Missing you, my heart

I have recently got a taste of things to come, and frankly speaking, I don’t like it much.

There’s a difference between being alone and feeling lonely. Alone is being just by yourself; lonely is when you long for company and can’t get it. One often wants to be alone; indeed, there are times in everyone’s life when one yells at other people ‘Just leave me alone, will you?’ I have needed a lot of alone-ness in my life, always: when I am reading, writing, thinking, watching  movies; even, sometimes, when I only wanted to sleep. My family has always been good enough to me in that regard – they have respected and granted my need for private mental space. If anything, I have had too much of alone-ness, which means loneliness; not wanting to be alone but having no choice. One can be very lonely in  a crowd, mind you; indeed, one philosopher has aptly described the denizens of all modern metro cities as ‘the lonely crowd’…

Most people always need company; some prefer to have much more of solitude. I guess it makes me kind of weird that I have always had an  equally strong desire for both. So on the one hand I have long avoided socializing, and on the other, I love teaching primarily because it gives me the chance of getting warm and close with so many people, new people year after year, and forging ties with some that last a long time. In the process of reaching out I have tried to be as intense as genuine; certainly far more than any other teacher that I know. It has scared some, exasperated others, made some suspicious and wary, while others have laughed, or simply ignored me as a crank. No matter. While there have been nasty surprises and bitter experiences and heartbreaks galore, the rewards have been deep, many, and diverse (indeed, if I told all, most people of my age would think it’s a fairy tale!): I wouldn’t change it one jot. And I am still hungry for more.

The job of a news reporter on the beat is always irregular and hectic, without a time-bound routine, and requires running around to all sorts of places most of the time. I got a taste of it and gave it up early in my career: I decided I liked to spend much more of my time at home, and at my own will, than that kind of life permitted. I am glad I could make up my mind early. Those who have bad wives and in-laws at home are glad if they can stay away most of the time, but I know too many men who live far away from home simply for the sake of having to make a living, and hate it. I am gladder still that the next job, at which I spent fourteen years, was that of teaching at a school, and that too, barely ten minutes driving from home. It was hard work, teaching school in the daytime and giving tuition at home in the evenings every day, but it gave me a lot of time at home, that was the important thing. And once I got married, things became even nicer, so I wanted to be at home most of the time: in fact, soon after learning that my wife was in the family way I stopped going to other people’s houses to take classes, and that’s been 17 years now. Once my daughter was born, I was only too happy to devote most of my time to the hearth, and God knows how richly I have been compensated. What made my life very unusual was that when I gave up that last salaried job eleven years ago, my daughter was barely past five, and ever since then I have been a complete home-body. Which means that, given my intense instinctive desire for and efforts to make a joyous family life, my wife and daughter have seen and got more of me than most wives and daughters do. I have enjoyed every minute of it – eleven years have flashed by like a dream – and I trust and pray that they have, too.

There have been bad patches every now and then – which family doesn’t have some? – but there has also been fun galore, chatting, reading, discussing books, watching movies together, playing games, making things with our own hands, going travelling all over the country again and again, planning things to do, swimming, shopping (yes, shopping too!), dining out, handling trouble… we were so close-knit a unit that we didn’t really need anybody else to stay occupied and happy, not even relatives, in all these years. The best proof of which is that even my wife and daughter have needed to socialize far less than most people do. And in between there have been so many connections built up with old boys and girls, face to face and over the phone and via internet, that my life has always been full. Which is why it is nothing less than weird that I keep aching for company. Shakespeare said of one particular and very exceptional woman that ‘she makes hungry where most she satisfies’. I can say that about all humankind – and that, despite all the worthless and disgusting and disappointing people I have known.

There can be no more telling fact about how much of a home-body I have become than that in all these eleven years there has been one solitary occasion when I went somewhere out of town without wife and daughter. And this despite their urging me again and again to go visit people I love and care for who live far away – not just in this country but abroad if I so wish. I just never felt a strong urge to do that: nothing else stops me, really, I know. My door is always open to anybody who wants to see me, as thousands of people have found out, but I rarely visit anyone, nor go to clubs, parties and festivals, unless my wife and daughter drag me along, which rarely happens… and all this time, I have been content.

So what about the line I started with? Yes, I’m coming to that. My life is at a turning point once again, I think. And that is because my daughter is going away.

A few people already know; to a lot of people it is bound to come as a surprise. That is why I put that line in a paragraph of its own, and put such a long preamble before it.

She’s grown up now, of course, and it would have soon been time for the fledgling to leave the nest for good and make her own way through the world. I had been struggling to reconcile myself to the thought for quite some time: after all, intellectually speaking, I have only scorn and derision for parents who refuse to let their children grow up. I know just how grown up I was at 16! And besides, I live in an obscure one-horse town anyway: there have never been any prospects here, so all but the stupidest and laziest of my students leave, never to come back, because there is neither a chance of a good education here nor decent jobs. This is neither Delhi nor New York that I could have sensibly asked her to stay back all her life. Only, she’s decided to speed things up a bit. She’ll go to college in 2015, so I thought I still have some time, but now she’s planning to go off to Calcutta already, and that means, of course, that the missus is going to be there much of the time too, and it’s going to happen within a couple of weeks, and though this has been the talk for several months now, I find myself all unprepared. “I suppose in the end the whole of life becomes an act of letting go...” says the eponymous narrator in The Life of Pi played by Irrfan Khan, and I understand. Eventually, as I have observed in my Meditations, you have to let go of your own life itself. But training for it is hard, especially when you love: Vidyasagar makes the sage Kanva weep when his foster daughter Shakuntala is about to leave for her husband’s place, ‘bujhilaam sneho oti bishom bostu’ (love – in the sense of strong affectionate attachment – is an awful thing indeed). As I was telling someone I also love with all my heart, the French say to part is to die a little.

Oh, of course, Calcutta is just a few hours away, the two of them keep assuring me, and they’ll keep coming over, and then there’s always the phone and email and sms and video chat, and I have my work cut out every day of the week, so why should I be lonely? Does anybody understand why? And does anybody have words of consolation or advice for me, things not in the nature of useless platitudes? 

