A nice book to read

My literary minded old boy Aakash had not been very pleased with the blogpost I had written on the Shiva trilogy, and had promised to send me a book in broadly the same genre that would provide much better reading. So now I have just finished reading Madhulika Liddle’s debut crime novel titled The Englishman’s Cameo, and yes, Aakash has kept his promise.

It is a murder mystery with a difference – for it is set against the backdrop of Delhi at the time of the emperor Shah Jehan in his last days on the throne, 1656 to be precise. Naturally one expects careful period detailing, and Ms. Liddle has done it very well indeed, ably helped by her sister Swapna, a historian who has specialized on late medieval India. The English is just appropriate, fluent and idiomatic at the same time, marred with neither irritating pedantry nor the colloquial pidgin that so many Indlish educated contemporary Indians find oh-so-cool. The plot centres around a fictional character, a young minor aristocrat ‘with friends in low places’ called Mujaffar Jang, who acts out of noblesse oblige to get a friend out of trouble, and in the process gets entangled in deep intrigue. One meets all kinds of interesting characters, beautiful courtesans and pot-bellied banias, supercilious omrahs and dedicated bureaucrats, ardent  lover, English fortune hunter, lusty but good natured boatman, spies and mercenaries and all in a pretty heady brew. The plot is not earth-shaking, but plausible enough, and the chief merit of the book, I found, is its readability: it definitely is a page-turner in the best tradition, and not too many writers can claim as much in contemporary India (it goes without saying that I do not consider readability a minus point, because where books are concerned I am anything but a snob; besides, writing racy but persuasive fiction is far harder an art than most people suppose). And – I say this as a compliment, not patronizingly – Ms. Liddle has accomplished the rare feat of not letting the reader guess that the writer is a woman if he has not noticed the name, just as you wouldn’t with J.K. Rowling or Agatha Christie or Ashapurna Devi for that matter. The book is refreshingly free of  à la mode feminist touches.

A quick search through Wikipedia tells me that Madhulika Liddle has come out with another collection of Mujaffar Jang stories (she apparently regards short stories to be her forte). I shall look forward to reading it, and I wish the writer very good luck with her writing. I should also be glad if a) she places her forthcoming books in other historical eras, equally painstakingly reconstructed, and b) other writers are inspired to do the same, because it is a very interesting genre, and also because very few good books of this sort have been written in recent times in India, whether in English or the vernaculars, so far as I know.

[The Englishman’s Cameo, by Madhulika Liddle, Hachette India 2009, pp. 281, Rs. 295, ISBN 978-81-906173-3-8. Available via flipkart.com]

Make up your own mind!

I have believed since I was very young that the most important sign of maturity is both wanting to and being able to make up one’s own mind on more or less everything under the sun that concerns one’s own life. As an elderly friend I respect said, ‘I will not of course always make wise decisions, but the point is I will make them myself and then enjoy or suffer the consequences; what else marks me out as a man rather than just another member of a faceless herd?’ Yet all my life I have watched people either completely unable to make up their own minds, or terrified to. So they go around consulting all and sundry, usually working upon the premise that if most people I know agree upon a certain course of action it must be the right (or at least safe) thing to do. Here is a random sample of questions people of all ages agonize over, though the ‘importance’or urgency of the questions varies with age:

Should I/my son study science or arts or commerce? Should I attend this or that coaching class? Should I bother much about examination scores? Should I go to this or that party? Should I keep long hair/wear short skirts? Should I have a girl friend/boyfriend? Should I tell my parents about it? Should I have an extra-marital affair? Should I tell my wife/husband about it? Should I shop at this or that mall/become a member of this or that club? Should I gossip with my friends about the latest scandal I heard? Should I watch an ‘adult’ movie? Should I take up this or that job? Should I smoke or drink, and should it be done on the sly? Should I tell my doctor about my problem?… I could stretch that list ad infinitum.

Both youngsters and adults come to me for advice, as they have been doing since I was myself very young. There are a few things I have noticed about almost all of them: either they merely want me to confirm them in their prejudices (‘See, Sir also says you must go for engineering/not have an affair at this age, just as I told you!’) or they are terribly guilty or afraid to take a decision which they feel inwardly compelled to, and are only seeking some sort of solace or reassurance from me that nothing awful is going to happen if they go ahead with what they want to do (they sometimes want to do quite pedestrian things, like kissing a girl/boy, and sometimes utterly weird ones, like ‘I’m studying physics and want to switch afterwards to an MBA to have a safe career, but basically I want to make a name as a writer, is that okay?’). For long I have enjoyed helping them, but these days, after handling too much of the same thing over and over again (and seeing confused teenagers grow into confused adults despite everything I said and did for them), I get very tired sometimes. It is neither possible nor pleasant to keep telling people they are doing all right even when I know they are being common at best and foolish at worst; it is also wearying to have to tell craven people that sooner or later they must make up their minds and choose between options because they can’t have everything unless they want to regret missed opportunities all their lives, and if they can’t do that no outsider can do it for them anyway, so what the heck? – I actually say this aloud very often, and then they go away not only confused and hesitant as before, but resentful of me that I did not resolve their dilemma with a painless wave of some magic wand. How childish most people are all their lives! All that swells with age, it seems to me, is the paunch and the ego.

Mind you, just because I advocate independent decision making, I am neither an anarchist nor a blind rebel without a cause: indeed, I fear the one and despise the other. As my readers will know, I set great store by order and discipline and old-fashioned good manners in social life, regretting much that is wrong in this country solely because our rulers (including heads of families) do not sufficiently appreciate their value to civilized living, nor have the courage of conviction to impose them without fear or favour. In personal life and habit, as those who know me closely will vouch, I live in a very staid and conservative style: I dress simply, paying no attention to fashion fads, I cut my hair short, I do not use trendy abuse in my speech, I do not zoom around on a macho bike, I do not stay out late, I am content to be much closer to  a stick-in-the-mud family man than a wild bohemian, I happily put up with my wife’s occasional puja at home provided it is not too long, loud or expensive, and I neither walk in noisy political processions nor subscribe to the idea that throwing a few bombs can solve any problem. And yet, ever since I was a teenager, I have insisted on taking my own decisions – seeking the advice of only those I personally respected (not necessarily parents), and never considering myself bound to follow anything that conflicted with my own reason, conscience or gut feeling. That has applied to things major and minor alike: nobody ever told me to smoke a cigarette or forced me to go to a movie, I dropped engineering and medicine because I wasn’t interested, I had affairs when I chose, got married when I wanted to, quit jobs that I didn’t like, read books because I wished to read them, went travelling when and where I desired, avoided partying like the plague, and reared a child the way I thought best. And look, at this age I have very few things to regret having done!

So why on earth do people bother much more about physics and chemistry and marks and looks and pay and what mummy and daddy will say and what their wives will do and what latest gizmos are on sale instead of this most important of all questions: ‘When will I learn to make up my mind?’ Give me an IIT topper who has never had an original thought and an 18-year old who knows his own mind, and I know which one I won’t waste a second giving attention to.

