Liberated women?

One of my older ex-students was telling me, with shock and disgust in her voice, that she had encountered a married woman of 22 who died in a government hospital in Kolkata recently. She had been burnt alive by her husband and mother-in-law, and lived only long enough to accuse them of murder. I hope the law will exercise its full majesty and wrath in punishing the criminals in this instance, but that is not what I wanted to say here.

We know that the law now tilts heavily in favour of the wife and her folks when it comes to cases like this; in fact, it is no joke that a lot of in-laws actually live in terror of their sons’ wives, and we even hear now and then about women who are taking unfair advantage of the law to lord it over their husbands and in-laws in a way that even other women find objectionable.

How then, in the same social landscape, do atrocities against married women still occur with such disturbing frequency? We can’t even blame illiteracy and poverty here, because such things keep happening to urban, educated women with well-off parents, too, and, though it takes some believing, even to women who earn their own (and quite adequate-) incomes! Doesn’t it all boil down, however politically incorrect it sounds, to the fact that even in supposedly enlightened families, most parents of daughters are still not only desperate to get their daughters married off to ‘suitable’ grooms (and suitable always refers to age, caste, looks and pay, never character), but equally desperate to keep those marriages from failing in the eyes of society – no matter how horrid the in-laws make life for the girl at home? And isn’t it true that most girls are so brainwashed and terrorized that they keep trying to ‘adjust’, and thus encourage growing atrocities – it being one of the most rigorous laws of human nature that the docile are always abused by the powerful – until it sometimes ends up in murder?

Let’s face it; murder outright shocks enough sensibilities to have become newsworthy, and to draw the might of the law upon the perpetrators, but don’t many women who have not been and are not likely to be killed by their in-laws/husbands actually live lives so miserable that death would be a welcome release (tragically, even women who married for love, pretty often, as I happen to know)? Isn’t it a fact that a ‘moderate’ amount of wife-beating is, if not openly condoned, at least winked at and ignored by ‘society’ which prides itself on an enlightened Constitution that guarantees basic human rights for all? Isn’t demanding dowry just short of universal (I have actually heard a girl student saying her father would get back twice what he would give for her when he married off her two elder brothers)? Isn’t it a fact that a lot of women are taught to be happy if only their husbands don’t beat them, and give them money for shopping now and then, and restrict them to obsessing over their looks and kitty parties and children’s examination scores – no greater independence is either sought or granted (my wife has been told by jealous friends that they cannot dream of their husbands allowing them control over money, so that they pick their husbands’ pockets routinely and without shame)? Two decades after Paroma  and eight decades after Tagore’s most ‘daring’ works, don’t the vast majority of our educated males and females alike accept it that married men flirting or even having an affair now and then can be tolerated with a bit of regretful clucking, but for ‘good’ women it must be an absolute no-no? Except when they are dolling up for parties and feasts, aren’t most married women simply living lives of unpaid sex-slaves-cum-domestic helps: and not only okay with it, but insisting that their daughters become exactly like them, so as to uphold ‘family honour’ and ‘respectability’?

For whom did women’s liberation occur in this country, and how far has it really gone? Leave alone men (most of whom are understandably scared witless by the prospect), how many of our ‘cultured’ women can think of liberation in all its dimensions without a shudder?

And if they cannot, what is wrong with things as they are – just so long as husbands don’t actually kill their wives?

Odd jobs...

I have been trying to remember some of the very many things I have done ever since I started, in a very small way, to fend for myself in mid-teenage. It’s because I worry these days that I might be beginning to forget, so it would be a good idea to write them down, if only for the sake of my grandchildren.

I have been tutoring school- and college kids all through,

I helped a teacher of mine to prepare her notes for a B.Ed. degree when I was myself in high school,

In college, I once helped a judge to pass his Master of Law examination (which he had been failing repeatedly and so couldn’t get promoted to first-class magistrate) by summarizing an entire thousand-page book on jurisprudence into one sheaf of foolscap handwritten paper in simple Bengali,

I wrote articles, reviews, news and stories for numerous magazines in both English and Bengali, and a few daily papers,

I designed a greeting card for a major public sector firm once, and a publicity brochure for a diamond merchant,

I translated a famous author’s novel from Bengali to English at very short notice so that he could read it out before a panel of fellow authors at the American Center in Calcutta,

I have edited, at various levels of detail, many people’s PhD theses on very diverse topics,

I have traded in encyclopedias on commission,

I have been paid by hundreds of people for counselling them and/or their children,

I have ghost-written speeches for a lot of bigshots,

I have hosted quiz contests,

I have conducted ‘grooming’ classes for college graduates about to appear for job interviews,

I have contributed ‘lessons’ to textbooks,

…

Some of that work has gone unpaid, or paid what I would call beggarly rates now. And despite making money in so many different ways, I have still jealousy guarded some time and leisure for fun, as well as for work of a purely charitable nature.

Now, if I am growing lazy and unwilling to work unless I am paid the kind of money that I want, I wouldn’t like people to hold that against me.

I wrote this just as an explanation for why I seem to be so unhelpful these days to a lot of people who come to ask me to do them all kinds of favours and go away disappointed (only last week I shooed away two profs from a local engineering college who had come to importune me to host a quiz show for them. As always, the only thing they refused to mention was payment). I think I have earned the right to have grown allergic to work that brings me neither love nor money! Salaried people will never understand the sentiment, whereas I trust that any businessman or self-employed person would go to the other extreme and call me a fool for having allowed myself to be exploited for so long. When I think of the countless ingrates for whom I did work for which I could have charged hefty sums but didn’t and who have long forgotten me, I keep telling myself I shall never let my daughter be suckered like that if I can help it.

If you are reading this, Tanmoy, that might be one way in which I have changed over the years...

Pages from a travel diary

[The following is a twenty-year old excerpt - late 1990, actually - from my diary. Some of you might reflect that you were in my class then, and some that this happened before you were born. By the way, I was a poor man then, and it happened before the era of the internet and cellphones, if you can believe there was ever such a time…]

Friday night: The last month passed in the twinkling of an eye marking school examination papers. In the midst of it I did something upon a whim, in consequence of which I have suddenly leaped to one corner of this vast country immediately upon the end of that ordeal. After school yesterday I caught the evening train to Calcutta, snatched a few hours of sleep, then took the early morning flight to Jorhat, Assam. After checking into this hotel, a bath and a quick lunch, I loitered about aimlessly in the streets through the afternoon, taking care of a few chores, then, once dusk fell, I crawled wearily back to my room, locked the door, shoved my legs deep into the thick blanket, leaned back on a pile of pillows and settled down to savour as deeply as I could this delicious little bit of unexpected leisure after a long time.

            You really can make things happen very fast in this scientific age when you have a mind to, fast enough for any ease-loving, contemplative person to lose his breath, so that one marvels at one’s own antics. I can hardly believe I have so abruptly moved so far away from my usual routine and usual haunts, and that too, to such a very unlikely place. Let me try calmly to arrange the pictures and look them over. Mental pictures are quite like pictures on paper – a single browse gives you neither full understanding nor satisfaction.

