Shame!

This front-page story in The Telegraph today draws attention to one of the (numerous) reasons why I can neither be proud of today’s India nor gush over our many recent ‘achievements’, nor believe that she is going to be respected as a global leader anytime soon.

It’s not so much that half the population of India still shits in the open (but do compare the figure with China’s, which has an equally vast population, and with which, we often claim, we are nearly at par by many indices of ‘progress’) but that so many of our ‘educated’ populace either don’t know about it or don’t care, leave alone feel ashamed about, and dare to claim that we are nevertheless ‘progressing’ tremendously, witness all kinds of yardsticks like the booming IT sector and the growing number of our dollar billionaires and our prowess in cricket and NRIs winning Nobel Prizes and the sheer number of dazzling and mindless flicks churned out by Bollywood year after year…

A land where so many cannot or don’t bother to use sanitary toilets, and so many others, far better off, do not consider it a matter deserving immediate, urgent, all-out remedial action, cannot be acknowledged to be civilized, or even remotely interested in ‘progress’ of any sensible sort. And by the way, I think that this ties in quite neatly with the fact that there are so many ‘educated’ people in this country who never read a book if they can help it. These things go together in the mind, though to see the connection requires far greater cerebration than most of us are capable of, our college-degrees notwithstanding.

Fool in the sea

Some people have been asking for personal reminiscences, especially of the out-of-the-way sort. Well, I have some pretty odd ones, but I don’t like much to write about them, because unembellished they don’t sound very exciting, and I hate embellishing or caricaturing real-life memories: I’d much rather write full-blooded fiction if and when I can. But here goes. If some reader’s fancy is tickled enough to ask for more, I might be encouraged.

This happened way back in 1986, when I was still at the university. I won’t go into irrelevant details, because I want to cut to the really interesting experience, so suffice it to say that we were a largeish party of students in their early twenties who were visiting Gopalpur-on-sea in Orissa. I have heard that things have gotten much more shabby and crowded since, but at the time it was a lonely sort of place, with hardly anything on the beach except the (rather forlorn-looking) lighthouse; there were certainly no cheek-by-jowl hotels and swarms of importunate hawkers selling foodstuff and knick-knacks of the sort that have been spoiling the beachfront scenery in Puri or Goa for a long time. We had checked into the Youth Hostel, and were putting up cheerfully with the rather spartan facilities available, because we were there only for a couple of days, and most of our time was spent revelling on the beach. Now this beach, unlike other places I have visited, was rather remarkable in that it sloped down very steeply, and unlike, say, in Chandipur or even Digha where you can walk a long distance before the water comes up to shoulder height, here you were out of your depth almost immediately you stepped into the water – which was a most disconcerting experience for landlubbers like us. And the sea was choppier than elsewhere, too: it didn’t seem wise to take risks with those rather scary, noisy, foamy swells as they came crashing on the beach. This was, by the way, just after the pujo-season in Bengal.

Anyway, for two successive days we spent most of the daytime on the beach, splashing about, yelling and shrieking and cursing and laughing wildly (there were several girls with us), swallowing large mouthfuls of sand and saltwater in equal proportions, sunbathing, singing raucously and tunelessly, gorging ourselves and getting slightly drunk late into the nights – enjoying ourselves foolishly, thoughtlessly and rather vapidly, as all youngsters are wont to do. The odd thing happened on the third morning. We were supposed to pack and drive off to the nearest railhead in a few hours: most of the girls had gone for a last-minute dekko around the little bazaar inland, most of the boys were still lazing in bed or tottering around groggily, complaining about the cloudiness and the slight chill in the air and the imminent prospect of departure homewards. In the event I found no companion to take a last dip in the sea with me, so I went alone.

Well, maybe I was still a bit sleepy, but I saw or sensed nothing out of the ordinary, and the sea looked unusually calm, and although the water seemed cool in comparison to the previous days (which I casually put down to the early hour), I had no premonitions at all as I waded in, and in fact, though I am most certainly not overly adventurous or brave, I didn’t think much about swimming out… and I kept swimming for quite some time, lazily, comfortably, without a care, until I began to feel slightly out of breath. Then I stopped, treading water, and turned to look back at the shore. And that is when I got the fright of my life.

It suddenly seemed to me that I had come out much too far, and for a panic-stricken moment the thought flashed across my mind that I’d never be able to swim back all that way; the landmarks on the beach looked tiny and hazy, and the sea seemed to be tugging me gently outwards. The bigger scare was the bizarre sight of an absolutely deserted beach: there was not a human soul as far as I could see, from the left horizon to the right, not a stray dog, not, when I looked up, a single bird wheeling in the sky. Why hadn’t I noticed such a huge and obvious oddity when I stepped into the water, for God’s sake? If I drowned, no one would notice, no one would know! But this wasn’t the worst of it. What really made my skin crawl was the out-of-this-world sensation of the sea in which I was bobbing gently up and down: there were no breakers, no foam, no noise at all, but the gigantic thing was heaving slowly up and down, as though it were a living thing breathing, a vast, silent, cruel leviathan which knew it had a tiny mite of a lonely human in its inexorable clutches, and was enjoying itself, biding its time…

I struck out desperately. I swam harder than I have swum before or since. In the process I probably did harm to my muscles and my nervous system, and actually lowered my chances of getting back to shore safely, for I could have exhausted myself and got the deadly cramps. In any case, I did get back to shore without much real difficulty, and already by the time I was heading back to the Youth Hostel I had begun to feel foolish about having given myself a fright for nothing. Oddly, though, they were looking worriedly for me by the time I got back. The sky was overcast, a wind was rising, it had started drizzling, and someone said something vague about a storm warning heard on a transistor radio. Well, the jeeps dropped us off at Berhampore station without incident, though it was raining now, not drizzling any more; but we even boarded the train and got going before all hell broke loose. The cyclone had struck with infernal fury. The thunderstorm was so violent that within half an hour the inside of our coach was dripping wet even with the windows tightly shut; the train crawled along at a snail’s pace for a couple of hours more before being forced to stop at a small wayside station, and we were many hours late in arriving at Howrah terminus – but we were the lucky ones, because the news told us that overhead power wires had been torn and railway tracks washed away in several places soon after we passed through, and the trains that came after us were delayed not by hours but by days. In Gopalpur, which had taken a direct hit, the banshee wind had driven thousands of tonnes of sand hundreds of yards beyond the usual limits of the beach, half burying buildings like the Youth Hostel we had stayed in, and enormous waves had pounded the shore with titanic power, hurling buses like toys off the roads a long way inland.

The point of this story is, I had found the sea behaving so oddly because that monster of a hurricane was coming up: it was the classic lull before the storm. Why had I been foolish enough to think of taking a bathe in the sea that morning, and why did I live to tell the tale?

Counterculture, postscript

Some serious readers might have been curious about why I was taking so long to write that third part I had promised, the part where I was going to talk about the kind of positive spin-offs that could arise out of mankind abjuring the high life in favour of what I – and a lot of other people – call the ‘good’ life. 