Meditations on death and dying, part two

My daughter, when she was several years younger, asked her mathematics teacher – a devout Malayali Brahmin then in his mid seventies (his mother lived beyond ninety) – why he made it a point to rub some ‘sacred’ ash on his forehead every morning after the daily religious rituals. He told her it is a very old custom, meant to remind the wearer every single day of his life what he is finally going to end up as: a handful of ashes.

It is interesting to note that many religious traditions make it mandatory for seekers of salvation to go through a period of what is called shmashan sadhana – meditating round the clock at the cremation or burial grounds. It is meant to drive deep the great realization that, in the English poet’s words, ‘sceptre and crown will tumble down/ and in the dust be equal made/ with poor crook’d scythe and spade’. Death is the ultimate equalizer: tyrant or tycoon, great artist or sportsman, Helen of Troy and Hercules, brilliant scientist and heartthrob of millions, as much as the humblest hewer of wood and drawer of water is going to go back to the earth and become a part of it, and that, pretty soon. What is more, they are all going to be forgotten sooner or later (look up the ancient emperor’s pathetic boast in Shelley’s Ozymandias, and recall Kipling’s famous lines reminding us that it is the same with nations as with persons: ‘Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/ Is one with Nineveh and Tyre’! There is also Kabir’s terrible song ‘Sadho ye murdon ka gaon’…everything is dying every moment, from the stars in the sky to the tiniest living thing on earth: keep that firmly in mind as you go through life.

Now focusing for any length of time on this most inevitable fact of life might, one could complain, make one very gloomy, frightened and depressed, totally unwilling to strive for anything worthwhile: if we are all going to die and be forgotten, why bother? Better by far to turn off all thought and live for the moment, to ‘seize the day’ and make merry for a while, indulge our senses to the fullest while we can, ‘take the cash and let the credit go/ nor heed the rumble of a distant drum’! One could argue that the glutton, the sleep-drunk, the shopaholic and the party animal are the wisest philosophers among us, for they have understood best how utterly transitory and purposeless this mundane existence is, and are determinedly making the best of their time the only way they can. Indeed, very clever men have actually preached this as the best outlook on life: the ancient materialistic sage Charvaka’s essential teaching can be summarized in the aphorism ‘javat jivet sukham jivet/ wrinang krityang ghritang pivet’ (live happily as long as you live, keep drinking ghee even if that puts you into debt). And indeed, if we were to make a global survey, we would quite possibly find that a great number of people, if they subscribe to any philosophy at all (many of us never even feel the need for it) actually believe this to be the sanest way of living. Whether we think about it or not, we are going to die anyway, so let’s all try to emulate Paris Hilton for as long as we can …

Well, obviously not all human beings through history have been satisfied with that outlook. Even emperors have been worried enough by the prospect of old age, death and oblivion to try all sorts of things to prolong their lives or at least their memories – from killing millions to raising pyramids to writing books of philosophy (Marcus Aurelius) to spreading religion (Ashoka) to looking for the elixir of life (Kublai Khan). Somewhat lesser men – the most gifted adventurers, scientists and artists among them – have often been motivated to doing great works at least partly by the hope that their deeds will fetch them a permanent place in history. Medical science still keeps searching as desperately as ever for ways to make us live longer, if not achieve immortality: far fewer people are engaged in seriously pondering over whether that is a very wise pursuit at all! As for the vast mass of ordinary human beings, we never can stop wondering and agonizing over what would happen to us and our loved ones after we die – hence much of the essential solace that religions provide (and one reason why neither mindless hedonism nor a purely ‘scientific’ outlook on life will ever be able to replace religion wholesale), hence the way we arrange funerals, write obituaries, build memorials and keep making love offerings to departed souls, hence the endless curiosity about the hereafter that has given birth to some of the most fantastic and beautiful art and literature in every civilized country, hence the unrelenting effort of scientists to figure out whether ‘entropy can be reversed’ (see Asimov’s priceless story The Last Question, or the one by Satyajit Ray where a computer self-destructs because it has become intelligent enough to want badly to find out what happens after death). No man with a mind can be truly happy to live with the thought that I matter as little as the bubble that rises momentarily on the surface of the ocean, and that I shall simply stop existing and vanish completely in a short while from now, leaving not a trace behind. In Hamlet, Shakespeare in the same short passage exults on ‘What a work of art is Man!’ and yet calls him nothing more than ‘the quintessence of dust’. Two of the most haunting lines I ever read come from a pretty cheap potboiler, Harold Robbins’ Memories of another day, where the protagonist begins a speech with ‘A man is born, he works, he dies. Then there is nothing.’

But is it possible to have the thought of the inevitability of death and eventual oblivion firmly fixed in mind and yet live a good, vigorous, interesting, meaningful, worthwhile life? At my age I believe it is, and I base my conviction on two things: a) the way I have lived my own life so far (remember that I brooded upon death at great length when I was only seven, yet in the post I wrote at age 45, I sound, I have been told, much more robustly cheerful about life than most people around my age manage to do), and b) if that were not possible, the finest men of thought and action would not have so strenuously enjoined upon us to adopt such an outlook (whether you think of the Buddha or the references to men like Tagore and Vivekananda noted in the comments on the earlier blogpost – these were not men who were tired, bored, frightened or despairing of life). And in fact I believe that it actually helps to live the good life if one makes a habit of reminding oneself every morning, in a calm, matter of fact way, as my daughter’s teacher did, that one is going to end up as a handful of ashes. About that, more in the next post.

All you who sleep tonight

It’s poetry time again. Sometimes, prose just doesn’t work (old timers will know that I wrote about ‘Poems’ a long time ago). This one is by Vikram Seth.

All you who sleep tonight

Far from the ones you love

No hand to left or right

And emptiness above –

Know that you aren’t alone

The whole world shares your tears,

Some for two nights or one

And some for all their years.

A teacher who shares my world view

Ms. Devi Kar, senior teacher, ex principal and currently director of Modern High School Calcutta, winner of various awards and advisor to several high level organizations, is one of the few contemporary educationists with a public profile whom I respect. She recently wrote this essay in The Telegraph about the gross and sad and continuous decline in educational standards in this country (which sits very uneasily with the loud public tom-tomming of the idea of how wonderfully and rapidly we are ‘developing our human resources’). For those who have read all my earlier posts on education (look at that label in the right hand side-bar) and the post titled ‘The crying need for quality’, it will be apparent that I might have written this article myself. Do let me know what you feel about it, especially if you are an ex student of mine, or a parent of a teenager, or simply someone who is keenly interested in which way education is going in this country.