The paradox is that the more the ad men extol and celebrate ‘freedom’, the more restrictive our real lives seem to become, the less independent our minds (and we seem to be growing so used to it that most of us cannot even see that anything is amiss!) ‘Children’ of 18-20 still have all sorts of decisions taken for them by parents, including when, where and with whom they should go out or chat on the Net; older people do unquestioningly what the boss/TV/wife tell them to do, modern ‘adults’ go chhee-chhee over things that would have been par for the course several generations ago: Romeo would have been arrested for pedophilia today, Shakespeare hauled up before the Race Relations Board for writing something as ‘prejudiced’ as The Merchant of Venice, and the Wright brothers punished instead of merely ridiculed by their father for ‘wasting their time’ trying to build a flying machine. Most people cannot imagine that they need not watch cricket when everybody else is doing it, or go pandal-hopping at puja time if they live in Bengal.There are millions who work in offices where they are constantly monitored by CCTV cameras in the name of security, the way only prisoners used to be not so long ago, something that Charlie Chaplin mocked so tellingly in Modern Times. And most don’t even seem to mind: rather, they are probably happy that the burden of taking decisions and being their own men has been lifted from their shoulders for ever, lifelong. But it makes me feel as though I am living in a cage, gilded though it might be, and the walls are closing in…which reader dares to tell me, after reading this post closely, that s/he still believes that the world is ‘progressing’?

One human heart

I should like the more serious-minded among my readers to go slowly and carefully through this essay. It would help them understand more clearly an important part (though, admittedly, only a part-) of the goals, ideals and principles I have tried to live by ever since I started to think (and that was a long time ago!)

No one has the full truth, of course, least of all professional philosophers. The contrary position, generally called utilitarianism, has led to much good in this world – from the abolition of slavery and legally sanctioned torture to the spread of democracy and literacy to all the wonders of technology harnessed to capitalism. I am no Luddite; I should be loth to subscribe to a naïve ‘revolutionary’ (actually very ancient-) back to Nature/ back to basics zeitgeist. As I often remind people, think of having your teeth pulled out without anesthesia whenever you are feeling too romantic, too peeved with the contemporary world and its ways. And yet, as the poet says, ‘God fulfills Himself in many ways/lest one good custom should corrupt the world’. Much that is wrong or bad about the world today might have been the consequence of utilitarianism pushed to absurd excess in every sphere of life. One begins to suspect as much when one finds that thinkers as disparate as Aristotle and Karl Marx and a Pope have had deep misgivings on the subject.

It all boils down to the question of ‘What is Man?’ or ‘What do we mean by human worth?’ Do read the essay, and get back to me. This is a question on which I should love to hear comments from young and old, male and female, highly educated and barely literate alike.

Midsummer musing

Several unconnected musings for this time.

We are going through the worst part of summer. What with temperatures soaring to 47⁰ C combined with the sort of very high humidity that is more commonly associated with Kolkata, life has been made miserable around here; everybody’s praying for rain, despite knowing that the monsoon is at least a fortnight away. Perhaps I grow more sensitive to extreme heat and cold with age, but it is a matter of fact that we are hearing of sunstroke deaths in the papers. Oh, by the way, the latest fashion among women around here – at least those who ride two-wheelers – is to clothe themselves head to toe in burqua-like apparel, face masks and elbow length gloves and all, presumably to avoid sunburn. I wonder how I survived so many years without any kind of special protection at all!

Starting today, I am taking the usual mid-year week off, but this time we are not travelling anywhere. That’s because we couldn’t think of any nice place to go to. We tried hill stations at this time of year, and got blisters and heat fever and upset stomachs after coming back; we also tried places which blaze, such as Varanasi, and had to virtually stay cooped up in airconditioned hotel rooms round the clock, which is no fun: if we are going to be cooked, we’d rather do it on the cheap, at home. So it will be housework, movies, books, sleep, swimming, chatting and maybe dining out once or twice, that’s all. And helping my daughter to get through the mountain of projects assigned in school…

I was looking at the list of ‘most-read’ blogposts, and couldn’t help wondering about some of them. The top two have been fixtures for a long time now, but why is Subarnalata on that list and so high for so long? The post relating to Anna Hazare’s mission (A most frightening prospect) is still relevant, so I am glad that people are reading it. The same goes for the one on Indian English and the one titled Are you sure (because it makes me feel good to think that maybe it has set a lot of people thinking a little!). Growing up in Durgapur obviously struck a chord somewhere, so let it enjoy its place in the sun. But I wrote very little in the post on 3 Idiots, so I cannot figure out why it should be permanently on that list, and placed so high too. That the post on Steve Jobs should still hang on there while the one on The Mahabharata has dropped away I find truly dismaying: how badly people these days have got their priorities mixed up, really. An epic will be remembered – at least if civilization survives – long, long after PCs and iPads have become as trivial and uncommented upon as the washing machine and refrigerator are today, yet readers are more interested in finding out what I have said about Steve Jobs? What a pity. And there are at least half a dozen other posts which I think deserve a place on that most-read list, too. I wish my readers would go back to older posts a little more often.

Finally, a reflection on my work again. Given the number of people who keep coming to ask me to admit their kids in my classes, virtually the only thing that has been stopping me all these years from increasing the number of batches is the fact that I cannot cope with so much homework. As thousands of ex-pupils know, I correct homework with a fine-toothed comb and write detailed comments, and it gobbles up time like nobody’s business (besides hurting the eyes and trying my patience, after having been at it for so long); beyond a certain limit I simply couldn’t handle it. I have been telling ex-students that I’d gladly pay 10,000 rupees a month to anybody who could do this job for me, in keeping with my standards. Let’s put that in perspective: people with master’s degrees are teaching full time in schools around here for as little as five thousand rupees a month, whereas I am offering double that for four or five evenings’ work a week, not more than three hours a day. Imagine how hard an insurance- or vacuum cleaner salesman has to work to earn that much in commissions. Reflect that engineers at sponge iron plants hereabouts start at 12-15,000 a month for doing 12 hour days, six days a week. And yet the wonder of it is that I have never had any takers on my offer in more than a decade…

Teaching children rot

I was marking a comprehension exercise done by a pupil for homework. It told a story about how the great German painter Albrecht Durer attained fame, what a tremendous sacrifice his brother Albert made to get him the career of his dreams, working himself to the bone for years in underground mines, and how the artist paid tribute to his brother by painting his work-wasted hands folded in prayer – a painting that became famous worldwide, and still remains.

A touching story. However, having read about that painting years ago, I had a niggling feeling that something didn’t quite sound right. So I checked it out on the net, here. And just as I had suspected, that story given in some school question paper or workbook was a silly sentimental fabrication. As a medical expert cum art historian confirms, they are not Albert Durer’s hands, indeed not those of a poor emaciated workman at all, but those of perhaps a slightly elderly nobleman, perhaps suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, and whoever the model was (it could be some obscure Italian), the same hands feature in another famous painting by the same artist which shows a saint praying. So this story prescribed for schoolkids is a load of tripe. And this, when any fool of a writer, publishing editor and schoolteacher can check out the basic background facts in five minutes thanks to Google. Given the fact that children on their own read nothing these days, imagine what harm this kind of irresponsible misinformation is doing to their minds (my only consolation is that this kid, being a typical teenage moron, will have already forgotten the passage, now that it is almost five days since she did the exercise… after all, no one retains any datum for any length of time these days, neither love letters nor movie storylines nor chemistry equations for much beyond examinations). But I cannot help having recurrent nightmares about these children growing up to be parents and teachers.

By the way, I found that website so interesting – Hektoen International, a journal of ‘medical humanities’, that I have put it on my blogroll.

