Sir and Madam, if you please

My wife was laughing the other day when our long-time insurance agent suddenly started addressing her as ‘Madam’. Both are Bengalis, mind you, and he had been calling us dada and boudi for years. Why the sudden shift to an alien style? Well, he shamefacedly admitted, a lot of women these days take offence if he uses ‘obsolete’ forms of address such as boudi…

We have heard the same from others, too, greengrocers and sweetmeat sellers among them. One fishmonger was hugely relieved and pleased when my wife told him she much prefers to be called boudi, as of old. He even had an explanation for the new fashion: ‘They’ve picked it up at the shopping malls!’ And the wives of the yuppies are much more prickly, it seems, than their men-folk are.

I remember that when I sat in the St. Xavier’s library in the halcyon days, and parents of boys in class 9 and 10 with any kind of query relating to their wards were routinely sent up to me by the headmaster, many of them felt this compulsion to speak to me in English, under the impression that to talk to an English teacher in an English-medium school in anything other than English was simply not done. Invariably they would take in a deep breath, puff up their chests, throw their shoulders back, go goggle-eyed and let loose a torrent of pidgin, whether they were engineers or clerks. Only perhaps one in a hundred could really talk in English, but what passion they threw into their voices! I could hardly listen for a minute before I was struggling to smother a smile, and I had to tell them that I was as much a  Bengali as they, and I would much prefer to converse in the native language. They looked nonplussed for a moment, then switched over to Bengali with obvious relief. Not that they could speak good Bengali, either, but that is another story.

The same happens in the bank I go to. Those manning the counters insist on talking in English, even if I begin the conversation in Bengali, but the moment I am driven by exasperation to start talking in English, they register alarm and promptly switch back to Bengali or Hindi…

What a country we have made, indeed: the most cultured among us are ashamed of our native tongues and so proud of speaking in an alien language most of them have only the most tenuous grasp of!

Pausing for a while...

Something that sometimes saddens and sometimes irks me is to see comments coming in saying things which make it obvious that the writer has either not read things I had written earlier, or not understood, or quite forgotten about them!

There is a search bar along the right-hand column of this blog, you know, just so that before dashing off a comment you can check out whether and what I had written on the subject already – just type in key words like education or religion or prices or Harry Potter or freedom or China or poems and see what is available. You might be pleasantly surprised to see that I have said a lot of things on all these subjects already: and you might find your queries answered, your doubts resolved. If you don’t like using the search bar, you may instead click on the various labels (‘personal’, ‘worldview’, ‘tributes’, ‘earliest posts’ etc). It will be a nice gesture to me, too, saving me the trouble of repeating things I have said (sometimes more than once-) before!

I have myself been going over some old posts lately, and there are now quite a lot of them, on a great variety of subjects. And since I don’t normally write about nine-day wonders, most of them are quite as relevant today as they were on the date of writing.

So I shall not write on anything ‘new’ for a while (what’s the big deal about newness anyway? An obsession with novelty is a sign of a weak mind that merely lives from sensation to sensation, retaining no memories and having no use for reflection … that’s not the kind of reader I wish to attract and keep). Instead, I shall wait expectantly for comments to come in on some really old posts. Like this one, for instance.

Adieu handwriting?

Some schools in the state of Indiana, USA, are bidding goodbye to handwriting as an essential and fundamental skill to be acquired by all children during their formative years in favour of texting and typing, says a report in The Times of London, quoted in The Telegraph, Kolkata, 13^th July (middle of p.3. I couldn’t find the link on their website). Apparently in 41 of the US states already, it is not compulsory for children to learn to write by hand any more. This may be the beginning of a great new trend, resulting in a world, maybe fifty years or a hundred years from now, where nobody (except a few antiquarians and cranks here and there) will know how to write with a pen any more…

All is flux, said Heraclitus and the Buddha long ago, all things must pass. There were countless skills that took great patience and labour to acquire, but were nevertheless acquired and admired by millions down the ages, and now they are gone. Like how to churn butter or hitch a horse to a wagon, says the report itself. Or swordsmanship and handling sails on a ship or remembering the contents of thousands of books, I may suggest. Even things like painting pictures by hand are on their way to becoming lost arts, and so may be the ability to do arithmetic in one’s own head, if my reading of the situation around me is right. So why not handwriting, indeed? Truth is, I should be happy – being a teacher of language, compelled to read and mark large amounts of text daily, I have nearly worn my eyes out reading the ghastliest of scrawls for nearly thirty years, and computer printouts should be a great deliverance. My old boys tell me that professors in many colleges even in this country are already insisting that assignments be done on computer and sent over by email for correction and marking: it’s so much less of a bother that way. It mightn’t be long before schoolteachers follow suit, and bye bye to carrying huge piles of homework books home and back every day. What a blessed relief that will be. And who writes letters longhand these days anyway? Personally, it won’t be any trouble at all: I have been typing fast since teenage, and already in the mid-1990s I was warning pupils that typewriting would become an essential skill soon. So why should I be upset now?

Yet I must confess I can’t help sighing wistfully. One reason is that I am the type who believe that anything that has been cherished for countless ages is likely to have some intrinsic value, so it should not be lightly forgotten, especially when the replacement is no great shakes (think: contact lenses have not been able to replace the spectacles which have been around for centuries, and despite the electronic music board, millions are still learning how to play real musical instruments – why?). Another is that, as some scholars, researchers and thinkers have already pointed out (and this has been mentioned in the report itself), any skill like good handwriting (or doing sums quickly and accurately in the head) which takes years of patient labour to acquire has strong beneficial effects on the human brain, which may be lamented only when they are lost – as a lot of people are already lamenting the demise of systematic drilling in grammar during the school years! A third reason is (and I say this though I am not as sentimental as some much younger people are) there is something personal and sincere about handwritten communication that can simply not be duplicated if the same is done via computer and internet. But the most important reason of all is that I fear that – leaving aside communications of a strictly business nature, such as office files and legal documents – all communication via computer and mobile phone is likely to be of a far more trivial, superficial and ephemeral nature, of no lasting value, unlike things written by hand. It is not just an irrelevant coincidence that a lot of successful professional writers prefer to write longhand even in this day and age, and one cannot imagine people of today writing letters like Chesterfield or Keats or Tagore (Chhinnopotro) or Churchill via keyboard or keypad. If that is not a loss to civilization, tell me what is (provided you have any idea what I am talking about)? I may not be so bitter and melodramatic as the commentator in the Wall Street Journal who writes ‘…it presages a further hollowing out of the human personality, a further colonization of the human mind by the virtual at the expense of the real’, but I am both sad and worried nevertheless. I belong to a generation which is equally at home with handwriting and typewriting, but think of entire generations of children being educated without ever wielding a pencil!

Whether you think that the supersession of handwriting will or will not be a great leap forward, do let me hear your views.

Quirky lists

It’s July 8^th today: Shilpi has just reminded me that my blog is now five years old (see the post titled ‘Four years old’ written a year ago). How fast time passes, really. I can hardly believe that I have been doing this without a break for five whole years! Many thanks to all the readers who have kept me going all this time by visiting regularly and commenting frequently. I hope they too want this blog to continue for many more years, as I do.