Some of you might also be able to relate this article with the contents of this essay whose link Krishanu Sadhu sent me only a few minutes ago.

Meditations on death and dying, part one

I shall be fifty in a few months’ time. Half a century spent on earth. A lot of my elders, not a few contemporaries, and even a sad number of juniors have already left, and obviously much less time is left for me than I have already spent: it does not make a very big difference now whether that is a few months or a few decades. The Bible says that a man who has lived ‘three score years and ten’ has had a full life and should be glad to go: I learnt about this when I was only a boy ( I spent my first long sleepless nights brooding over death at the ripe old age of seven!), and I have spent all my adult life marveling at what a wise saying that was, and how little it has been invalidated by several recent centuries of social change and technological progress. If I live on much beyond 70, I shall know I am living on borrowed time, and try to conduct myself accordingly. In fact, I don’t find it a cheery thought that a lot of my elders have lived into their late eighties…

My parents married very young. It was in 1988 that we celebrated both their silver jubilee and my father’s fiftieth birthday, and it seems as though it was only yesterday, and now it’s my turn to be fifty! Here is an excerpt from my diary written twelve years ago:

“The strangest thing about my life at this moment is that I’ve just turned 38 and I can’t feel a thing about it, except perhaps wonder (what is one supposed to feel anyway?), and the funniest thing is that I am very happy and a little sad about my life at the same time (is that the way most people without major successes and major troubles start feeling at about this time in their lives?) I distinctly remember feeling wise and old at the age of eleven, like young Scout at the end of To kill a Mockingbird, and wondering whether I’ll ever manage to turn 18 (and it wasn’t mere childish fancy – after five years of journalism and twenty years of teaching I know that I had read more and understood more and reflected more by the age of sixteen than ninety percent of people do in their entire lives, and a quarter century removed I also know that I am not very much wiser and cleverer than I used to be: in that sense I never found out what it means to become a ‘normal’ adult!). Now lo and behold, I’m pushing 40 already and there’s precious little to show for it, either by way of fame and money or even a paunch and grey hairs. Physically I’m just about as active as I ever was – I never was the athletic type anyway – and if it’s a telltale sign of advancing years that one becomes garrulous and pontificatory, well, I always loved to lecture people once I had overcome my intense innate shyness; now the shyness is all gone, but dislike of society (of society, not of all men) has taken its place, and if anything, I lecture much less these days; indeed, try to avoid talking to people outside the family unless they are paying me for it! If worry is another sign of middle age, I worried just as much as a boy as I do now: only I was troubled by examinations and my parents’ rocky marriage then, and I worry about the future of my wife and child now, so there. When did all those years fly by, and where did they go? It’s all passed like the rising mist – and that leads to the unavoidable but sobering thought that the rest of my life (another thirty or thirty five years, maybe?) is also going to whiz by, and before I know it will be ‘Sunset and evening star, and after that the dark…….’

           

I don’t feel down in the dumps like Macbeth,

            Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

            Creeps in this petty pace to the last syllable of recorded time

            And all our yesterdays have been candles

            Lighting fools the way to dusty death:

but who can disagree with Prospero when he declares

Our lives are such stuff as dreams are made on,

            And the end is rounded with a sleep…?

People have done Nobel Prize-winning work before they were 38, become Presidents and acknowledged saints and self-made tycoons; Alexander and Shankaracharya and Shelley were dead; my own father had spectacularly ruined what could have been a good career and sired three children by this time. After showing some early promise, I’ve only just managed to get a complete formal education and become a recognised hardworking schoolmaster, a family man, a strenuous saver and taxpayer, besides remaining a whimsical scribbler and bemused spectator of life and manners. So in a sense I have done nothing, my life is worth nothing. On the other hand, strange to say, I feel more secure and content with my life than I have ever been before – I feel so good, in fact, that my only real worry is that this idyllic existence might come to an abrupt end all too soon through some unexpected quirk of fickle fortune. You’d call that strange, wouldn’t you? How dare a man feel so good about himself with so little to his credit, and if he has somehow managed to work the impossible, why on earth should he still crib about feeling uneasy?”

Given that I was already feeling that way back in 2001, it is nothing short of bizarre that another twelve years have simply slipped away almost unnoticed, despite so much that has happened in between (see the post titled ‘Forty five and counting’, which I wrote back in 2008). I am definitely on my way to old age, I have a grown up daughter on the threshold of adult life now, and so many of my dear old boys and girls, now grown up enough to understand and appreciate the meaning of this essay, were far too young then to do so! I am not often at a loss for words, but I find it well nigh impossible to express just how I feel about this… but the overarching and undeniable fact is, the Shadow looms ever larger now.

[I pause at this point. Let me see whether some people would like me to carry on. Madhuchhanda Ray Choudhury’s remark ‘I wonder if it really matters’ on my last post gave me a big boost to start writing in this vein, so I guess she deserves a word of thanks, though I don’t know her at all, and she didn’t sound as though she was trying to be friends.]

Look back, look around, connect

I wish to remind my readers that I keep writing on my blogs with the express hope of creating an ever-expanding worldwide network of like-minded people who want to share thoughts, ideas, experiences, realizations, fancies, joys and woes as they all soldier through life, and keenly feel the lack of good people to talk with around them. Remember the cartoon which shows a man’s funeral service being attended by two people though he had in excess of 1700 ‘friends’ on Facebook: that defines the world we live in much more truthfully than most of us like to admit even to ourselves.

Now – and this bears repetition – that does not mean just regularly visiting and reading my blogs, not even commenting often and thoughtfully on my posts. It does not even only mean writing your own blogs now and then. It also means (especially if your are a blogger yourself-) writing fairly regularly: at least once a month. And above all it means visiting the blogs of others like yourself, who too write sensible stuff on a lot of subjects, and who too could do with more visitors and more comments. That means you should often read up some of the blogs I have linked on my blog roll (even Arani’s and Shubho’s and Rajarshi’s and Saptarshi’s, though they write so rarely), and tell them, in a friendly and helpful way, that you have liked what you read. We hug our own loneliness too dearly, and blame the world for being cold and unconcerned, but we forget too often and too easily that we are not setting better examples: it is not guaranteed that you will make good friends if you take the trouble to reach out and shake hands, but it certainly increases the probability!