            A senior friend in Durgapur had asked me conversationally one day about a month ago whether I might be interested in Rotary Club’s Group Study Exchange program. Some ‘smart’ people of my age would be taken to the USA for six weeks or so as ‘cultural ambassadors’ for our country. Well, it sounded like fun – I hadn’t thought of such things for ages; rather, only last year I had gone to a great deal of trouble to send a young pupil of mine to an International Children’s Conference, and now this invitation all of a sudden for me! I felt a sudden urge; yet such was the pressure of work that I had little time to spare for it, so I filled in and sent off an application form in an absent-minded hurry. Then in good time the local club filed nomination papers for me – after which the next thing I heard was that I was to appear for final selections in Jorhat, of all places. It is so located that it could take ages to reach by road or rail, and those who should know warned that the journey would be gruelling, so there was no choice but to take a flight. Hence a luxurious and expensive self-indulgence, almost twenty years since I last flew.

            Flying is a rich man’s sport, so everything has to be done in style. There were umpteen extravagant expenses ever since I took a cab at daybreak. If only there were some compensations… but alas, the airport at Dumdum was hot and crowded, and the flight was delayed by a whole hour – think of how cheaply thousands of commoners enjoy such pleasures at Howrah or Sealdah railway station daily! Since I hadn’t lost all the anticipatory exuberance of childhood, the flight itself was not bad, despite the lack of leg room, cramped seats and incessant noise of the engines. And I could have done without the excitement at the time of takeoff and landing; not a massage for the heart or nerves. At Tezpur I had sent a message to an air force officer friend stationed there to come and see me inside the airport, at which the captain laughingly assumed I was after cheap liquor, while the mustachioed security man patted me all over, and apparently disappointed at not having been able to discover something seriously incriminating, contented himself with confiscating a box of matches – luckily there were only two matches left in it. The other, full box came back safely with me: a government functionary is too lazy to  pat all one’s pockets conscientiously. God works everything for the best. The trip would have been a complete write-off but for a very sweet stewardess who charmed me with a winning smile: not the kind of dry, mechanical, official smile that they normally greet you with, but the real thing. I must have earned it by thanking her very earnestly for a small favour, because she looked pleasantly embarrassed. Later, when I was watching the clouds from my window, she called me again and again when she came round to serve breakfast, but I couldn’t hear her. When she finally tapped me on the shoulder I pulled out the cotton wool earplugs and grinned broadly, at which she too couldn’t help smiling back in a most unofficial way. Nothing more happened, but I did get one last dazzling smile while getting off which made my day.

            This town is nothing to write home about – there are thousands of identical towns all over India, the same drab, dusty dinginess, the same mindless immemorial workaday routine. Most of the better hotels have been commandeered by government officials on one pretext or another. I found this one almost at the end of a seedy by-lane. There are three hotels in a row, mine being the newest – one wing is still under construction, in fact, which is why I got a decent room on the cheap, considering all the dust and noise around. There’s a huge pond clogged with green algae just outside my window and a slum beyond it, and a few scattered shanty shops; it gets very quiet after seven in the evening, barring the music from a transistor radio blaring somewhere. The power goes off every now and then, and the mosquitoes are terrific. The food is just about okay, and cheap if you stick to a vegetarian menu.

            You step out of the lane and there’s the main bus terminus. The bazaar stretches for a mile or so along the main road, pouring into side streets wherever it can. A special kind of relaxation is possible when you have ample time on your hands, so I sat on a bench in a roadside cobbler’s shop on the pretext of getting my shoes shined and whiled away half an hour in the afternoon, chatting with him and other customers and watching passers-by. Then I ferreted out the local Rotary Club district governor’s house and presented myself: here I am, so is the interview going to be held on schedule? He is an amiable wealthy elderly Marwari who has built a very nice, sprawling garden villa for himself; I made friends with both him and his son quickly. The son is about my age, and has his own business in Jaipur; he has a pretty wife and an equally pretty sister.

            I am well set-up for the night now. It’s been a long day. Getting very sleepy, too: had better stop scribbling for now.

Saturday: If there’s nothing else to be said for working hard over long stretches, one must admit that it makes the occasional idling truly a treat to cherish. This is the profound truth I have been happily reflecting upon the whole day today. I do hope there won’t be a price to pay later on! I lazed in bed till eight in the morning, got up for two leisurely cups of tea, paced about in the sun on the roof for a while, then shaved, exercised, ploughed through a hearty breakfast, bathed and went out for another stroll. The walk put a keen edge to my hunger again soon enough, and I satisfied it like a good boy, put some sounff in my mouth, came back to my room and got into bed – next time I looked at my watch it was four in the afternoon. I went out for yet another walk around, what else? – exploring the town until the sun set. Schools, hostels and government offices are a dime a dozen here. I took a good look at everything from the deputy commissioner’s bungalow to the workplaces of the census taker and the ‘malaria officer’ – heaven knows what the last mentioned functionary does! I watched with the delightful ease of someone who doesn’t have anything to do a snub-nosed traffic policeman busily earning his daily bread. I read signboards for a long time until it became clear to me what they meant, because the Assamese use the Bengali script with innovative touches of their own. As dusk began to settle I timidly crawled back to the hotel, since the streets are rather dark, everyone is a stranger, terrorists often go on the rampage without warning, and the truckloads of soldiers swarming all over the place are on a hair-trigger alert, with a tendency, apparently, to look askance at bearded youths like me: why ask for trouble? I sat doing nothing by candle light in my room for an hour, there being a power cut again, then wrote a little, and listened to some music. Wrapped heavily in blankets, I reflected on this chance to enjoy an extended winter: back at home, seven long months of blazing summer were waiting for me. The interview is due tomorrow, the thing that I have come all this way for; I wonder what fate has in store. I put on the blazer and knotted my tie before the mirror and took a good look at myself. It’s been ages, so I have gotten out of practice, but I don’t look too bad, really.

            It’s eleven in the night now. I had better pull down the mosquito net and call it a day.

Monday evening: This is the way things go: easeful idling doesn’t last long! The laziness of the first two days has been more than compensated over the next two. Ever since I walked out of the hotel in the morning yesterday, nattily attired for the interview, it’s been one hectic roller-coaster ride, until now, past eight in the evening today.