Well, the fact is, I have been thinking, and reading those last two blogposts again, and I have begun to have the feeling that it’s not much use talking in this vein for much longer, really. Those who have already been persuaded do not need more persuasion; those who have not will never really be persuaded – much greater men than I have tried and failed – because they are determined not to be, so more talk will be a serious waste of breath.

However, since I promised something, and I do not like to renege on promises, here are a few bits and pieces:

1. There are some hints in the last posts already. There will be an end to (or at least a great amelioration of) problems like poverty and environmental degradation and corruption and excessively-stressed lifestyles and war only when mankind decides once and for all that it is essential to abjure the high life. Without that major global change in tastes and outlook, all talk of solving such problems is futile, and all time spent on criticizing or lamenting over them is a waste. Once upon a time, not too long ago, a global cataclysm called the Second World War forced a lot of people in high places to agree on this: that is why the UNO was founded (tellingly, the UNESCO Charter says that ‘since war begins in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences against war must be constructed’). The world has since forgotten, and gone back to its old ways. I belong to those who worry that another titanic cataclysm might be necessary – and looming – to jerk mankind back to its senses. History certainly tends to repeat itself if we don’t learn lessons from it: the current worldwide recession brought back eerie echoes of the Great Depression of the 1930s (and the Great Depression played a very provocative role in causing the World War!)

2. All mankind’s problems do not have technical fixes. This is because, among other things, every new technology throws up a host of new problems even as it ‘solves’ some older ones. Those who depend on technology to see us through all our woes are fundamentally childish, no matter how clever they may be with words and numbers. We have to change our ways. I am writing this on the birthday of a man who never tired of insisting that the world has enough for man’s needs, but not enough for man’s greed. Again, uncannily enough, a lot of very clever people who never called themselves Gandhian, such as Albert Einstein and T. S. Eliot and Charlie Chaplin and G.K. Chesterton and Ernest Hemingway and Erich Fromm and J.K. Galbraith and E. F. Schumacher have agreed on this. That is why I keep saying that those who refuse to listen are living in denial… the biggest problems of this century do not belong to the realm of physics or mathematics or even biology any more.

3. The greatest economist of the 20^th century, John Maynard Keynes, who was an economist only by accident (as geniuses usually are), had dreamt wistfully in a little essay called Economic prospects for our grandchildren (that meant my father’s generation, actually!) that a time might come when ‘the economic problem would be solved’, meaning that thanks to the progress of skill, technology and organization, the world would soon be producing enough material goods to satisfy the basic needs of all human beings (assuming the world’s produce were fairly distributed), and then men could turn their attention to living the good life at last – the kind of life that the sanest and best of men have always wanted to live, the life lived in pursuit of all the higher things that only humans are capable of pursuing, knowledge for its own sake (rather than knowledge for power, or merely making a living), art, music, justice, good health both physical and mental, friendship and willing cooperation among all men and nations to achieve such ends that cannot be accomplished by men single-handedly, and cultivating the highest faculties of the mind, which are necessarily not just intellectual and aesthetic but ultimately spiritual. That is the kind of pursuit that only the bravest of men have been able to aspire to in the world so far, only those who were willing not only to live the hardest of lives but even to die ghastly and untimely deaths, such as being nailed to the cross. Sadly, brilliant as he was, Keynes did not anticipate two utterly horrible developments in the post-war world that have nearly put paid to his dream and set the clock back: the population explosion and the greed explosion. Either of them could be disastrous yet; combined, they are guaranteed to lead us to our doom. 

Am I hopeful that things will change for the better? Well, yes and no. I want to believe that they can; what I see all around me, barring little sparks of light in the engulfing dark, prevents me from being too optimistic. Right now, indeed, the tide of global culture is strong in the opposite direction – China and India, which between them account for forty percent of the world’s population, are hell-bent on achieving per-capita consumption levels equal to that of the US, convinced beyond all persuasion that that is the only meaning of progress, and praying that it can be achieved without blowing up the whole world! Men in the mass do not learn easily, even if that learning is good for them, and these days there are lots of clever and ‘educated’ men around to keep assuring them that whatever they are doing is all right, and even good and necessary (such as a particular – common – brand of economist justifying every ill of the consumerist culture by claiming that it is indispensable for the world economy). I keep telling my daughter it is a very nasty world she is growing up in, much nastier in many ways, in fact, than the world I was born into despite all the vaunted ‘progress’ made in these nearly five decades, so like everybody else, she’ll have to learn to cope. But she, too, cannot afford to lose hope, or stop trying to contribute her mite to making things ever so slightly better.

Counterculture

This ‘counterculture’ (see previous post) I have been talking about has deep and ancient roots in Indian scripture, folklore and the popular psyche. It goes at least as far back as some verses in the Vedas, and much advice about the king’s duties and behavioral desiderata given in the two great epics, as well as those who have been portrayed as models of virtue, such as Rama (and Bharat while he was officiating in Rama’s place), and Bhishma, and Govindamanikya of Tripura whom Tagore used as a model for Rajarshi (The Royal Sage). A great deal in the Arthashastra, that famous how-to manual written by one Kautilya for his pupil, India’s first (historically-speaking) emperor, deals with the rules to be followed and ideals to be aimed at by anyone who wishes to be respected and remembered as a ‘good’ king: and among other things, it enjoins that the king, however rich and powerful, conduct himself not only as a wise guardian of his people, but one who sets standards of probity and sanctity that they may emulate for the greater common good, even though that may require that he sternly restrain all his greedy material impulses, including gluttony, lust and avarice. And it cannot be denied that many rulers all through Indian history at least tried to live the non-greedy and generous life, from Chandragupta Maurya himself through Harsha and Rana Pratap and Shivaji to Gandhi and Subhas Bose and Lal Bahadur Shastri and Morarji Desai and Jayprakash Narain and a great many ICS officers, judges, doctors, teachers and other lesser lights too numerous to list here…

And it was not just about kings, either. I think India, more than any other country, has consistently idealized the non-greedy man, the saint, the ascetic, the scholar (not the technician, mind you, who is too commonly confused with a scholar these days), the artist in love with his art for art’s sake, the wandering or meditating wise man, and even the householder who lives a quiet, undemanding, self-controlled, socially-responsible and charitable life – the grihi sanyasi (which, I think Swami Vivekananda once said, is the hardest kind of sanyas to practice!) At least, it is India where not conquering generals and rich shreshthis or even kings who have been traditionally accorded the highest social esteem; rather, it was expected that such men who have won great worldly success be seen as prostrating themselves before those who have been recognized as ‘holy’ men. And whereas I am sure that the great majority of kings and tycoons did so only for the sake of form, to keep on the right side of overwhelming social opinion (the same reason why so many medieval European kings did not want to rub the Church of Rome the wrong way), there were many, from Ashoka, Menander (Milinda) and Akbar to Shivaji and the early Chogyals of Sikkim (and countless less-known minor princes and zamindars) who did so out of genuine conviction, esteem and awe of men whom they genuinely felt to be superior, men from whom they could learn lessons of lasting value. Maybe things have started changing rapidly of late, but even a hundred years ago (and that is only a blink in India’s history), Rudyard Kipling was quite right when he wrote that across the length and breadth of this land the humblest of folks considered feeding a wandering sadhu a matter of earning merit (punya); he was not sneered at or shooed away as an importunate beggar but treated with reverence as a better man. Also, I can say both from my reading as well as from direct personal experience that, while charlatans there have always been aplenty (as there are among scientifically-educated men today, such as doctors!), truly wise and holy men have never been lacking in this country either.