As some people might have noticed already, I have recently added a blog titled ‘Listverse’ on my blog-roll. The fellow’s strongly idiosyncratic, of course, but he is harmless, and clever, and wicked, and though I don’t always agree with him (as I commented on his recent post about why he thinks newspapers are on the way out), I generally enjoy the slightly weird lists that he keeps putting up. He’s been teaching me a thing or two, too (as my daughter has written in her own recent blogpost). His latest post is ‘10 Industries that thrive on holidays’, and I relished the hard-hitting cynical tone so much that I must draw my readers’ attention to it (do read some of the comments, too: so many people have nothing to say to him except ‘I hate you’!).

Among other things, it should make you think: the very fact that these ten industries are thriving as never before should give the lie to the oft-repeated claim that people these days are terribly busy all the time. With so many holidays, and with so many people having both the leisure and the money to throw at all those holidays, one can only sigh to think that there used to be a time when most people had to work most of the time just to make a bare living (I have been reading Dickens lately, and his world seems light years away). That’s progress for you.

While the party lasts.

A Telephone Conversation

(with a doff of the hat to Wole Soyinka)

An old girl rang me up from distant Bangalore last night, essentially because she wanted to hear my voice, and because she wanted a shoulder to weep over about a lot of unsettling things that have been happening lately – accidental death of loved ones, loneliness, inability to focus on essential work at hand, loss of self confidence and lack of direction, etc. etc. I said what I usually say on such occasions (which are not infrequent), and, to cut a long story short, she sounded much more cheerful towards the end of the nearly half-hour conversation, and acknowledged as much, adding, ‘Sir, you have no idea how much you have done for so many of us, and how much you still mean to us. Thank you!’ Goes without saying, it made my day.

And in turn it made me think of so many who gushed that way in class and then have dropped out of my life completely. Other boys and girls even tell me that some of them regret not having kept in touch, and wish they could renew the connection, but are ‘too scared’ to try, remembering that I had made scathing remarks in class about how many will gush and forget, and they fear they will be in for some tongue-lashing if they do call, or email, or turn up at my door now, after a long hiatus.

I shall never stop wondering about what really draws people to a person, and what repels, and what makes us forget some people completely after their immediate ‘utility’ is exhausted.

And, of course, I grow more cynical every year, more convinced than ever that it’s not just about me and my ex-pupils: human beings in general care little about one another, even so-called loved ones, much beyond their immediate utility. I have heard so many things, you see. I have heard a father pointing to his wife and daughter and saying ‘I am just their ATM!’ and I have seen grown children referring to their aged fathers as burdens and old fools, and I have heard about the man impatiently asking the insurance agent ‘Who cares what my family will get when I am dead? Just tell me how much I will get if I am still alive when this policy matures.’ I have seen 'friends' falling out merely because one scored a few more marks than the other in some silly examination. And I have seen so many young married couples breaking up before my eyes, apparently because they simply couldn't bear each other any more.

I was recently going through some essays on the subject of love written as homework by some high-school girls, and I couldn’t help smiling sadly as I read through the absurd teenage romantic fluff. If only they knew a little more about hormones, and making a living, and going through the daily grind day after day, year after year…how I wish our children could grow up, not cynical, certainly, but a little more clear-eyed! I believe, you see, that even three generations ago their ancestors at this age were not quite so dumb, and therefore not quite so vulnerable to reality when it bites.

Summarizing Harry Potter

In recent years I have been re-reading and rewatching some great books and movies. So I read through the Mahabharata, Asimov’s Foundation series, all of the Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown books, the Don Camillo series, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Tolstoy’s Resurrection, and some more (quite a lot more, actually, and there were always new books to read besides). This, even as I realize ever more deeply how right Khushwant Singh was when he wrote (then approaching his nineties) that as one grows older, one realizes how many people one need never have met, how many meetings one need  never have attended, how many books one need never have read. One must not only be lucky enough to be free to choose, but have the power of discrimination that allows one to choose wisely – a power that, sadly, is given to too few of us, or is lost too early in life.

And even with all the freedom that one wants and all the discrimination one needs, one must concede that life is too short to savour all its pleasures over and over. There are simply too many good books, for instance, that I will never have the time to read from cover to cover again. Shortly after the seventh Harry Potter book (The Deathly Hallows) came out, therefore, I read through the whole saga at one go, and determined to write down my own summaries of all seven books, so that I could at least have the pleasure of re-visiting them from time to time. My daughter, avid Potter fan that she is, helped me most ably from the start. Sometime last year, when I had reached the last book, the continuity of the project was broken for some now-obscure reason (we became ‘busy’ with other, more pressing things, I suppose, as most people do when they do not want to admit that they simply grew impatient and distracted…). I am happy to say that today we have picked up the threads again, owing to my daughter’s stern reminder, and the job will soon be complete – before the last movie (DH 2) comes out in July. And it will give us both, father and daughter, a great deal of satisfaction.

A civilized person needs to carry around a lot of books inside her head. It helps to refer back now and then to summaries that one has made for oneself. It is also a most delightful feeling that I no longer have to think that I did it for my daughter, because I did it with her.

College admissions: curiouser and curiouser...

There is a certain elite college in Delhi which specializes in teaching commerce (much abused among the engineering fraternity – please refer to 3 Idiots), and this year they have announced that their required ‘cut-off’ score for admission is (hold your breath, all those who are both still sane and haven’t been reading the papers) 100%!

Even the Union Minister in charge of education, Kapil Sibal, who is not exactly feted for being a highly rational person, has publicly said that the decision is ‘completely irrational’ (The Telegraph, June 16, first page). An old boy of mine who saw the principal of the said college on a TV show said the man tried to defend the decision by claiming that it applied only to non-commerce stream applicants (it so happens that one science student has scored an aggregate of 100% marks in this year’s CBSE plus-two level examinations); for commerce students, the cut-off is ‘only’ 97%. This decision has been taken, according to the said principal, because they have a policy of taking in only the ‘very best’.

Here are a few things I would like to say as a lifelong teacher who also happened to be a better than average student in his time:

1.   Do the ‘very best’ habitually go for higher academics (recall gentlemen called Tagore and Sachin Tendulkar and Vishwanathan Anand and Dhirubhai Ambani) at all?

2. Of those who do, since when did the ‘very best’ start going for commerce studies?

3.  As for colleges indulging in this farce of setting 94% or 97% as their cut-off requirement, when will it cease? Isn’t it an open secret that most of those who score such marks these days are only slightly better than duds (most secondary- and higher secondary level toppers, briefly but ecstatically celebrated in the media, are never thereafter heard of again, as I have personally checked for nearly three decades: at most they become faceless managers in banks or power plants, working 12-hour days for a pittance)? I can also personally vouch that of all the scores of my own pupils who have got 90%-plus marks in ICSE English this year, hardly a handful ever scored more than 70% in the tests I gave them in class, even objective-type tests when I called out the answers and they marked themselves! Since the boards grossly inflate their abilities (and egos), why not prick the balloon by telling the colleges to select them strictly on the basis of their scores in standardized entrance tests, the way the engineering and medical colleges (and some top-of-the-line liberal arts colleges, like St. Stephen’s in Delhi and Presidency in Kolkata) do?