Thinking about words

Language keeps ever changing, like a tree shedding old branches and putting out new ones, or like a river that never stops shifting course – and, at one level, it is a fascinating thing to watch and practise with, as any teacher of language must. It’s one of those things that keep me from getting bored with what I do. But, as I have sometimes commented before, there are changes that cause disquiet, or at least stir the funny bone for their sheer frivolity or absurdity, like substituting ‘anyway’ with ‘anyways’, and calling everything under the sun ‘awesome’ (recently some of my kids got certificates for being ‘awesome’ volunteers in a school function – not ‘excellent’ or ‘outstanding’, but awesome), or signing off with ‘Best’, as though it would wear your fingers out to type ‘With best wishes’, and calling the head of an academic department a ‘Chair’, or saying ‘I hope you’re doing good’ when you obviously mean ‘doing well’…galloping laziness and mindlessness combined with a desperation to be ‘in’ with the ‘cool’ crowd is not an edifying thing to see all around you!

There are three words in particular that I want to discuss in this post. Everyone suffers from ‘tension’ these days (and everybody seems to have forgotten that once upon a time it was a technical word, by which doctors referred to blood pressure and engineers to the tautness of an electrical wire): what happened to the good old ‘worry’ and ‘anxiety’? What better function does ‘tension’ serve (especially in the mouths of paanwallah’s sons, the sort of people who cannot string together one ten-word sentence correctly in English)? Then there is ‘mistake’. Everybody seems to make only ‘mistakes’ these days, never a misdemeanour or an offence, leave alone a crime or a sin! I regularly underline the word when I read essays where a pupil writes about a bully harassing a child, or a student cheating in his examination, and afterwards – most commonly when they are punished for it – realizing their ‘mistake’! Isn’t it one way we are teaching our young (and by young today I mean everybody under thirty) never to take responsibility for serious wrongdoing – when they can always expect  to get away by claiming it was just a ‘mistake’? How much longer will it be before people in the dock accused of murder will tell the judge they shouldn’t be severely punished because it was, after all, just a ‘mistake’?

And finally (for now) there is ‘insult’. Of late I have been frequently hearing (and reading-) teenagers saying ‘The teacher insulted me’ (for not doing homework, being rude in the class, coming late to school, failing in an examination or whatever). They didn’t say it so commonly twenty years ago, I can vouch for that, and I find it deucedly odd. Has the meaning of the word changed then, or have teachers changed, or have the children’s attitudes changed drastically? In our time, we had in general much sterner teachers: they not only scolded us, often harshly, but were liberal in meting out corporal punishment with the cane and otherwise. Many of them we still revere, and have no hard feelings for; to some, we are eternally grateful for all they did, and no, we certainly never dreamt of saying they ‘insulted’ us (though, admittedly, as all my Bengali readers will understand, even the best of us were frequently addressed as goru, gaadha, bandor, chhagol, pantha, bhoot, hotochchhara, idiot and the like). On the other hand, on the very few occasions when I did find a teacher’s behaviour truly unjust and cruel, I stood up to it in a way that no present-day student can dream of doing: at best they go and complain to daddy and mummy. My father did the same as a schoolboy, I happen to know: he seized the cane from his headmaster, broke it and threw it away – and willingly took everything that came his way as a consequence. Real men don’t cringe before authority figures and abuse them behind their backs. So what do my readers think has changed in these intervening years? Has something gone wrong with our teachers, or are today’s students a cowardly lot saddled with overblown and fragile egos?

Is all 'work' work?

I watch cycle-van pullers sweating as they drag along huge loads in the blazing sun, and I watch government clerks lounging away in cool dark offices, I hear of schoolteachers chattering away in class about ‘interesting’ episodes from their personal lives and also of tycoons who spend their time drinking champagne and playing golf when they are not clinching hugely lucrative deals in five-star environs. ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ was the rousing rallying cry of the communists since the mid 19^th century: partly through their efforts and partly through historical circumstances which they could not have predicted, the lot of the average blue collar worker, at least in the organized sector, at least in reasonably developed countries such as India – leave alone Germany or the US or the UK, where they talk of a ‘labour aristocracy’ – is far better than anyone could have dreamed around 1900 C.E. But looking at people working, or pretending to work, I have wondered ever since teenage: how many of these can be called workers in any meaningful sense?

Both make-work and finding elaborate ways to shirk work are so deep rooted in the human psyche, you see. I myself allow for a very broad definition of ‘worker’, much broader than traditional communists, who could only think of peasants and ill-paid, overworked factory workers when they first defined their beloved proletariat. I can consider a top flight surgeon to satisfy my definition – as long as he does his work well – and equally a housewife who does all the household chores all by herself every day. A teacher who really has to teach instead of fooling and boring and browbeating his wards for a living is a worker, too, and so is a shopkeeper, though much of his work might consist only of fighting off boredom when there are no customers, and keeping fit despite his totally sedentary occupation. The engineer who has to rush at all hours to attend emergencies at the power plant is a worker indeed; so also the sculptor hammering away at his statue, or the scientist keeping a sharp eye on a bacterial culture in his laboratory for months on end. But when you watch a bank clerk taking half an hour to do a little thing that should take five minutes, even as he chats away with his colleagues and is rude to the client who dares complain, yet gets paid 30- or 40,000 rupees a month for it, can you call him a worker? What about the man who keeps running away from the workplace to ferry his kids to and from tuitions, and is never hauled up by his boss for it? Can most PhD scholars honestly assuage their conscience with the thought that they are doing some useful work?

Then there are sinecures – from ATM attendants to the President of India – well paid or not, they do get paid (some, even after retirement) for doing virtually nothing, or nothing of any importance. And of course, bureaucracy at all levels is a byword for inventing work: the more the papers, the fatter the files (which go unattended for years on end) the more important they look, the bigger their budgetary allocations grow, the more the perks they can claim for themselves! I still don’t know whether fashion designers and models do any work by the traditional definition of the word. The same goes for a lot of currently ‘in’ professions that I shall  not name here…

In a world where work was much more rigidly defined, and Tolstoy’s dictum of ‘He who does not work shall not eat’ was sternly enforced, how many housewives and headmasters, CEOs and celebrities and secretaries to the government might go abegging!

Wife beating? why not?

This newspaper report, based on the findings of a recent UNICEF survey, draws attention to exactly the kind of serious and very unpleasant social realities that we Indians live with, and prefer strongly to shove under the carpet rather than discuss threadbare with a view to criticizing what is bad about us and replacing them with healthier attitudes and practices. In this day and age, 57% of male teenagers and 53% of their female counterparts are okay with the idea that married men should beat their wives now and then!

I, of course, differ strongly on the question of whether India is ‘rapidly developing’ as the editorial writer claims, as anybody who reads this blog regularly should know. Sanitary toilets, decreasing superstition, greater freedom of expression and increasing public awareness of rights and responsibilities are far better indices of development than cars and cellphones and shopping malls, and my worst critic cannot deny that we have made very little progress on such counts. But let us think for a while about all the possible reasons why such a fiercely atavistic attitude regarding what is permissible in marriage should still prevail so widely among our young, especially given that so many of them believe (inspired by Bollywood if nothing else) that ‘love’ should be the cornerstone of a good marital relationship.

First, the survey could be very small and based on too biased a sample to be reliable. I doubt it, though, because the UN is not known for superficial and shoddy work.