Also, those who have made initial forays into my blogs and liked what they have read, them I’d strongly urge to look up older posts (the labels along the right hand side bar would help greatly). Shilpi is one reader who has literally read and digested everything, but I know a few others have been making the effort lately, and they have told me they are glad that they decided to do so. This is something I’d exhort two particular categories to try: those who are right now  attending my classes (I consciously try to make these blogs extensions of both my classroom and  my personality), and those, who, looking back over the years, feel a new urge to find out more about this particular Sir. They will discover that they probably don’t know another contemporary man who has tried so hard and so long to know himself and help others know him for what he really is, warts and all – and contrary to what someone hurt me badly by telling me a while ago, there is probably no better way of getting to know me really well if they are interested than reading up (both) my blogs thoroughly. It is, I repeat, a matter of being interested – as a lot of people not wholly unemployed have assured me, it’s not a question of being busy at all. Someone who is interested will always find time. All I shall add is that you might grow more interested as you go along.

And finally for now, it fills me with a never-ending sad wonder to think of so many old boys and girls who once came so close and have now fallen completely out of my life, often with utter suddenness and without so much as a by your leave. They include a considerable number of people who were enthusiastic readers and comment writers on my blogs even a few years ago. Today itself a few very young girls were asking me why I have become increasingly cynical, and why I assume that they too would go the same way by and by. I could only smile wryly. I have been working since I was little older than they, and now I am approaching fifty, and I have a very long memory, and so I simply cannot help it. The question that is constantly uppermost in my mind these days is ‘Who will cry when you die?’ along with ‘How genuine will those tears be, how long will they last?’

A glorious morning

Lavona Areghini and her husband Jim were, apart from Arthur and Bernice Lundh, my finest hosts while I was touring Arizona on a Rotary club-sponsored trip back in the summer of 1991. She kept up a correspondence via snail mail (kids of the current generation will find this incredible) for years after that. Then this year she found me on the internet, God bless her soul. She’s now 84, but still feisty enough to drive a new car home alone on a dark rainy night.

This morning I found this YouTube link from her in my email inbox. Many thanks, Lavona. I truly can’t have enough of it. I shall in return draw your attention to The Interview with God, which is there on my blog roll, as well as two posts I wrote quite some time ago: Look, for heaven’s sake look! and The Sense of Wonder.

So I guess you sent the link to the right person. And thanks to you, several hundred people are going to have a very edifying experience via this blog…

[P.S.: If readers want to search for any older post of mine by title, I recommend the search bar on the top left hand corner of this blog]

'I don't really know you'

There is a girl who used to be a pupil of mine more than a decade ago (I call them girls and boys, though technically all of them are grown men and women now, and some even like to affect that they are very worldly wise and growing old, but it is impossible for me to forget that when they first came to my classes in their mid-teens, very silly and very ignorant about the world, I had been a teacher for twenty odd years already…). She now lives far away: I haven’t seen her face to face for ages. I was always uncommonly fond of her – maybe I credited her with far more sensitivity and affectionateness than she would herself claim – and I have been in touch with her almost continuously since she left.

I have listened for years and years to her whimsical outbursts, tales of trouble and woe, complications in her love life, academic grouches, career-related uncertainties, family imbroglios, mundane problems with daily living… and I have tried all through to lend an attentive and sympathetic ear, and offer what little advice and help I could. Lots of girls will know what that means, even those with whom I have been corresponding for only two or three years, Rashmi and Vaishnavi and Dipanwita and Sayantika, to name just a few: I wouldn’t even bother to mention the hundreds of old boys who’d say an impassioned ‘Of course!’. Of late, I had been growing irritable and even querulous with her, because I had a feeling I was wasting my time on someone who simply did not want to listen to what I was saying, who was too different a person to vibe with me, who was getting me angry all too often with needlessly callous offhand remarks (lately her uniform excuse has been she can write only from the office, where she is constantly busy and harassed), and who yet kept knocking, if only via email and google chat, for reasons she wouldn’t even care to explain. Very recently I exploded when she wrote ‘I don’t really know you except through your blogs’.  

What does it mean to know somebody? I am almost sure that she is not sophisticated enough to think of making innuendos with Biblical undertones. Then again, it is easy for someone to say ‘I don’t even know myself very well’, and for someone like me, married for seventeen years, to say ‘My wife doesn’t really know me’. These things are fine for occasional idle philosophical speculations, I suppose. But the world doesn’t – couldn’t – function from day to day on the basis of such woolliness, right? Surely, for the sake of all practical purposes any person with whom I have spent hundreds of hours talking/chatting, besides taking classes for two years (given the deeply involved way I teach), should be someone who knows enough about me to carry on dealing with me knowingly (and liking what she knows, if she bothers to keep in touch for years and years)? Besides – and this is directed at all those who claim to have been reading my blogs thoughtfully and consistently for years – is it possible for someone like that to claim ‘I don’t really know you’? Is it possible, on the other hand, that it was meant as a deliberate insult – whether the girl in question admits it even to herself or not? She insists that she can’t understand what I am saying, what has made me so angry. How many will concur with her?

Let me be totally fair to the girl. She has said sorry, almost towards the end of the last chat she wrote ‘… not sure how to take back words, but if I could I would’. Only thing why that cuts no ice with me any more is that she has said that kind of sorry a hundred times before, so it’s become kind of stale. Keeps reminding me of the fool of an employer who, when I exploded in anger, got scared and said ‘If you are so angry then I am sorry’! Only because I was angry and that frightened him, note, not at all because he had admitted to himself that he had done something wrong and was feeling ashamed about it.

So if I now decide, very regretfully (and that’s God’s truth), that I want to forget this girl, to shake her off, to write her out of my life because it’s become a thankless exercise to keep knowing her, how many will say that I am being impatient and intolerant and cruel, that I don’t understand girls and their very special problems and needs? Feel free to comment: no matter how unflattering, I promise to publish everything that comes in except for anonymous messages and pure abuse. If you do write sympathetically (towards me), no expletives please, no wanton female bashing. My overriding feelings are shock, disappointment and sorrow, not rancour. Many girls and women have been kind and good to me, even if they have eventually forgotten and dropped out of my life: I don’t want anybody to forget that, least of all myself.