4.   And what about the school and plus-two boards deciding to give marks more sensibly, so that one has to be really, really good (as it was in my day) to score an aggregate higher than 80%, and 90% meant sure-shot Nobel Prize material? Would such a decision hurt anybody but idle semi-literate middle class mothers whose whole existence pivots around boasting about their children’s examination prowess before other equally stupid females?

Science contemporary style

This link to an article written by someone who ought to know the inside story of drug-development research should send shivers down many spines. Do read it slowly and mindfully right through.

My reflections:

1.      I know a little more about this than the man on the street, yet it gave me fresh nightmares.

2.      This is one reason why I steer clear of doctors and hospitals as far as I can, and never regret that I did not become a doctor myself.

3.      This is also why I have a (I believe healthy) disrespect for so-called science: meaning that I don’t swallow every kind of rubbish which is claimed to be the product of the ‘latest scientific research’.

4.      If this is the case in the USA, one can only imagine what the situation in India is like, where loyalties can be bought, and facts can be twisted to suit opinions convenient to the rich and powerful, so much more easily…

I shall be glad if, after reading the article through, some people want to engage in serious discussion on this issue – something that affects not just a few big business interests but all of us, in a very immediate and indispensable way.


P.S.: I have found that 'real' scientists are either quite ignorant of or disdainful of the subject called sociology of science.

Brief holiday

It was my half-yearly one week holiday, and I try to stay off the Net as much as I can during such times, hence the delay in posting.

It wasn’t much of a holiday actually: there was very mundane but essential work to attend to in the Big City, and it was sweltering hot all the time (though right now Durgapur is just as bad). Still, Kolkata did look a teeny-weeny bit cleaner and greener than usual – or was it my Didi-infatuated eyes playing tricks on me? And we got a bit of rain, though it did precious little to affect the weather for the better. Anything without air conditioning was a perfect nightmare, and whenever I feel like griping that God didn’t do enough for me, all I have to do to feel mightily better is remind myself I could have been a daily office-goer in Kolkata lifelong…

We took a two-day breather by scooting off to Diamond Harbour. It was a very nice hour-long drive from my in-laws’ place. Sagarika, the government tourist lodge, is located on a prime spot right on the waterfront. We took a liking to it immediately, although, expectedly, not everything was as spick and span as one would like, because the room was large and airy and slightly olde-worlde: I mean, very much on the generously expansive 1950s scale. One does not see such big bathrooms and enormous balconies in hotels these days, except in the five-star category. There wasn’t much activity on offer, but we were only looking for uninterrupted leisure, and we got it. The weather was just as muggy as in the city, but the waterfront was always breezy, and you could sit out on the river’s edge till nearly midnight if you wanted to, listening to the lapping of water on the shore and watching the lights of Haldia on the far bank, and following with your ears more than your eyes some small steamer or trawler throbbing away downriver in the dark. I dreamt how the first British ships had come up the same river more than 300 years ago to lay the foundations of empire, and also of how when I had last made a day-trip to the place, my entire expenses had not been more than a hundred rupees. To my daughter, they both sounded equally like fairy tales. Here is a link to some photographs that we took.

Back on the net, I am delighted to see that there have been so many comments on my last post (though, it goes without saying, I am always hungry for more), and that, without my noticing, the number of ‘followers’ has reached the 200 mark. Who was it, I wonder, the 200^th one? I’d have loved to thank her or him personally.  (The few who left recently were no loss; they had enlisted themselves for a lark, I’m sure, and never really read what I wrote). I am looking forward to suggestions from serious readers again. And I do wish that more people would look up my other blog more frequently…

Sal forests and driftwood collectors

My wife and I often simply run away together on the scooter to take a deep breath of fresh air whenever the life of the city begins to stifle us. We have been doing this unremittingly for the last 16 years. Once every two or three months, that is. There is a long tree-lined drive through the country that leads to the Ajoy river, and that is the route we invariably take. In all these years we haven’t tired of it. As the first picture shows, the Forest Department’s desultory efforts at conservation have managed to preserve only a thin line of sal trees bordering the road, but even that is enough for our thirsty eyes: the silence, disturbed only by the loud chirp of crickets even under the mid-day sun, the gentle breeze, the lush green of new and freshly-rain washed profusion of leaves, the absence of traffic (though it’s much worse now than 16 years ago) – the magic never fails to work. I took a few photos on my mobile phone (I keep forgetting to take my real camera along), and here are two of them, with apologies for the poor quality.

Where we stopped – I for a smoke and my wife for a drink of water – today, there was this villager struggling to tie up a huge bundle of dry twigs and driftwood that he had collected (fuel for the hearth) on to the carrier of his bicycle. He was huffing and puffing and making a bad job of it, and he let out a plaintive cry for help when he saw me. We fought with the bundle together until we had securely roped it up, then we paused to regain our breaths, and that is when I took the second photograph (he addressed me as ‘kakababu’: just imagine!)

I reflected that if the new government which has just assumed power can do something for this man, it will have achieved something praiseworthy indeed. And by something I don’t mean turning him into a drudge at a sponge-iron plant: he’s much better off as he is…

Salaam Mamata!

Shabaash, Mamata!

Be careful. Remember your promises. And God be with you.

An archive of infinite value

Google has done all mankind a signal service by helping to put online the historical resources of Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem based centre for remembering the Holocaust.

The work of this kind of research centre grows increasingly more important and valuable every day, as the last survivors die, and as hundreds of millions of children worldwide grow up history-illiterate (or, what is just as bad, unconcerned), and so they can be fed any nonsense, any vile and motivated garbage about what some of our ancestors did to their contemporaries.

Holocaust denial has become a kind of industry in many parts of the world. They say everything from ‘It never happened’, to ‘it was vastly exaggerated’. As if saying that ‘only’ fifty thousand or a hundred thousand Jews were slaughtered like sheep somehow makes the crime less ghastly, less mind-numbing than saying the number was close to six million; or as if saying a few million Jews were ‘only’ thrown out of their jobs and houses and countries, or robbed and beaten and raped and jailed as a national mission-cum-pastime for years together for no crime they had committed except the fact that they were Jews makes the horror less damning, more tolerable. I dare anyone who knows what it means to be human, to be a father/mother, a son/daughter or a husband/wife, and who knows about the Holocaust, to stand up and assert that a) it wouldn’t matter to him/her if it happened to ‘only’ his dearest one, and that b) knowing physics is ‘more important’ than knowing that kind of history, so s/he just doesn’t ‘have time’ for that kind of knowledge.

