wishes (‘kiss the most beautiful girl in the world’, his little granddaughter). While attending Carter’s funeral service with a huge lump in his throat (he was discovering – or, rather, finally acknowledging – a little seen dimension of his character), he decided to cross out yet another, something that Carter had put into the list: ‘Do some good to a complete stranger’, and now that stranger’s memory was the best part of him, and he knew, and publicly admitted ('I loved the man...'), that he was a much better man for it. Carter had insisted upon faith, had told him a story about how in ancient Egypt they said you are only allowed into heaven if you could say yes to two questions: ‘Did you find joy in your life?’ and ‘Did you give joy to somebody?’ Now, Edward felt, he could not only face those questions unflinchingly but say yes to both. Life, not despite the cancer but because of it, had been good to him.

Edward Cole died at the fairly ripe old age of 81, and his ashes were buried (according to his last wish, and against the law, which would have pleased him greatly!) on top of a snow-capped mountain, beside those of his best friend.

I found this movie to be wonderful, the mush and the bad temper notwithstanding. Both Nicholson and Freeman have given superlative performances (how some old men can still show the world a thing or two!); so also Sean Hayes in the role of the quiet, dour, long-suffering personal assistant Thomas (‘actually it’s Mathew, but Edward finds it too Biblical’!) – I couldn’t have imagined that it would be he who took the risk and trouble to climb the mountain and put Cole’s ashes in their final resting place. How much money buys that kind of loyalty, I wonder, or how much love? I am also disappointed to find on the net that Roger Ebert, a critic whom I had come to respect for his generally very balanced, informed and cultured views, has trashed it. Reading his comment (http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080110/REVIEWS/801100301/1023 ), my regard for him has come down several notches. I shall be glad to go into details with anyone who has watched the movie and read through both this review and Ebert’s, but for now let me point out a few things that irked me about Ebert’s comments:

1. I wouldn’t have expected someone of his stature to mix up personal likes and dislikes so badly with what one expects from true criticism: the fact that he starts of by talking about ‘two old codgers who are nothing like people’ gives away his personal distaste, which has little to do with what the movie is really like. The fact that I personally don’t like the colour red or a particular flavour of icecream is okay, but that doesn’t give me a right to say that everybody ought to have the same tastes!
2. He has (deliberately?) ignored facts in his urgent haste to badmouth the movie: unlike what he saw (or thought he saw), there was suffering even during remission, and the wife did take her husband’s sudden truancy hard: Ebert would have liked her to make a much bigger song and dance about it, maybe, but again, that’s entirely a matter of personal taste, not a valid cause for judgment.
3. Ebert has posed as more of a know-all than he is. Okay, he has been through thyroid cancer (though without chemo) while I haven’t, but again, he is wrong to declare, god-like, that he knows how morosely and fearfully all cancer-sufferers behave, and therefore, since these men don’t comply, their story is just a fairy tale. I have someone in my own family who has been battling cancer for the last fourteen years, and her resilience and ebullience could stun Ebert. Maybe someone should tell him to read Tuesdays with Morrie, or Art Buchwald’s Dying is such fun!
4. He calls the two men’s discussions ‘pseudo-profound conversations about the Meaning Of It All’. I have read enough of poetry, philosophy and religion to know that there was nothing ‘pseudo-’ about it. It’s silly and rude teenagers who use that word as a kind of abuse for things they don’t understand and don’t want to: Ebert has some serious growing-up to do.
5. I was much saddened to see that Ebert doesn’t yet know – or want to know – that fairy tales (or rather, more broadly speaking, parables/allegories) serve some very important purposes. Without them, life would become too much of a drag – perhaps not for the likes of him, but they are not the only kind!
6. Finally Ebert writes: ‘I’m thinking, just once, couldn’t the movie open with the voiceover telling us what a great guy the Morgan Freeman character is? Nicholson could say ‘I was a rich, unpleasant, selfish jerk, and this wise, nice guy taught me to feel hope and love.’ Yeah, that would be nice. Because what’s so great about Edward anyway? He throws his money around like a pig and makes Carter come along for the ride. So what?’ Precisely that has been said in the movie, but too quietly for Ebert to hear. It is ironical to see that Ebert condemns Nicholson for 'overacting', because he seems to have gone deaf: he can’t hear things unless they are yelled into his ear. And again, all that comes through his ranting is that he hates (and maybe envies?) all rich men, insisting that their riches prevent them from being good and even hoping for salvation. That’s Bible-belt bigotry of the crudest sort!

