Sachin, too!

I read in the newspaper a few days ago that Sachin Tendulkar’s autobiography is about to be released. Only ten copies will be sold to start with, at a price of $75,000 each (that’s a little shy of forty lakh rupees).

Wait, there’s more: the USP of the book will be, not ho-hum stuff like ‘hitherto unpublished photographs’ of S and his family, but an actual drop of his blood, mixed into the paper of the signature page in the form of a resin.

The publishers, M/s Kraken Media based in London, have explained this ‘innovative’ effort as the best way they could think of to give the ‘personal touch’ to those of S’s followers who regard him as ‘god’ (and, it goes without saying, are both rich and damn-fool enough to part with that kind money for a book of this sort. Bill Gates paid a vastly bigger fortune for a book, yes, but that was the original handwritten diary of Leonardo da Vinci, for heaven’s sake!)

Think.

Even if, as claimed, the entire proceeds of the sale really go to charity, what kind of a world do we live in that this is how funds have got to be raised from stinking-rich oafs for good causes?

As for me, I was thinking of countless men and women who have lived wonderful lives and have written wonderful autobiographies, and would have died before they stooped to such utterly pathetic gimmicks in the hope of being seen a little more in the newspapers or making a little more money. Even after getting the kind of money and publicity that Sachin has got already...

Where would you live?

If you had the money to indulge your every whim, where in India would you like to build a house with the purpose of living in it most of the time?

I like to think of such things in my leisure time: it’s one way of making fantasies come true, at least in the mind.

As I have said before, I hate big cities: so I start by ruling them all out. Rural India, on the other hand, is (still, alas) far too backward to think of settling down permanently there, no matter which state you have in mind. Quick weekend getaways, maybe, living there, no.

So – for me, at least – it quickly boils down to some small town or the other. But there are thousands, and it’s hard to pick from them. There are problems with most towns I know, too: in one place there are daily power cuts that last forever, in another there is an acute water shortage in the summer months. Some are too cold, and some too hot. Some are plagued by militant insurgency: not my cup of tea. Some are getting too noisy and polluted for comfort: my Durgapur is definitely one of them, besides lacking in the most basic amenities that a man of taste looks for, such as parks and museums and libraries and art galleries and book shops and health clubs and green walks and a lot of nice places to go visiting within a few hours’ driving distance (as you could, for instance, if you lived in Shimla). And I should want neighbours who are either friendly or of the harmless, non-interfering sort.

Mussoorie, Chandigarh, Ranikhet, Udaipur, Shillong, Bhopal, Bhubaneshwar, Vishakhapatnam … or some place deep down south, which I haven’t explored?

Or have things come to such a pass that no town in India is anything to write home about any more? 

Viva Johnny Depp!

I used to say that whatever Tom Hanks did in a movie would make me want to see it at once: he just couldn't help being deeply, compellingly watchable. Of late, after having seen Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Finding Neverland, Chocolat, Pirates of the Caribbean, and very recently Alice in Wonderland, I can say that Johnny Depp has definitely joined my very exclusive list of must-see-whatever-he-does actors. When it comes to portraying offbeat, eccentric, loveable-yet-sad and lonely characters, there's really nobody else around who can hold a candle to this man. I wish him a long, happy and highly productive life for very selfish reasons...

I was reading up about him on wikipedia. Maybe the facts that he is exactly my age, and a musician besides, and that I love harmless but brilliant cranks all have something to do with my admiration for him. I was also wondering what a director like Satyajit Ray might have done with him (if he had the money) and why Steven Spielberg (who I don't think is short of money) hasn't cast him yet. 

How wonderful it would be to live long enough to boast that one of my old boys has become a director or actor like these people!

O tempora! o mores!

The mania for becoming doctors and engineers has been giving the expression ‘at all costs’ a new meaning of late.

There are factory-scale cram shops in different parts of India (Kota, Delhi, Hyderabad prominently among them) which annually send around touts to small towns like mine to hunt for potential ‘students’. It is part of their strategy to find out the names and addresses of well-known schools and tutors in the town, and approach them with offers of ‘commissions’ in return for persuading their current pupils to join those tutorials to be ‘coached’ for various engineering- and medical-entrance examinations. I have often been visited by such touts myself, that’s how I know. I also happen to know that they have many takers…

A few years ago an old boy, who was then studying in a certain private engineering college down south (let us mention no names, for they are all alike), came to see me, and said he was looking for some ways to make money, his dad finding it difficult to support him on a government salary. At first I was enthusiastic, for I have been fending for myself from a very early age, and encourage young people to sit lightly on their parents’ shoulders once they are past school. But then he turned me off by saying that he had become one of those touts himself, as the college had promised to give him hefty concessions on his own fees if he could rustle up a certain number of freshmen in his turn, and he offered me so many thousand per candidate if I could help him in this ‘job’. I shooed him away without much ado, telling him that in my book crooked wheeling-dealing was not the same as doing honest business. He couldn’t make out why I was so furious. I wonder what he is doing now.

I was reminded of this incident by this news item in today’s newspaper, which says that now things have come to such a pass that one such student-cum-‘recruiter’ has been killed by members of a rival gang, who had earlier kidnapped one of his newly-recruited milch cows!

And still the parents of my current pupils will not listen when I keep telling them that they need not utterly ruin their children’s bodies and minds all through teenage by pressurizing them to ‘study hard’ (which has come to mean merely turning them into dull, disenchanted and dishonest robots who can only cram and then cheat in examinations, excusing themselves with the plea that they are all doing it), seeing that – so long as they can pay – their wards cannot be poor enough students that they cannot become engineers these days! 

My daughter's new blog

I am happier than I can say to announce that I have very recently succeeded in persuading my daughter, who is now thirteen and a half, to start up a blog of her own. It is linked on my blogroll (The Bootle Bum Trinket).