It didn’t happen to Jews only in Germany or German-occupied territories such as Poland during World War II, by the way. To cite just one instance, the Nazis did the Russians a service of incalculable value by deflecting the world’s attention from the record of the endless pogroms in which heaven knows how many million Jews suffered and died. And there are many countries, if truth be known, which have no right to hold their heads high over their record of treating the Jews, though they might never have descended to downright, cold-blooded mass slaughter.

And it hasn’t happened only to Jews, either. Even if we restrict our attention to the 20^th century alone, humans of every description who were unfortunate enough to be hated and weak minorities in the countries where they lived have been humiliated and slaughtered savagely in vast numbers, in all places from south America to the Balkans to Africa, the Indian subcontinent and East Asia. No one who has had both the energy and the stomach to go through that history of endless night should dare to say that the 20^th century was an era of spectacular and unsullied ‘progress’. No one except the technology-drunk (and also personally unaffected) can make a claim like that.

I carry no brief for what the state of Israel stands for today, nor have any wish to defend it if in their historical turn the Jews have turned oppressors in some places (about which, though, there can be more than one opinion). But using Holocaust denial to bash the Israel of today is not just ignorant and silly, it is diabolical. And the same goes for all those elsewhere on earth who want to forget or deny what their forefathers did because it makes them ashamed to call themselves human beings.

Keep up the good work, Yad Vashem. Your kind of work is of ever-increasing necessity. I can vouch for the ignorance and unconcern of only a very tiny section of the human population – to wit, teenagers who are studying in my town for the secondary board examination and have to read about the Holocaust as part of a short chapter on the Second World War in history – and I know just how clueless they are, all of them. If I can get even a handful of them to click on the links provided here (and I am not very hopeful) I shall consider that I have been doing my job well.

[You can go to their photo archive and take a look for yourself.]

Poll update

I feel more enthusiastic to cast my vote as I grow older: when I was young, I was too cynical to take the trouble.

Today was polling day in Durgapur – the fifth phase of the West Bengal Assembly elections, 2011. My wife and I checked out with neighbours that there was a big crowd at our designated polling centre in the early morning, so we turned up there at about 11:30, hoping that the blazing and sultry heat would discourage a lot of people from turning up. We were not disappointed, and we were lucky too, for there were two long queues at the other booth, whereas ours was deserted, so we were in and out within five minutes flat.

I was deeply satisfied and not a little proud to see how quietly and efficiently the whole show was being conducted. Three cheers for the Election Commission! I sighed to think, for the umpteenth time, that things can be done very well indeed in this country whenever the administration makes up its mind to do so. Shall we ever see the day when everything runs smoothly and speedily like that, every kind of public service that goes into making a great country?

Now I am watching talking heads pontificating on TV, and catching up on the unraveling news. Barring stray untoward incidents, things seem to be going equally quietly and smoothly everywhere. One noteworthy thing is that the voter turnout is likely to be very high. It is heartening to know that the real common man (and woman – women are highly visible at all the booths) still pins so much hope on the electoral process. I hope, for the long-term welfare of this country, that our ‘leaders’, regardless of their party affiliations, learn to take the faith reposed in them more seriously: our people have been betrayed too often for too long…

One thing that I have been missing on TV is that young voters (those in their 20s) are not being interviewed at length anywhere. Is it because the news channels have a blind spot, or because the young generation doesn’t count, not having any coherent and articulate political views of their own at all? If the latter is true, what a shame!

Self-assured, or merely pig-headed?

A very interesting idea raised by a recent comment-writer is that I sound very ‘self-assured’ in this blog.

I could choose to be facetious (or unkind) and imagine that she meant dogmatic or pig-headed, and was just being polite.

However, I prefer to give her the benefit of the doubt, and believe that she meant it as a compliment, as a recognition of a good and rare trait. And then I turn around to take a good hard look at myself, and ask – am I really as self-assured as I sound?

Well, here are a few things that occurred to me off the cuff:

Firstly, I grew up rather quickly and started fending for myself (not just financially but morally, aesthetically and intellectually) from a very unusually early age (I meet so many 30-plus children these days!). And I have been buffeted by not only the slings and arrows of fortune but by contrary ideologies and ways of life rather more than most men, even if I say so myself. So God knows if I hadn’t had that kernel of self-assurance (and consequent self-reliance) to see me through the bad patches, I’d probably not have survived and functioned sanely till this late date. I congratulate myself for it, and consider myself deucedly lucky too. There have been times galore when I have felt lost and drained out, and just somehow managed to keep dragging myself onwards. (If in the process I have grown a bit of a thick skin and a habit of raising eyebrows at people who want to re-educate me, I guess that cannot be helped).

Then again, I am not really as self-assured as I give the impression of being. I am not really very sure that I have done the right thing by not wearing jeans and not bothering about cricket all my life, and by laughing at and steering clear of every brand of organized fanaticism – from traditional religion to the gospel of the market to Marxism to arcane “Theories of Everything” in Physics. I am not at all sure that I have a lot of ‘valuable’ advice to give to my daughter about how she should grow up (as so many parents and teachers do – I marvel at their self-assurance!). And I have no clue if there’s one person alive and kicking in this world today whose life I have strongly influenced. How’s that for modesty?

But there are indeed a few things about life that I have learnt well, and on them I won’t budge an inch. If someone has been a regular, long-time, attentive reader of this blog, s/he’ll know exactly what I am talking about. If the above-mentioned comment writer had that sort of thing in mind, I thank her for noticing. And I hope she will wish that I may continue that sort of pig-headed, hard-nosed, unrepentant self-assertion for some more time before I hand in my dinner pail. Reed I may be, and a very unimportant reed to boot, but I shall not be deterred from having my say – if and when I have something to say.

What news is news?

Very big recent news headlines:

Satya Sai Baba has passed away.

Prince William is getting married.

Winds of change are blowing strongly in West Bengal, as will soon be apparent to one and all when the Assembly election results come out.

Alas, all three leave me unmoved.

Is it because I have grown old and cynical, or is it that there is something lacking in my mental makeup that I simply cannot get excited when millions of others do?

If pressed, I would say that to me, the first item was of the greatest significance. Not because I liked the Sai Baba’s looks, his love of wealth and pomp, his taste in clothes or interior décor, his (or rather, his followers’) claims that he was God incarnate, or his penchant for magic shows.

I had a certain degree of respect for him because of the immense amount of good works that he had done in one lifetime: from bringing water to some of the most drought-prone areas of the south to setting up schools and colleges where a lot of young people got fairly good-quality education to his several A-grade hospitals where hundreds of thousands have got medical treatment for almost free. I have also seen the educational booklets that they use at his Bal Vikaas Kendras (a type of playschool, of which there are hundreds around the country), and found them eminently sane and relevant to a good upbringing of children: they teach very practical things about resource conservation and environmental protection, about good manners and social responsibility, and about relying on one’s own spiritual strength to tackle all the hurdles and challenges of life. Whether or not such ideas are spread with a religious backing, heaven knows that this country desperately needs to spread that kind of education among its young.