Secondly, (if we assume that the above is not the case) it may be that the young are so indoctrinated by both oral tradition and what they see at home that they actually believe wife beating is ‘normal’ and even right. If that is so, what, as the editorial asks rhetorically, are our young people being taught at home – what kind of parents are we? Do we need the kind of public regulatory authority of the sort that they have in countries like Norway, where governments can take away very young children from home and put them in professional care if their experts think that the parents are incapable of raising decent children decently? How many Indian parents are going to lose their children if that happens?

Thirdly – and I am being politically incorrect here consciously – shouldn’t we ask why such an attitude still prevails among so many? Let us grant the feminists what they have always shrilly claimed, that men are brutes, pigs, so they can’t think of anything better, marriage for them has always meant exercising crude physical dominion over the wives. Well, why aren’t today’s mothers (many of them ‘educated’ too) teaching their sons any better? This is one question feminists answer with a loud silence. Much more alarmingly, so many girls seem to find wife-beating okay too – what can be said about that? What is it about our females of all ages that they should still hold such a belief? Could it be – dare I articulate this question? – that too many women are aware, deep inside somewhere, that there is much in them that needs disciplining lifelong in the crudest possible way? Could it be that too many women, having seen how some of their highly ‘liberated’ sisters abuse their freedoms, have decided that most women cannot handle freedom responsibly? (I hold no brief for men, by the way – to my knowledge, most men cannot do it much better either, but the very ancient tradition that acknowledges their ‘superiority’ in this matter still seems to have very strong roots in many women’s minds!)

And what about the remaining 43% of boys and 47% of girls, those who apparently do not condone wife beating? Shouldn’t they play a more vocal, more active role in bringing about change for the better?

My daughter belongs to this set of teenagers. What her attitude in this matter is should be obvious to all who know – if only from this blog and hers – what kind of parents she has. But the fact that she is growing up in the midst of so many others of such a very different and ugly mindset is something I find most disturbing to contemplate. Will most of these girls be happily married if only their husbands buy them a lot of clothes and jewellery, and let them go to parties and malls and beauty parlours every now and then, even if they are occasionally beaten just to be reminded who is the boss? Is that all they ask from women’s ‘emancipation’?

An old boy was recently lamenting that his girlfriend of many years, having suddenly ditched him for a wealthier husband without so much as a by your leave, is now trying to get back to him, moaning about how badly she repents her ‘rash’ decision! Do such women deserve to be beaten by their menfolk, then, as disgusting creatures who have no real minds and feelings of their own? Remember, in our hoary scriptures, women have often been compared to various kinds of domestic animals…

Postscript: Critical comments are welcome, but for those who base their comments merely on the last line (because they have already forgotten the rest), let me remind them that if I have referred to a certain type of woman derogatorily, I have also called some men pigs in the same blogpost! I have written glowing tributes to women I admire, too. And if I see that most female readers prefer to stay quiet, I shall assume that most of them cannot see anything wrong in what I have written, only they are too embarrassed to say so openly.

Troublesome freedom

I do not always write for children here (and there are a lot of 50-year old children around these days, I know), so here’s some serious stuff again.

This article in The American Scholar has set me musing over one of my pet themes once more: where does one (and a society) draw the line between freedom and responsibility (I strongly recommend that this earlier post be read in tandem with the current one)? Is it possible to have too much freedom? Do we perhaps make a fetish of freedom as with everything else, from God to science? Can a society go to the dogs with freedom just as it can asphyxiate or explode under tyranny?

Karl Marx once famously said ‘The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.’ Had that savant lived to see all that has happened since his day, all the change that freedom-intoxicated humanity, commoners by the millions as much as technologists and businessmen and politicians and pop-philosophers and ad-men have together done to change the world, he might have found himself breathless and very confused, if not also dismayed and disgusted (in personal life, as far as I know, he was a much more quiet and conservative man than I am). What would he have said when Revlon and Twitter alike can bring about instant and virtually painless ‘revolutions’, when the Higgs boson and Lady Gaga are equally ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ in the mass media for the passing moment, when nothing is sacred any more except what cults and loony fringes subscribe to, when schoolboys either hang themselves or shoot their teachers on failing examinations, and when change for change’s sake has become a hypnotizing mantra whose spell enthralls virtually everybody? Wouldn’t he have started looking desperately for people who still want to ‘stand and stare’, to make sense of the whirligig of life, and to make judgments they can live by, judgments they don’t have to change from one day to another to fit the fad of the moment?

Are we really free – whether we are children or adults, male or female, rich or poor – or simply tied to some eternally turning machine like cogs in the wheel: either studying for examinations, or making a living, or attending to social ‘obligations’, or shopping or watching TV simply because we can’t think of anything better to do? Do we really want very much freedom, or will most people’s lives fall apart if ever the ropes of routine and discipline were loosened a bit? Is it perhaps the primary duty of the ruling classes – among whom I include not just politicians and policemen but teachers, religious men and celebrities, too – to provide a little more discipline, more structure, more orderliness in our lives, and are they failing in their duty (which would explain everything from soaring graphs of divorce and death in road accidents to sudden economic crashes through unregulated and rampant greed at the bourses)? Are we being taught enough, at all levels from kindergarten to the university, about how best to use our freedom(s)? And, as the linked article very pertinently asks, are we forgetting that there are other, very important ideals to aim at, by being obsessed with freedom – even trivial freedom, like wearing abusive comments on t-shirts?

What is the point in thinking about such things, many readers may wonder. I am very clear about why I do it. It is the only thing that keeps the essential humanity in oneself alive: otherwise we are just living the lives of (sometimes glorified, but mindless) drudges. Cogito, ergo sum. Besides, all real change for the better comes from thinking in this fashion, and spreading the thoughts around. I am a cerebral man, and naturally all my heroes were cerebral over and above everything else. One of them said ‘The ideas of economists and political philosophers… are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else… sooner or later, it is ideas rather than vested interests that are dangerous for good or evil.’ And John Maynard Keynes did change the world in a very significant (I’d say on the whole better-) way with his ideas about how governments should regulate capitalism in the larger public interest…

Taking stock, post the 100,000 milestone

Well, first of all, the visit count has officially crossed the 100,000 mark now (actually it did so a couple of months ago), and these days I routinely get more than 2000 visits a month, so now I can consider myself a serious blogger. Thanks to all who made it possible (even my detractors, because after all their visits too were counted!), and more so to all from whom congratulations have been pouring in.

Next, about the last post. It has now been visited almost 1000 times. So I guess a lot of people have now come to know what I feel about the whole subject, and the word will get around, especially to those whom I most want to know. Thanks again, to all who wrote encouraging and congratulatory comments. Consider, though, that 1000 visits have drawn only about 25 comments: and people get so angry when I publicly remark that most people who chatter all the time actually never have anything substantial to say on any substantive issue! Very interestingly, there has been not one foolish and rude and irrelevant comment yet, though I have been checking the trash bin daily.