At just about her age, something I wrote first saw the light of day in a Bangla literary little magazine called Chetanik. It was a little essay called Shohorer Surjasto (Sunset in the City). My father had sent it to the editor, a friend of his, for publication in case he liked it. The erudite elderly gentleman wrote back very courteously, saying it was quite obvious that it was my father who had actually written it (‘it is not just the grasp of language but the maturity born of long and well-digested experience evident in this essay that makes it highly unlikely that a 13-year old could write it’, he wrote – I am translating verbatim, with his letter in front of me). My father shot back a letter, insisting that it was my work, and requesting him to come over and look into my school essays to put his doubts at rest, and the man actually sent someone – his nephew it was, I think – to do just that! Afterwards he not only published my essay but appended the entire correspondence with my dad, and added a most handsome apology and a blessing for me.

My parents rarely talked about what they would like me to do as a career, but I remember my mother saying nothing would please her more than to see me acquire a writer’s reputation. It took me many years after that to find out – the very hard way – that no one could make a living out of writing alone in India, and even to become a well established writer (albeit still a poor man, as most of our writers are, unless they are doing something lucrative on the side), one has to wear out one’s shoes and grovel before frequently incompetent editors with swollen egos and grease palms and cultivate ‘contacts’ and see one’s work being hijacked by others and other grossly demeaning stuff like that… happily, I lost the rather childish thrill that comes from seeing my name in print after getting several hundred bylines in a national daily when I was still a boy. So I decided that I would never take up writing for a living, but do it for personal pleasure alone. And I have stuck to that resolution all along. God has been kind in ensuring that I found other ways to make a living, while keeping the flame alive.

Now the wheel has turned full circle. My daughter started picking up language skills very early on, and began to experiment with writing when she was a mere child. Today, she is poised on the threshold of what I hope would be a long and happy adventure. And, thanks to modern-day tools like the internet and blogger, she never has to see an editor in her life to see her work being published and read by hundreds or even thousands of people around the globe. My blessings go with her – that she may be luckier than I was, but unfortunately, it is already evident (from her experience in school) that the family curse goes with her too: whenever she writes something good (she has had little things published in newspapers already), not only her friends and their parents but her teachers say ‘Oh, her father writes for her!’ She will have to cope with that as best as she can.

I hope some of my most ardent readers will visit her blog here and give her a few words of encouragement, constructive criticism, and tips on what to write about next. Just remember, though, what you were like at her age!

Sahibs to rescue our cinema too?

There was a news item in today’s edition of The Telegraph (top of p.4 – I couldn’t find the link on the net: if someone discovers it by chance, please send it to me) titled ‘Hey, hero, Brando’s school is coming to Bollywood’. The gist of the story was this: mainstream Hindi cinema has always been high on melodrama, burlesque, slapstick and suchlike stuff (a package they call ‘nautanki’ in the vernacular) and low on acting; so Bollywood stars have specialized and taken pride in being good at dancing, mock-fighting, hyperemoting, in-your-face tomfoolery, lip-synching with background music and so forth, and have never bothered much about acting proper. But now those days may be over: in response to a supposed change (‘maturation’?) in audience tastes, they will soon have to learn what real acting means and how it is done. To help them along, the Stella Adler Studio of Acting (founded in New York, 1949) is setting up shop in Mumbai soon. This famous school supposedly brought about a sea change in Hollywood following the lead given by the ‘immersive, psychological acting technique’ based on the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky, actor and sometime director of the Moscow Arts School. The school claims to have Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Susan Sarandon and Martin Sheen, besides other stellar Hollywood actors, among its alumni.

Now that might be welcome news to some, but I am not too sure. First, I don’t know whether the above names are the only greats among Hollywood actors, and whether great Hollywood actors, generally speaking, really learnt their skills from European pioneers. Secondly, if mainstream Bollywood cinema rarely rises above pedestrian levels, isn’t it because our producers, directors and actors have to make a living like everybody else, so they have to keep dishing out the sort of stuff the great majority (which, unfortunately,  includes not just the vast unwashed masses but even the children and wives of the rich and supposedly educated public, with few exceptions) wants? If their tastes require that movies never be more subtle and aesthetically demanding than Hum Aapke Hai Kaun or Dhoom in order to succeed at the box office, is it the fault of those who make cinema in this country, and can it be cured by a foreign school of acting?

Besides, is it true that our actors cannot act when they want to, when they are given a chance to? I can  think offhand of dozens of fairly good-to-excellent movies made even within the suffocating limitations of mainstream Bollywood cinema within just the last decade or so: Dor, Aamir, Black Friday, A Wednesday, Cheeni Kum, Black, Swades, Parzania, Rocket Singh, Lage Raho Munnabhai, Taarey Zameen Par, Guru, Paa, Johnny Gaddar, Omkara, Yuva, Dev D, Kaminey, Ishquiya… and if you bothered to look at regional cinema in at least half a dozen languages, you would find a much bigger pool of proven talent: talent which was home-grown, talent which, if it could not do as well as it might have, was only restricted by what the audience was prepared to take, in terms of both story-line and acting methods (Raj Kapoor said long ago that the commercial failure of Mera Naam Joker had taught him a bitter lesson he'd never forgotten, much more recently Sanjay Leela Bhansali said, in expiation of Devdas, that he could do much better films than Black, but the audience wouldn’t pay for them, Ayesha Takia has gone on record saying that if she only acted in movies like Dor, she would starve, Nagesh Kukunoor has trouble getting new projects funded, Shah Rukh Khan has wasted a life in singleminded pursuit of pelf, and Aamir Khan had to stoop to juvenile clowning and teenage mooning to make a hit of as important a movie as 3 Idiots). How is a ‘phoren’ school of acting likely to make a difference in a country where actors as talented as Om Puri and Utpal Dutt have been reduced to what is basically rustic jatra  to pay their bills?