And if you ask why this ideal was so strongly held and insisted upon, well, I have found through very wide reading that it was because India discovered long ago (long before western socialists and environmentalists and psychologists started spreading the word around the world anew), once and for all, that high living is not good for you, as an individual and as a society. It ruins you in both body and mind, it makes decent social life impossible, it hurts the ecosphere that nurtures you too badly to be sustainable for long. Intelligent and well-informed people will realize that I am summarizing whole libraries here, but to give a few indicators of what I mean – look around yourself, and you will see millions of obese and brain-dead people glued to their potato chip packets, beer cans and video games or football on TV or hanging out at the shopping mall: that is a little of what I mean by saying it ruins you in body and mind. In a world of competitive high-living, where everyone is playing the game of consumerist one-upmanship all the time, everyone is bound to burn with jealousy and discontent and malice towards relatives, friends and neighbours; no society can exist in a healthy state under such conditions, because no one can wish anyone well, and widespread ‘corruption’ (which stems from millions of the undeserving, from rickshaw-pullers and police constables to MBAs and MLAs alike determined to access the high life by hook or by crook), frequent scandals, riots, insurgencies and wars will be inevitable: that is a little of what I mean by saying that it makes decent social life impossible. And the warnings that the environmentalists have been giving out for at least forty years now, about increasing pollution levels and rapidly-dwindling natural resources and ominous signs of man-made climate change are hints enough about what I mean by saying that it ruins the ecosphere and threatens the very continuance of human life on the planet. Those (from George W. Bush down to my fat neighbour who insists that she only has a thyroid problem and her pampered brat is not a lazy rascal but only ‘suffers’ from attention-deficit disorder) who choose to believe otherwise are living in denial: the best they can do is carry the world with them towards doom.

This is getting to be rather a long post again, given today’s typical attention spans (another sad sign of the consequences of ‘high’ living!). So far I have written mostly about the negative aspects of chasing the high life. In the next post I shall try to explain what I have understood about the positive aspects of abjuring the same.

Ministers flying cattle class

The sudden hullabaloo over the so-called austerity drive launched recently by the Congress (and immediately imitated by lesser parties, like the CPIM organizing a khadi fashion show) first made me merely laugh sardonically – déjà vu absurdity, what else? Then I fell to reflecting, and it occurred to me that it was not a matter to be laughed at and ignored; there was food for thought here.

It is well-known that our politicians by and large like to live the high life; indeed, a great many people get into politics (have always done, at least ever since the British started letting in a trickle of Indians into government, way back in the 1890s) because they have decided it is the only way they can get a taste of the high life. It is not merely about dining at five-star watering holes and flying first class and staying at vast and grand bungalows at public expense, it is equally about being surrounded by armed guards and riding about in trademark white cars with sirens hooting and making swarms of secretaries and peons scurry about and keeping visitors waiting for ages just to tell the world how important one is, every waking moment. That is very much a characteristic of our political culture.

The interesting thing is that there has also been what I may call a counterculture, for want of a better word, of demanding that our rulers be self-effacing, simple in lifestyle, endowed with a philosophical bent of mind, dedicated to the ideal of service to the common weal, sage enough to know that to be honest in this world requires conquest of greed and brave enough to try conquering greed, regardless of the world’s opinion. That voice has never been completely drowned, and it grows strident every now and then – as now. This requires some understanding.

First thing to be noted: much of this strident criticism of the opulent living of our netas reeks of hypocrisy and double standards. Those who level such criticism – and those who focus and express it publicly, to wit journalists – are by and large middle class people who are themselves horribly greedy for the high life, and indulge in every kind of unethical dealing happily for its sake as long as they feel sure they can get away with it: I have been closely associated with the mass media myself, I have seen it all from the inside. I know how cheaply a reporter’s malleability can be bought – sometimes for as little as a suit length or an expensive saree or a bottle of good whisky or at best free tickets to Dubai or Singapore for self and the missus – and I despise them heartily when they write about politicians’ peccadilos, or sermonize about the importance of honesty and probity in public life. They deserve every bit of contempt I have heard politicians pouring on them. Their censure stems solely from impotent greed: they don’t hate the high life, they only hate the politicians who seem to be enjoying more of it than they can ever hope to. The fewer such people we have, the better for all of us. A straightforward crook is far more respectable than a pious fraud.

It is also a fact that our society (and that means not only the middle class, which has always been rather small till very recently, but the vast unwashed masses) has always expected the rulers to distinguish themselves from the ruled by grandiose and unabashed displays of pomp, pelf and power. Our folklore is replete with stories recounting, half-grudgingly, half-admiringly, the incredibly expensive and often unspeakably cruel ceremony and magnificence with which the sultans and badshahs, the maharajas and nawabs surrounded themselves. Single weddings, single monuments cost the taxpayer so much that great hordes had to be slaughtered to persuade other hordes to pay through their noses, and famine stalked the land afterwards and took off vast numbers again. It was not only accepted as part of the normal order of things, but even celebrated; after all, what were great sovereigns for, if they did not provide the masses with the spectacle and grandeur that they so craved, and could not hope to have in their own lives? Regardless of their avowed respect for their austere mentor Gandhi, both Jawaharlal Nehru and Md. Ali Jinnah carried this tradition of high-living into the palaces and courts of the new nations that were born under their stewardship in 1947 (Nehru was not dubbed 'The Last Moghul' for nothing!) Given that history, our current breed of rulers are doing nothing new or overly shameless and reprehensible; they don’t really need to apologise for anything.

Besides, the rulers of today – I wonder why they don’t have the guts to do it! – can very well point to the way the burgeoning middle and upper classes (by various estimates between 70 and 300 million strong) are living it up under the new dispensation, worshipping money and shopping and conspicuous consumption as the only things worth living for, all questions of ethics in making money be damned. Every other maidservant gets some jewellery made for herself whenever she can afford it, and tries to put her kids into an English-medium school; higher up the income ladder, every middle-class housewife splurges on puja shopping as though there will be no tomorrow, though her wardrobe may be bursting with luxury clothes already; look at how everyone spends on lavish weddings these days, and how nobody objects to the way the pujas themselves are becoming more ostentatious and expensive with every passing year, and fashion-show extravaganzas gain all-round approval, while money for poverty-alleviation programs is always scarce. And in case they dare to raise the inane objection that ‘it is our money we are spending’, they need only to be reminded that no money is their money by divine right: it is only a certain kind of social arrangement, a certain system of laws, that allows them to make and keep and spend that money the way they wish – and in allowing them to do so, politicians play a very decisive part (as in periodically hiking the salaries of government and PSU employees through one Pay Commission recommendation or the other, or in deciding how stiff taxes on businessmen should be). So why should the politicians themselves be left out of the party? Why on earth should the people expect them to be upright and moral and frugal guardians of a nation that is neither upright nor moral nor frugal when it comes to enjoying the material goodies of life?