A few acknowledgments are due. As several have pointed out with sympathetic understanding, it took a great deal of guts to make the decision (best proved by the fact that many of my frustrated ex-colleagues have fumed before their pupils that they too were of a mind to leave, but not one has done so in all these years!), and, what is more, it takes as much to carry on, year after year. Belonging to the Bengali middle class as I (alas!) do, I realize only too well the desperation to just somehow get a job – any job, however ill-paid and demeaning – as the one and only purpose of ‘education’, and how utterly unthinkable most salaried Bengalis find it even to consider quitting something easy and comfortable and secure: nothing has changed since the days when Bankimchandra and Vidyasagar, Tagore, Vivekananda and P. C. Roy poured scorn over this disgusting, spineless tribe; only their greed and vanity and prickly egos have swelled manifold. I reserve my sharpest invectives for people who, protected by company health insurance and life insurance and provident fund and gratuity schemes and leave travel allowances and cheap loans for buying houses and cars and schooling for their young, often having nearly 100 days of holidays a year, envy us self-employed people for making the money we do, and even grumble that we do not pay ‘enough’ taxes! And my greatest respect is reserved for those who stand on their own feet and make their own living, whether they are humble dhaaba owners or top flight surgeons and lawyers and tutors with private practices, and, it goes without saying, writers and musicians and those who try to make a living by making good movies…

At the same time – and I do hope my favourite readers will understand and admit it to themselves – there is also the reverse of the coin to be always kept in mind: there is the constant danger of being swept off one’s feet by the lure of easy money, especially when so many people are so keen to shove it into your hands, just so long as you say yes and take their child in. I have seen so many doctors and teachers first make a name for themselves and then turn into mere money-making machines, completely unconcerned about the deterioraring quality of their services… my greatest pride is when a current pupil meets with someone who studied with me ten or fifteen years ago, and compares notes, and they both discover that I still give unstintedly of myself in class as I did so many years ago, and because I can’t do it with too many at a time, so many people go away disappointed, even offended, utterly incapable of understanding why I said no. Believe me it’s hard, having to make myself disagreeable by refusing money, especially since I am not really rich in the sense of not having to work at all. And so I still fantasize about winning a lottery, and pray that God may sustain me in active mode a little longer. Nishant, that is the only sense in which I expect ‘results’ from my actions! Does that make sense?

Sreejith, that was a touching recollection. Makes me proud in retrospect, thinking that amidst that kind of stress I could bear up so well, calmly and with dignity, for that is the quality of character that I most admire, and find least often around me. Debarshi, frankly, I didn’t notice the coincidence about the date, but it’s intriguing, yes. Dipanwita and Arani, thanks for the kind words, but I mourn for the school, imagining the kind of people who will be celebrating its golden jubilee next year. Sayan and Rashmi, I hope you will always keep in mind that a true teacher must uphold high ideals, and practise what he preaches. It is that, rather than lack of capital or technology or organization or anything of that sort which is holding India back from realizing her full potential, and this has to be preached by millions of teachers at the grassroots, not the likes of APJ Abdul Kalam pontificating from the luxurious and exalted confines of Rashtrapati Bhavan!

Anand, my deepest regards to your aged relative: she had it exactly right. Don’t lose faith in yourself, and don’t forget God. Only, we ‘smarter’ young people think we have better ideas to live by, and some of us must take it upon ourselves to prove that the old way was the right way after all.

Sayantika, I wish you well. At least you have tried, and found out for yourself how hard it is to do something instead of merely talking about it  And Arnab, ‘ferocity’ is  a rather odd word to apply to a teacher. Did you mean that word, or something close but not quite the same?

Ten years of flying solo - yay!

Today is a day I can call a red-letter day in my life without dramatic exaggeration. It was exactly ten years ago that I tendered my resignation to that school where I had done my last salaried job (a fourteen-year stint, no less). I had become tired, disgusted and totally frustrated with the way things had been going there (see the letter here), and my wife and I had together decided that enough was enough. Since I obviously had certain rigid standards of which they were falling increasingly short, and since I could not do a thing to turn things around, I should quit, become a free man once more, and try my luck in the open arena of the world, with only God as my master. I can assure you it was not a sudden or painless decision.

I left telling them I neither liked nor wanted the job any more, and I believed I could do much better for myself, still in the teaching profession, on my own. Many of my colleagues said pretty loudly behind my back that I was an arrogant fool who was soon going to get his comeuppance, and even hoped to see me come back in sackcloth and ashes, begging to be reinstated. When I didn’t, and things didn’t work out quite as they had figured, their chagrin knew no bounds, so they mounted a vicious, no-holds-barred whisper campaign to slander me, in the fervent hope that it would ruin my reputation, and force me off the turf for good. God and my family know what we went through and endured. Let me pass lightly over this, though, because the point is that we not only survived but thrived, and ‘Vengeance is Mine, said the Lord’ is one of my most favourite quotes from the Bible: many of these creatures will live to rue the day they spoke and spread evil about someone who had never hurt them – except indirectly, by his own work, showing them up for what they were. One consequence of it that I must mention, though, is that it has not only made me firmly unsocial for the rest of my life but persuaded my daughter to be tough-minded, and have as few ‘friends’ as possible…she will not make the same mistakes I did for so long.

Now it’s been ten years. A whole decade of being ‘unemployed’, a seventh of a normal lifespan, nearly a third of a man’s working life! No middle class man in India with a  single income and a family to support and a child to raise quits a safe and cushy job in middle age (I know how little work schoolteachers do) if he can help it to go it alone. I took an incredible risk, knowing the full burden of it, and I have come through: not unscathed, no, but vindicated. The children who were last in my care in class ten the year I left are grown men at work now; the children who come to my tuition today hadn’t even been admitted to that school then, and have often heard only vaguely, wonderingly, that I was a teacher there once upon a time, and couldn’t care less. Those who came in as children have now learnt enough of jealousy and invective to abuse me, or of gratitude to thank me for what I did for them, according to their characters. But the facts are thus: I am now far better known for the work I do than the school had made me; I make a  much better living, I am far, far freer to do my own thing my way, the numbers enrolling for coming years keep swelling with the passage of time; my wife is content with the kind of life I live, my daughter has grown up the way I wanted (which is something that very few parents can say, given the kind of norms I live by), and God alone can destroy me now, as and when He pleases: I can cheerily look forward to retirement without having to depend on any man’s friendship or support. Not a bad report card, though I say it myself, and I’d like to meet some men who have done better against that kind of odds. Obviously I don’t count doctors and engineers whose parents have made their beds for them even after they were 30…Yes, I am a proud man, and I have earned my pride. Not for them to lecture me about modesty who are desperate to show off trifles like cars and houses and jewellery and club memberships and trips to Umrica because they have never been able to achieve anything of significance in their lives, such as independence and self-respect and being called ‘Sir’ by everybody they meet, from garage hands to managing directors, from policemen to netas.

All this is not meant for gloating or preening. I want my life, my example, to be a reassuring beacon light to a lot of young people who are being brainwashed by their parents and ‘teachers’ into believing that in this country only crooks and cheats, flatterers and opportunists and mindless crammers choosing ‘safe’ career avenues and sacrificing all principles and ideals at the door of expediency can hope to survive and succeed; that only bootlickers and backstabbers and time-servers and oppressors have a ‘future’. Not so. You know your job well, you work long and hard, you stick to some time-tested principles, and, only God willing (there’s nothing in modern experience that can contradict this ancient wisdom – karmanye vadkhikaraste/ ma phaleshu kadachana), you win out. No matter what happens to me tomorrow, no matter whether I grow rich or poor hereafter, no matter how long I live, no one can rub out the success-story of these last ten years. And so I go to sleep content tonight. If my daughter starts off by being as lucky and as well-endowed and as determined as I have been, she will do far better still by the time she reaches my age. That much I know.

Oh, before I forget: someone should tell K. K. Devasy (I would send him the link myself, if I knew his email i.d.) how eternally grateful I am to him for helping me so mightily to make up my mind!