I’d like comments from serious cinema buffs here: not those who presume to write 'reviews' by hamhandedly copy-pasting stuff they get from IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, wikipedia and other such sites on the net…

Auld lang syne

college days (seems like yesterday)

there was a little sister...

holding a new born

when we were very young...

one year old

back to the past, in reverse order

A moment's halt, a momentary taste

Of Being, from the well amid the waste

And lo! - the phantom caravan has reach'd

The Nothing it set out from: Oh, make haste!

Four years old!

Come July 8^th, this blog is going to be four years old; and this is the 180^th post. I hardly wrote much in 2006, the first year: the tempo picked up only in late 2007, but I am happy to say that I have maintained it ever since, and not by constantly repeating myself either: I have written about everything from aeroplanes to religion to economics to literature and movies, environmental issues and politics and education and ethical concerns and little travelogues and personal reminiscences and what have you.

I am glad that the number of people enrolling as ‘followers’ has begun to rise fast since mid-2009. At this rate, I might have a thousand of them well before I die! A big thank you to all who have joined, and boo to all those who ‘follow privately’, and those who have vanished after I ticked them off in no uncertain manner.

I shall entreat first-time visitors not to make up their minds about me before they have read at least fifty posts, including the seven labelled ‘earliest posts’ (see right sidebar) and the essay titled What sort of person am I, the link to which is a permanent fixture on top of this page.

To comment-writers – except those who are old friends already, and therefore always welcome to say whatever they like – I shall only say ‘Please do write, but not unless you have something substantial and relevant to say, or something to draw my attention to, or something to ask’. I have this urge to reply to everybody (except the very banal and vulgar, of course), because I regard it as essential courtesy, but I get tired of answering people who really have nothing to say, only a desire (often subconscious, maybe) to quarrel based on a) a dislike they have taken to me, b) strong opinions backed by poor knowledge and little reason and c) an urge to get noticed! To all such, I must repeat: just because you have written a comment does not mean that it is going to be published or answered. I am perfectly within my rights there, I should think.

Another request: please do follow the basic universal rules of courtesy. An address is absolutely necessary (Dear Sir/Dear Mr. Chatterjee), and that according to my admittedly old-fashioned notions of civility, which means no one addresses me as Suvro or Suvroda unless s/he is a senior, a close friend, or a favourite ex-student. There are many things about being old-fashioned that I like much more than I want to make new ‘friends’ or keep old ones. If that last sentence brands me as elitist and misanthropic, I don’t mind. I have been around long enough to have been able to make up my mind on a subject like that. And I bring to the internet the same self that I am in the brick and mortar world.

It tickles me to note that whenever I write things that are in the nature of unpleasant truths – as in the immediately previous post, or the one I wrote about fatherhood a short while ago – the flow of comments suddenly dries up. Nothing makes me feel more vindicated!

An apology is in order next – to all those who have very kindly requested me to write on this or that subject they were interested in, and I couldn’t oblige, either because I didn’t consider myself competent to comment (I hate know-alls, and am the first to admit that I am not one), or simply because I forgot! An old man’s failing, and I am getting old, no matter how indignant that makes some people who love me…

That’s all for now. Maybe I shall add a few lines here if something else occurs to me. You might want to read what I wrote exactly a year ago: that post is titled 'Looking back again'. Do say ‘Happy birthday’ to my blog, unless you are feeling particularly uncharitable. You don't have to wait till July 8!

A guilty conscience, helpless...

All kinds of people without whom we couldn't do stay invisible all around us. Not just ordinary people like us, but even very wise and worldly-wise people, as well as political personages across the entire spectrum of ideologies from left to right, seem to be unaware or unconcerned about their existence and their plight, or stop at paying lip-service to their interests, or pass over by promising them their dues when the messianic time dawns - which, of course, never happens! I am thinking of traffic policemen (every time I go out in this blazing heat, and with the airconditioner in the car going full speed), and about maidservants who work seven days a week for a pittance, and vendors who hawk fresh vegetables and fish from door to door, and railway gangmen and men who work in underground mines and beside open furnaces, and waiters at cheap roadside eateries, and the men they call 'khalasis' who travel with truck drivers across the country... and I can only count my blessings, and feel slightly ashamed, though I have never been able to figure out exactly why. You could certainly think of many more. Together these people number in the hundreds of million, and nobody does a thing to better their condition, and little has improved in their lives under either so-called communist dispensations or during times of rapid capitalist expansion. 

I suddenly remembered a book titled The Long March of Everyman (I have forgotten the name of the author), a British publication of the 1960s, I think, which recounted in glowing terms how conditions have improved vastly for the proverbial 'common man' - at least in the most 'developed' western countries - over the last 200 years. Well, maybe so, maybe not: given the kind of socio-economic data about the plight of the underprivileged in most advanced western economies right now that I have with me, I am no longer too sure. And when I turn my eyes to look at India, it makes me weep. Particularly because my own social class is so drunk on the ongoing 'success story' of this country...

I have never believed in revolutions (in any case, these days the word is most commonly applied to new lines of cosmetics). But it would make me happy if our government could soon find the political and financial wherewithal to make the Right to a minimum livelihood effective for all (while simultaneously ensuring strict birth control, of course), and pass the bill in parliament that mandates decent pay and perks for domestic workers, and ensure that every traffic policeman has a sunshade over his head, and cool water near at hand, and not more than four-hour stretches on his feet. If that makes me sound like a bleeding heart, it's much, much better than having a stone where one's heart should be. I have never thought that bombs and bullets really solve problems, but when I see scrawny and ragged children fighting over scraps of leftovers thrown into garbage vats after lavish wedding feasts (and some people holding endless seminars in five-star comfort to discuss the issue, and others demanding that we be more sympathetic to the 'sufferings' of the obese), I feel only murderous rage. It's getting worse as I grow old.