To all those who turn up their noses because he was regarded as a godman, I can only say ‘do more than he did for social welfare, then start criticizing him’. I know, too, about many kinds of unsavoury rumours and canards that go around about him – and all I can say is, with a millionth of his fame, I have suffered lifelong from the same insane rumour-mongering industry, so I know how much they are worth. Finally, for all those who consider themselves too ‘smart and scientific’ to revere godmen, all I’ll say is that they are calling all sorts of people from Mukesh Ambani to APJ Abdul Kalam, from Sachin Tendulkar to Manmohan Singh and literally millions of ordinary devotees (who include all sorts of highly educated professionals) superstitious fools. I prefer to be humble, and adopt an agnostic position, choosing to judge a man by his words and deeds. I have no idea whether Vivekananda saw God (I don’t even know what that means, after reading both science and religion all my life), but I respect him profoundly for the life he lived.

And I certainly believe that Vivekananda living or Sai baba dying matters considerably more than Prince William getting married, or what the election results in West Bengal may say (about this last, see my comment on Tanmoy's blogpost).

Kids at a loose end

There’s a girl I met on the street yesterday, a 16-year old who’s recently become an ex-pupil. She finished writing her secondary board examinations three weeks ago, and she was complaining that she was bored, having just about nothing to do at home. It threw my mind back to more than three decades ago, when I was exactly in her position.

I was luckier than most in a way. Exams ended in end-February: I went off gallivanting with some friends on that very day to nearby Shantiniketan (travelling without adult escort was still a great thrill in those days) to enjoy Holi as only footloose and fancy-free boys can do. Then back to Durgapur, to get thoroughly bored as that girl is being bored now for two whole months – though I read enormously, and often went to the movies, and cycled all around town alone and with friends, had sleepovers with one or two them, went swimming, and mooned over a budding romance. In May I had a lucky break again, and went holidaying with a friend’s extended family all around Himachal Pradesh for close to three weeks. We travelled on a shoestring budget, yet the memories still glow in my mind: it was one of the best holiday trips I have ever made. I came back to collect the examination results, and then it was permanently off to Calcutta. There I promptly got involved in a lot of things, from typewriting class to French lessons to giving tuition and writing for magazines and helping with my dad’s little business, and then I gradually began to study for the higher secondary course and prepare for admission. By mid-August I was well into a new and very hectic academic schedule once more, with hardly time to breathe, leave alone feel bored.

The girl’s complaint brought home to me the fact that very little has changed for the better in this one-horse town in thirty-odd years. Oh, there’s a multiplex cinema now (while most of the old cinemas have shut down or gone to seed), and you can easily watch movies at home, but on the flip side, there are no libraries any more. Nor museums, art galleries, zoos or parks worth the name. Shopping malls are becoming common, but no thinking person who is not a rich shopaholic can go to malls every day. As my daughter avers, it’s hard to keep watching TV all day for weeks and months on end, unless you are born with a vegetable brain, which doesn’t need much stimulation anyway. There are few clubs where parents can send their young to enjoy themselves in safe and healthy ways, such as by learning to dance, paint, sing, act, tell stories, cook or pick up some martial art: those that there are have been too strongly affected by a rather sick competitive spirit. One of the few bodily pleasures that I still enjoy is swimming, and I have to drive halfway across the town to do it: besides, it’s rather too expensive for most people. There are few interesting places nearby that you can drive to for a day’s outing. No wonder that most kids strain at the leash to start attending tuitions once again: that’s the only thing that is available aplenty, and the only place most parents are glad to send them, and where they can breathe a little and chatter a little and while away the time…

So why did I myself come back after eight very busy years in a metro? Well, partly it was because I was fed to the gills with the noise, crush, squalor and the peculiarly poignant kind of loneliness that grips a certain kind of person in a great city (see Albert Camus, The Outsider); partly it happened by accident (too long and convoluted to interest my readers, I’m sure). But it is true that it offered a more relaxed, less expensive, clean and quiet lifestyle, and I quickly got addicted to it. It gave me a decent living, and it helped that I became heavily enough engaged not to have time for boredom and loneliness. And now I am so used to it, 24 years later, that I can hardly imagine moving to someplace else, unless it were to some cleaner, quieter, nicer place still.

But the girl’s problem remains unsolved. What does a lively teenager do in this town when she has time on her hands?

A most frightening prospect

A lot of people have been asking me to comment on what Anna Hazare and his supporters have recently and spectacularly achieved with their agitation in New Delhi.

This blog writer (and those whom he has quoted, along with those who have commented on his blogpost) has done a great deal of work for me, so I needn’t write a lot of things that I’d have otherwise had to. To all of them my thanks. My readers should look up the contents of that link thoroughly before proceeding to read the following lines.

Well, now that you have read the above (if you want a professional lawyer's take, here it is), all I want to say is:

1.      I have profound respect for Anna Hazare and all he stands for (today the media have made him a national celebrity: I have talked about him to thousands of pupils for years when their parents had never heard of him), and as a thinking man and an Indian I am deeply grateful for much that he has fought for and won for all of us. India certainly needs lots of people like him.

2.      Having said that, I agree with Dr. B. R. Ambedkar that trying to coerce governments by going on fasts unto death Gandhi-style is a very very dangerous strategy (Nirad Chaudhuri once famously said that Gandhi was a worse dictator than Hitler!), to be used rarely and with extreme caution, and I am not at all sure that Hazare-ji did the right thing this time round.

3.      While any reader who follows this blog regularly will know how serious I am about this corruption issue, and though I do not want to sound cynical just for the heck of it, this ‘movement’, such as it was, makes the corners of my lips involuntarily curl up with suspicion and disdain. Who are these members of ‘civil society’ who have so suddenly woken up to the crying need to do away with corruption in public life? Someone who watched the whole shenanigan from almost next door as long as it lasted averred that a huge number were exactly the kind for whom any tamasha will do when something like World-Cup cricket is not available – they would run at the first hint of serious trouble, or as soon as they heard that a new shopping mall was being inaugurated nearby by Katrina Kaif. Of the rest, a significant number simply wanted to be seen on TV, wannabe celebrities all, a most pathetic class indeed; no one who respects the Masterda-Bhagat Singh type of patriots can spare a kind thought for them. Another group came riding in chauffered limousines – the five-star chatterati class – to show their solidarity with the aam admi’s concerns. Now chances are 99 to 1 that their wealth has not been gotten by means that would bear scrutiny by any anti-corruption body worth its salt, so no matter whether they are big-time contractors or ex-civil servants or yogi-babas or film stars, aren’t they taking a very silly risk, living in glass houses and still throwing stones? Would they enjoy the fun if and when such a high-powered vigilante body really came into being and started looking closely into their means and affairs?