Despite Ebert’s comments, the movie seems to have gone down well with ordinary viewers at large, judging by the box-office takings in the first few months (if wikipedia has got it right).

Moral of the story: I am reminded again of Virginia Woolf’s dictum about which books to read (it applies with equal force to movies): the only advice to give is that you should not take anyone’s advice too seriously. Read/watch with an open, attentive and refined mind, then judge for yourself! – I am glad that an old boy of mine, much younger than Roger Ebert and much less ‘learned’, found this movie good enough to persuade me to see it. A big 'Thank you' to him. This was definitely not one of the ten best movies I have seen, but it's definitely not a waste of time either.

Indians and English, Indian English!

In its July 2008 issue, Reader’s Digest published an article which concerns an issue very close to my heart, and invited readers to write in their comments. I have just emailed a long comment to them. They might publish it in full (they sometimes do), or they might not, or they might cut it short to the bare essentials (in their opinion, not necessarily mine!) I thought I should post the whole thing I wrote here, for the benefit of the blog readers. I shall be glad for all the sensible comments that I get. Here goes…

Sir,

I am writing this in response to your invitation to comment on the article titled 'The Americanization of Indish' written by Mohan Sivanand in your July 2008 issue. As someone who adores the English language, and has been making a living teaching it not only to high-school children but also those appearing for tests like the CAT, the UPSC, the GRE and TOEFL for more than 25 years, I thought this was a chance I should not miss.

I have no problems with Indians adapting from both British and American English, nor with Indians, including Indian writers, who boldly experiment with Indian images, metaphors, allusions, special/untranslateable local expressions, and peculiarly Indian themes/concerns as they work with English: in that sense I am no rigid purist; I know that any rich and vigorous language does and must keep evolving, for the benefit of all concerned. I am proud of the works of the whole long tradition of Indian writers in English from the time of Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Toru Dutt to Jawaharlal Nehru and Sarojini Naidu to Kamala Das, R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Khushwant Singh, Anita Desai right down to the contemporary tribe of writers for what they have done and are doing with English literature. No one will be happier if because of their efforts, along with the contributions of millions of ordinary Indian users of English, a genuine 'Indian English' evolves and is recognised as such by the whole world someday.

What I object to, and cannot help lamenting over, is the fact that vast numbers of today's nominally educated adult Indians - and that includes millions of successful professionals (alas, even teachers!) - think nothing of mutilating the language for no rhyme or reason, or rather because they have simply never bothered to learn the language well, and are quite blase about passing off whole pages and speeches of bad, clumsy, unidiomatic, misspelt, mispronounced and just plain wrong English as 'our kind' of English, or simply shrugging it off as a matter of no consequence. Semi-literate poster writers (the kind who have been mocked at in the caption accompanying the photograph at the end of your article) can be easily forgiven for wretched spelling; should you do the same with editors with postgraduate degrees who cannot remove bad spelling from books they supposedly go through with a fine-toothed comb (and probably using the MS-Word spell-check facility, too!), and college graduates who apparently have so pathetic a grasp of the fundamentals of the language that they have to be tested for not just spelling but punctuation, correct syntax, proper use of tenses, gender, number, articles and punctuation, besides vocabulary? - witness the contents of the typical CAT conducted by the IIMs. This is a basic literacy test, albeit conducted at very high speed, and yet these institutes ask such questions of those who are supposed to be the cream of our student population! What does that say about the quality of English education given in even the best schools in our country these days?

I am compelled to deal, day in and day out, with 'highly educated' adults who can neither read and speak their native tongues without continuously (unconsciously and unashamedly) interspersing them with English words and phrases, nor can speak or write English for any length of time without lapsing into gross errors of the sorts mentioned above, besides caricaturing the language with silly and ugly Indianisms, most of which are too familiar to mention ('We are like that only'/'Please pull my photo'/'He won't leave me unless I say sorry'/ What is your good name please?'/ 'Open your shoes here'/ 'We charge Rs 500 a day for fooding and lodging'/'My cousin brother is coming'...!) What does it say about our national psyche? Do the Chinese or the Russians or the Japanese or the French habitually do the same, or indeed the British and the Americans?

And have you surveyed the kind of rude, crude sms text they write instead of English on forums such as are provided by social-networking sites like orkut on the Net? Given that the average orkuter is in his or her early 20s, what does that augur for the standards of English that are going to prevail over the coming decades? I heard once that a New York politician who could spell 'cat' was called talented. Is that what the new generation of adult Indian users of English is going to be like?