[P.S.: Nice to see the member count has just touched 250. I shall be glad for comments on the previous blogpost to keep coming in. And no more posts for a while: I want this one to take me past the 100,000 visits mark, so it will be something to remember. Let’s see how long it takes!]

Engineer or bust!

A small boy who has just finished his secondary level board examinations (ICSE) came to see me the other day to say hello, to ask after my health, and to tell me about his plans for the immediate future. He was the quiet, sober, attentive, diligent and reasonably intelligent type: far from well-read and hungry for knowledge, of course, but the type that is sure to do well, in today’s climate, in whichever line of study and work he chooses for himself. I naturally wished him well, and said I’d be glad if he keeps in touch. The sad thing – for me – was that he too (groan, yawn) is determined to go into engineering. Ever heard of the phrase ‘siren song’?

Will someone explain to me this craze that has absolutely possessed this country? I have written on this before: see, for instance, this post which is now almost two years old. In my day it was bad enough (a fool of a headmaster cast one glance at my ICSE marksheet and said ‘You are going in for science, of course’ – and nipped in the bud what might have been a far more rewarding career, though I eventually gravitated towards my amour propre anyway…), but now it has become nothing less than a mania, a pandemic. Just about everybody wants to become an engineer, from a banker’s son to a paanwallah’s. The truly mad, sad thing about the whole business is that a) most of them – often their parents, too – have no idea what engineering means and what kind of career it offers, b) most have never thought it necessary to find out about it, nor about what other options they have, c) most of them will just drift into whatever stream they get according to their ranks in one entrance test or another, and spend four listless years learning very little, because, frankly, they are not interested, d) after college, they will get into very run of the mill jobs (even totally unrelated ones, like chemical engineers going into IT, simply because they cannot get anything else) and spend the rest of their lives being quietly frustrated – as I can see with thousands of ex-students, who cannot say what they are doing with their lives besides shopping, eating, partying, watching TV, yelling at spouses and children, quarrelling with colleagues, envying slightly more ‘successful’ neighbours and relatives or preening on Facebook, or they will switch courses and go off into entirely irrelevant careers like management or public administration, which is a total waste of an engineering education (I have this on the authority of an ex-director of IIT Kharagpur, besides knowing that you can get into an IIM with a degree in history if you can pass the CAT), or lament for the rest of their lives that they didn’t go into something more interesting that they were born for …

I wrote in an op-ed article in The Telegraph titled ‘Is the Joint Entrance Examination a social evil?’ almost thirty years ago that what was actually happening was that India was churning out, broadly speaking, millions of third-rate engineers (glorified mechanics, no more, doing repair and maintenance jobs most of the time) and probably losing out on countless first-rate artists, writers, teachers, musicians, sportsmen, film directors, judges, administrators, lawmakers… all types needed to create a healthy, balanced and truly progressive society, and who was really gaining anything from it except those who ran cram shops (think Aakash and FIITJEE)? I have been saying this all my life since then, as a teacher, public preacher and parent. The wonderful thing is that most people I question have no answers (and they often mind terribly that I make them uncomfortable by asking them to think about answers), or they dumbly repeat the same lines I have heard ten thousand times before – that ‘society’ expects them to goad their children into this common cattle pen so that their wards can find some ‘status’ and ‘security’, or that the ‘other lines’ I talk about (‘general line’, many of these semi-literates call them, though I have never heard of anybody, not excepting the likes of C. V. Raman and Amartya Sen and Sugata Bose, who studied in a ‘general line’ rather than physics or economics or history) are only meant for talented people, whereas they know that their children are ‘mediocre’, and shouldn’t dare to venture into such dangerous waters. Well, there are three things I want to say about it: A) what very great status and security does a common engineer’s job grant, for heaven’s sake? I don’t meet too many engineers who make even a lakh a month, and especially in private sector jobs there’s hardly any security of tenure, even, leave alone freedom and respect: both union leaders and senior management treat you like scum! B) how do all these parents know that their children are merely mediocre, and have no special talents to cultivate? and C) if it is so widely agreed that engineering is the only refuge for mediocre people, how do they then dare to turn around and start talking about how their ‘talented’ kids have got into engineering school? How weird a country this is, really, where you can have your cake and eat it too; one can be a moron and a talent at the same time!

What I truly wonder about is why so many people keep coming to me every year: and this year I am wondering more than ever, because my classes are filled to bursting, and people keep on dropping in and phoning at all hours of the day still, literally begging to let their kids in, desperate even to enroll for the next year, bluntly refusing to take no for an answer. But why, I keep on asking myself as well as those who are closest to me – what do these people want, and what miracle do they expect from me? I am just an English teacher, and they are all convinced that their children absolutely must become engineers, for which you certainly don’t need to know more English than the average lower-division government clerk, and good marks in ICSE/ISC don’t matter much anyway, since bright kids and idiots alike go on to get admission in the very same schools and colleges, and on top of everything else, I don’t advertize and I am not even in the business of ‘guaranteeing’ good marks in examinations; instead I keep telling them like an endless litany that marks depend partly on luck and partly on the children’s own merit and effort! Nobody, I am quite sure, gives a damn for the things that I myself consider important parts of what I teach: the ideals, the respect for language as the greatest invention of all time, the love of knowledge in its entirety, good virtues like courtesy, diligence, cleanliness, quietness, punctuality and keeping promises and hating gossip, the importance of the right and power to make up one's own mind, informed concern for the neediest in society, appreciation of art and literature, fascination with history, admiration of justice and contempt for the merely rich… all that goes into the making of civilization, all that has always been dear to me: nobody, I am sure, cares a busted nickel for all that. Yet so many hundreds of parents – many of them well educated too – are somehow convinced that their wards absolutely must get into my tuition; and they are willing to go to absurd lengths for it, in terms of the people they are ready to urge to coax me to the kind of money they are willing to spend and the time and distance their children will have to spend/waste routinely simply coming and going. What folly is this?

Just as an aside, I teach plus-two level students, too, in the commerce and humanities streams – mostly female, alas, for obvious reasons – and it’s been almost 24 years now, and I have little to report that is encouraging. I find the overwhelming majority of them to be not only intellectually mediocre but lazy, listless, unfocussed, interested only in fun and games, really… as though they are already sure that they are merely killing time until their parents can marry them off to (no need to hold your breath) engineers. Every year I think I am going to shut down those batches; every year just one or two gems in the muck keep me going – other than the money.

The most cynical among my well-wishers keep telling me that I am wasting my own time philosophizing and under-selling myself instead of making hay while the sun shines. ‘Just jack up your fees and sit back and watch the fun!’ they have been telling me for years; ‘those who abuse you will go on doing the same, those who are desperate to come here will pay whatever you ask, and about the rest, who cares, as long as you can get rich?’ Now that I am growing old and quite sure that I have a big market but must give up all hope of bringing about any social change for the better, should I finally decide to give them my ear and just ensure a cosy retirement for myself? I can go on at this seven-days-a-week rate for at most another ten years, after all!

"If winter comes..."