4.      I shall go on repeating ad nauseam that this kind of corruption that has supposedly angered so many people is bound to become systemic and incurable in a country where most people are lazy and therefore want shortcuts to ‘success’ ever since childhood, and most have no means of making big money by honest means (think of a typical government clerk, a private sector engineer, a petty shopkeeper, a schoolteacher or a police constable), yet everybody has started worshipping money, slavering over it all the time, and using it as the only real criterion of ‘success’. Admit it to yourself; almost all of us are like that now, and those who aren’t we call stupid or crazy! (How many Indians do you think would be ‘fans’ of SRK or Sachin if those two had not been making pots of money?) Gandhi knew this very well, which is why he insisted lifelong that there can be no honesty in public life unless public figures (cricketers as much as politicians, mind you) are committed to living simple, undemanding lives as models of self-control and probity. He himself practised what he preached, but remember he couldn’t persuade even the man who liked to call himself his closest disciple to follow in his footsteps. Anna-ji maybe has every right to call himself a Gandhian, but he should be very careful about all the people who are clambering on to his bandwagon: he has a hard-won reputation to lose!

5.      Most worrisome of all is that a small number of people – even a few tens of thousands is a minuscule number in a country of 1200+ million, remember – is aiming to set itself up as the supreme national arbiter of all things moral, a kind of absolute, unchallengeable supra-governmental authority over all the rest of us. Even if every one of those ‘revolutionaries’ were a saintly lover of mankind, I would be terrified at the prospect: if this does not strike at the very roots of representative government (which, as Churchill said, is the least bad of all forms of authority known to man), if this does not reek of fascism of the worst sort, I don’t know what does. I for one would much rather live with a lot of crime and corruption and confusion and dissent of even the violent sort than submit myself with glee to such a draconian dispensation: I see shades of the French Reign of Terror and the worst times after the Russian and Chinese revolutions in the very attempt to create such a monster in the name of cleansing public life. I do, do hope that a lot of sane Indians would see the danger before it is too late, and protest very loudly indeed. Oh that we were a race that knew and cared a little more about history!

Filling in

I suppose I owe a word of apology to those of my readers (I know there are a few) who wait eagerly for the next installment of what has become virtually a once-a-week ritual: I’ve kept them waiting. These last few days have been admission season, and every year around this time my family has all its work cut out, handling floods of people and answering the phone from dawn to almost midnight, doing a lot of clerical work and waiting and saying the same things over and over again. There are also some minor irritations every time. You must remember that all this happens in the midst of existing classes running round the week as per usual schedule. The result is not only exhaustion but frayed nerves and minds perforce emptied of all other kinds of thought. Hence no blogposts for a while.

One good thing this time is that the weather has been unusually balmy, thanks to several early nor’westers since mid-March. It still doesn’t feel as though summer is here, and the trees all around are lush green, and the cuckoos are going full blast right since the wee hours of the morning. It is good not to have to cope with sweltering heat on top of everything else.

This is not only my silver-jubilee batch with class nine-rs, but it so happens that it’s my daughter’s batch too. I can’t believe she has grown up so much. I hope all my well-wishers wish me luck. Growing old has its compensations: over these last few years the number of pupils who are children of my own childhood friends has been increasing.

Meanwhile I also note with pleasure that the number of people who have kindly enlisted as followers is about to approach the 200 mark. That will be a small milestone, and I request the 200^th person who enlists to let me know who he or she is; it will be a pleasure to say ‘welcome’. The fact that the number of visits has been climbing slowly but relentlessly is another very nice thing indeed. It is not easy to write continuously and keep people interested in this day and age (without resorting to sleaze, sensation or some sort of commercial solicitation) for almost five years at a stretch. The overwhelming majority of bloggers I know – especially among Indians – run out of steam after the first half dozen posts, and the visit count never goes beyond four figures. I also happen to know that there have been a number of new visitors of late who have been exploring this blog eagerly: them I request to visit and comment on older blogposts, instead of restricting themselves to only what they find on the home page. That is something I find especially delightful, and I daresay my new readers will find quite a lot of stuff to interest them, too.

Finally (for now) I note wryly that very few people have found anything to say with regard to my last two blogposts. I flatter myself that I have made a lot of readers uncomfortable, and left them at a loss for words…

Excited? Enjoying yourself?

There are a lot of Americanisms in vogue which must seem execrable to any discerning mind with an educated respect for language. Calling everything from your girlfriend to your last holiday to your ice-cream ‘great’ or ‘awesome’ is among them. Of late, ‘enjoy’ and ‘excited’ have entered my yuck-list.

While I yield to none in my appetite for enjoyment, and I entirely agree that being occasionally excited is a very good thing, because it keeps you healthy in body and young in mind, you can have too much of a good thing. These days the papers and television and roadside billboards are offering you ‘exciting’ offers on everything from shaving blades to apartments – and I notice with dismay that on the official Google blog that I follow, they seem to be ‘excited’ every day about some trifling new innovation they have launched. They may be gifted in everything from math to marketing, but there is no doubt whatever that they are linguistically challenged! Firstly, no healthy-minded person either needs or wants to be excited all the time: it would be such a bore. Secondly, we don’t really want people we trust with our money and lives and much else with to be excited (and therefore absent-minded and careless) when they are at work, do we? – Just think of your doctor, banker, your child’s teacher or the traffic policeman. And thirdly, staying excited for too long just isn’t possible without damaging your nervous system: a scientist trying to prove a theory or a writer penning a book might take months or years, and while one needs true passion if one has to do such arduous things, one cannot stay continuously ‘excited’ for all that time without falling sick or going out of one’s mind!

As for enjoyment, if some of us are still capable of recalling that the word originally meant feeling joy, one can only weep to see how vulgarly and meaninglessly it is bandied around by everyone everywhere nowadays. More and more it seems that one can only enjoy things (cars, mobiles, hairdos, jewellery, food, whatever) rather than feelings, and even worse, one cannot even enjoy things any more, but only the act of buying them! So my wardrobe bursts with clothes I hardly wear, I rarely listen to anything on the obscenely expensive music system, and I simply cannot understand people who claim to be able to enjoy a lot of things for which they have spent only trifling amounts or none at all – reading books, painting pictures, singing songs, playing games with friends on the field, helping people to do things that they cannot do very well by themselves, watching birds and butterflies, flowers and sunsets and chortling children; making or repairing things of household use with their own hands, exercising, taking long walks and lazing on the grass on balmy winter afternoons, having good conversations, falling asleep after a hard day… the list is endless. What I see instead is that the less people find true enjoyment the more frantic they become to find it, and the more they are convinced that all they need for it is to make and squander even more money… so cheap have these words become that they have to assure you that they are really excited, they truly enjoyed themselves, because excited and enjoyed have become so debased by mindless overuse that they have ceased to mean anything by themselves at all.

There are, I feel more and more often, far more poor people in this world – poor in the sense of lost and unhappy – than there have been ever before. And they are overwhelmingly to be found among the moneyed classes, the only people simultaneously stupid, lazy and solvent enough for advertisers to have brainwashed them into believing that nirvana can be found in the shopping mall!

(I was prompted to write this after reflecting on Rashmi’s comment on my last post, where she mused upon how she found simple and hard-up rural folks to be far happier than their urban ‘superiors’. Thanks, Rashmi, for stirring my grey cells). 

The crying need for quality

And now, to answer some queries about why I put up a series of essays in quick succession on this blog.