Well, that brings us back to the insistent voice of the counterculture I mentioned earlier, the voice that is often almost drowned but never goes away, and that keeps making a lot of us feel guilty about our chosen lifestyles again and again. About that, in the next post…

Poor little rich thug

(photo courtesy timescontent.com)

That is the photograph of Gaffar Mollah, a one-time rickshaw-puller who, thanks to a recent uproar in the mass media, has suddenly become one of the most recognizable faces in West Bengal, if not yet all over India. Goes to prove my contention that, given a little bit of luck and pluck, just about anybody can become a fifteen-minute celebrity these days.

He is the face of the dark underbelly of all that has been going on in the name of the development of the state of West Bengal over this last decade. As I said somewhere before, I once read ‘development studies’ avidly as a student of economics: the ground reality now makes me weep (but look, the happy cynic would say – isn’t this the apotheosis of the social-democratic dream: even a rickshaw-puller can aspire to live the five-star life in today’s India? What else is upward social mobility all about? You are just an elitist old fool for whom the grapes, unless you can get them yourself, are always sour…)

I should just like to say a few things here. First, don’t act holier than thou about ‘our sort of folks’ and pin all the blame on the Gaffar Mollahs and the political leaders who patronise them. They are simply on hire to do all the dirty work that the bhadralok don't want to soil their hands with; they are only members of the ‘executive committee’ (to borrow a Marxist phrase) of the moneyed elite who almost always manage to stay out of the undesirable kind of limelight – all bhadralok, doctors, engineers, actors, lawyers, NRIs, high-flying bureaucrats and businessmen of various hues – who create the demand for land that inevitably brings into being the landsharks and their godfathers. Where there is a demand, there will always be supply, sooner or later, by straight means or crooked. And when something is chronically scarce - such as land - the crooked means will always be resorted to, because the straight and narrow path is so difficult and unpalatable. So don’t call Gaffar Mollah or his political masters crooked while absolving the Raj Kishore Modi type or companies like Wipro and Infosys (see this news item) as ‘good’ businessmen, and the moneybags who want to luxuriate in the Vedic Village sort of vice-dens as ‘nice and innocent’ people; that is where you will go wrong. Nor do you need to shed too many tears for the farmers who are now up in arms (emboldened by the Trinamul landslide) against the land sharks – they are motivated by no nobler a sense of mission than to wring more money out of the buyers, now that all that hot money has driven prices up a hundredfold or more. All those farmers’ sons are now salivating over the imminent prospect of driving about in SUVs and lazing about in multiplexes and pubs, young and nubile and greedy females on their arms. Also remember: the Gaffar Mollah sort of fools deserve some pity. When the axe falls (as it does sometimes), chances are always ten to one that it is they, rather than their bhadralok patrons, who will be shot dead or locked away in prison for the crime of getting caught, while their real masters, the money-bags, can get away without getting singed, let alone put into serious trouble. So don’t envy Gaffar Mollah his few years of luxury.

Only, once and for all, get rid of the notion that a man deserves admiration or respect for the kind of car he drives, or the kind of hotel he stays in, or the amount of marble and granite in his house. Always try first to find out where the money came from. There will be no change for the better in India until every household begins to believe once more that one honest and hardworking man, though he makes only a humble living, is worth more than ten thousand rich and flashy crooks. And remember, too, that it is a really warped sense of values that can allow you to claim that the government doctor who gives protection money to his local neta so that he may not be posted away from the town where he has built up a cushy private practice (which gets the money to buy a bungalow in Vedic Village) is not a crook, but the neta who takes the money is!

Ah, music...

They taught the Lord’s Prayer when I was in kindergarten, and I was so taken by it that I said it before going to bed virtually every night all through my school days.

As part of my curriculum while doing the higher secondary course, I came to know a little about the padavali (devotional poetry, directed chiefly to Ram and Krishna) literature of medieval Bengal (Vidyapati, Chandidas and Govindadas, among others), written in the artificial language called brajabuli and – I believe alone in my entire batch – I became convinced that this was the most important and precious thing I had learnt in those two years (barring poetry and humour in French), not all the nuclear physics and organic chemistry and calculus and stuff they taught in ‘pure science’. That did not prevent me from qualifying for medical and engineering school, but it may have been a major factor behind my deciding to opt out of such career choices. Maybe I was already convinced that my life and time were worth somewhat more...

In the course of studying economics in college and university (during which time, while teaching a great many students and winning medals in examinations and writing a large variety and quantity for diverse magazines and newspapers) I did a great deal of high-level math (only to find out how little it helps to figure out how to help people live better) but also somehow found time to read an enormous amount of subjects as diverse as environmental science and politics and sociology and history and psychology and linguistics and education and law, besides the literature of seven or eight different languages, and philosophy spanning three continents and three thousand years. And I became more and more convinced that Man was lost, and of his own choosing. Even skepticism and atheism and hedonism were thousands of years old – there was nothing in what the Sartre and Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg and contemporary management-guru types have been saying these last few decades that have not been said, debated and either blindly swallowed by some or laughed at by some centuries ago, in many countries. I learnt that sooner or later I would really have to become my own man and make my own choices. As the poet said about Reality, ‘It beckons and it baffles/ philosophy – don’t know/ and through a riddle, at the end, sagacity must go…’

So I began, as the years passed by, to understand more and more about what Socrates meant by saying ‘I know nothing’, and the Buddha meant by saying you first have to empty your mind, and Newton said about a child collecting pebbles on the seashore, and Tagore by dhulaar ja dhon taha jete dao dhulite (leave back in the dust what belongs to the dust).

While I have left behind a lot of things as boys’ toys, one thing that has stayed with me, and indeed grown ever stronger, is a profound affection for devotional music of any sort. The first notes of a really great piece of music, no matter what its age or language or denominational belonging, often transport me to a quiet ecstasy, and coming back to this world of here and now is a pain like no other.

Here’s a small but eclectic choice of my favourites. Youtube is a recent technological wonder that I am truly thankful for! Here is Achyutam Keshavam and Payoji Maine (pardon the ghastly graphics), here is Khwaja mere Khwaja, Richard Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathustra played as the title theme for Stanley Kubrick’s classic science fiction movie 2001, Abide With me, and This World is not my home sung by Jim Reeves in American country style. Also, Indranil Sen's rendition of Tagore's Dnaariye achho tumi amaar gaaner opare (listen closely to the lyrics if you didn't know the song). 

‘Ah, music!’ said Professor Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, ‘a greater magic by far than what we do here’.

Those who are interested might want to read what I last wrote on this blog about religion here.

I am not trying to convince or convert anybody. Just enjoy. And if you do find you share my tastes, get back to me, I’d love to talk to you.

Use the 'search' box

If you scroll down along the right-hand sidebar, you will see a little white window below a line saying 'Search this blog'. You can type in all sorts of key words, such as 'orkut', or 'religion', or 'democracy', or 'Harry Potter' or 'Obama' or 'children' to see if and what I may have written earlier on those subjects. Alternatively, please click on any of the 'labels' to find out what they lead to. I am requesting this because I have a feeling that a lot of visitors, especially new arrivals, don't find out about earlier posts (there are now lots of them) simply because they don't know how to.