            The ‘Garh-Ali’ neighbourhood is the Chowringhee of Jorhat; the venue of the interview was the upmarket Eastern Hotel there. It being a Sunday, and having arrived early, I found most shops still closed, and had some difficulty finding a packet of cigarettes. Diverse kinds of candidates had appeared for the interview – from a humble government engineer to a noisily garrulous journalist from Manipur with an uncanny resemblance to Ho Chi Minh. Sitting around for four hours, we were virtually forced to make each others’ acquaintances to while away the time, so we were all pretty much relaxed and the conversation was flowing freely when I was called up at last. The bar had been modestly re-decorated for the day to serve as the interview room. A panel of five gently smiling middle-aged gentlemen asked all kinds of non-too-serious questions for a space about fifteen minutes, to which I gave prompt and rather bland replies. They seemed in a bigger hurry to get through it than I was, which was most convenient for me. When the question of my knowing French arose, someone mumbled ‘Comment allez vous?’ apropos of nothing – probably the only bit of French he knew, poor chap – and I shot back ‘On va bien, merci’ in the best Parisian style out of pure reflex, which seemed to satisfy their curiosity entirely. After two or three more questions they sent me away saying ‘You have to wait some more, please don’t mind’. Two more candidates were checked out, after which they conferred among themselves for an hour before reading out the list of selected candidates – and lo! yours truly had found a place in it, as had Laba from Manipur, Goutam who runs a toy shop in Guwahati, Langba who heads a watchmaking factory in Shillong, computer scientist Ojha from Vishwa Bharati and civil engineer Mukul from IISCO, Burnpur. By the time we parted company after heartily patting one another on the back, it was past three. I didn’t like the prospect of spending yet another fruitless day in Jorhat. Mukul and his wife had put up in the hotel adjacent to mine: after a very hurried lunch there we piled into a minibus upon a sudden decision to visit the Kaziranga wildlife sanctuary. The road was good; the trip took us a mere two hours.

            A straight tree-lined path off the main road leads to the neat tourist lodge with several wings, spread over a huge campus. The place is lush and very tranquil, and we took up rooms for the night. My friend’s wife Usha had evidently fallen in love at first sight with the place – I heard her saying at least five times within an hour of arrival that she would have loved to spend a few days here if our flight tickets had not been booked in advance. After dark, the starlit sky seen from the verdant garden was a treat for the senses. I have a snug little room to myself in the outer wing; after a heavy dinner I soon fell fast asleep.

Tuesday: I was afraid that the siren nearby would scream us all into sudden terrified wakefulness at an ungodly hour – but nothing so unpleasant happened; I woke up very normally at around six. We took a jeep into the jungle on the other side of the main road, then wandered about the baada (tall grass on soft ground) on elephant back for about an hour, feasting our eyes on one-horned rhino, wild buffalo, wild boar, lots of deer and antelope, baby elephants frolicking around their mothers, pelicans and mist-shrouded, heavily wooded hills in the far distance. Of course the men who had hired out the elephant fleeced us well and proper, but it couldn’t be helped. We strolled on and off-campus till lunchtime, saw tea and coffee plantations side by side, lugged our luggage down to the bus stop, had a hearty lunch, got scared by the rumour that traffic on the highway had been held up by a murder somewhere nearby, then somehow got back to Jorhat well in time. On the way a young lady virtually sat on my lap in the overcrowded bus, and an old gentleman complained that the music system had been turned off: ‘Aren’t we paying full fares or what, son?’

            I have had dinner a while ago. It was cloudy all day, and there was a gentle shower in the evening. Now I am sitting back to reflect wonderingly upon everything that has happened over these last five days. At the age of twenty seven, an opportunity like this has fallen into my lap out of the blue in the course of a little adventure. Whether I want to go, whether I can get leave, whether I will have time to make all preparations, I don’t know – but this much is certain, I can set off on a trip halfway across the world in April if I like, almost everything paid for. Imagine! – I am feeling both restless and very apprehensive. Anyway, I had better stop brooding for the present; let me get back to familiar surroundings and then I can take up the threads again. Meanwhile I hope I can get back safely and without hassles. Will the same stewardess accompany me on the flight back?

Oh, India!

As this editorial in The Telegraph takes note, the National Advisory Council headed by Mrs. Sonia Gandhi has pointed out with concern that the proposed new law against sexual harassment of women in the workplace has left out of its purview a very large number of girls and women workers, indeed the worst paid, most abused (not just sexually) and most insecure among women workers – to wit, the several tens of millions who work as domestic helps for all of us, middle and upper class India (which has been ‘shining’ for some time now). In this context, the paper sarcastically observes that ‘any sign that this country is actually growing civilized must be celebrated’ – a vindication, if I may so claim, of something I have been insisting upon for a very long time, namely that far more than seven star hotels and fancy cars and IT jobs and number of 3G mobiles and ‘successful’ NRIs, it is how we behave with the least privileged among us that is a true sign of civilization, and by this index, as by many others, India is still far short of the mark.

            Indeed, the editorial goes on to remark upon ‘the fathomless hypocrisy of middle class India’, which allows us to feel no shame about pretending that this entire class does not exist except to supply us with drudges – they are not to be counted among the human beings for whom all the glorious rights are guraranteed in our Constitution, so what does their happiness and dignity and freedom and standard of living matter? Their condition has nothing to do with all our ideas about progress! The editorial writer also expresses doubt about how soon such protective legislation is likely to be passed (and even more to the point, implemented), because, it wisely observes, the officials involved are hardly likely to be very interested, since ‘officials… employ domestic workers too’, and they are very likely to obstruct, or drag their feet over, any measure designed to make it harder for them to live easy-going lives on the cheap (two thousand for the part-time bai every month, and PF contributions, and medical insurance and one paid holiday every week? Can there be a more terrible vision of hell?). How true. Only, I should like to spread the net wider. Don’t our netas employ domestic workers, and won’t they (or their wives) have strong objections too? Indeed, doesn’t this apply to our whole burgeoning middle class, comprising doctors, engineers, teachers, and journalists? To the best of my knowledge, few of their counterparts in the really ‘advanced’ countries can afford the luxury of domestic help on a daily basis – simply because those countries, though they too are democratic and not all of them style themselves socialist, have actually managed to give the poorest of workers the kind of dignity and wages and security that our miserables can only dream of… and that, rather than the number of IT-workers and Facebook users and millionaires, is what justifies their claim to be advanced!

            Coincidentally or otherwise, in the op-ed article titled Dangerous Mission on the same page, the noted economist Prabhat Patnaik has mused on the very disturbing mindset currently in vogue among our ruling classes, as recently voiced by none less than the prime minister himself, to the effect that a high growth rate of gross national income should be the paramount – if not the only – national goal for any decent and sensible Indian: indeed, anyone who thinks otherwise may soon find himself socially outcast, if not liable to be thrown in jail! As any economist of a far lesser stature than Dr. Manmohan Singh should know, the mere crude growth rate indicates very little about what is happening to the country, in terms of real progress, as measured by improvements in the overall standard of living as well as the safety, security, longevity, health, education and happiness of the total population. More drugs, more lethal weapons, more lunatic asylums, more fancy junk food outlets, more fairness creams, more movies of the trashiest kind – the increase of the output of just about anything figures as growth in the national accounts (and I am reminded of the joke that if a man marries his cook the national income goes down, since he is no longer paying her for her services). Besides, the growth figure by itself says nothing at all about who gets what, and how much: which is the question of overwhelming importance to all but the richest (and/or most ignorant - there is a surprising degree of overlap!) five per cent of the population.