Essentially my purpose was not to show my readers only what good writing means (and what even very young people can accomplish if they really put their hearts and minds into it) but what I feel about the question of quality. I wonder how many readers have already guessed that larger purpose by themselves, so let me elaborate…

Quality is supremely important. Not only where the quality of our work and produce affects other people – such as with a surgeon to whom the patient surrenders himself totally when he goes under the knife, or when a pupil studies with a master (very few people can do more short-term harm than a surgeon, and more long-term damage than a teacher), or when we expect a judge to pass sentence, or a bureaucrat to really serve the public, or when a cook serves up a meal. It is indeed true that a lot of people can become successful in the short term without aiming for high quality (especially in countries like India where the public expects little, and so official quality standards are notoriously lax) – witness so many bad doctors and teachers flourishing, at least in terms of earnings – but in a country full of people giving shoddy service, everyone ultimately suffers (even the millionaire cannot trust the surgeon, the teacher or the policeman to do his best on his own, without threats or bribes, and sometimes even with them), and the country acquires a bad name which is very hard to live down (travel guides routinely warn foreign tourists to beware of touts of every kind, to bargain hard everywhere and never to drink anything but bottled or boiled water in this country…). The millions who are brought up to get through exams somehow (which means just getting mediocre marks by last-minute cramming and cheating) cannot later figure out why, though they have done all the right things (such as getting BTech and MBA degrees), they either cannot find good jobs, or why they get pink slips so frequently, or why pay rises and promotions are so slow in coming: they console themselves with many ‘explanations’, but rarely does it occur to them that something might be lacking in the quality of their work which makes them less than valuable to their employers (though I think they do have some vague idea, which is why in all but traditional business families, there is a desperation to land salaried jobs somehow. When one is self-employed, one is much more strongly compelled to live up to some minimal quality standards all the time or perish, because the customers will go elsewhere otherwise. Salaried jobs are far more secure. Schoolteachers can sleep or chatter nonsense through classes with much more impunity than private tutors can).

This, rather than mere difference in per capita incomes, is what really sets the ‘advanced’ countries apart. A lot of NRIs aver that even high salaries cannot lure them back home, now that they have got used to a much more high-quality lifestyle, measured by a thousand little things that add up to something big – how clean, quiet, green and much safer their neighbourhoods are, how much faster things work even in government offices, how much more conscientious everyone is about doing their own work well, everyone from doctors to domestic helps, how much more convenient things are for all kinds of people (such as the disabled), and so on. Quality makes for national advancement as no mere jump in per capita income can, or else Kuwait would have been considered an advanced nation at par with, say, Switzerland or Germany. Yet, unfortunately, not only do we not pay adequate attention to quality enhancement in this country, I fear this attention level has actually been going down on the whole in recent times. Till the 1980s, you could only go to dirt cheap government hospitals to get poor quality treatment; now you are allowed to pay through your nose to get the same in supposedly high-class hospitals. That’s progress for you! Worse, even people who have doggedly kept up high standards of product or performance rarely get the kind of respect and reward they deserve – whether it be Kashmiri carpet weavers or Mumbai’s dabbawallahs (still poor and low-class despite all the attention paid to them by some American business schools) or the rare rural schoolteacher who struggles to keep the lamp burning against almost impossible odds…

But attention to quality is very important even at the private, individual level: something that is much more poorly understood by today’s young people, I fear, than in an earlier time. Whether you paint houses or sing, write computer programs or teach a language or look after handicapped children, if you can tell yourself you have worked long and hard and become really good at something, that you can do something much better than most others you know, you can take a quiet pride in yourself – no matter whether the world recognizes you adequately or not. Unlike most people who have never tried to be better than the rest, you can take leave of this life when your time comes with the satisfaction that you have not lived entirely in vain, you were something better than a mere replaceable cog in a wheel, you did make a difference to some people and are leaving behind an ideal to live up to. Without that self-assurance, one is condemned, as so many people are today, to wallow in misery because they always feel inadequate, unwanted, incomplete, worthless … and try to make up for it by being rude to all and sundry, and boasting of their pay packets, and filling up their homes with all sorts of consumer products that they don’t have any need for in the hope that adequate possession of trash will someday give them that sense of identity and self-worth that they so desperately, if unconsciously crave.

It is, of course, good to be adequately recognized and rewarded – I won’t indulge in negative snobbery by making the absurd claim that only material failure proves that you were good at what you did! – but one must simply accept that that does not happen as one might wish: one person reaps enormous rewards (fame and money included), while another just somehow makes both ends meet and remains obscure, while yet another goes under ‘unwept, unhonour’d and unsung’, although all three might have been gifted people who always tried to give of their best. That is called fate. It just so happens that cricketers are far better rewarded than hockey players, and surgeons far more than musicians (and that, too, differs greatly from one age to another, one country to another… what can you do about it?). Rewards may also be a long time coming: lawyers, writers and actors know all about that! But nothing can be nationally more suicidal than everybody aiming at ‘sure and quick’ if modest success, such as by becoming engineers, at the price of sacrificing everything else that is worth aiming for: job satisfaction, social usefulness and self-esteem being high on the list. For one thing, a country needs good carpenters, musicians, nurses and writers at least as much as it needs good engineers and doctors (to paraphrase the US thinker and senator John Gardner); for another, merely becoming an engineer is nothing unless you can respect yourself for the quality of work that you deliver; you are merely adding a digit to the vast horde of mediocrities who neither contribute anything of much substance to their milieu nor can ever talk of ‘worth’ beyond their pay packets – and therefore can only get very angry when people talk about other yardsticks.

The most horrible consequence of a country filling up with such people is that everybody’s standards tend to get lowered to their level, so money becomes the only means of judging a person’s ‘value’ … and call-centre operators start looking more ‘successful’ than movie directors unless the latter make a lot of money, and I am considered a good teacher only if I can visibly make a lot of money teaching!

Let me stop at this point, and let my readers think. I hope I have managed to get the idea across – that it was not just about writing good essays, but wanting to be good at whatever one does. Only, I do believe, when all is said and done, that language was the greatest invention ever, and knowing how to use a language well is  one of the greatest of achievements by far, deserving of admiration even if one cannot do it very well oneself. Those who believe otherwise are sliding towards a new Dark Age, however technologically sophisticated and materially comfortable that might be…

Writing an essay, part three

And now, reproduced herebelow is  a ‘good’ essay that someone wrote as homework for my class about ten years ago.

I see the world through their eyes

I have the bad habit of rising late, and someone usually has to shake me awake in the mornings. One of my parents does the job, reminding me every time of all my faults and follies, which make me grumble as I brush my teeth. But by the time I leave for school, relations have sweetened up again.

I have mixed feelings about the way my parents treat me. The most common is anger – but strangely enough, it only serves to make the bonds stronger. I still cannot dream of taking a step in this world without holding on to the fingers of those who taught me to walk. It is through their eyes that I still see the world. My parents are the very staff and prop of my life.