I believe that this is not a facile question lightly to be ignored. Language is not merely the vehicle of communication and the bedrock of culture; it is the very framework of thought. A whole nation which has become so frivolous, so disrespectful of standards, so callous with language, whose citizens have nearly forgotten their native tongues and made a hash of English at the same time, is not likely to prosper rapidly and robustly in any other walk of life. I can vouch from personal experience that someone who matriculated from a Bangla-medium school 75 years ago (my own grandfather) could write at least more grammatically and idiomatically-correct English than 95% of postgraduates I meet today, though he could not have spoken with a pseudo-American twang, and flavoured his speech with so much currently-'in' slang as the young do these days. This development is certainly something to ponder about!

Yours truly,
Suvro Chatterjee
July 21, 2008

Unaccustomed Earth

Book review: Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri, Random House India 2008, Rs. 450

I have just finished reading this book, and thought it might be as good an occasion as any other to pen down a review, seeing that so many blog-readers have been asking why I stopped writing reviews after just one.

As a rule I do not think very highly of the current crop of Indian writers in English – I find them too recherché at times, and clichéd at others, I feel they write too exclusively about NRIs for other NRIs, they take too little direct and involved interest in Mother India (probably because that doesn’t pay, as so many Indian writers in Indian languages have found out the hard way!), that they have too much sauce and too little substance, in contrast with the earlier generation, R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Anita Desai, Khushwant Singh, Naipaul et al, who had a lot to say, and knew how to say it simply yet impressively… I am, of course, willing to pay tribute where I feel it is due; I have spoken and written highly of such works as Rushdie’s Haroun and the sea of stories, Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music, and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. Jhumpa Lahiri did not strike me as great stuff with her first volume, The Interpreter of Maladies (despite the fact that I couldn’t help being both very surprised and very proud that it had won the Pulitzer, putting an Indian in the elite company of titans like Hemingway – God knows how that happened!) though I did feel she had promise, and might go on to surprise us pleasantly with works that kept getting better as she kept thinking, observing and polishing her art. Even in that first book, the story about 'Buri-ma' and the one called The Third and Final Continent struck me as very good and sincere writing as soon as I read them: here, I thought, was a fine writer in the making. Since then The Namesake has appeared on the market, made waves and won accolades: it has also been turned into a movie I can vouch is worth watching. Now I have this latest collection of short stories (for want of a better expression: they are not typical short stories, but rather ruminative essays/travelogues/partial autobiographies) on my table, and I can say with conviction that Ms. Lahiri has definitely lived up to my expectations. This is good if not excellent writing. Indeed, if only the Indian diaspora knew a good thing when they saw one (or rather, if enough of them read books at all – far too many of them, alas, are money-minded and ‘busy’ doctors, engineers and traders to think of higher things such as books), they would have left no stone unturned to ensure that this writer became a global celebrity as, for instance, so many Latin Americans have managed to become. I am proud when I hear that an Arun Netravali has become director of Bell Labs, a Vinod Khosla has financed Sun Microsystems or a Vikram Pandit has become CEO of Citibank, but an Indian author who is acknowledged as great worldwide, as Tolstoy was, and Marquez is, would please me infinitely more. Tolstoy and Tagore are remembered as no tycoon or technical man of their times is – that’s the way of the world!

Other than being keenly observant and sensitive as any writer on lives, lifestyles and manners should be, Jhumpa is admirable for the many different ways in which she has portrayed the human condition of Indians abroad (and their families back in India). She writes not only about lonely children trapped and struggling between two cultures, but about fathers and mothers, wives, sons, daughters, in-laws, family friends and colleagues, and how they cope, each in his or her own distinctive way – though with many common features too – and how so many lives are crushed by failure and misfortune, and how happiness occasionally blooms despite everything, even if it is fated to be transient. I found the sister being forced to throw out the alcoholic and criminally-irresponsible brother truly tragic, and the way Kaushik is taken out of Hema’s troubled love-life by the tsunami of December 2005 is wrenchingly neat. The mother’s lifelong secret crush on her father’s young colleague forces a sigh from many of us who are old enough to know, understand and forgive such things: it happens all the time inside India, too; the setting on alien soil only makes it more plausible, and more poignant. The way Amit deals with Megan, or Sang with Farouk might not make great stories, but it tells us that some Indians have managed to become so thoroughly Americanized that their problems and solutions no longer have anything very specially Indian about them, either in their follies or in their triumphs. Truly, a new sub-species of Indian has been breeding over the last half-century, and society and politics in both India and America would sooner or later have to engage seriously with them! It is something important for both countries to know, and Jhumpa Lahiri will be remembered for being among the first writers to point out the phenomenon.