And since I am waiting eagerly for comments on this one, no further blogposts till I feel that I have got enough. So those of you who are thinking of commenting, don’t hesitate but get going.

Things happening around me

A few isolated thoughts for now.

It truly bemuses me to see that more and more of my old boys who have gone in for engineering are turning to cinema as a serious hobby now, and even secretly dreaming that they might succeed in making a profession out of it. One has left behind two short movies that he and his friends have made which I found to be pretty good, given that they have been done by young amateurs with very basic equipment and software. I wish them luck (they want me to act in their next production – what will people think of next?)

A girl in college who was visiting recently told me that her boyfriend has been shocked witless by the teachers at a coaching class he has just joined in the hope of ‘cracking’ the CAT (toughest management-school entrance test in the country) because they have told him he will have to read up at least a hundred story books in the next six months.

Will someone run a survey to find out whether in this country there is a strong correlation between people growing up in culturally deprived backgrounds (no music, no art, no good movies, no political, economic or philosophical discussion at home, and above all, no books) and those professing to be interested in physics and math from an early age? I am talking about people who have grown up in the last thirty years, of course: I am perfectly well aware that people were different earlier.

I have been seeing photographs on Facebook of some who used to be my friends and students in the 1980s and ’90s, and I wouldn’t be saying this if it didn’t hurt badly, but many of them look not just old but positively decrepit and ugly. What have they been doing to themselves, for God’s sake?

Listening to people all around me speaking a strange hybrid of broken Bengali and pidgin English, I wonder how much longer the Bengali language will survive. Indeed, had it not been for Bangladesh, maybe it would have been dead already (how often do you hear people saying dhonyobaad or suprabhat, or amar duschinta hochchhe instead of tension korchhi?)

And finally, I am feeling rather doleful because the long winter (it lasted a full three months this time) seems to be leaving. That means we shall not only have to brace ourselves for another – presumably unbearable – summer, but I shall be doing double duty round the week as soon as a host of new batches come in, which will be from the end of this month. Every year I fear a little more that I cannot take this for very much longer.

But my daughter is growing up fast. My mind keeps going back to February 1980, when my friends and I were getting ready for our ICSE examination. An entire generation has passed, and it’s my daughter’s turn now. She’s been studying at the same table which I used back then – that’s good teak wood for you! Dollops of nostalgia...

It's the SAT now!

A coaching institute of India-wide repute has lately been advertizing lavishly in the papers, pushing a new program purporting to train young aspirants for the SAT examination conducted by ETS Princeton, so that they can bypass the whole rigmarole of trying to get into some so-called elite Indian college/university – such as the IITs – and directly go to the US of A (which is, after all, the ULTIMATE AMBITION of the whole Indian middle- and upper middle classes; the IITs have never, let’s face it, been anything more than undergraduate churning factories which serve as a stepping stone on the way). After all, says the ad, why waste time trying to get into one of the IITs? They don’t figure among the top 200 elite institutes in the world anyway. Especially when you can go directly to attend the ‘best’ colleges in the world?

The irony in this ad stems from the fact that this is being done by an organization which for nearly two decades, I think, has been both feeding the ‘dream’ of sending millions to the IITs,  the ‘finest colleges in India, among the best in the world’, and making a fortune out if it (they have started ‘preparing’ kids as young as class six). Obviously, their chief honchos are now beginning to realize that this particular milch cow is beginning to dry up slowly – the competition has increased manifold, the market is reaching saturation, and a still small but increasing number of parents are beginning to realize that getting into one of the IITs, especially these days, is something pretty much short of finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow; the best that they can lead to is attempts to go off into a master’s course on scholarship somewhere in the US, or preparing to get into some decent B-school, or taking a shot at the civil services. And a lot of photographers and fashion models and lawyers and private tutors and chefs and airline pilots and musicians and restaurateurs are making far more money than IIT graduates on the average can ever hope for. But imagine: it’s  a big ticket tutorial which is saying so now, not just Suvro Chatterjee, who is just a small-town private tutor of English and who has been reviled, scorned, feared and avoided by a lot of parents and kids alike simply because this is the tune he has been singing for 25 years and more!

But caveat emptor. Unlike these big businesses/cram shops, I have never wavered from the true teacher’s credo in all my life: tell the truth, no matter how unpopular it may be, and even if it brings me no material advantage whatsoever. This SAT is no big deal; steer clear of expensive coaching for it. If you have an ICSE/ISC background and are in the 75%-plus marks category, to get a decent score in SAT which will get you admission to a fairly good college in the US, you need to do nothing more than buy a widely available guidebook for a few hundred rupees and practise daily for an hour or two for two months or three. Of course, that will not ensure you a full scholarship: for that, you need to score in the 99^th percentile or higher, and most of you should forget about that straightaway, unless you really believe you are Einstein or Tagore. These newfangled courses will be designed for the wards of that newly-rich class of Indian parents who can afford to send off their kids to Umrica on their own, no scholarships needed – that’s anything between 15 and 30 lakhs a year or even more for four straight years. So if your dad makes something between Rs. 50,000 and 200,000 a month, don’t even think about it. The ad talks about sending you to Harvard. Well, I know a bit more about the ways of places like Harvard than the average parent hereabouts, and let me tell you this: the three best ways to get in there are  a) prove that you are the next Zuckerberg, even if not Einstein (it will not hurt to watch the movie 21 either), b) have a surname like Gandhi (not even an Ambani or Tendulkar is quite good enough), or c) tell your dad to make a $10 million endowment to the university fund. Note: coaching classes don’t figure in this picture at all!

Vibrant Gujarat, moribund Bengal?

One has to accommodate only about sixty million people over an area of 203,000 square kilometers, the other is home to nearly 91 million, meaning 50% more, in a space of just over 88,000 sq. km. Should you even begin to compare the levels of development attained by the two without keeping these two pairs of stark, fundamental, unalterable facts very firmly in mind?