Indeed, it is an oft-repeated and very thoroughly documented fact of economic history that unless wisely controlled and guided (by society as a whole and most directly by government working in the larger interest), a high overall growth rate, while ensuring the flooding of urban areas with luxury goods and a few thousand suddenly-very-rich customers for those goods (most of them quite unnecessary for a good life, like Louis Vuitton bags, and often very harmful to the environment and a drag upon natural resources, like golf courses and SUVs), either does little to ameliorate the lot of the really poor and most needy (in whose name all 'development' projects are still justified!), or even actually worsens it. And indeed, though the jury is still out, there are already enough hard data from many impeccable sources (as Patnaik has pointed out here, and has elsewhere been variously done by stalwarts like P. Sainath and Amartya Sen) to indicate that not only have things not improved for a very large number of Indians after two decades of near-dazzling economic growth (India still has the largest number of absolute poor in the world, defined as those who survive on less than US $1 a day, and greater incidence of poverty than even sub-Saharan Africa!) but that things have actually grown worse for many of them (our per capita foodgrain consumption, which rose from less than 150 kg per year at the time of independence to nearly 180 kg in the late 1980s, fell again to around 156 kg in 2008, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN – and this in a country where obesity among the idle rich has already acquired clinically menacing proportions; so if the latter are eating like pigs, what are the very poor eating at all – given that the cheapest rice is going at Rs. 17-20 a kilo, onions at Rs. 60-70, the cheapest unbranded cooking oil Rs 60-plus, sugar Rs. 35 and lentils Rs. 80-100?).

 Dr. Patnaik quotes not only his personal god, Karl Marx, but also that greatest of the 19^th-century English liberals, John Stuart Mill, to argue that this is not a happy state of affairs; I have not only abetted him by referring to Sainath and Amartya Sen, but could go on to reel out the names of all the greatest and best human beings through history in support, from Buddha and Hazrat Muinuddin Chisti to Vivekananda and Tagore and Gandhi and Satyajit Ray… but what more could you expect in a country where the likes of the low-end-software peddler-cum-body shopper Nandan Nilekani now presume to show us visions of national greatness?  There is a saying in Bengali, haati ghora gyalo tol/ mosha bole koto jol (the mosquito scoffs at the depths in which elephants and horses have sunk). Even a great tycoon like JRD Tata had once said 'I'd not so much want India to become a superpower as a country where everyone was happy'! My hero John Kenneth Galbraith, lifelong professor of economics at Harvard, used to laugh that in the 1950s and 60s, the American obsession with a high growth rate was such as if they all expected to be asked by St. Peter at the gateway of heaven only how much they had contributed to that growth. Fifty years down the line, we have caught up (just as we are planning to send a man to the moon, too). Aren’t we progressing, doing everything stupid now, at last, that the Americans were doing half a century ago?

Change resistant, am I?

Quite a few people have told me that they have been reading this blog all through last year. I should like them to let me know which posts they found most interesting/touching/informative or thought-provoking.

Some people are born conservative-minded, and most people grow more resistant to change as they grow old. Someone reminded me of this recently, probably hinting that I had better watch out if I didn’t want my public image to get cemented as a stick-in-the-mud, who hates all kinds of change and wants desperately to hang on to old-fashioned ways.

Well, indeed, I have never been excited by change for the sake of change (so I’ve always laughed at fashion trends, and I’d go on wearing the same old jacket as long as it doesn’t look shabby). I also ignore a lot of change around me as essentially trivial (as I have done with Facebook and twitter after giving them a year’s trial) no matter how big a noise they make, and I do believe that a lot of things about old-fashioned ways are worth conserving (like good manners and museums, and teachers taking pains to drill their pupils in math or grammar, and giving marriage a very long trial before breaking up…). But I think those who imagine me to be an inveterate change-resister simply don’t know me, and if I make out a very short list of changes that I wish to see in my lifetime, many of them, supposedly eager votaries of change, may quickly and quietly decide that they cannot stomach so much drastic change after all. So here’s a tentative wish-list at the start of a new year. I’d like to see

1.      that war is officially banned everywhere, and only the UN is allowed to keep a standing army;

2.      that in no country (especially where there are large numbers of poor people still) are multi-million dollar incomes allowed by law, nor giant inheritances;

3.      that no one, not even the most competent technician (by which I mean everyone from doctors, accountants, engineers and managers to plumbers and carpenters) is allowed to call himself educated unless duly authorized colleges certify that s/he has also had a thorough grounding in the humanities (which would include compulsory reading and assignments on a very considerable amount of literature in at least two languages);

4.      that in no society are parents any longer allowed to drill it into the minds of children that monogamous one-time marriage between two members of the opposite sexes is the only ‘nice and normal’ thing to go for once one grows up;

5.      that mandatory speed governors be installed on all motor vehicles which ply on municipal roads and busy highways;

6.      that worship of money (rather than achievement or accomplishment of any significant kind) would automatically brand every man and woman as uncivilized;

7.      that conversely, everyone who puts ideals like beauty and justice and freedom far above money and machines be automatically accorded the tag of civilized – as indeed every ‘great’ society from Periclean Athens to Gupta-era India to the Tang era in China to 18^th century France has actually done;

8.      that the pursuit of science and art and teaching are again accorded the status they deserve, which is that they are the pursuits of the best of men for the highest social good, and not merely ways of making a living;

9.      that Singapore- and Switzerland-style laws against littering and noise and vandalism be enacted and enforced in every city in the world;

10.  that every able-bodied man and woman give mandatory national social service for at least two years of his or her life within the first thirty years (the kind of thing they do in Israel, and the kind of thing the NCC and NSS were started in India for).

… and that is only a small part of all the changes I should like to see. Now then, change, anybody?

Goodbye, 2010

As I write, the sun has set on the last evening of the year: 2010 is coming to a close.

In one sense, it has been an eventful decade for me, and busy enough. Big family turmoil, successive surgeries on my wife and one on myself, minor accidents on the road, dad-in-law having and surviving a stroke, resigning my job and learning to be self-employed after I was past 38, getting used to the world of mobile phones and the internet, having some of my writing published, writing a whole book for my daughter, travelling again and again to different parts of the country, teaching thousands, bringing up my daughter, warding off and surviving all kinds of mischief-makers bent on giving me depression at best and a bad name at worst, buying a new car and a house, coping with at least two great bereavements and people who have taken me through emotional roller-coasters deliberately or otherwise, getting burnt and food-poisoning, saving obsessively month after month, year after year, being betrayed very badly by some I had loved and trusted… yes, I guess I have had my hands full.

And yet, strange to say (I was reading my journal entries nearly a decade old), time seems to have stood still. Were it not for the fact that my daughter’s grown so big, and that I have thinning grey hair and the beginnings of a paunch and twinges in both knee joints now when climbing stairs of winter mornings, this could still be December 2000. Very few really big changes have come about in my life and lifestyle in all these ten years, despite so many things happening: or at least I wonder why it seems that way. That is why it feels so weird to see and hear from so many people who were children then and are quite grown-up now, married, divorced, making a living, researching and teaching in their turn, raising children of their own, scattered all over the world, some having turned into snobs, some fancying themselves to be intellectuals, many ‘too busy’ to look back, some gone astray, some already thoroughly sick of life. When did they grow up? Have they really grown up at all? Have I grown old, or has Time somehow passed me by, so that I feel I am hardly much older than these people? Do all ageing teachers feel this way, or is this something peculiar to me?