Use these facilities, read earlier posts, and keep commenting. Nothing in this blog has yet become dated, and I would like renewed discussion on any of them. I am the last person who would say only the latest matters...

Dirty Harry revisited

Film review: Gran Torino

Walt Kowalski brought back old and glad boyhood memories.

I haven’t watched Clint Eastwood since Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby, but boy, he can still do his stuff! Old and bent and hoarse and tired, at 78, he brought back a rush of delight as I remembered the days of Dirty Harry, The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, Where Eagles Dare, For a few dollars more, and even Every which way but loose.

Gran Torino (name of a Ford classic car, actually) was released worldwide in January this year. The disk was lying with me for a few months: I wish I had made time to watch it sooner.

You can read all the summaries and reviews on the Net, so I won’t bother telling the story here. Or even to write an exhaustive essay about why I liked the movie. This is just to say that I am happily amazed to see that all the old fire is still there, though he doesn’t do one whit to make himself look and sound a day younger than he is. He wheezes up stairs, spits blood in the washbasin, can’t pull heavy loads any more. But he stubbornly prefers living alone to living with grown children who don’t want him or in an old age home. He is nastily narrow-minded and racially prejudiced and foul-mouthed, yet a lot of people can’t help feeling there is a good man in there, struggling to come out… always has been. A decorated Korean-War veteran, he carries bitter memories of a horrid past. His guns are always close at hand. He dies heroically to save people he apparently cared so little for that he called them gooks to their faces. He doesn’t even fight the way he used to in his old movies: the heroics are of a far higher, understated order. And he goes, the old diehard atheist, with a ‘Hail Mary’ on his lips, leaving his house to the church because his wife would have liked it, and his beloved Gran Torino to the only friend he had found. As some people acknowledge, he was a man, to the last.

Mr. Amitabh Bachchan - with all due respect - still has to learn a great deal from geezers like Sean Connery and Eastwood. I remembered the Modesty Blaise story A few flowers for the colonel (wonder how many readers will even know what I am talking about!) And I remembered the line from The Old Man and the Sea: ‘A man can be destroyed but not defeated’. If Hemingway had been around, I think he would have begged Eastwood to play Santiago before he died.

Watch the movie.

Teaching!

In connection with discussing (I much prefer that word to ‘teaching’ in this context) Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn in class this evening, the conversation veered to concepts of beauty, its meaning for different people, the degrees of intensity with which different people admire and appreciate and remember things of beauty, how beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, how very many different things can seem beautiful to different people (equations, natural scenery, the human body, music, paintings) not only according as how people have different personalities and tastes, but also depending on how much attention they are willing to give, and how much patient reflection, and how in a distracted age where haste and hurry are not only obligatory but ‘in’ and ‘cool’, all kinds of appreciation of beauty might be in danger of vanishing, the ‘Love aajkal’ way, to be replaced by merely sensual and momentary titillation…

As is my wont, I tried to weave in as many diverse kinds of material as possible, examples, anecdotes, jokes, quotes, appeals to pupils’ own experiences, tips on what they could find out with a bit of googling (like a famous scientist agreeing that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’…). I was rewarded with some laughs, and some attentive listening, and some shining, focused eyes: but I could give my right hand, even after so many years of this work, to know what really goes on behind those eyes, how many of them enjoy, understand, think, remember, allow themselves to be subtly changed by what they have been led to think and feel and find out. How much has so many thousands of hours of talking mattered to people, beyond getting them some marks in examinations and me some money to live upon?

How hard it is to explain something without becoming dull, or crass, or highbrow, or just plain vague. And how sad that despite all one’s efforts, one can find out so little about how much one has succeeded!

Looking back on a nasty experience

If there is one important truth about me, it is that I have tried to be a true and good teacher to the best of my ability all my life. Nothing hurts such a person more than a sign that someone who pretended to be a devoted and special student for years and years finally proved to be an insensitive ingrate. I am referring to the blogpost I wrote on May 01, 2008, titled "Don't be a teacher with a heart". I do wish more people would chip in with comments on that post, telling me how they would feel if they had been cheated like that after they had done their best to be a teacher with a difference... and whether they can honestly condemn teachers who become scoundrels with not a care about whether their old boys and girls go to blazes after they have paid their fees in full, once they have had experiences as painful and galling as I have had.

Oh democracy!

The Washington Post apparently conducted a socio-psychological experiment in 2007 involving Joshua Bell, a great contemporary violinist. The sad results are provided and commented upon here. I thank my bright young pupil Harsha for bringing this to my notice.

Rarely do men and women of even the highest talent and skill and goodness get the respect and attention they deserve from the public unless they happen to be in the right time, place and ambience. That is because individuals among masses of people do not have minds and tastes and opinions of their own, they do just what everybody else is doing because that is ‘expected’ of them, and that applies as much to gossiping as to gaping at paintings of great masters in art galleries, pretending that they understand and admire…

In my very modest station in life, I have had enough opportunity to witness this phenomenon. When they come in droves to admit their children to my tuitions, they cringe and fawn as though they are begging an all-powerful emperor for favours (I am still embarrassed by the kind of language they use), and then they cannot recognize me at shops and hospitals and banks, and yet I know they would come in droves again if they heard I was being lynched, just to watch the fun.

Plato called democracy a pig’s philosophy, and despite still being committed to it myself (if only because I know too well how much more awful all other alternatives can be!), I can perfectly understand why he did so, and why the greatest democrats of all ages have rued its shortcomings, sometimes in good humour, sometimes bitterly, as when Churchill said he knew very well that though large crowds came to hear him speak, they would be far larger if they were going to see him hanged. And Einstein said he had no illusions about who would draw much larger crowds if he and a famous Hollywood star got off the same train. Democrats murdered Socrates, after all, being led by nothing nobler than mob hysterics, and Browning’s patriot found out only too late how foolish and deadly it was to trust public memory and adulation. It is a sad and pitiable world indeed, where the stupidest, crudest, most ignorant and aggressive of men and women are put at par, where questions of tastes and opinions are concerned – people who would prefer shopping malls and pubs and football brawls and wedding feasts any time over libraries and museums and research labs and philosophy – with the most learned, wise and decent of men. Since the vulgar folk form the majority almost everywhere, any society which pins all its faith in their tastes and opinions is always in danger of going the way of madness and decadence…the greatest democrats down the ages had hoped that education would make better men of the vulgar majority and so ensure continuous progress, but after several centuries of experimentation, there are now grave reasons for doubt and concern. Education as it is given and absorbed these days makes vulgar people richer and more arrogant and more demanding by the million, yes (the classic contemporary example being the Dursley family in the Harry Potter books… I can see so many like them all around me), but it certainly does not make men with more taste, decency, sensitivity, charity, imagination, courage … all the qualities that distinguish true elites from the riff-raff. 

I have mused in the same vein myself time and again (as for instance here and here) on this blog.

Just one little ray of light: the first link says that at least a lot of children stopped to watch the musician, in wonder or at least idle curiosity. Children are born intelligent and sensitive, they are made dull and crude and ‘busy’ and callous by their elders (see the quote from the great psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, at the bottom of this page). But, as Tagore said, the birth of every child is proof that God has not yet lost faith in Man…

Scary news and views

On some days the newspaper is bland and empty of content, and then there are days when it bombards you with strange news from around the world that is bound to put worry lines on any thinking man’s brow. Today was one such.