The first, if you haven’t guessed, is the currently favourite supermodel among Indian states, Gujarat; the second – you have obviously guessed – is our own sad West Bengal. Swapan Dasgupta’s edit-page article (one more eulogy for Narendra Modi) in the January 18 issue of The Telegraph made me check up a few things, and thereafter I have been thinking hard about how much Mr. Modi deserves all the encomiums and our leaders, be it Buddhadev Bhattacharjee or Ms. Mamata Banerjee, all the brickbats. Mr. Dasgupta is a veteran and informed journalist; when people like him start talking like that, one begins to wonder whether they are not being deliberately disingenuous, … inspirational leadership (Dasgupta’s last but one paragraph) is all very well, and I hold no brief for any of our local leaders regardless of their political colour, but I do wonder whether, given the ground realities, the greatest leaders we have heard of, be it Lincoln or Adenauer, Kemal Ataturk or Lee Kuan Yew or Subhas Bose (leave alone Mr. Modi) would have been able to do much better for West Bengal. It is always so much easier to criticize.

Yes, WB has been in a bad way for a very long time. Yes, Bengalis have much to be blamed for – they are as a rule lazy, uncooperative, quarrelsome, jealous and suspicious of material prosperity, and so on and so forth (and no leader can really change a whole population’s mindset, remember, certainly not in a few years). Yes, after Dr. Bidhan Roy, none of our CMs can be credited to have pursued any large, constructive long-term vision. Yes, we have not been able to make full use of our natural wealth and intellectual capital. Yes, our infrastructure is in shambles, by and large. Yes, we are saddled by a venal, incompetent, bloated bureaucracy. Yes, our educational and healthcare systems are creaking. But as I said, who has a good, practical idea, a magic wand, to get us out of this mess? Let us imagine putting someone like Mr. Modi in the CM’s chair. Can he wish away our long history of disasters and their consequences that refuse to go away – from terrible famines to partition-induced migration on an unimaginable scale that swamped every resource we had to the long fight to curb Naxalite-led threat of anarchy; to mention just three things that Gujarat has never faced? Has he been able to do a better job of maintaining communal peace if not amity (remembering that we have a far larger Muslim population than Gujarat)? Does he preside over a population ‘too poor to tax, too numerous to feed’, which has saddled our government with such a gigantic debt burden that it is currently having to live hand to mouth? Can he who gives away hundreds of thousands of acres of land on the cheap to tycoons to build industries on think of handling a situation where every nook and cranny is crawling with people who refuse to leave simply because they have nowhere to go – and every attempt to take over land for any public purpose at all, even roads, power plants and hospitals, threatens to turn into a bloodbath unless the losers are compensated on a scale which makes it either unaffordable or utterly unattractive to any investor? Can he alter a political culture which has seen a long decline into street hooliganism and organized browbeating of all but the very rich and powerful? And also – is there any real reason why Bengal needs to hang its head in shame, given that, despite such horrible odds, it has (until the early 1980s, at least, when it went into secular cultural decline) produced more big achievers in art, science, literature, music, philosophy and patriotism than virtually all other Indian states put together – however politically incorrect this sounds? (For Christ’s sake, Narendra Modi himself professes to revere and walk in the footsteps of a Bengali: his name was Narendra Dutta!)

My point is, we certainly need better leadership; we certainly need to get rid of a lot of ingrained bad habits, we certainly need to gird up our loins and make an all-out effort to hasten our rate of development so that we don’t end up at the bottom of the list: what we don’t need is foolish, motivated, malicious comparisons with those who shouldn’t be compared with. Here’s a little mischievous idea: let the World Bank or Mr. Manmohan Singh or Bill Gates give our current chief minister an interest-free fifteen year developmental loan of Rs. 100,000 crore, and simultaneously export about fifty million Bengalis to Gujarat for Mr. Modi to take care of, shooting them not allowed. We can come back and compare notes in the year 2028.

I am glad that Sunanda K. Datta Ray’s article on the same page of the next days’ issue of The Telegraph (“Laughing up his sleeve”) debunks many of Mr. Dasgupta’s tall claims on Modi’s behalf, and exposes how he has put a spin to the story by hiding all sorts of less than scintillating facts about his ‘vibrant’ Gujarat, including a) that a lot of other states, including Nitish Kumar’s Bihar and Navin Patnaik’s Odisha have been making the same sort of progress with far less chest thumping, b) that Gujarat is pretty low down the list of states in terms of many social development indices, no matter what the rise of multi-storeyed buildings and shopping malls and fancy cars in the cities hints otherwise, c) Modi’s increasing glamour as the national opposition’s poster-boy has been won to a great extent by default, by contrast with the UPA’s record of corruption combined with confusion and inaction, and, most tellingly, that d) the big moneybags, Indian or foreign, are going to sing loud paeans to any political master who makes it easy for them to avoid social obligations and reap ever bigger profits, so as far as big socio-political realities are concerned, only fools would take heed of their ‘opinions’. As I shall never stop underlining, businessmen never have to worry about anything other than bottom lines; even low level politicians have to think of far more, and far more serious things.

Not putting things in perspective is intellectual dishonesty, and intellectual dishonesty is the worst sort of dishonesty there can be. Yes, Mr. Dasgupta, I shall be glad to see Mr. Modi on the throne of India. If only to see him proving to be just another damp squib. India is not merely Gujarat, and as someone called Chandrababu Naidu, now forgotten, found out at great personal cost in Andhra Pradesh, running a government is not done very well by imitating corporate CEOs. Let Modi and his acolytes find out the hard way. It is a good thing that not only senior news editors in Delhi but top leaders in West Bengal don’t take him seriously.

delhi noir

‘Noir’ is French for black. The noir mood in cinema and literature indicates a hard-nosed realism, a focus on the seamier side of life, and a wry, satirical, even bitter or despairing outlook arising from it. The noir series of short stories, originally based on contemporary low life in some US metropolises, has now spawned imitations worldwide, and some of them are good (look up this list). I have just finished reading Delhi Noir, and it made gripping reading – besides making me surer of myself that I have always been right about three things: a) big cities are increasingly becoming the same everywhere, b) I am very lucky not to have to live in one of them, and c) no country can hope for much in the way of long-term social peace and stability, leave alone progress in any meaningful sense, unless it goes all out to give a better deal to the vast under-class of down and out people who are always swarming, scrounging, fighting, cheating, robbing, mocking, killing, getting killed and otherwise interacting with their better off fellow citizens simply out of the primal urge to get along as best as they can through a life which loaded the dice against them from the very first. No moral codes apply, simply because, in Shaw’s immortal words, they cannot afford them. The wonder is that some of them not infrequently behave in such a way as to put us, their ‘betters’,  to shame.