They have put up colourful festoons and bright lights in the little industrial township next door: in a few hours’ time, the merry-making will begin there, as in millions of households and hotels and resorts all over the country, dancing, feasting, jesting, carousing until many of them have drunk themselves silly, and so another New Year will be rung in with head-splitting hangovers and surly mutterings. I have in mind the sort of people who write comments saying ‘Get a life!’, because I prefer to stay at home and think, and reflect, and write the year away. More sand trickling down the hourglass, but I don’t feel too bad about it. I guess I have stepped into what the poet called the ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’, and though I crib sometimes, it’s certainly a vast improvement upon the hectic, confused and dreary adolescence and youth that I have had to live through. In the year ahead, I wish some of my readers will find serenity.

There are such people around us, too

Tomorrow will be Christmas Eve, so I shall continue to muse on the Christmas theme…

It is not quite a coincidence that lately I have been handling stories in class on the essential spirit of the season, telling us what being human is and is not about, both for one’s own self and for others: Tolstoy’s How much land does a man require, O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi, and Ebenezer Scrooge invisibly and enviously watching the Christmas revelry at the Cratchits’ in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. And I have been musing, like a thousand times before, about giving and sharing and loving. I read in Robert Fulghum’s classic heart-warmer All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten about how V. P. Menon, who rose from obscure poverty to become the most powerful bureaucrat in Jawaharlal Nehru’s first government, had repaid his debt to someone who had helped him out at a time of great distress in his youth with a small gift of money by giving charity of the same amount many thousands of times to perfect strangers in need throughout his life.

I have also read in Reader’s Digest, November 2010 edition, how a self-made Austrian tycoon aged 48 is giving away all his wealth to charity, and insists that he is doing it because it’s brought him a kind of happiness that he never thought existed, just like Dickens’ Scrooge, because he has found he had been wasting away his precious life chasing things he had absolutely no need for (fancy villas, snazzy cars, expensive holidays, grossly-overpriced clothes with designer labels, getting sozzled on champagne, trophy wives), socializing with people who were just as shallow, aimless, conceited and wasteful as he used to be, while the lives of so many in the world out there could be made safer and healthier and happier with a little bit of his money.

And it’s not only mad millionaires who give away a great deal of their money. Hard on the heels of that article comes another one in this month’s RD, paying glowing tributes to those they have rewarded with the title Asians of the Year. The top award has gone to a 60-year old roadside vegetable vendor in Taiwan, who has been working since teenage, still maintains a backbreaking work schedule day in, day out, and yet has managed to give – hold your breath – the equivalent of fifteen million Indian rupees in charity so far, following a habit of simple living, careful saving, ignoring the follies of ‘high’ society and caring for everybody around her whose need is greater than hers.

The saints have said ‘Give until it hurts’. These people are saying it doesn’t hurt to give, it’s actually great fun, and brings a profound sense of satisfaction. And yet, when the editor sadly says ‘if regular middle-class families too made giving an important part of our lives, it will make a real difference… we have so much to learn from this elderly vegetable seller!’ I know, only too well, how much it hurts people like us to give away the tiniest bit of even things that we don’t need at all. It hurts to give up that obscene birthday bash at a fancy hotel, it hurts to forego the holiday abroad, it hurts to make do with a cheap watch or vanity bag for several years, it hurts to give a rickshaw puller five extra rupees when he has pulled you a mile through blazing heat, it hurts even to give away books we’ll never read and clothes we haven’t worn for ages, it hurts to express gratitude to those whom you owe a great deal, and it hurts to give sad and lonely people a patient and sympathetic ear…

I am reminded of the old Bengali doggerel ota ke re? / ami khoka / mathay ki re?/ aamer jhankaa / khash na kano?/ daante poka / bilosh na kano?/ ore baba! Which, crudely translated, would sound like this:

Who’s there? – just the kid

What are you carrying? –  mangoes under a lid

Why don’t you eat them? – this toothache’s horrid

Give them away then? – God forbid!

So Karl Rabeder and Chen Shu-chu make me bow my head in admiration and respect in a way that no tycoon or cricket celebrity or scholar or merely successful professional man will ever do. If that makes a lot of people gnash their teeth because they, highly admirable in their own eyes, find it unbearably hateful that they can’t extract the same respect from me, I am sorry for them.

And I shall consider myself deeply rewarded if a few readers, after going through this post, tell me ‘Now I know why you have always stuck to a lifestyle much less fancy than you could afford…’ Maybe I keep all that ‘extra’ money for better things!

P.S., Dec. 31: I should like my readers to look up this earlier post  in this context.

Santa Claus is coming to town...

The short winter set in this time with clockwork precision: the first really chilly day here was 15^th December. I guess it will vanish as punctually as a German drill sergeant, too, which means I have just one month to savour all its charms. And by God, I am trying to.

It is deliciously cold if you go out on a scooter early in the morning or late evenings. Hot baths and hot soups are a pure delight, and so is sitting in the sun in the afternoons, soaking the warmth into the bones, and snuggling into blankets at night. Sometimes a balmy breeze blows up, and the sky overhead is a dazzling azure: I can never have enough of it. Fruits and fresh vegetables are available aplenty and in lush variety – even if they are not cheap – and a good walk stimulates the appetite for the simplest of meals (although I am ashamed I am indulging myself on my wife’s wonderful cooking). My workload is at its lightest around this time of the year, too, and so I have lots of time to laze around the way I like. Physically I am in good shape, there’s enough money in the bank to suffice for all the needs of anyone except those who are greedy and live to show off; there are people around who care for me and make it apparent, and lovely books to read and movies to watch and puppies and children to play with and a lot of bird song and butterflies flitting in the garden, and the year has passed without mishap. Above all, I don’t have to rush around to make a living, nor to cringe before and ingratiate myself with countless undeserving people, as, alas, so many people have to. My daughter is growing up like a blissful dream before my eyes. Truly I have a great many good things in life to be deeply grateful for. I only wish I could make a lot more people happy, and my only regret is that so many people are making the world so dirty and noisy and ugly merely because they have been brainwashed into the wrong way to pursue the good life…

Anyway, it’s the season of universal good cheer and goodwill, so I send out my most earnest regards, blessings and good wishes to all. May everybody have a Merry Christmas. May more people find out that all they need in this world is happiness, and the only happiness possible in this world comes from sharing and giving and loving (besides work that you enjoy for its own sake). Not from capital and technology, not from political power or fancy intellectualism, not from marks and degrees and pubbing and shopping. God bless us all with a little wisdom.