[I was thinking of what to write on World Environment Day. I am convinced beyond argument that the natural environment cannot stay healthy when the social environment has become so sick.]

New old Penguins!

I am writing about this newly-reprinted 1928 book for a variety of reasons.

It reminds me very feelingly, but without rancour, how tough the lot of women has always been, until very recently, especially women who were ‘cursed’ with the divine spark (Virginia Woolf herself was led by recurrent and increasingly deep depression to suicide).

It also led me to ponder over how much has changed – and not changed – both in the west and in India – since Woolf delivered this lecture at Girton College, Oxford, in the very early days of higher education for women. I look forward to the day when womankind will finally produce the equivalent of Shakespeare (Woolf had expected the signs to become visible in a hundred years’ time!)

It told me how difficult really good ‘stream of consciousness’ writing is, and how sad it is that it has been ruined by countless incompetent emulators since Woolf’s time.

It was Woolf’s thesis that the most fundamental reason why women have never had the time and opportunity to write great literature was that they were bound in fetters of absolute poverty, and hence absolute dependence upon male-folk, and confinement to the domestic hearth, and lifelong grinding menial servitude. So every aspiring woman writer needs a room of her own and ‘five hundred pounds a year’ in order to spread her wings. Why, then, now that women’s material condition has vastly improved – even in India, at least among the urban educated liberal elite, whose numbers must certainly be greater than that of the whole of Britain today – do we still not find great creative (and independent-minded) folks among our women in good enough numbers? And if material poverty and sexual bondage are quite adequate explanations, how do we explain phenomena like Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale and Marie Curie?... read the book.

Above all, I bought this little volume at Crosswords in Kolkata because it had the old, original Penguin look. My grandfather’s book-case was filled with books with the selfsame look, but then, as I grew up, they apparently went out of fashion, when Penguin started publishing books with covers as garish and commonplace as every other publisher was doing, in the belief, I suppose, that it was important to draw customers who were not really readers, who could not help judging (whatever their judgment was worth!) a book by its cover… it was an indescribably happy moment for me to find that they had started re-publishing books in the old, plain, familiar format again. Apparently sufficient numbers of readers with my kind of tastes still exist to justify it: a heartening thought. They are calling the series Penguin Red Classics. Only, in my grandpa’s day, the typical price of a book was one or two rupees (and it was often printed in terms of shillings): I bought this reprint for Rs. 199. But I am looking forward to buying many more.

P.S., June 02: Please do note, before dashing off a comment, that this post is not merely (or even mainly) about feminist issues but about good writing, and about genius, and about the (rather rare thing these days) love of books.

About old posts, fathers, and other things

There was a post I put up more than three years ago titled How my world has changed, and I have got very few satisfactory (informative, thought-provoking…) comments on it yet, though it aimed to stimulate thinking in various different directions. Now that I have so many readers, I ask them once more: do please visit it, and reflect, and let me have the benefit of your reactions - after you have gone carefully through the comments already there.

As anyone who knows me (or at least has been following this blog closely for some time) will realize, fatherhood, and more broadly, parenting, is an issue that is perennially close to my heart. I also keep lamenting that of late so many parents – even if they know their real responsibilities, which is not a common thing in this country – delegate them by and large to servants, schools and tutors, imagining that spending money lavishly on their children is all they need to do. Worse still, countless children are growing up before my eyes thinking that that is indeed true, and the best parents are those who either scold all the time or indulge their every material whim – sometimes both together ( I have met a great many like that myself)!

Contrast this with the attitude of Barack Obama, whom I deeply admire as a father (look it up on the Net).  It so happens that this man is also the current President of the United States. Unlike so many fathers I know, he doesn’t claim he is too busy to take an active, sympathetic, helpful part in the growing up of his children; instead, he publicly laments that he has been an ‘imperfect’ father. And, writing from the White House, he also asserts that good parenting is fundamental to making a better society: we cannot hope for good results by foisting our failures as parents on either schools or the police or the church or the Net. Also, note that not once does he say that being a good parent means merely providing a comfortable and irresponsible childhood to his wards and ensuring that they ‘study hard’ in order to get a job. At the same time he (following in the breathtaking tradition supposedly set by Lincoln. As any sensible reader will understand, it doesn't matter one whit, of course, whether it was really Lincoln himself who wrote that letter) asserts that the task is infinitely more difficult, because the real goals are so infinitely harder to reach!

I should like some of my readers to assure me, after having read this post (and the links) very carefully, that their fathers did their job really well. A good father doesn't sermonize, snoop and boss; nor does he hold himself aloof: he is a friend who teaches by example - solving sums, telling stories, cleaning the toilet, playing games with his child. He doesn't molly-coddle, but he is always there when his child needs him. He has some genuine ideals (meaning those which he won't instantly desert the moment they get him into trouble). And he practises anything that he preaches, whether it is hard work or punctuality or not spreading malicious gossip. Remember also that they clearly said in the Aamir Khan starrer Rang de basanti that the least children can do is to find out how their fathers made their money before they decide whether to be proud or ashamed of such fathers! Leaking question papers for example, and awarding 'grace' marks for a consideration - is that okay as long as it pays for the childrens' frequent trips to the restaurant? Or prescribing quite unnecessary tests as a doctor, because the clinics pay commission on them? Or asking for 'cut money' in return for sanctioning building projects, as public engineers and administrators habitually do? Or simply sleeping at work, as so many dads do in this country? Why don't the kids go and look at them in the office sometimes?

Meanwhile, I am trying as a constant daily practice to ensure that I can respect and live up to such standards for my own daughter, because I have taught her already to be very critical of everybody, daddy included, and not to be ignorantly and easily proud…

Now this is something I like!