Think autorickshaw drivers, bus ticket touts, roadside chaiwallah’s assistants, municipal sweepers, small-time hookers – and police constables and junior journos on the beat, resident doctors at government hospitals and petty shopkeepers and tenement landlords, the vanguard of the upper classes who cannot avoid rubbing shoulders all the time with the former (an ordeal from which the really privileged are insulated most of the time), and you get the brew out of which these fourteen tales are concocted. Only a long-time Delhiite with eyes wide open will be able to confirm how true to life they are, of course, but from what little I have myself known, they do, most grittily, even gorily. The only thing I am not sure about is whether the Delhi Police deserves such unrelenting bad press. Some of these stories even manage to do that almost impossible thing – make the reader laugh, or at least grin ruefully, even as she sighs over what a bad shape the world is in: How I lost my clothes by Radhika Jha, for example, and Hostel by Siddharth Chowdhury. Some, like The Scam by Tabish Khair make you wonder along with the author. Some, like The Walls of Delhi (by Uday Prakash, translated from Hindi) carry you away into a world of fantasy which does not have a happy ending. A few like Railway Aunty by Mohan Sikka would move even a jaded reader to pity: the poor boy had fun of a weird sort for a brief while, but in the end he stood no chance at all.

The last story in the collection (Cull, by Manjula Padmanabhan) stands apart from the rest, for it alone is set in an imaginary future rather than the present; a bleak dystopia set in a ‘New’ Delhi sometime maybe a hundred years hence, when the gigantic, almost-totally-planned urban agglomeration is aspiring to be a World City, but is challenged by the cancer within – brought back echoes of all sorts of books and movies, including Brave New World and District 9.

They are all accomplished writers, at ease with the language in its sahib and desi idioms and confident of their message. Only, they could use fewer expletives without seriously harming either their style or content, I think (it’s become such a cool thing to do post Chetan Bhagat that far better writers are deliberately stooping in order to catch the average reader’s eye), and somehow, they sound a little too alike, as though they have been cooked under the eyes of the selfsame chief chef. Something to do with the editing, perhaps, or is it just a personal illusion? … which reminds me, this is a book where the introduction written by the editor must be read for its own sake. Saying any more would be a spoiler; go read the book. And thanks, Dipanwita and Arani, for giving me this book to read. I should very much like to read Kolkata noir. If Didi permits such a book to see the light of day, that is.

[delhi noir, edited by Hirsh Sawhney, published jointly by Harper Collins India and India Today group 2009, ISBN 978-81-7223-853-7, pp. 289, Rs. 399]

P.S., Jan. 20: Do look up the latest post on my other blog.

People, people...

Since I am enlisted with the local Voluntary Blood Donors’ Association, people often call me up in medical emergencies. It so happened that a woman phoned me on Monday night (Jan. 7^th), sobbing that her 84-year old father was struggling for his life in hospital, and needed blood urgently, and since his group matched mine, would I please come post haste? I drove over on Tuesday morning, only to find that this woman was someone who lived on my own street, and her daughter had attended my tuition nearly a decade ago. Blood donation over, she and her mother were all over me, of course, telling me what a good man I was and how grateful they were, and how keen a student the daughter used to be and how much she loved and admired me, blah blah blah… whereas the fact of the matter is, the girl could at best be called mediocre, she has never once met me or called me since the last day of class, and her mother and grandmother never so much as acknowledged me with a courteous nod on the street in all these years until Monday last, when they were in dire need of the sort of help that only a few softies like me are kind enough to fulfill in this great big town full of rich, educated, healthy people, all very proud of their ‘status’ deriving from fancy cars in the garage and sons/sons-in-law in Umrica, civilized qualities of character be damned.

And on Wednesday morning, while visiting somebody in his third floor flat (I was literally dragged in, and they were too nice and insistent to refuse without being rude), I met a man in the lift, both of whose daughters used to be pupils of mine in years gone by. Not only that, I have lost count of how many times they and their parents visited us out of class hours to tell me  about all kinds of woes, seek solutions to all kinds of problems, and generally weep over my shoulder. The man studiously looked away, not giving the slightest sign that he knew me from Adam.

Immediate need over, that’s the way most people behave with me, the same people who come in droves to admit their kids every year. I hope many of my readers can recognize themselves and their parents in these lines. I know their grouch is that I publicly refer to their type as chhotolok, riff-raff. Given a lifetime of such experience, can I really be censured for having developed a very jaundiced view of mankind? Tell me honestly, what would you have done  in my place? … and to those who might ask ‘Why do you do charity, then?’ my answer is quite clear: For the good of my own soul. As a rule, I couldn’t care less about the people whom I do good to. I do not hate mankind, but I most certainly despise a very large part of it.

P.S., Jan. 12: Swami Vivekananda would have been 150 today. Country-wide celebrations, of course. I choose to maintain a confused and rather shamed silence. All I can do.

Delhi-Agra trip of 2012

Another New Year has dawned, and it’s business as usual for me again. But let me reminisce for a bit over how I spent the last days of the dying year. It was a perfect vacation…

I took my last classes on Friday, December 21st. My wife and daughter had left for Kolkata the day before, and I took off on the 22nd morning. Lovely Volvo ride along the NH2 (I am addicted!), and soon I was in our city flat. Kolkata was unusually cold. Basked lazily in the sun the whole afternoon, then Sayan and Rashmi came over: we had a long, lovely chat. Sunday was spent housecleaning, chatting with Abhirup and then an old friend of mine, Subhasis, whom I was seeing after more than a quarter century! Biryani from Shiraz did not agree with me. Monday morning we moved to my in-laws’ place, and then off to catch the Rajdhani Express from Sealdah station. Got caught in a traffic jam on the way; would have missed the train but for my over-cautious habit of setting out early. Thanks to dense fog all over Uttar Pradesh, we were eight hours late. Poor Arundhati, Aakash, Saikat and Subhadip had to cool their heels at New Delhi station waiting for us, but we got a cheery welcome. Off to Aakash’s flat, and we decided it would be too risky to drive down the deserted road to Agra that night, so we dined and slept there: Aakash and his wife Arundhati, whom we were meeting for the first time, proved to be the perfect hosts. My apologies to Arundhati for the trouble we gave her; I hope she didn’t mind too much!