A waking nightmare

Jaded as I am, I had a most jarring experience in class yesterday. I had just read aloud Guy de Maupassant’s famous 1884 short story, The Necklace, and reached the horrible twist in the last line – when Matilda Loisel realizes that she and her husband have ruined their lives for nothing – an ending which makes me shiver forty years after I first heard my mother telling me the story, and believe it or not, many of the children in the class laughed! They found the wanton ruination of two human lives funny! These were kids in their early teens, too, people who you would think had not lived long enough for their innate intelligence and sympathy to be deadened by too much sordid worldly experience.

All I can say is Jesus Christ… what kind of adults are they going to grow into? People who will laugh to see parents or children being crushed by trucks on the highway, and carry on with life as though nothing very significant has happened?

Mind you, most of these are what these days is called ‘bright’ students, in the sense that they get reasonably good marks in school science and math tests, and (merely extrapolating from so many years of teaching experience) I can confidently predict most of them will be in medical and engineering colleges a few years from now.

Is the world filling up with monsters? Would I want one of those engineers to build a house for me, leave alone ask one of those doctors to look after me in my old age? (do scroll down a bit to the post titled Morality Training for doctors?)

One thing that I am now convinced about: you need to teach people to feel (good feelings, especially, not the brute ones like anger and greed and sloth and avarice and vengeance, which, heaven knows, have never needed to be taught) just as you need to teach math and science. Unfortunately, education worldwide has concentrated maniacally on the latter kind of teaching, to the detriment of the former in the name of ‘progress’ – assuming that people will just somehow learn to become good human beings by themselves, automatically. We are now beginning to reap the whirlwind.

Hurry, distraction and the net-on-mobile

Imagine a young Newton trying to work out one of those famous equations of motion or Wordsworth thinking up Daffodils or Bach composing one of his gems while answering the cellphone while zooming down the highway on a motorbike.

I had a little argument via email with my thoughtful ex-student Navin the other day about the wonders of the internet, and then I read this article about the epidemic of multi-tasking (also see the New York Times article mentioned therein). I hope everybody will notice that a writer and a medical-school teacher have complained equally vociferously about exactly the same thing. Look them up, all, then get back to me.

I can vouchsay that everything from new publications being full of howlers and typos (which I never saw in books of the 1940s and 60s, though the proofreaders had no computers to help them!) to botched surgical operations to bankers messing up statements of accounts to third-grade essays being written by high school pupils to the alarming rise in road accidents to the fact that kids these days cannot remember things they ‘learnt’ three months ago while those of our generation and older can easily call back what we were taught many decades ago – all this can be laid at the door of this multitasking scourge, to which the mobile-net addiction contributes mightily. Think: what kind of a romance can you have, even, when the so-called lovers meet up only to check messages from their respective friends every two minutes? Who says it’s just an unrelated accident that so many of my ex-students have already broken up with their spouses within a year or two of marriage?

I thank God that I can still enforce the no-mobile-phones-in-my-class rule very strictly, and I pity the schoolteachers who cannot (as is now true in many places). They are wasting time on those who have become incapable of learning anything (so many ex-students who are in college now solemnly assure me it is impossible to pass examinations without cheating!) I shudder to think of the world of the 2030s, when all the people in their prime will be like this: a thousand grasshoppers jumping around in their heads all the time, hopelessly incapable of concentrating on any one serious occupation for more than five minutes, whether it be a debate or a piece of engineering design or driving a car or listening to music. Already people are blasé about getting run over by trains and buses while talking into their phones, and utterly shameless about texting away at an office meeting – I only wonder how much worse things are going to get. How much longer before parents by the millions ‘forget’ to bring home their children at night (as they are right now forgetting to pay their wards’ school fees), and surgeons ‘forgetting’ to sew up after operations? Looking at the kids whom I teach today, I can assert that such a scenario has now become entirely plausible. In this connection, also look up this post on my other blog.

Morality training for doctors?

I saw in the newspaper the other day that the government, alarmed by the rising tide of reports and complaints about inhuman callousness, irresponsibility and greed among doctors all over the country, is mulling over the idea of including a course on human rights in medical colleges by way of a corrective, so that the next generation of doctors may be sensitized to be better human beings, and not merely technically competent (the two are not as independent of each other when it comes to dealing with humans as most people think) while dealing with people in their care.

Given the prevailing social climate of greed is good and making money is everything, who will lay bets against me that such a course, if implemented, would be any more effective than the environmental education syllabus introduced in schools more than a decade ago has been in making more environmentally responsible citizens, or self-imposed codes of conduct, such as there exist, have made teachers, policemen, mediapersons, business executives and politicians more disciplined and service-oriented on the whole?

Physician, heal thyself, goes the hoary adage. I shall insist that it applies equally strongly to all the other vital services. And that in today’s social ambience, only a few isolated eccentrics are bothered about upholding certain minimum standards and ideals: all the rest have become so dedicated to the blind chase of easy lucre that the dividing line between right and wrong has become blurred, if not invisible, a long time ago…anything goes as long as you can get away with it, and you are not the victim.

Millennial musing

I wonder whether a lot of people have noticed it, but the first decade of the new century (and millennium) is over.

Many of my readers are too young to remember the (frequently synthetic and exaggerated) worldwide excitement that surrounded the turn of the last century. People like me, on the other hand, who were old enough to remember well because it all seems to have happened yesterday, have reason for both mirth and bemusement as we look back.

There were ‘millennial’ expectations galore, from the most gloomy sort (the world is soon going to come to an end…) to the most adolescent fantasies (we are soon going to migrate en masse to Mars, computers are going to educate us while we sleep). Most of the hyperbolic expectations have been – predictably enough – belied. Despite 9/11 and the Airbus A380 and Facebook and bird flu and the Harry Potter phenomenon and the current recession and the rise of China, I think the world of 2010 would be entirely familiar to any worldly-wise man from 2000 A.D. If that man also happened to be someone with a lively sense of history (meaning one who can easily go back a few hundred, or even thousand years in his mind, and can therefore remember so many things that have happened so often before), 2010 could in fact have been boring by its over-familiarity – coming after all the hype and hoopla, that is to say.

I should like my readers to disagree with me here. I should like them to tell me about all the really epoch-making things that have happened in the last ten years: things that are going to change our lives drastically and forever, and therefore will be remembered vividly a hundred years hence. The way, I mean, that (picking great events roughly ten decades ago at random) events like the publication of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Einstein’s annum mirabilis (1905), the first aeroplane flight, the discovery of the electron, the passing of Queen Victoria, the Russo-Japanese war which cracked the myth of white invincibility after a three-century run, the first great successes of the women's suffrage movement, the early political upheaval in Russia (which would lead to the world being torn into two a little more than a decade later) shook up the world…? Or would they agree with me that it has in comparison been rather a damp squib?

Bye bye time again...

The older we grow, the faster time seems to whiz by. It is hard to believe that I wrote a post titled To those about to become ex-students a whole year ago. It’s that time of the year again already when a very large number of pupils, 16 and 18 year olds, are going to leave my classes all together. I would like to say goodbye, thanks, good luck and love you to them, but I don’t want to repeat what I wrote so recently, and besides, I don’t have a lot of new things to say. But since it may sound new to the current outgoing batch, I’d ask them all to click on the above link and read it for themselves.