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google Inc, went to work riding a bicycle, on a day when shareholders were meeting too, because it was Bike to work day at the company, which encourages green (eco-friendly) policies.

Brin, when I last checked, was worth $14 billion. As far as I know, he is a reasonably busy man. I should guess he ought to have some 'status' (the way Indians understand it) to maintain, too. None of these things stopped him from biking to his office. And hundreds of his humbler colleagues did the same   - some came from 50-plus miles away!

But of course, we Indians (however more or less 'successful' we are, from clerks to celebrities, and their children) are far too 'busy' and 'important' to do such silly things...

P.S.: I have put Sergey's blog on my blogroll.

Just FYI

Seven hundred visits in seven days. Odd. The last time this happened was when I wrote I wish I had resigned sooner. Makes one think, doesn't it?

After a gap of years I have been experimenting with the 'look and feel' of this blog. I was getting a little tired of the same old (and rather bland-) template. Within two days one reader has sent in some positive feedback, one has complained, one has sounded doubtful. So I guess it is hard to please all. But I am not entirely pleased myself, so look forward to further changes soon.

I am glad some old boys are trying their hand at writing on their own blogs and telling me about it. I wish them good luck, and many happy hours of writing. Just don't give up too soon!

P.S., May 16: I am done tinkering with the blog template - for the time being. Please do let me know if and why you like it. As some kind readers have noted, they visit my blog far more for the sake of the contents than for the 'packaging', and I wouldn't have it any other way. But even looks need a makeover now and then, I'm sure most will agree... (by the way, you may have problems with reading this blog if you are still using an old browser like IE6: so the blogger administrator tells me. Try IE8 or Google Chrome, or a recent version of Mozilla Firefox).

I have 135 followers now, and the number keeps climbing, so I guess it should be close to the 150 mark by the time of the blog's fourth birthday in July. The 50,000-visits mark, of course, has already been crossed...

Not impressed...

I am now really tired of people trying to impress me.

Partly due to predisposition, and partly due to the way I grew up, I have always been very hard to impress.

I saw chairmen of ultra-large companies and union cabinet ministers in my father’s drawing room even when I was a child, because of the kind of politicking he then did. And I was brought up on stories of the kind of fabulous wealth my ancestors had piled up (before they threw it all away: that is another story) – someone paid Rs. 100,000 plus as income tax way back in the 1930s, when anyone earning a thousand a month was regarded as a very rich man, and his son got the latest Harley Davidson imported the week he saw it advertised in a British magazine when 99.9% of Indians didn’t even know what it was – and about others whose photos and exploits featured frequently on the front page of national newspapers, and yet others who were intellectual geniuses, like the doctor who could speak in nine languages, paint beautifully and play chess with grandmasters.

As a boy in school and college I myself got the kind of praise from teachers that is the stuff of dreams for most people, and even taught my own class at university on a professor’s request. My only boast about the Joint Entrance Examination is not that I got through with a decent rank (which, I have always maintained, is something that any half-wit crammer can do with a little bit of luck) but that I did it without going to any tutor, and while reading enormously ‘outside the syllabus’, including poetry in brajabuli and philosophy in French, and while tutoring many people almost my own age and helping out with my father’s fledgling business at a time of great financial distress and having a very intense love affair, and I don’t know of one other man of my generation in my own social set who has done that: if there is any, I’d love to meet him!

I drank the finest wines and spirits long before most of my classmates had heard about them (they are doing it now, and preening like children!) I was drafting editorials for a major newspaper and getting into the high security VVIP enclave of Government House (Writers’ Building) in Calcutta before I was 21, and had a company car to pick me up for work, and dozens of bylines in a year – and those were times when these things were not available to every newly-hired Tom, Dick and Harry, which is why I attracted the envious wrath of so many seniors that became a major stumbling block to my career. I grew sick of tycoons and big-shot ‘educationists’ sucking up to me in the hope that I could give them a few column inches in the paper.

Even when I came back to Durgapur and took a job with St. Xavier’s School, it was all most informal: I never wrote an application, never appeared for an official interview; the Jesuit fathers in charge simply invited me over, one because he knew what kind of student I had been, and the other because he was a regular reader of my newspaper columns (the one he had read most recently was my review of Dr. Amlan Dutta’s book on Gandhi). I chucked up jobs for the asking with employers like the Doon School and The Times of India and Oxford University Press only because they could not simultaneously pay me what I wanted and assure me the kind of quiet, free, organized lifestyle that I demanded. I have travelled abroad, and seen wonderful sights, and stayed at palaces and five-star hotels, and have always maintained that only crude and ignorant fools think these are things to show off: indeed, reading Hergé or Premendra Mitra or Isaac Asimov on distant lands they had never seen with their own eyes, I know for a fact that not one in ten thousand people who travel abroad these days can come anywhere close to entertaining and educating me as those giants of the mind could, for the simple reason that these people don’t have eyes to see with.

And now folks my age and twenty years junior are trying to impress me (when they are not spinning malicious yarns about me) about their bylines, and their trips abroad, and their piddling new cars and their ‘executive’ designations (I keep remembering the gag that in the US even in the 1970s a sweeper had become a ‘waste disposal executive’…)! The oldest so far was someone in his mid-70s on his recent business trip to China, the youngest was an early-20s idiot who told me this very morning that he was now in France. So big deal!

I am at peace with my station in life, and if I blame anybody at all for things that didn’t work out, I blame only my karma and no human being, and I am impressed only by a) simplicity and earnestness of character, and hardiness in facing misfortune (as I find far more commonly among rickshaw pullers and greengrocers, baul singers and maidservants than among ‘successful’ doctors and lawyers and executives, or b) men of really great wealth and power – and I expressly don’t mean the local thug or some engineer or doctor who makes just a few lakhs a month and is worth nothing more yet thinks the world of himself, and most of all c) when I see a combination of great and diverse knowledge with imagination, courage and charity. Alas, the number of people in the last category whom I have met in all the forty odd years of conscious life so far I can count on the fingers of one hand. But I refuse to lower my standards simply because most people don’t fit the bill.