First, here is a startling revelation of how China’s much-vaunted ‘one-child policy’ (which had lots of loopholes and escape clauses I didn’t know about) designed to check explosive population growth is now backfiring on it, and they are so worried there will be too many old people around (too many ‘unproductive’ people to support) soon that they are thinking about relaxing the rule. They have even begun to feel that one-child families are not healthy – children grow up to be spoilt or lonely (we can see that all around us in middle-class urban India, too!) But then, China is three times the size of India and already very considerably better off, so their population pressure (except in big cities) can be nowhere as nightmarish as ours…

Then there is the update on the ongoing row over the arrest of a black professor at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., USA, because the arrest was carried out by a white police officer. I was nowhere around, nor do I have the remotest chance of getting the inside story (even from neighbours of the professor), but the more I read the news the more I grow suspicious that this is a case of knee-jerk reverse discrimination: the white western world is bending over backwards to ‘make amends’ for all the nasty things that their racially biased and cruel forefathers did to the blacks in days gone by, and clever and none-too-nice blacks are having a field day taking advantage of all that accumulated social guilt… I wish that President Obama had not got into the fray with an off-the-cuff comment before checking on the details. Apparently the head of the Cambridge police department has strongly backed up Sergeant Crowley, the officer in the dock, saying that he has a perfectly clean service record, and was acting strictly according to protocol, and the prof in question, Henry Gates, had forced his hand by raising an almighty ruckus which could have been easily avoided. If Gates had been white, or if the policeman had also been a black, it might not have been news at all. Just because blacks have long been sinned against does not make all living blacks good people, nor should it be that whenever a black is ‘troubled’ by a white for what the law calls wrongdoing all society should scream bloody murder blaming the white for being racist in a stupid and dangerous attempt to prove how ‘liberal and open-minded’ they are. That only encourages opportunists and trouble-makers of all hues, until things get out of control. The same sort of thing is happening with women and other ‘disadvantaged’ groups in our country, because the law is now biased in their favour, and do-gooders with too much heart and too little brains are falling over themselves to help them regardless of whether they are guilty or not.

And then there is this article about how Britain is being taken over by folks of alien races and strange mores. It made me shiver. I shall desist from making any comments on it, beyond saying that I am all for good and healthy cultural inclusiveness (that’s what Rammohun Roy, Tagore, Vivekananda and Gandhi stood for, after all – enrich yourself by borrowing the best of every culture you encounter), and I see nothing to object to if native-born white Britons wear the burqa for fun, or vote for chicken tikka masala as their most favourite dish, or choose to marry Sikhs or Muslims of their own free will… but the things that Mr. Datta Ray has hinted make my skin crawl. Read, and you will see why. From all that I know and have read of him, I have no reason to regard him as an irresponsible and uninformed scare-monger. Maybe I won’t want my daughter to settle down in a country like Britain thirty years from now, after all!

Goodbye, old man, RIP

I was much cheered to read (here) about how Henry Allingham of the UK passed away on July 18: at 113, he was then the world’s oldest man. He was one of the last of the veteran soldiers of World War I (lesson: if you are blessed with a long life, even a world war can’t kill you), he had a vivid memory well into his ripe old age, and he died peacefully in his sleep. Most comfortingly for the likes of sinners like me, he had once laughingly attributed his longevity to ‘whisky, cigarettes and wild, wild women’ (so much for the medics who keep trying to take all the fun out of your life by telling you how bad these ‘risk factors’ are, statistically speaking. Someday someone should tell these statistical experts just what they can do with their expertise. I studied quite a bit of statistics once, and the most important thing I learnt was its limitations, especially where human lives and minds are concerned…)

On a more sober note, how terrible it must be to live to 113! His wife (second? third?) must have passed away decades ago (the news item didn’t say). His children must be in their 80s, dotards themselves if not already dead. His grandchildren must be in their mid-50s. He seems to have seen one great-great-grandchild! How long has he worn that silly toothless grin (had he been handsome, with a magnetic personality, as a young man)? How long has he been out of touch with the world, and how hard and sad did it feel? Could he even move about without help and difficulty these last twenty years, or use his mind to do anything worthwhile? I feel only pity for people who live too long. The Bible prescribes three score years and ten as a full life, and I agree entirely. Unless you are very fit physically, and have a lot of interesting work to do, rich, and surrounded by a lot of friends and admirers (chances of which diminish rapidly as you grow old), living much beyond seventy is a drag like no other. For every old man and woman my most sympathetic prayer is that they may be taken soon, without pain, horror and humiliation… and if I do manage to survive beyond seventy, I’ll be praying the same night and day for myself.

I am reminded of the sad joke about the man who goes to consult his doctor about how he can live to be a hundred. ‘Don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t womanize, don’t keep late hours, don’t eat meat, don’t party, don’t worry about money, wake up at daybreak, do a lot of manual labour daily…’ chants the doctor. ‘Doctor,’ says the dismayed patient doubtfully, ‘if I follow all those rules, am I really going to live a hundred years?’ ‘Well, let me put it this way,’ says the doctor, ‘you may not actually live that long, but it sure will feel like it!’

Science says it has ‘blessed’ mankind with ever longer lifespans. I wonder. I also wonder that people these days are so afraid even to think about their own dying, even when most of their lives are behind them – they are scared witless of letting go of the only reality they have ever known, I suppose. I hope I can look death gladly in the eye when it’s my turn, looking forward to ‘quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over’. As Professor Dumbledore said, echoing the greatest sages of all lands and times, ‘To a well-ordered mind, death is only the next great adventure.’ If I do long for anything, it is that I might be twinkling out of a picture as D. does for Harry, long after I have gone, for a lot of people, who can still hear my voice inside their heads when they badly need it.

They live beyond the lights

My father told me very few stories, but the ones he did left permanent imprints on my mind. This one, for example, I heard when I was a mere child, and so I don’t recall the details, but the impression is indelible. I realized after I grew up that he was probably speaking from his own experience, trained as a geologist as he had been, and familiar with the atmosphere of mines and miners. I remember him telling me about how someone like us (an engineer, probably, and young, middle-class, and smug) was going home at night after a tour of the mines, when the car stopped along the dark road beside the forest, and he saw shadows of hollow-eyed, ghostly men and women and children lurking silently among the trees just beyond the reach of the headlamps – and one of his companions, his driver or colleague probably, told him that this is how the labourers in the mines (many of them tribals, and other very poor folk) lived, scrounging for the merest subsistence, treated like pack animals, no one taking moral or legal responsibility for them, not reckoned as human beings at all, living and dying in pain and misery as though they never mattered – though this country boasted of itself as a democratic nation wedded to ‘socialistic ideals’. They live permanently beyond the lights.

Well, my father was talking about conditions forty years or more ago. Nothing much seems to have changed, except for a vast increase in our numbers. I was reading (here) about how the workers at the construction sites of the grandiose Delhi Metro are treated in this day and age, and how villagers living close to Pune have to live and die amidst the mountains of filth that that city dumps upon them day in, day out, without a care (here).