There were no big surprises this year. I can vouchsay that I have still not slackened up, the way so many teachers do as they grow old: I tried as hard as I could to make my classes both useful and interesting as I have done every year since I started teaching such a long time ago. There were, as always, some irritants, and also a few young people who kept the flame burning with their attention, affection and enthusiasm, so that I could tell myself before going to sleep night after night that it wasn’t a bad job after all.  There were a few girls among them too, which was most gratifying.

But I keep getting more tired and dispirited year after year. And that is only partly due to advancing age (there are many busy and vigorous teachers my father’s age): the tiredness comes mostly from the fact that more and more, no matter how hard I try, things are perforce becoming increasingly mechanical and lifeless because my ‘customers’ want it that way. It has been well said that you can take a horse to the water but you cannot make it drink; that you cannot describe a sunset to a blind man, that people don’t hear what they don’t want to hear. With a lot of people, stories, quizzes, debates, movies, jokes, games, music, nothing seems to work, nothing seems to shake them out of their apathy. Learning, people have decided, cannot be something enjoyable, worth remembering and therefore respecting (and this regardless of subject): it’s all about cramming and getting marks in examinations, only to be forgotten instantly in favour of more ‘interesting’ things (such as money and beauty care and shopping and parties and ‘reality’ shows on television), and therefore, there’s nothing more valuable and enduring to be gotten from a teacher than a few notes and tips and tricks to get through exams without too much effort. Naturally, the teacher’s value dwindles to zero the moment the exams concerned are over! There are, indeed, lots of teachers and tutors around these days (who knows but the majority of them) who have comfortably adjusted with the situation, and don’t care a whit, as long as they get paid in full till the last month, and then they wipe out the memories as quickly as their ex-students and their parents do: they are, I suppose, as happy as men can be. It’s my bad luck that I could never reconcile myself to becoming a mere trader in knowledge… it would have been a far wiser move, when I still had the time to choose, to become a stockbroker instead, because there would have been the prospect of much more money there, at least, than any teacher can hope to make!

Anyway, as I often tell people these days, I can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel. Once my daughter is on her own two feet, and I don’t have to bother much about making a living any more, I shall turn away from this thankless grind. One way to do that would be to take in large batches as I have always done, but with the caveat that after the first three months, I shall turn away most of them, keeping back only the maybe twenty per cent or so who have given ample evidence that they are really keen on learning the way I would like them to be – and their school reports and parental ambitions be damned (ten years down the line the parents will be much junior to me anyway). Added to my savings, they will just about give me enough money for me and my wife to live in a humble style, but I shall certainly enjoy myself a lot more. And all the time I save when I no longer have a seven-days-a-week routine can be happily invested in doing the things I have always loved to do: writing, travelling, watching movies, listening to music, playing with toddlers, getting involved in welfare work, counselling, perhaps learning new things again. It is looking forward to that prospect that cheers me up most these days… after a forty-year marathon, if I live, I guess I shall have earned it.

Obama in India

There is both a lot of heartburn as well as exultation in the Indian mass media over President Barack Obama’s ongoing visit to India.

The heartburn stems from the fact that the US of A is still unwilling/unbothered about acknowledging India’s notional Great Power tag – they won’t endorse our bid for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, they are still dragging their feet over granting us full and legitimate nuclear-power status, they are still too cosy with Pakistan to acknowledge that we have a right to have our problems with that country fully and officially recognized, etc. The crowing is due to the fact that while only forty years or so ago our PM had to go hat in hand for help to the US, and was insulted as the representative of a third-rate backward country, the current incumbent in the Oval Office has come to hawk his country’s wares and solicit business because he desperately needs to create more jobs in his homeland in order to survive the next election – and India, supposedly, is one of the few countries which can help him create jobs on a significant scale, both by investing in US companies and by placing large orders, especially for defence equipment.

It would be nice if our media took a closer look at the ground realities and discovered for themselves that there is little cause for either heartburn or exultation.

No matter how much we dazzle ourselves with our recent successes, whether it be the average annual GNP-growth rate or the number of dollar millionaires we are creating every year or the razzmatazz of the recent Commonwealth Games, the fact remains that India is still one of the poorest and most backward countries in the world, and carries very little clout. Decide for yourself after checking out just the following statistics: the per capita income, compared with the ten richest countries, the number of people who live below or just above the poverty line (not less than 600 million – that’s twice the whole population of the United States), the number of illiterate people, the quality of our infrastructure (consider the power and drinking water situation in the capital city; you don’t even have to think about the hinterland), the number of Indians who have won Nobels and Oscars and Pulitzers and Grammys and Olympic golds in the last 50 years (that too, given the fact that we have the second largest population), the number of people from advanced countries who want to come and study in even our ‘elite’ educational institutes, the number of Indians who want to run away to the US for a better life, and the all-pervasive corruption in our public domain. Finally take into account the fact that, unlike in the era of Gandhi and Tagore, there are no Indians around who strike the rest of the world with awe (and don’t even bother to mention SRK or Sachin Tendulkar). Even where economic and military power is concerned, China is vastly better positioned to give the US headaches – or demand its respect – than we do. So heartburns can happen only to those Indians who live in a cloud-cuckoo-land of their own imagination. We literally have miles to go before we have a right to expect that the US take us seriously as a ‘great’ power.

As for the crowing, I should like to make the following points: a) it is gross bad manners to crow over others’ misfortune, as individuals or as nations, b) we haven’t got much to crow over anyway, seeing that the US, even in these troubled times, is a larger economy than the next three (including India) combined, c) they haven’t exactly come begging, but only to do some hard-nosed business, and they are not even willing to make any significant concessions to our national interests in return, such as increasing H-1B visa quotas, which means they still feel confident enough to ram what they want down our throats, d) it would be stupid on our part to forget that we depend on them (think of the dollar inflow from NRIs and FIIs) much more than they need us.

Both Obama and Manmohan Singh will negotiate with one hand tied behind their back, so we should wish both well, and not expect too much. Meanwhile, if we really want a future US President to treat us with the kind of respect that we like to dream of, let us remind ourselves that a long, tough road of nation-building lies ahead. We might start by resolving to set up a system whereby tens of thousands of beggars will not have to be unceremoniously carted off to distant towns in order to uphold our ‘national pride’ whenever an important foreign head of state comes visiting or some event like the Commonwealth Games is being held in the capital city !

Sorry, and new question...

So this last planned venture has definitely been given the thumbs down by my readers, if only by default: 600-plus visits in seven days, and only 13 people have felt enthusiastic enough about the project to tell me to go ahead. In a way it’s good that I had asked before plunging headlong into creating the new blog; it would have been so much effort wasted, and that would have been most annoying, because I’d have not even been doing it in the hope of making money, and I have to struggle to find time for all such new ventures.

I guess, for reasons unknown to me, people are still not willing to use the facility provided by the net for this kind of communication – at least not with me. So maybe I’ll just have to carry on dealing with them privately, face-to-face, on a one-on-one basis, as I have done for so many years. I wonder how much longer I’ll have the steam power, but that’s another question.