Otherwise, I am fine with old boys who drop in with gifts (most important of which are chats about their work and about places they have been to without ego-hassles, chats which I enjoy). But please – this is meant for all readers regardless of age and sex and location and occupation – please don’t try so hard to impress me. You are only likely to burst a vein!

Afterthought, May 09: And then there were the titans, about all of whom it can be aptly said that generations to come will scarce believe that men such as they ever in flesh and blood walked the face of this earth. The greatest of all my sorrows is that I never had the inestimable privilege of prostrating myself before one such man. Today is Rabindra jayanti.

hey mahaguru, shorboshastrashaar, tirthoshreshtho, chiropother shongi - loho pronaam.

In praise of nerds

Tanmoy’s recent musing on nerds set me thinking, and presently it occurred to me that humanity can be safely divided into nerds, lunatics and automatons (let me know if I have missed some important category). The lunatics, of course, are a threat either to themselves or to society or both, whether they are of the trivial type like the housewife I mentioned in my last post on the other blog, or of the Ivan the Terrible/Adolf Hitler sort. The less we have to take notice of them the better.

Most of us are not born to become anything better than automatons, first at school and later on as workers and neighbours and family men… even those (a very small minority) who seem in their youth to be gifted with energy and imagination and a sense of personal direction by and large become that way by the time they have lived forty years on earth. Most of us have to, simply in order to cope with life as it is; the dullness of unavoidable routine not only eventually grinds out all sparks of the divine fire, but maybe that is the way it should be for ‘civilization’ to survive, seeing that most kinds of necessary work is of a menial, low-IQ, repetitive kind, whether you are pushing files or removing tumours or repairing boilers or balancing account books or selling insurance or managing a shop or cooking daily for the family. Thank God mankind produces far more of the Telemachus type than the Ulysses…

But, although defined in a rather sneering way, it is the nerds who keep not only the individual life but civilization as a whole from dying of stagnation. Every great invention or discovery was made (if not accidentally) by some unsocial nerd who stayed obsessed with finding out the why or how of something he found irresistibly curious, some problem he felt just had to be solved, no matter whether he could see any kind of immediate benefit from it or not – whether it was vast questions like why the apple always falls straight to the ground or finding out if something could shut bags and other things better than hooks, clasps or buttons could (I am thinking of the zip fastener), or figuring out what a strange inscription on a rock in a desert meant, or how to remove seeds from a juicy fruit. And where would sensitive and thinking people be without the likes of Homer and Shakespeare and Stevenson and Rowling, who were all nerds of the finest types? All mankind owes a debt to nerds that can never be repaid. Without them, we should still be swinging from the trees. And turning to the individual life, I admire no one more than a man who can say, at age 50, that he has started mastering sudoku or learning a new language, or watching a new genre of movies, or cultivating a new talent such as music or painting that he has just discovered inside himself. All of us who cannot do that are already dead, even if we might physically survive (and continue to pollute the earth, and irritate our families and neighbours with endless grumbling and preening) for some more decades still. Without a strong nerdy instinct, men and women become insufferably boring by the time they reach my age, as I can see very clearly among my own contemporaries: I’d hate to spend an evening with them instead of with their children, who, mercifully, are still not quite so brain-dead … though, alas, they are trying very hard to become like that, with Facebook and video games and Hannah Montana to help them!

P.S., May 05: Someone who probably wouldn't want himself named here (otherwise he could have sent in a comment directly) wrote that I might consider a fourth category of 'idiotic dreamers'. What do my regular readers think?

I love Lalit Modi!

He personifies so self-assuredly, so brazenly, so happily, everything that is true about the contemporary Indian wannabe high-profile success (shades of Harshad Mehta, Ramalinga Raju, and others too numerous to mention, including thousands who, more wisely in my poor opinion, stay out of the media glare…).

Here, in a thumbnail sketch, is his ideology:

1. Money buys everything, including fame and the power to dodge the clutches of the law, so nothing else is worth aiming for;

2. Use the money to live the high life of luxury yachts, private jets, fleets of limousines, armies of bodyguards, an endless supply of nubile and willing bimbos – and the ‘public’ (read mass media) will simultaneously envy you and admire you as they used to admire gods in the olden days;

3. Use whatever your native animal cunning is best at manipulating to make and squander money – be it sports, politics, crime, IT, real estate, movies, healthcare, education or the stock market: it makes no difference at all.

4. When in trouble, be even more brazen than before, and chances are 1000 to 1 that you’ll be able to ride it out. And even if you can’t, what harm can a few months in a five-star jail specially built for you do? A long holiday, all comforts paid for, while the public forgets why it was mad at you, and then you can happily go back to your shenanigans. After all, this is India: no big-time crook ever gets seriously punished!

And – except when their stars are bad – these are the sort of ‘great’ men who will make India proud as a great nation soon: about that our prime minister is still firmly convinced. baaki sab bakwaas…

(If the reader is interested, I recommend her/him to a series of essays I wrote through September and October 2009 on this blog, titled Poor little rich thug, Ministers flying cattle class, Counterculture and Counterculture: postscript. The search bar will help you. It might strike you that in India, a truly democratic country, literally anyone can be ‘successful’ these days, whether you are an ex-rickshawwallah or a friend of chief ministers, if only you are shameless enough, arrogant enough, violent enough and greedy enough. Absolutely no other talents required. The parents of all my students and ex-students should take note. Why waste time chasing the JEE? Your children will be serving masters like these anyway!)