I have been reading up on Jhumpa on the Net. It seems she is quite candid (and why shouldn’t she be?) about the strongly (though fragmentarily-) autobiographical element in her stories. The protagonist of The Third and Final Continent was supposedly modelled on her father, just as The Namesake reflects much of her own youthful agonizing over her difficult double name (it was originally Nilanjana Sudeshna) which made her so uneasy and guilty in the American milieu that she replaced it with the short one they called her by at home!

I have started liking her for a number of reasons. First, she writes good, correct Standard English devoid of mannerisms, currently ‘in’ slang, prolixity, excess of innuendos, fanciful ornamentation and over-use of Bangla words in italics, yet manages to be as elegant and expressive and impressive as she would like to be: all worshippers of cant, jargon, bombast and ‘Indlish’ (including the likes of Kiran Desai and some blog writers I know!) may please note. It doesn’t stop her from winning prizes, either: I find that a most reassuring thing about contemporary critics and readers alike. Second, she writes about things she knows, understands and empathises with, and (contrary to what I have been hearing some people saying – ‘She’s writing about the same sort of people and issues again and again!’), I believe that’s exactly what an honest person who wants to be a good writer should do. It’s nothing new, actually, only people have forgotten: Erich Maria Remarque went back again and again to the lives of the generations in Germany torn asunder by the First World War, and Dickens wrote only about the middle- and lower middle classes struggling, losing out and profiteering out of the Industrial Revolution raging like a hurricane through early 19th-century English society – and oh my God, what books they have left behind! So more power to Jhumpa’s elbow. Maybe though, she should write about other Indians in America, too: till date, she has focused too narrowly on Bengalis. And while some critics back in India have accused her of not portraying our NRIs in a sufficiently positive light (long ago Nargis accused Satyajit Ray of ‘showcasing India’s poverty' through Pather Panchali! Some people never learn…), I would rather say she should take off the kid gloves and start telling the truth more like it is; not just mention but criticize, or at least laugh at all the petty spites and jealousies and backbiting and one-upmanship and little cruelties and provincialism that make up and embitter so large a part of the collective lives of all Indians in the US of A. (baggage that has been carried over and intensified). Without that, we would have become at least as strong a force in American social and political life by now as the Jews and the Chinese have managed to become! It is essential for a writer who wants to be remembered to be bravely and unashamedly didactic.

As for all folks back here at home, I wish more and more parents in my country (and in my little one-horse town) would read these books. They would then begin to wonder whether it’s really not quite silly, despite all the material goodies on offer, to boast of one’s son having moved to ‘Umrica’. A few of us have always known that it’s not the same thing as going to paradise; now the likes of Jhumpa Lahiri are telling us all why not. May her tribe prosper.

P.S.: here’s one interesting link to an article about J.L.:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59256-2003Oct7?language=printer

Also, I read the following in wikipedia: “Upon its publication, Unaccustomed Earth achieved the rare distinction of debuting on The New York Times best seller list in the number 1 slot. New York Times Book Review editor Dwight Garner stated, ‘It’s hard to remember the last genuinely serious, well-written work of fiction – particularly a book of stories – that leapt straight to No. 1; it’s a powerful demonstration of Lahiri’s newfound commercial clout.’ ”

Finally, many thanks to young Abhishek Das, who has just finished class 10 with me, and who very kindly lent me the book to read. I was thrilled to bits to learn, too, that he has a mother who, despite being a doctor, has time to read books like this one. I wish her a long life of happy reading.

The blog writer looks back

Now that I have been blogging for two continuous years (and an enormous number of people, including lots of celebrities both in India and abroad are doing the same), let me look back and reflect upon the experience.