Anyway, my thanks as well as apologies to the few people who wrote in with encouraging comments. (One thing I couldn’t help noticing was that, while so many people write so much nonsense anonymously, this time, barring one stray exception which I have posted, there have been no anonymous comments at all!) And, as far as the earlier post is concerned, comments are closed, as of today.

Now let’s turn our attention in another direction. A fairly sincere and thoughtful pupil recently asked, in the context of something we were reading in class, ‘What does it mean to be truly human?’ Good question. I gave an answer in class, but I shall reserve opinion here for now: let’s hear what readers have to say.

What, in your opinion, makes someone truly human?

[P.S.: I found the picture on the net. If someone has copyright problems with my using it, please let me know]

Should I start a new kind of blog?

In the early days of this blog – that’s more than four years ago – I wrote this post giving a short explanation of why I was starting it. I should like my regular readers to check it out: once more, even if they have read it already sometime back.

Since then a lot of water has flowed under the bridge. This blog has willy-nilly become fairly interactive: many followers (growing every month), lots of visits, and a considerable sprinkling of sensible and interesting comments on almost every post. The same goes for the other blog too. That’s all very satisfying – and may the numbers keep increasing – but one thing that has been bothering me is that, contrary to what I had really wanted, these blogs are mostly about what I am thinking about various things, and people reacting to my thoughts. At the same time, lots of folks still come to me – if not in person then over the phone, or via email – for counsel on just about everything under the sun (see that link above again), people of all ages from teenagers to those who want help (not tuition) for their own children. I can’t attend to everybody at much length these days, and I get tired more easily too, tired of answering the same sort of questions again and again.

So do you think it would be a good idea to start up an all-new blog where the ‘posts’ will be questions from people (who might choose to remain anonymous, though I’d want to know a few things like age, gender and current occupation), while I answer their queries in the form of comments? One thing that many readers are sure to discover is that as more and more posts keep coming in, their own questions are getting answered, even though I never talked to them directly (many people don’t know whom to ask, or simply feel too hesitant to air their problems: and I have found through long experience that people who think their troubles are unique actually share them with lots of others!) The queries, I suppose, could be sent to me by email … but these and other details can be worked out gradually, if and when the new blog has been launched.

I shall wait keenly for responses to this post. And, for this once, even anonymous comments will be posted, as long as they say something relevant and meaningful.

P.S.: Nov. 01: Comments on this post are now closed.

mahavidya

The current October 2010 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine sadly ran what they call an ‘open  photo editorial’ (p.44), commenting on how shoplifting at our malls has become really big in this country – to the tune of an estimated Rs.5,000 crore a year (that’s about one billion US dollars), almost. Shoplifting happens in other countries, too, but the Indian figure, as a percentage of total sales is much higher than, say, in the US and UK. India, they said, has earned one more dubious distinction: ‘the shoplifting capital of the world’! They also wondered ‘what the Father of the Nation (to whose memory we still officially pay homage this month) would have said about such a collapse of national integrity’.

I was reminded by this story of the fact that a certain girl – ashamed to admit she used to be a pupil of mine – had boasted, after going to college in Delhi, how ‘cleverly’ she and her college friends steal things from shops, all kinds of things from cheap trinkets to expensive electronic items, ‘just for fun’. That was maybe five years ago; I wonder what she’s stealing from the office now. And only a few days back I read in someone’s blog (another Delhi-wali college goer) that she has stolen books from the book fair ‘for fun’. Yes, say the Digest editors, for some people shoplifting can be ‘fun’. And they say there are even parents around who think ‘their thieving teenagers are clever, because the kids don’t get caught at their shameless (italics mine) game’.

A critical point to note is that all these thieves are ‘educated’ as well as well-off; they steal only for fun, or maybe out of greed, or merely to show their friends how ‘brave and clever’ they are. And, as noted above, there are lots of people from whom they win admiration for it: or at least, they are certainly not called ‘shameless’ and worse. Indeed, if you look into the comment on the last post I wrote on the other blog, you will see that someone has asked ‘Why should it be mandatory for everyone to be interested in the same things – such as books?’ I am sure that it is the same sort of (by now very numerous-) people who will say ‘Why should everyone be bothered about morals and things like that? That is so 1970s (or whatever)!’

In this context, I only wonder whether it is indeed a fact that there has been any all-round decline in national integrity of late, as the Digest editors seem to think. Aren’t fraud and theft and blackmail and lying and cruelty of the worst sort quite as much a part of ‘our hallowed tradition’ as the rise of great men and women now and then who have set good examples and persuaded a few of their fellow-Indians – for a while – to rise above the muck to better things? My reading of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata certainly makes me think like that. I have read about graft on a gigantic scale in Mughal times, and heard that even in my grandfather’s youth – that’s about 70 years ago –  the municipal Corporation of Calcutta was called chorporation (den of thieves), where nothing moved without a bribe. From Vidur to Gandhi, good men have been freaks actually, I think, who have in vain rocked the boat briefly before vanishing from the stage, leaving the ‘wonder that is India’ to wallow back in the filthy mire, which, maybe, is the only place where most of us really feel at ease. After all, there is nothing new about the Bangla saying churi vidya mahavidya, jodi na poro dhora (theft is a great art, if you can avoid getting caught). The only difference that may have come about lately is that people have become more ‘shameless’ about what they do, more in-your-face, even ‘proud’ of it. Until very recently, men like Harshad Mehta, Ketan Parekh, Ramalinga Raju and Lalit Modi were being touted as icons and role models for our youth, remember? Their bad luck they got caught: it is an open secret that countless ‘icons’ of exactly the same ilk are still sitting proudly on their pedestals! Who cares how they made their money? Isn’t just having loads of money everything these days? I have never yet met a young man who is ashamed that his father got rich stealing scrap metal from a steel plant. 

Our children get to know it and practise it, apparently with their parents’ tacit (or even explicit) approval, in school itself, the day they start copying in exams, don’t they? If ever they get caught, their parents raise a huge ruckus about how the poor darlings don’t really deserve any serious punishment, don’t they? And, as I shall never tire of pointing out, it is these millions of children who grow up, by way of honing their skills at cheating, shoplifting and other minor arts like that, to become ‘successful’ doctors and engineers and teachers and bureaucrats and lawyers and politicians and business tycoons, don’t they? So why don’t we at least collectively cry halt to our other national passion once and for all: that of forever beating our breasts about how ‘corrupt’ this country is becoming? Why not declare that churi vidya… will be our national motto hereafter, for one and all – and then find out whether a country which bases its economy and polity explicitly on such a foundation can survive for long. Which crooked millionaire wants his milkman or tailor to cheat him? The one universal constant that I have found in dealing with people is that even thieves absolutely hate it when others cheat them or steal from them; that's the one time they talk nineteen to the dozen about the need for morals! Why can’t we applaud those who are smarter crooks than we are, even when they are picking our pockets?

 Besides, why should someone who steals Rs. 50 be called a crook and another who steals hundreds of crores be invited to lecture at high-end business schools?