And then I wonder that people like us boast so shrilly about how rapidly India is ‘advancing’, and react indignantly when some such wretched folks here and there cannot take it any more and break out in violent rebellion … sporadic of the street-riot kind, or organized and sustained, as with the many forms of guerilla insurgency currently rampaging all around this country.

P.S.: Interested readers might like to read this about what I wrote regarding my dreams for India on August 15, 2007.

How different!

I have always loved travelling, but fate has decided that I should get to travel comparatively little in the flesh – so all my life I have travelled in my mind, through books and movies and stories and pictures that my favourite old-boys bring me from around the world. I travel through their eyes and minds, and I don’t regret it: it’s so much safer, less taxing, less hectic, less of a strain on the pocket... all strong arguments for someone getting on in years, and no longer eager to exert himself as much as he was twenty years ago!

One young man, just back from a trip to New Zealand, brought me a story this evening that I must share. He put up for a couple of days with family friends there – Indians – and by way of explaining why he had elected to settle down there (not a very common destination for Indians), the man of the house told him the following story.

He (let’s call him Mr. X) was tanking up at a petrol pump one day, when he saw a smartly-dressed man, obviously a well-heeled businessman or executive, who had just driven up in a Mercedes, reading up a notice saying ‘Help wanted for a day’ for some sort of manual work. On finding out that the manager of the pump was willing to hire him, he took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves and set to work at once. It took him only a few hours. As Mr. X found out afterwards, he finished his work, collected his pay – a bunch of small notes which he didn’t so much as look at – shoved it all into a collection box for some sort of children’s charity, and drove away. By way of explanation for his ‘weird’ behaviour, he only said that he had driven into town to look up a friend, and learning that it would be a few hours before they could meet, and not having anything to do, and being unwilling to spend his time guzzling away in a bar (one of the few pastimes available), he had opted for this one-off job.

On hearing the story, Mr. X decided on the spot that this was the country where he wanted to live. He has been there for about five years now, and holds the status of a permanent resident (something like a Green Card holder in the US), and has no plans to move out.

If some of my readers feel that this sounds like a fairy tale, I shall only say that I am glad that such places exist on this planet (still), and I hope I may be able to die in one. Physically, too, NZ is a dream: hardly any people around, lots of unspoilt natural scenery, endlessly variable weather, all mod. cons, decent folks… to me, it sounds like heaven!

Another old boy, Tanmoy, has been stationed in Auckland, NZ, for more than a year now, and he has written variously and often on his blog (link provided along the right sidebar). I hope he enjoys this story.

I shall be delighted to hear more such interesting and unusual stories from other ex-students scattered around the globe. The really good ones will be narrated here…

First video!

My daughter has just made her first full project with Windows Movie Maker, all by herself - no one showed her how to - and using stuff she had on the computer as well as things she had downloaded from the Net. The subject, as you will see, couldn't be closer to my heart. Enjoy!

Food for thought

On consumerism and its attendant evils, see this article.

On how you can enjoy more while spending less, see this.

And on how one of my all-time favourite authors, Charles Dickens, has suddenly acquired a new relevance and appeal in this day and age, read this.

Those who like to think about serious issues and find food for thought in this blog will, I am sure, enjoy all this reading. And be able to see the connections...

Looking back again...

My blog’s third birthday is coming up. As any avid reader will have noticed, I have been writing steadily if not too much, and keeping that up over three years without a break in the midst of a seven-days-a-week work schedule and trying to run a family well is not an easy thing to do, especially if you take writing seriously. Now it is once again time to take stock.

What am I getting out of it? To start with, this is not a money-making venture; nor is it designed to get some publicity – I don’t need it either for my pocket or for my ego, and in any case hardly any blog-writer earns much publicity unless he or she is famous in the real world already. My only purpose was to share my thoughts, experiences, feelings and opinions on a variety of subjects with like-minded people, mainly old boys and girls who have liked me all along, and their like-minded friends: a way of keeping in touch more meaningfully than you can do on so-called social networking sites on the Net. And what have I got so far?

Well, on the plus side, writing has always been a form of stress-busting meditation for me, a far better way of enjoying whatever leisure time I have than lots of things I see people doing, so in that regard my blog helps me to pursue my hobby happily. I have always been a diary writer (well, at least since I was seven), and now I write parts of my diary on the internet, that’s all. In addition, my blog has put me back in touch with quite a few old friends and ex-students whom I thought I had lost for good. It has won me a few genuine admirers too, both from those who already knew me (but apparently not well enough) and some complete strangers, whose occasional messages of appreciation, congratulation or thanks truly warm my heart. The best of these people keep sending me ideas about what they want me to write about next, and I am thankful to them. It is always a good feeling, too, to know that someone somewhere has been informed, encouraged or comforted by something that I had written.

On the flip side, this experience has taught me to grow a thick skin. The cyberworld, just like the real world, is filled with a lot of unpleasant people: those who have nothing to say, and lots of time to say it – those who are so much at a loose end and hate you so much that they would post abuse anonymously again and again, or assume silly pseudonyms and create temporary blogger profiles only for the strange pleasure of writing abuse, even though they know their comments will hardly ever be read (because I have said here before that I routinely delete comments from anonymous sources and from people with pseudonyms without opening them), leave alone being published. I have learnt to shrug at this phenomenon and carry on as if I haven’t noticed. After all, in this country you have to turn a blind eye to so many things day in, day out – like people peeing by the roadside! I have also learnt (or rather, re-learnt) that it is very hard to find out what people are really like until you criticize them; anybody sounds nice as long as you are praising him or her to high heavens…

But these are not the people who really irritate me. Those who do are the ones who just send in one-liners, like ‘Hi! Nice post…’ or ‘I don’t agree with you.’ Just that, and nothing else. What I would love is genuine debate, something I have again and again mentioned as ‘feast of reason and flow of soul’. A good debate is like a good game; if you play it in the right spirit, it leaves you with a good sweat, and feeling reinvigorated, no matter whether you have won or lost, and you shake hands with your opponent before parting, without hard feelings on either side. And maybe you are even grateful for having been taught something of value in the course of the interaction. Alas, rare is the comment-writer who either understands a debate in that spirit or is keen and able to participate in one. That is one thing I have decided to accept, instead of lamenting all the time, but it’s hard.

So I guess I shall keep on writing, but, as some well-meaning folks have repeatedly told me, I shall write more for my own sake than for anyone else. If some reader doesn’t like it, I humbly ask him or her to stay away; if someone does like something and tells me about it, I shall be grateful as ever.

A warning and apology

It seems that someone hacked my gmail password, because some people have told me in the last few days they have received emails which I couldn't possibly have written. I am sorry if anyone has been given offence of any kind by the 'ghost' writer. I have since changed my password, but I am keeping my fingers crossed: it seems there's no real security on the Net, after all! If someone close to me gets some strange mail supposedly from me, please let me know: in person or over the phone.

You don't have to post any comments on this. This was for your information only.

Gathering dark...

It would be putting it mildly to say that I was horrified to read this news item in today’s newspaper. It would be better to say that I still keep reading the papers daily to see, in Max Weber’s words, ‘how much more of it I can take’.