Many people now have access to reasonably fast internet connections (in India it started happening only about five years ago, but that’s not much behind the west), and there are lots of web services like blogger.com to provide the necessary technical support very cheaply or for free, so I suppose it is natural that all sorts of people would start writing diaries on the net. A couple of savvy old boys got me interested, I made a tentative beginning, it took some time before my blog (or weblog, to give it its original and already-almost-forgotten name) started drawing people’s attention (mostly my ex-students, but also some of their friends/mentors/relatives) and comments, and then I was hooked. Since July 2006 I have posted 60-plus articles on all sorts of subjects, from religion to Harry Potter to poetry to career counselling to humour to personal reminiscences, short and long, at the rate of about three posts a month in recent times. Till date the blog has been visited almost 15,000 times, counting the 4000+ plus that the previous sitemeter had logged before I accidentally uninstalled it (which I consider rather good for a provincial non-celebrity who refuses to make his blog look sexy), and on average each post draws about 20 comments. I have just installed a poll for people to tell me why they like it, and I got twelve votes within the first two days (do vote; or let me know by email that it’s not working). I get a lot of hate mail, too; the less said about it the better. I prefer to laugh it away as the price of fame (however modest that might be in my case)! I am also toying with the idea of linking my blog to a Google program called Adsense: they supposedly pay you every time someone clicks on your blog. The only thing that’s holding me back is the thought that my blog would be cluttered up with advertisements yet not make me any significant money, because it’s just not popular enough on the scale that Google is looking for. But it feels good to be able to stay in touch with lots of people whom I could never have otherwise chatted up with, home-bird that I am, and my interlocutors scattered around the world. So long live the internet: it was created with just my kind of person in mind! I have written a diary since I was seven, and continued the habit till I was almost thirty; now the net has got me back again, only this time there are scores (or maybe even hundreds) of others who are following my thoughts around, more or less keenly. I wish, though, that more people would get back more often with intelligent, informed and sympathetic comments.

Here are a few discoveries I have made as a regular blogger:

1) Net penetration in India is still abysmally low (especially if you compare with the degree of penetration that fridges, mobiles, motorcycles and TV have achieved). That’s one genuine reason why many people cannot keep in touch even if they might wish to; 2) most people who visit don’t read closely and with understanding, which I can make out from the average time spent by any visitor after clicking on to my homepage, as my sitemeter informs me; 3) few people have the time, energy and opportunity to write long and serious comments (yet a lot of them apparently have enough of all three to write abuse); 4) Most net users are young people (and naturally ill-informed and having little experience of real life, which they try pathetically to cover up with an arrogant attitude); the comments would have been, I think, far richer, more frequent and more varied if people of my generation and older had logged on in large numbers, but they don’t (why, I wonder? They are quite comfortable with all kinds of other gadgets like cars and mobiles and iPods and microwave ovens, as I can see all around me. And of course very few of them are genuinely busy as they claim: otherwise so many fathers and mothers could not have waited patiently outside my gate for their children at my tuition day after day, year after year. And they always have time enough for their gossip-circles, clubs, parties and every wedding in town – oh, and by the way, I have checked out for years and years that these parents as a rule don’t read newspapers either). I have been an oddball in all sorts of ways, now I have found out yet another! 5) Few bloggers read others’ blogs. Westerners, in particular, don’t as a rule read blogs by Indians. So, alas, the Net is not really succeeding in forging a global village inspired by mutual knowledge, respect and understanding – not, at least, as yet. 6) The most traffic is drawn by blogs with a lot of pictures/cartoons (especially of the porn/soft porn variety), or those offering fashion tips and updates on the latest gimmicks and gizmos on the market (‘Boys’ Toys’, as Discovery Channel called them), not those discussing serious grown-up stuff (like, say, politics – unless it’s all about mudslinging – economic affairs, philosophy, literature, art, high-level science or charity). Says a lot about mankind, doesn’t it? 7) Hurry, pretence and bad manners give wrong impressions very quickly, and turn people off – it does to me, and I am sure a lot of other decent people react the same way. Too many people have this silly notion that on the Net you can pretend to be whoever you like, and be as rude and brusque as you like, and lie as much as you like, and nobody will find out, and nobody will mind if they do find out (that includes current and ex-students of mine who say the kind of rude things – often unthinkingly – to me over the net which they wouldn’t dream of doing face to face). So this is a reply to a question put to me by Rupam Mukherjee recently: it is indeed difficult to have genuine conversations (leading up to genuine and good relationships) over the Net. But we mustn’t give up trying too easily, must we? 8) people these days are so not well-read, yet they have neither any shame about it, nor fear that they might fall by the wayside (I said in one of my posts in my orkut community that ‘leaders are readers’), nor stop to think that they owe a well-read and much older man the courtesy of at least reading up a few things before they start shooting their mouths off at him, even though they hardly know what they are talking about (a little boy doing physics, who by his own admission has read virtually nothing but physics – not a word of whole libraries on theology, metaphysics, epistemology, semantics, logic, dialectics, history, you name it – presumes to tell me that I don’t know the difference between causality and determinism, when an hour’s face-to-face discussion would have convinced him that I have forgotten more about the subject than he in all probability will ever learn!!! Talk about empty vessels). I contrast this (alas, now all too common) type with the Upanishads categorically specifying humility in front of superior wisdom as an absolute essential for the progress of learning, Socrates declaring that the only thing he was sure about was that he wasn’t sure about anything, Newton comparing himself with a child collecting pebbles on the seashore, Russell saying that the highest hallmark of civilization is always remembering that I may be wrong, and Steve Jobs urging the young to ‘stay hungry, stay foolish’. What lesson does the contrast teach me about today’s ‘educated’ people? I know now why so many wise folks sneeringly refer to doing a PhD as ‘phudding’ (Many of these will soon be bringing over their kids to my tuitions, and resent it that I deal so dismissively with them!)