When I was going up to class 12 (in St. Xavier’s Collegiate School, Calcutta), they sent me to participate in a ‘creative writing’ competition at Loreto House, which was almost next door on Park Street. I went without any clear idea about what I was supposed to do: after all, what was special about ‘creative’ writing? Wasn’t all writing meant to be creative? Anyway, several of us from different schools were assembled in a hall, and a girl came over to write three topics on the blackboard, out of which each had to select one. I have no memory of what the other two were, but as soon as she wrote ‘If winter comes…’ (first half of a famous line from Shelley's immortal poem), a flashbulb seemed to go off inside my head – the classic Eureka moment – and I literally saw the whole story full-blown in my mind’s eye. For the next half hour I was scribbling furiously, dead to the world, just copying out the story from my mental screen as it were, and then I submitted the story and walked out, leaving the girl gaping after me. No wonder: the time allotted was, I think, three hours, and many of my fellow-writers had just stopped chewing their pens and started writing slowly and laboriously, visibly bereft of ideas. Thus “Natalie darling” was born: the story of a young geologist cum KGB agent in late 1970s USSR who is sent off on an urgent mission to Siberia, leaving his sweetheart behind in Leningrad, and who survives an accidental and global nuclear holocaust out there in the freezing wilderness, the only human left alive on the planet, who spends his last months and days and hours scribbling letters to his lost beloved, even as his radioactivity-contaminated body falls slowly apart.

Our team coordinator was waiting breathlessly outside, and asked the obvious question. I remember I answered, with the overweening arrogance that only teenagers are capable of mustering at will, that if the judges were literate, I was sure to win first prize. Which is what I did, in fact, but Natalie brought me much, much more. When a year later I went to Jadavpur University and tried to introduce myself to some of the girls I had just met, several of them simpered ‘Oh, we know you, you are Natalie darling (sic)!’ Let us pull a delicate veil over all that has passed in the intervening decades, but even today I can bring tears to the eyes of many a girl by reading out the same story.

I don’t know why I suddenly wrote about this. But the story has a bizarre sequel. Many years after I wrote it, while I was a schoolteacher, I had to deal with a story by the renowned science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke called History Lesson. It gave me goosebumps to see how uncannily similar his basic storyline was to mine (though there wasn’t any love interest or any poetry in his version). I had never read that story before, and surely Clarke couldn’t have read mine. So maybe in the world of creativity the selfsame ideas occur to entirely unconnected people at different times and places?

The legend of Shiva

Amish Tripathi’s Shiva trilogy has gripped me strongly. Book One, The Immortals of Meluha, and Book Two, The Secret of the Nagas I have read already; I am waiting to get my hands on the third book, The Oath of the Vayuputras.

In threadbare outline, it narrates how Shiva, a very gifted but minor tribal chief from somewhere near Mansarowar Lake in Tibet, comes to India almost two thousand years before Christ, falls in love, gets embroiled in pan-Indian politics, leads great armies to victory, discovers awful secrets about the eternal intertwining of Good and Evil, and lives up to the legend of a great saviour so gloriously that in his own lifetime he becomes a god in the public imagination, Neelkanth Mahadev, as other great heroes like Manu and Bharat, Rudra and Ram had done long before him. The books are racily written, and very cleverly meld and transcreate stories taken from the inexhaustible treasurehouse of classical Indian literature, with a flavour that should appeal to 21^st century readers.

Judging  by the sales figures, the trilogy has been quite a success. I think it deserves much more. Amish is not yet a great writer, stylistically speaking – the sooner he can learn the art of writing a tighter narrative and drop the English-medium-schoolboy slang and expletive-loaded patois as well as typical Indianisms which should have been edited out (‘lightening’ for lightning, ‘pin-drop silence’, ‘past-time’, return back, persistent confusion between its and it’s…) the better for him, if he is aiming for recognition as a writer among educated adults worldwide, that is. I have issues with some of the content, too: Ram is portrayed as a very great lawgiver and ruler of men, yet nothing at all is said about how shabbily he treated his own wife; the whole story of the Mahabharata is entirely absent, except for passing mention of the tribe of Vasudevs; it is entirely part of the author’s imagination that the whole of eastern India was simultaneously settled and civilized along with the so-called Indus Valley culture (called ‘Meluha’ here); there are unreconciled contradictions, such as why the Naga Lord of the People would hurt the mother he craved to be reunited with in a sword fight; Parashuram’s explanation for killing his mother is radically different from the way the Mahabharata tells it, and of course the Parashuram we know never cut off his sword arm as a penance for wrongdoing (can one take liberties with both history and received legends?); no explanation is offered for how the deformed Naga warrior became the loveable and placid Siddhidata of contemporary folklore. Above all there hangs the question – yes, ancient India might have been far more scientifically advanced than most of us can imagine (I have written about this before), but brain surgery and life-prolonging elixirs and thought transference via radio waves, too? Isn’t that taking things maybe a bit too far?

But Amish is certainly good, given that this is a first effort, and the subject matter deserves far more attention and cultivation. There is a long and rich tradition in the west of recreating ancient stories for modern audiences in literature and cinema: too little of the sort has yet been done in India, though the resources available are so tantalizingly rich and diverse. This is a good beginning, and if it could coax young Indians to take a new interest in their own country, her past, her achievements and her potential, it will have done a magnificent and much-needed job. Among the urban, well off, Indlish-educated, technology obsessed babalog of contemporary India (to which class, surprisingly, Amish himself belongs – he is an IIM alumnus, and has done a long stint in the insurance industry: what background could be more boring?), few people read books, fewer try writing them, and if they do, they write teenage fluff, like Chetan Bhagat. History, which has stimulated the greatest minds of all lands and ages (Churchill as well as Zuckerberg!) is so uncool to them that they can hardly scrape through school examinations, and actually believe that it is necessary to be a dud in history in order to become an engineer… they should be reading this series by the millions and become slightly less simian. Meanwhile Amish has expressed a desire to write more books taking up themes from the epics, as well as about Akbar and Dara Shukoh. I shall certainly look forward to reading them.

Growing up in Durgapur

What was Durgapur like in the days when I was growing up here?

Much quieter than it is these days, of course, much greener and with much more of wide open spaces which I sorely miss now. Far fewer vehicles on the roads (when my father bought a ‘Jawa’ motorcycle in 1967 hordes of people came over to marvel at it). No mobiles, no TV, no computers and video games; no shopping malls either. Private telephones were a rarity, and they all had four digit numbers (ours was 2788), had to be dialled, and nobody had heard of caller line identification. Today’s children hear about ‘trunk calls’ as though they were fairy tales. Far less dust and grime in the air, too. White skinned foreigners were a much commoner sight, though – we knew too little to distinguish between British and Russians and Germans, of course, but there were certainly no Chinamen around, except for those who made shoes and pulled out teeth in Benachity market. The first high pressure sodium vapour street lamps were put up on Central Avenue in 1977, I think.  High society flaunted huge American Dodges, Plymouths and Studebakers…oh yes, there were quite a few libraries around. The one at Durgapur Club was well-stocked, there was Anurupa Devi Smriti Pathagar for Bengali readers, and even a tiny outlet of the British Council: unthinkable in this age of philistines.

Children live different lives from adults. As Tagore in his childhood, though physically confined by and large to the four walls of the house in Jorasanko yet roamed all over the wide world in his imagination aided by his tutors and books, I grew up seeing very little outside the DSP township until my fourteenth year, so I knew far more of the great world outside than I did of my own town. I remember only occasional trips to the barrage before that, so even going to AVB township on the invitation of a friend was an adventure to remember, and likewise a bus trip through the nascent Bidhan Nagar, where I now live. It was like visiting another country, almost, and what I remember best is making a bicycle trip through the same place soon afterwards, thrilling to the knowledge that the streets I was passing through, bordered by dense jungle on both sides, would be the sole preserve of armed and vicious dacoits after dark (it was almost like that as late as 1990 on the same road which is now a blaze of multicoloured neon lamps and choc-a-bloc with guest houses, restaurants and hotels, humming with merrymaking crowds till late at night – where fireworms glowed and jackals howled even 25 years ago). And the hot and happening, crowded and bustling City Centre area was an open wilderness well into the 1980s. Yet, as I was telling my daughter only the other day, the really strange thing is how little  the town has changed in more than three decades!