I am fortunate to have parents like my father and mother. I wouldn’t exchange them for anybody else. Their influences on me are equally strong: if daddy taught me the consonants of life, mummy taught me the vowels. But I do take sides in their quarrels sometimes – generally only to have some fun, or get one of them to do my bidding.

It is not as if I always think positively of my parents: far from it. There are things about them that I strongly dislike. Why do they always have to be austere about trivial things like buying me a chocolate, for instance? And in matters such as this, it is my mother who invariably takes the tougher line and yells at me. Father is milder, but sometimes he has to make a token show of anger to stay in mummy’s good books. Thank God he cools down almost at once!

I think my parents worry too much about me. Granted, at times they have good reason, but often they get worked up needlessly. They insist on supervising my homework, as if I were still a child. What does it matter if I sometimes want to take time off studies to read a comic book? Also, they take the privileged position to decide everything for me. I feel like stuffing my ears with cotton wool when they launch upon one of their pet sermons about how to be a ‘good girl’. I am sure they are just repeating the moral lessons that their parents preached to them, and I’m sure in their own time they were not much better children than I am – at least, if all that my grandparents tell me about their childhood mischiefs are true! Why do parents always think that they know best about everything?

I have devised ways to get around them, too, and amazingly, they often work. When I know that my mother wants me to buy the red dress and I want the blue one, I just demand the red dress, and instantly, my mother changes her mind – I must have the blue dress, and that’s final! I wear an annoyed look, but give in with secret relief. We are not such simple creatures as our poor parents think.

Yet for all that I respect and obey my parents in all the really important things. They have made certain decisions easier for me. I cannot summarize my feelings about my parents – seeing that they fluctuate at least five times a day – but I can definitely say that I love them with all my heart, and I shall never leave the path they have shown me with so much time and patience and care.

…..

The best that can be said for it is that it is not as unspeakably wretched as the one I posted first in this series (I did have to iron it out quite a bit before it was presentable as it reads here, though: unlike in the best ones of yesteryear, there were faulty use of idioms and inappropriate and misspelt words aplenty). But – especially when read just after the previous one (‘Memory’) – I am sure no one can disagree with me that it is bland, shallow, narrow in scope and not very memorable (besides evincing a remarkable degree of helpless and unself-conscious dependence on parents – certainly not healthy for a teenager, as any psychologist will tell you, no matter how common a type it has become in urban middle-class India today. Incidentally, the writer is a fully-qualified doctor now). Remember, this is the best that kids today can write, and only one in several hundred essays that I mark is of this quality. Also note that this level of mental ability gets most of them into engineering college, not excluding the IITs (I needn’t even mention, I suppose, those who can only make it to hotel management and BPOs…). Such people are routinely referred to as ‘talents’ in the media these days, too: and by God, you should see the size of their egos, now that they have visited Umrica once or twice and bought a car…

I am sure that, with this gigantic talent pool, India will soon produce a dazzling treasure-house of new scientific inventions, literary wonders, brilliant musical compositions, amazing works of art, ground-breaking philosophical paradigms and every other kind of creative outpouring that together make a nation great. Aren’t we on the threshold of a golden age? I think the last time it happened was when the likes of Nagarjuna, Kalidasa, Aryabhatta, Susruta, Shankaracharya, the great early geniuses of Nalanda and enlightened monarchs like Chandragupta Vikramaditya and Harshavardhana were alive and active!

Writing an essay, part two

This one comes in response to a large number of reader requests. It is a sample of the kind of essays which used to be graded as ‘excellent’ by our teachers in the olden days (meaning the 1970s).

Memory

I have a rotten memory. I forget names, directions, appointments; at times I even forget my own address. It annoys me to see people rattling off the latest stock quotations or twenty telephone numbers from memory. Poor things! Memory, I always feel, should be treated like a chest full of jewels. To use it as a lumber room for trifles is like getting a combination safe to keep one’s waste paper in it, like buying up Buckingham Palace only to break it up into tenements.

           

My memory, now, is like a bed of exotic flowers. Every so often, I go weeding it out. Then, when twilight breezes blow over my soul, I can step into the garden and be deliciously lost.

My memory is my own little story: a diary of my soul. If I look it up, I shall find it full of myself, like a mirror. Triumphs and glories will hail me: ‘This is you!’ Pleasure and laughter will bubble: ‘This is you!’ Defeats and bereavements will mourn: ‘This is you!’ Sin and shame will hiss: ‘This is you!’ – and all the nameless little half-sad joys of humdrum life that stand in the background like a chorus will press my hand and say: ‘This is you!’ When I want to look at myself I turn to memory: all I stand for is sure to be written there.

I sometimes wonder if others feel like that too. How does the old man feel, looking back on a life that must be (to him) a symbol of all existence as he knew it? What of the squalid sinner, whose cold black memories flow over his soul at night like a dark glacier? And what of little children, whose tiny pasts must seem to them so close to a former oblivion? But perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps the child’s short life has already filled its precocious memory with remembrances of jam cupboards that are no more? And who knows what comfort memory brings even to lonely, frightened sinners cowering by their night lights?

Memory is a postman to all men, bringing together friends half a world apart; he walks swiftly and takes no fee. What little ties of memory will bind two souls across an ocean; what love and hate will be hurled across continents through the mailbag of memory! The lonely mother hugging her memories of her lost son and the shattered victim losing sleep over memories of his accursed wrongdoer; the sweetly wistful memories of the man whose life was a poem, and the bitter memories of one who comes from the east end of life; one woman’s expectant memories of her lover soon to return and another’s weeping remembrance of one who will return no more. The mailman’s bundle is large and full. Joy, sorrow, hope, fear, love and hate – all these and more are delivered to men’s hearts by memory.

I have a rotten memory, but that won’t get me down. My head is no bin for the pettiest worldly facts. My memory is an album of precious things, sacred and intensely personal, to be shown to the world only when it is my friend.

…...

Having been condemned to mark mountains of trash all my life (of the sort that I put up in the last post), this kind of writing takes my breath away. And it’s not just a matter of masterly grasp of language. The level of GK combined with the richness of imagination (memory as a globe-trotting postman, buying up Buckingham Palace and breaking it up into tenements, cold black memories flowing over the soul like a dark glacier), the degree of individualism that is manifest in every line (without which the most ‘successful’ man is merely a cog in some vast wheel), the depth and variety of human sympathy, the kind of visualization that can only be called poetic, the perfect sense of proportion and balance – I am certain that neither those students who are called ‘talented’ these days nor the typical ‘teacher’ of English can dream of writing something like this (mind you, being ‘good at science’ instead of what are called the ‘arts’ has nothing to do with it: Jagadish Bose, Balaichand Mukhopadhyay aka Banaphool and Conan Doyle were all students of science who could write excellently). Even the ‘best’ essays that are written these days by high-school children cannot hold a candle to this sort of stuff (I do not think any child who has grown up with orkut and Facebook and sms-chat could write something like this, and that is indubitably a loss to civilization, not compensated by LED TV and iPad). If enough readers are interested, I can put up one that I recently graded myself, just for the sake of comparison…