You will notice that there is only one entry under the label ‘Books and Movies’ so far. A few people – keen readers and serious movie watchers themselves – have asked why I haven’t written many more essays of the same sort. Just look at the number of comments (and check out Abhirup’s experience after writing an ‘evaluation’ of a good movie by clicking on the link called ‘Thoughts of an idiosyncratic mind’ given here under the heading ‘I frequently visit…’) and you will understand why. The hardest thing to find in today’s world is people who can think and feel, and books and movies call for thinking and feeling in a very serious and sustained fashion. I wish my blog could draw such rare people to me: that would create a community I could cherish. I keep getting the depressing feeling that we are drowning in an ocean of philistinism, a world full of people with money in their pockets, degrees galore under their belts, and nothing (other than technical manuals and the grossest of basic instincts – greed, sloth, vanity, envy, spite) in their heads!

One more thing. Do visit the blogs of a few of our celebrities – compare those of Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan, for instance. Just find out what ‘turns SRK on’. What does it say about his personal culture, and that of his family? And if these be our cultural leaders/icons, can there be any doubt that we as a nation are going to the dogs?

On the whole, the net reflects the world as it is in microcosm, except for the fact that is still populated too heavily by the young, uninformed (in all matters other than the purely technical – my daughter picks up the tricks of using every new gadget I buy much faster than I do, and I use her youth to advantage, but that is not a reason I respect her for! She’ll have to accomplish much bigger things first), irresponsible and fancy-free, and that people take more liberties there than they generally do in real life. Maybe things will get better with the passage of time, as net users age and mature and learn some good things (such as manners – vastly harder to pick up than software code!) the hard way.

Despite the disappointments and unpleasantries, my own experience hasn’t been too bad on the whole. I have got back in touch with a lot of good people – sometimes even been happily surprised that they remember, care and listen still – and I keep getting very nice comments and requests and suggestions for more, and thanks for putting me in touch with other interesting blogs/websites (it also amuses me to see that some people – nominally adult and supposedly employed, even in government! – go to great lengths and waste their precious time just to tell me they don’t like me). A lot of people who for one reason or another won’t write comments have assured me by email, over the phone or face to face that they eagerly keep track of whatever I am writing, and I mustn’t stop. Some (including current pupils of both sexes) have told me that reading all those posts – ‘What sort of person am I?’ in particular – has helped them to know me much better than they otherwise could have, and they are glad they took the trouble. So I have decided to carry on blogging for some more time. Someday, maybe, the blog is going to become an important adjunct to my tuitions. Meanwhile, here’s wishing more power to both admirers and detractors. I only wish the latter would write some sense. Even invective is welcome, if only it is informed, relevant and flavoured with wit (and of course, on my blog, I decide what is and what is not – that’s elementary, isn’t it? Some people are so intellectually-challenged that they have trouble understanding even that much!). Otherwise, as Professor Dumbledore told the house elves, you can call me a barmy old codger if you like: if that says anything at all, it’s only about you, and I’d much rather not know! Nature abhors a vacuum; so empty minds quite naturally fill up with nonsense and filth. Not something you ought to exhibit to the whole wide world.

[P.S.: My daughter very kindly took a few minutes out of her busy schedule to draw the Happy Birthday cartoon for the blog on top of this post]

One more thing, July 08: Do look up Stotra's comment after this blogpost!