My early years in school were spent during the time when the tumultuous Naxalite movement was at its peak, and yet, strange to say, our lives were virtually unaffected; though one morning we gaped over the school perimeter wall at a severed and bloody human head on the road outside (that was 1971), I worry much more about my daughter’s safety on the roads today, thanks to the reckless motorbike-crazy and often drunk kids zooming around, than our parents ever worried about us. I can hardly remember my parents asking where I had been when I came home late, morning or evening, wandering around the township on my bicycle. I travelled far and wide on that bicycle, as far as Panagarh and Ranigunj, even, yet it amazes me that I had never heard of Garh-jungle with the Shyamarupa temple nor about the little village of Kenduli on the Ajoy, famed for the medieval poet Joydev and the annual festival of bauls held in his honour, until I was well into adulthood…

Festivals like Holi and Diwali were observed in a much  more communal spirit, and therefore enjoyed much more, in our day. Kali-pujo was a red-letter day in my calendar, because my normally aloof father got actively involved with me and some of my friends in making fireworks with our own hands: truly a labour of love, if ever there was one (he wasn’t quite as successful in teaching me the art of playing with marbles and of flying kites). And today’s children have no idea of the fun we had organizing picnics (chorui bhaati) all on our own, with no adult help or supervision!

I was very fond of swimming, always, and Durgapur Club had a pool where I luxuriated for hours every day all through the long hot summers (and first discovered the charm of looking at shapely legs! Unlike in these much more 'modern' times, there was no gender segregation in the pools then. Also, I didn't notice so many schoolgoers wearing charmed amulets in my day. So much for progress). Many of my boys and girls might be surprised to know that at least up to the age of twelve, when I went down with a long spell of nagging illness (and turned for solace and comfort almost wholly to books) I was not above playing a lively game of cricket or football, ping pong or badminton, with any friends who were available.

As I have said elsewhere, my mother, her brother, and most of all my grandfather richly filled in much of my time with their friendly companionship and endless storytelling. To them I owe most of my teaching skills, such as they are.

For the rest, it was books, books, books all the time – an endless number of them, in both English and Bangla, on every conceivable subject under the sun.  Books have made me the kind of person I am: no two opinions on that. And some teachers. Most teachers in my life, as in most others’, were brutes or bores, but I think I was lucky to have an unusually large number of teachers who made strong and good impressions on me through my childhood. To them, a silent but deeply respectful bow in passing.

Summers were hotter in those days, I think, and only the very rich had airconditioning at home, so we really knew what blistering afternoons and sweltering nights meant. Winters have definitely grown milder: one no longer has to shiver deliciously under blankets these days until one is warm enough to fall asleep. The rains were wonderful to watch then, and thankfully so they are even today, living as I do amidst a verdurous ambience, and where waterlogging is not a perpetual menace.

Oh, this I forgot to mention: I have lived in 13 (or is it 14?) different places in the same town, including this, hopefully my last, house. That should be odd, I think. My own daughter has lived all of her first 15 years in the same house...

Memories have grown dim, sketchy and jumbled up with the passage of years, so I sense the imminent danger of this becoming a ramble making sense to no one at all. So let me pause and wait for readers to start commenting. It is their remarks that will make me decide whether it would be prudent to continue reminiscing.

Landmarks coming up

I am getting a little excited now – and as my readers know, I don’t use that word easily. Two reasons: the number of members publicly following this blog is approaching 250, which is respectable (since I know several hundred others visit without having enlisted as members, and since most personal non-celebrity blogs I look up have far fewer members), and the visit count is nearing the 100,000 mark; also, next month will see the tenth anniversary of my resignation from my last salaried job. Which is going to happen sooner, I wonder?

And meanwhile, will regular readers help me along by suggesting things they want me to write on – things that can be accommodated within the 1000-1200 word range I usually stick to? I especially ask those friends who have been devotedly following almost right since the time I started, back in 2006…

Lost in the great blue yonder

Sputnik went up in 1957, Gagarin went out into space in 1961, Alexei Leonov made the first space walk shortly after. Then the alarmed and insulted Americans scrambled furiously into the race, and lo, by the end of that decade the first men had landed on the moon (or so they claim, and not everybody believes them!) By 1973, with Skylab, astronaut-scientists were ready to spend months at a time in a space station far above the earth. That was the era in which my generation grew up (I was ten in 1973, and a voracious reader already). The whole world was agog: space was hot, and next to the Beatles maybe (“we’re more famous than Jesus Christ!”), space science was the coolest thing.  

Sci-fi imaginations ran wild, predicting wonders that went vastly beyond anything that the most daring scientists were then willing to contemplate, and yet such incredible and all-round progress was being made by those same scientists all the time that it seemed all the fantasies would come true only too soon. We talked avidly of hibernating spacemen and proton/ion engines, super-intelligent computers in charge and teleportation and hyperspace jumps and wormholes in the space-time fabric, and world government and intergalactic empires and how ancient psychological, economic, political and religious problems would re-surface in new guises in vastly distant and alien environments light years away – as though such things were sure to come true, if not in our own lifetimes, then certainly within those of our grandchildren. Meanwhile SETI seemed to hold forth another glorious promise: discovering different forms of intelligent life scattterd all over the universe! Those who want to know what I am talking about need only to look up the books written by Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke and Frank Herbert, and the incomparable Star Trek series on TV…

That vision has largely faded, leaving only a dim afterglow. There have been no big-ticket space projects since Pioneer, Voyager, Viking and the Shuttle program. Despite searching for more than three decades, no serious hint of alien civilizations (a la War of the Worlds, Close Encounters, Star Wars, ET and Independence Day) has been found. Given the technological plateau we have reached, interstellar travel, it has now become apparent, remains a pipe dream for the near future at least. These days, it’s only boys from Bankura who talk of specializing in astrophysics and joining NASA (most of them end up writing software code in Bangalore, or fusty post-doc papers which nobody reads at places like TIFR at best). Now that the missile race (which, as those in the know have known for a long time, was the real purpose behind all the PR drivel) between two superpowers has subsided – and since China doesn’t seem to be interested – no government can whip up public enthusiasm to fund big new exploratory projects either; much better to focus on very earthbound problems, such as finding new sources of oil and water, and better methods of pollution control, and how to make keyhole surgery on the heart. Programs like the International Space Station have hardly made a blip in the global media, and most of the current enthusiasm focuses on privately funded shuttles/hyperplanes designed to carry well-heeled and sensation hungry tourists into near-earth orbits for a few hours. Even fiction and fantasy seem to reflect the trend: if you think Matrix or Minority Report or Artificial Intelligence or Inception or the Harry Potter saga, nobody seems to be thinking seriously of leaving earth far behind – an occasional Avatar notwithstanding.

Shall we tell our grandchildren we were the last space crazy generation, then? Or were the sci-fi writers of the 1940 to 60s right all along: that such miracles were only likely to come about in a matter of hundreds, or even thousands of years, and we were getting all het up for nothing?