P.S., May 05: Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri, sometime head of the department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, has this to say about the IPL mania and its social significance. Most readers are not going to like it!

A father's abiding woe...

When does a dad go wrong? And when he does, can he ever forgive himself?

Pupu was born a more than normally lively and intelligent child. She loved to listen to stories, yet she was already past two and having difficulty concentrating on making the effort that every child must make to start on the long journey to literacy – learning the alphabet. Being persuaded that it was best to start with the mother tongue, my wife and I had been trying gently, but with ever increasing anxiety, to get her to start reading on her own (we didn’t believe in relegating even such basic responsibilities to those cram shops that call themselves by the fancy name of play school). Already precocious at that early age, she had memorized all the writing in her first picture book by simply listening to us chanting the rhymes over and over again, and naughtily tried to pass it off as ability to read! Naturally, she was caught out when we switched books. And one evening, when her mother had complained after several months of fruitless struggle, I lost my temper.

I had always been, both by training and temperament, a firm believer in Asimov’s aphorism ‘Violence is the last resort of the incompetent’. Never in two decades of teaching had I ever hit a pupil. Yet that evening I put her firmly on my lap and gave her an ultimatum: ‘I’m not letting you go until you have started reading on your own!’ I find it agonizing to recall the next half hour, though more than a decade has passed by – it seems like yesterday. I scolded and threatened, even cuffed her on the head and boxed her ears two or three times (I am ashamed to say I probably even slapped her once), all the while holding her tightly to my breast and urging her ‘Go on, go on, keep trying, again, again, again, you can do it…’ and she sniffled and sobbed and wriggled and kept whining ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t’ and went on trying desperately, poor child. I had almost given up in despair when I saw that the miracle had taken place without either of us noticing it: she was reading fluently, and quite unconscious of the fact that she had done it!

I stopped her short in mid-rhyme and said, ‘Look, darling, you can read now!’ And you should have seen her look of startled, unbelieving surprise, and then the lovely, heavenly smile of delight and pride lighting up her tear-stained face: ‘Oh, yes, daddy, I can really read now, can’t I?’ and we hugged each other as though we had just been declared lords of the world…

It has been years, and now Pupu is a very grown-up sort of teenager, big and smart and talkative, a voracious reader in two languages far ahead of most people of her age, and learning two more languages with hardly any prompting on daddy’s part. Every time I ask her for forgiveness, she says, ‘Oh, come on, Dad, I should say thank God you took a firm line that day!’

So did I do the right thing after all, and can I be forgiven when I stand before the Lord’s Judgment seat?

[That was mum and daughter studying together a few months after the nightmare was behind them...]

Bangla new year: a nice feeling

Right from the morning we have been inundated with Bengali shubho noboborsho greetings - by phone, email, e-card, and lots of personal visits - from literally scores of people, and literally from around the world. It makes one feel good. Happy New Year to all, and many, many thanks to all who took the trouble to wish us well. A pity that I couldn't respond to everybody personally...

It's the money, honey

Of the millions of words being said and written in the mass media following the Maoist-organized massacre of CRPF policemen in Dantewada, Chattisgarh, this particular news item caught my attention. Look at the last paragraph. It seems that the families of the jawans who were killed will receive a total of Rs. 38 lakhs (3.8 million) each as compensation, besides one job per family on humanitarian grounds.

Now I have no intention of belittling or insulting the soldiers who die fighting for the government (notice I didn’t say ‘for their country’, though), but a few reflections are in order:

1. A lot of people work in very harsh conditions ‘for their country’ (postmen and firemen and ordinary policemen and teachers in private schools – who are usually paid much less than their government counterparts – and coolies at construction sites, to name just a few), and cannot expect even a tiny fraction of that kind of reward whether they die at work or live beyond normal retirement age;

2. Given that these policemen come from humble or even poor backgrounds, the compensation is truly princely – now I know why there’s never a dearth of people eager to sign on, despite the risks;

3. Since these people know they can look forward to that kind of reward for their families in case they are killed on duty, don’t expressions like ‘they made the supreme sacrifice for their country’ sound a little hollow, not to say pretentious?

4. Make a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation. The government doles out several tens of crores in such compensation to the families of dead soldiers/policemen every year. Mightn’t it have been a better idea to spend that money on the kind of genuine and much needed development of those most backward regions of this country where mass discontent is the breeding ground of militant rebellion?

5. A few years ago the father of a pupil of mine, a civil engineer working for the army’s Border Roads Organization, had volunteered to work on a highway construction project in Afghanistan, despite the huge risk from resurgent terrorists there, because, he said, the pay was really good. Since these people love money more than their lives (remember, the man was, if not rich, quite comfortably off here, and nobody had forced him to go), do we really need to shed copious collective tears over them when they are picked off by terrorists or brigands? Why do we want to have our cake and eat it too?

6. I have been a teacher all my life. For the last eight years I have been entirely self-employed. The government happily takes income tax from me every year, but promises my family no reward, no compensation of any kind should I die early. A beautician charges ten times what I do for a tenth of the kind of work I do, whether you count mental skills or physical exertion (of late my doctor has been urging me to take it easy). Everybody in this country pretends to ‘honour’ teachers and the work they do. Yet there are so many people who say behind our backs that we teachers have become 'greedy'. Whereas Shah Rukh Khan is not, and Sachin is the pride of India, and fashion models 'deserve' to be paid little fortunes for posing in underwear, and soldiers make ‘supreme sacrifices’ killing their own countrymen. (Just to silence armchair cynics, I'd be glad to 'die for my country' anytime provided I knew that my family would be comfortably off as a result for the rest of their lives. And I wouldn't care whether people called it 'the supreme sacrifice' or not.)

Any comments?

Shilpi's latest

Go to this page and read, and reflect, and comment.

National treasures?