A young woman in New Delhi conspired with her clandestine boyfriend to kill her mother in a barbaric fashion. This woman is a schoolteacher, and belongs to a 'normal' middle-class family.

Reflection no. 1: It would be worth pondering over what kind of a teacher she must be.

Reflection no. 2: One psychiatrist, who hasn’t examined her, has dubbed her just a criminal, but the police claim that she had been warped and goaded beyond endurance by a mother who had nagged her too badly for too long. Knowing how badly how many kids are nagged and bullied by their mothers all through their childhood and adolescence, I wonder what is the breaking point for a human being… when do all normal taboos and inhibitions break down? I do, do hope that a lot of mothers would read, or somehow get to know about this incident, and reflect on whether they need to mend their ways a bit.

Reflection no. 3: How many people will read this news item and pass over, glibly assuring themselves – ‘Oh, this was just an unfortunate aberration; we are different, and nice and good people, we’d never do things like that’? How few would like to find out (say, by talking to journalists, policemen and doctors/psychiatrists, as I found out in my youth) how frighteningly common such atrocities are all around us? It’s just like every rash driver thinking ‘an accident will never happen to me’, denying the stark reality that he knows a lot of people who have been killed or crippled in accidents, and hears about more such stories all the time!

Reflection no. 4: If this is what people do to their own families, why should anyone be shocked when they do ghastly things as teachers, or politicians, or whatever? After all, they are the same people still, aren’t they?

Reflection no. 5: Would this problem be neatly and fully 'solved' by hanging the murderer and her boyfriend?

Rain, and a new blog

The met. office has confirmed that the monsoon winds have hit the Kerala coast already, and right now, at 1610 hours, the sky overhead is dark with billow upon billow of the best sort of clouds, and it has been raining off and on since morning. I have no idea whether this is the real thing or a pre-monsoon shower or whatever, nor do I care – it is a treat to all the senses, and I am luxuriating. I love a rainy sky accompanied by lightning and deep rumbling thunder more than almost anything else, and I had almost started forgetting what it looked and sounded like, and now I can draw in lungfuls of the smell of warm, damp earth even as the squall drives the drizzle into my face and the freshly-bathed trees sway in the wind and the rain patters on a tin roof, and I am happy again after a long time. How truly has it been said that we often quite unnecessarily look for complicated philosophical explanations for feeling happy and sad, when the fact is that all we need is for nature to smile on us now and then. And how unfortunate are all those people around the world, however rich, who live in such artificial or constrained circumstances that they neither notice nor can thrill to the changing rhythms of the seasons!... in any case, after living through one of the most horrid summers in recent memory, I am looking forward to enjoying a long rainy season.

(2115 hours): A little news item titled ‘World’s oldest blogger dies at 97’ caught my eye in yesterday’s newspaper. I clicked here, and was charmed. Take a look at it yourself. It’s mostly written in Spanish, but there are snippets here and there in English, too, and in any case it was the idea that fascinated me: that a woman, thanks to a gift from her grandson, could find a very invigorating new way to live life richly at age 95, that her thinking aloud on life and living could draw so many visitors that she became an overnight celebrity meriting a personal visit from her country’s prime minister, that she was blogging away almost right up to her dying day… I am a keen blogger myself, and I envy her, and pray that her soul may rest in peace (or that she might be happily blogging away in some other dimension beyond space and time!). It would be a good thing indeed if I could bring the world into my room the same way in the years left to me. I wish that Indians had been keener readers and writers. If they had taken to the internet with the same alacrity that they have taken to the mobile phone, this blog would have been far better known, read and commented upon already. It is a pity that in such a gigantic country where so many people supposedly put a very high premium on ‘education’, so few people consider reading a great way to spend their time!

General elections

The people have spoken. Vox populi, vox dei!

I only wish to put on record that I am delighted with the results, not because I have ever been a diehard Congress supporter, not because I share the euphoria over the likelihood of Rahul Gandhi taking over soon as prime minister and things like that, but because:

1. It was high time that India’s future stopped being held at ransom by a motley group of half-baked, johnny-come-lately regional parties which have no vision, no significantly discernible goals beyond the gargantuan selfish ambitions of their very crude and petty leaders, no long-term plans, no clear understanding, even, of the needs and troubles facing India as a nation (rather than a congeries of sub-national identities…), and
2. It was more than essential and urgent that the rotten, sick, too-big-for-its-boots Left Front was cut down to size at the national level, and got a wake-up call at the state level in West Bengal. If they still don’t press the panic button, if they still don’t realise that the bell is tolling for them, if they still don’t eat humble pie, get back to square one and start retrospecting over, and correcting, everything that has gone badly wrong with their brand of politicking over the last three decades, they will richly deserve the drubbing and disaster that is waiting for them in the 2011 state Assembly elections (please see what I wrote here, especially the open letter I wrote to The Telegraph congratulating as well as warning the Buddhadev Bhattacharjee government after they won the state elections last time round).

I wish Mamata Banerjee good luck – she has earned it – and pray that statesmanlike good sense will prevail on her. I shall now sit back to watch what kind of alliance is cobbled together by Madam Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh-ji to form the new government at the centre, and what sort of programme it chalks out for itself. Accordingly, I may write postscripts to this blogpost every now and then. Watch this space. And questions and arguments are welcome, of course…

Monkeys in Armani suits

Andrew Sheng is a scholar and high-level government official who has succinctly and hilariously explained how the recent global economic meltdown came about – as I wrote in this blog a while ago, it was basically brought about by all-round greed of the ‘monkey’ variety (read Sheng’s article). He has saved me a lot of trouble. For those of my readers who cannot wade through ‘sophisticated’ economic jargon to get to the heart of the matter, let me leave the assurance that it all happened exactly as Sheng has described: truth has always been stranger than fiction (or rather, great writers pick up cues from all the bizarre truths they see around them). Only, he might have explained the ‘herd instinct’ (which is, believe it or not, very strong among the rich and ‘educated’ – meaning MBAwallahs, of course, not the really wise) and ‘domino effect’ in a little more detail, though I guess that would have made the article drearily long, and robbed it of much flavour. And he might have quoted Abraham Lincoln, too: ‘You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time’. Alas, hotshot MBAs thought they could! That is why that line at the end of Sheng’s article is priceless – a monkey in an Armani suit is still a monkey (I could sue him for stealing my line… this is something I have said a thousand times in my classes!). Such monkeys impress only other monkeys like themselves. The problem with the world today is that there are too many greedy monkeys around, all flaunting MBAs and the latest boys’ toys, and they manage to rise very high up the corporate ladder before people begin to find out how harmful such monkeys are… as the wag said, the only thing we learn from history is that we never learn anything from history (it is not just a pretty coincidence that as a rule those who aim to be MBAs already find history 'uncool' by early teenage)!

P.S., May 15: For those who still imagine MBAs know and do something worthwhile, here is an eye-opening link. Of course, those who don't want to have their eyes opened...! many thanks to Navin Rustagi for this link.

The other blog

While it is gratifying to see that the visit count and number of followers of this blog keep going up steadily, I really do think that my other blog (click here) deserves more visits, comments and followers!