This editorial in today’s edition of The Telegraph gladdened my heart as few things do these days. I have immediately shot off the following congratulatory email to them:

Sir,

I have been reading The Telegraph since the day it was born, and no editorial ever made me so happy as today's first - Icon Fever (TT, Wednesday, March 31). It so happens that I have been harping on the selfsame theme for more than a quarter century in my humble capacity as a teacher, to no avail. Judging by their icons, Indians have grown immensely smaller indeed. They don't seem to be even aware of it, leave alone feel ashamed, more's the pity. And it all stems not only from a total confusion between ideas of greatness, excellence and mere popularity, as you quite rightly say, but the fact that we can no longer imagine that without material success of a large sort, anybody can deserve respect or emulation. The lot of the Satyen Bose, Ramkinkar Baij and Bibhuti Banerjee types was bad enough in their own time, but it would have been far worse today, because to the hardship of penury would have been added the humiliation of near-universal contempt and ridicule. And that speaks volumes about how much this country has 'progressed' in the last half century, culturally and morally speaking. Good to see that your editorial writer takes the role of conscience keeper seriously sometimes. More power to your elbow.

Yours truly,

A book worth reading (I think)

Pawan Varma, IFS, a most erudite man and a felicitous writer, has become one of my favourite commentators on the way the Indian cultural scenario has been evolving. I thoroughly enjoyed his sympathetic yet scathing analysis of the ways and mores of The Great Indian Middle Class, and his second book, Being Indian (published in 2004) was just as interesting to read, and thought-provoking. So much so that these days, when anybody wants to discuss matters cultural in the Indian context, I ask her whether she has read Nirad Chaudhuri, Khushwant Singh, V. S. Naipaul, Mark Tully and Varma, at least; otherwise it's likely to be an idle and pointless conversation.

Varma has now authored yet another book, Becoming Indian: the unfinished revolution of culture and identity. I have just read Kanchan Gupta’s interview with Varma about this book, and I am looking forward to reading it myself.

To my mind, Pawan Varma belongs to that old tradition which has been coming down from the likes of Rammohun Roy: close observers, vigorous thinkers, who want India to become a truly great country, who can see her great potential, who are also aware that a lot of cultural baggage is holding her back, and who can criticize all our faults (not even sparing icons like Rammohun himself!) unsparingly though not cruelly, and always with constructive ends in view. In short, a man after my own heart. Do read his books, all, and get back to me about them. I like to think that I too am an argumentative Indian in the sense conveyed by Amartya Sen, and that there are still some such people around…

'Very serious' issues

A young man was chatting with me and mentioned how terrorism, he thinks, is a 'very serious' problem facing India. I fell a-musing about this... how the mass media decide which issues will be uppermost on people's minds, and which will permanently stay in obscurity. A few hundred people killed yearly by terrorists is a 'very serious' issue; several hundred thousand killed or crippled by reckless or drunk drivers is not! IPL cheerleaders are an item, good teachers and doctors who work quietly, day and night, for the common good are not. A new BMW model introduced in the country is hot news, millions permanently malnourished is not. More shopping malls is development, more people who can spell correctly (with or without college degrees) is not. Millionaire footballers are heroes, highly-decorated soldiers are not (be honest - how many Param Veer Chakra winners can you name?)

Funny country, India.

Or is it like that with all humankind, more or less?

A good campaign

"Earth Hour is a WWF initiative which sends across an inspiring message of hope and action for Climate Change. At 8.30pm on 27^th March 2010, cities, towns and municipalities across the world will turn off their lights for one hour – Earth Hour – sending a powerful global message that it’s possible to take action on global warming. "

So started the email from campaigner Poulomi, urging me to talk about the coming event (which they want to make the largest mass-participation event in history) on my blog.

What they are essentially doing is to create mass awareness about the need to be less wasteful in our use of energy – and thereby cause less pollution. An initiative like this deserves everyone’s support, I think. It doesn’t cost anybody much to switch off all gadgets for just an hour on just one particular day. While the energy-saving from that might be minuscule compared to the amount we consume annually planet-wide, I believe that a) every little bit counts, and b) the real benefits will start pouring in when people in the hundreds of millions (including people like teachers, judges, journalists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and all our educated youth) start thinking seriously about not only energy conservation but also taking really serious steps towards harnessing alternative, less-polluting, renewable sources of energy on a scale large enough to say goodbye to coal and oil within a few decades…

Go ahead and do your mite: not just by switching off the lights at your own house on March 27 at the scheduled hour, but persuading at least five other people to do the same.

And I hope they will do likewise in Las Vegas!

You can find more details about this effort on the official Earth Hour website. Also look up their campaign on Facebook, or even follow them on twitter here.

Join this debate!

My readers are the young educated elite of India, largely in the age group of 15 to 40. I am sure they have a lot of complaints as well as aspirations about their country. I would like many of them to write in on the theme of ‘Emerging India: failures, problems and hopes’.

Which way do you see this country going? What are the good signs, and which signs bode ill? Restrict your comments to 500 words, and avoid putting all the blame on the usual whipping boys, such as corrupt politicians. Try to be as personal and specific as possible about what ‘development’ or ‘progress’ means to you. Compare with other countries/cultures you have seen.

And in this connection, take a look at this article and this one to give you some ideas…

P.S., March 11: Must admit to a feeling of disappointment. Here I had offered a chance to my readers to vent their opinions, without me imposing anything on them, and it's such a perennially interesting issue too, so naturally I had expected a deluge of comments to pour in. You visitors are really funny...

P.P.S., March 22: Good to see that more responses have been coming in since that last prodding. But I want many more, knowing that so many other people are reading without commenting. Indeed, I think that this mental lethargy (or simply not having anything worthwhile to say on any serious issue) among our so-called educated young is one of the worst things about contemporary India...