Early on the morning of the 26th we set off along with Saikat for Agra in a hired car. The eight lane superhighway, opened only months ago, was a driver’s dream. We stopped off at Itimad-ud-daulah’s tomb (‘baby Taj’) before arriving at Sai Homestay, where we had booked a suite online. The owner, Mr. Rajiv Sethi, made our stay very pleasant, as much by the impeccable service as by his affability. In the afternoon we visited the Taj. It was horribly crowded – poor Pupu, she was seeing it for the first time. Agra Fort was somewhat better. But alas, thanks to excessive vandalism by ill-mannered tourists, more and more interesting things are being put out of bounds: the Sheesh Mahal, for instance, and the room where Shah Jahan was imprisoned during his last years. Very soon, we shall be able to see all our top attractions only on TV and DVD, and that will serve us right. Fatehpur Sikri was a dream, but it was foggy all the way, and bitterly cold: I hadn’t felt so chilled to the bone in Shillong at this time last year, though we were more than 5,000 feet above sea level then! Dined at Pinch of Spice on the second night. It was nice, though a tad over-priced.

We visited Sikandra on our way back to Delhi, and also Mathura, but gave the birth-place of Krishna a miss: it being too crowded, and too over-zealously guarded by swarms of gun-toting guards. What a country we have made, really. Checked into a very nice hotel in Paharganj, a five-minute walk from the railway station: my old boys, themselves living in Delhi, were surprised that such a good hotel room at so reasonable a price could be found anywhere in the capital. The weekend was spent travelling all over the city, especially the parts my wife and daughter had not seen during their last visits: Purana Quila, Humayun’s Tomb, Delhi Haat, Mirza Ghalib’s den at Balli Maran, Gurdwara Shishganj, the Baha'i Temple, the ruins of Tughlaqabad Fort. Also, stopping off at various eateries on the way (the nahari at Karim’s off the Jama Masjid and the mirchi bhajji at Green Park Market were superb), as well as markets (naturally, with so many women present – Arani and Dipanwita had joined us on Sunday). There was Aakash’s car, alongwith a rented MUV to ferry us around. Driving around was not a problem, despite several approach roads to India Gate being closed off. I marvelled for the umpteenth time at Delhi’s wonderful roads and wealth of well-tended greenery. My daughter’s sixteenth birthday was celebrated with books from Spell and Bound at SDA Market, a pair of boots she had set her heart on, and red wine, besides assorted gifts. Sunday evening was spent chatting in our hotel room and the rooftop restaurant (Fire and Ice) over many cups of coffee before they all bade goodnight.

Monday went by at a leisurely pace, packing up, bathing and dining. We left for the railway station, and – after ten continuous days! – the Rajdhani was bang on time. Arani, Saikat, Subhadip and Subhanjan came to see us off. A quiet, swift ride, and we were back at home by 8:30 a.m. on New Year’s day.

So we saw a lot of sights, dined well, stayed in good hotels, and moved about a great deal. But for me at least (my daughter will write about her own experience, and I’m sure she’ll tell it differently), the real – and indescribably heartwarming – pleasure lay in meeting and going around and chatting with so many beloved and loving old boys. I could have sat in a hotel room and done just that and never felt that I was missing anything. Saikat has become almost a family member now. Subhadip Biswas, God bless him, is still happy and ‘excited’ to be my trusty point-man in Delhi, and assures me that much that I taught is still of use to him. Aakash, in his own quiet way, kept amazing me with his minute and glad recollections from his days with me in school. He went to a great deal of expense and trouble for my sake: it fills me with a deep sense of gratitude that he made it apparent he was enjoying every minute of it. Arani and Dipanwita, dog tired after having travelled all over the country, made it equally apparent that they were happy to meet up and go around with us nevertheless. I look forward to many more delightful encounters with them, and they have my best wishes for everything. Subhanjan was tied up with work, yet somehow made time to come to see us off at the railway station; my grateful thanks to him, too.

Bijit Mukherjee broke my heart five years ago. Something was lost there that will never come back, of course, and yet, these boys (I still call them boys!) have tried magnificently to make up for it. One of them was gracious enough to tell me that those pupils who never made the effort to know me well, or those who dropped off after a while don’t know what they have missed. So I can’t help feeling that despite everything, I have been truly blessed as a teacher. These young people had been telling me for years to come over and enjoy myself with them, and by God, I did. All that remains to be seen is how their tribe increases as the years roll by…

[here is a link to fifty selected photographs, in case you are interested] 

Bye bye, 2012...

It’s the 18^th of December, and the year is rapidly drawing to a close. I was just as busy or lazy as I have been for ages, and yet the year has zipped by so fast that I can hardly believe my eyes when I look at the calendar and see that it’s time for my year-end holiday again. I have stepped into my fiftieth year; my daughter has grown up to finish secondary school, and in another ten years’ time I can definitely start thinking of myself as an old man, and acting accordingly, demanding from the world the consideration that old age can expect after having lived through decades of hard and continuous work and paid my dues. Even the government will start giving me the privileges legally due to a senior citizen, fancy that!

On the whole this has been a pretty uneventful year, not just for myself but for mankind as a whole (discounting the possibility that the world will be destroyed in three days’ time). Of course there have been the usual chills, thrills and spills, Olympics and terrorist attacks and continuing wars and celebrity hatches, matches and despatches, but little that would be remembered as major historical landmarks (do tell me if you think otherwise, referring to specific incidents that you consider world changing – only if you have a historical consciousness, of course, and don’t imagine that the launch of iPhone 5 too is a phenomenon worth noting). My generation is reaching the age when no news is likely to be good news, so I am glad that this was another year that passed quietly, smoothly, without too many and too nasty hiccups. And that I found a lot of time for myself, reading, watching movies, writing, chatting up old boys, walking and swimming and meditating…

In a comment on the first post of the year, I wrote “the rest of the story will be my daughter’s”. Well, my wife’s too, actually, because she’s building up her own career with gusto now. So as my daughter grows more independent and career oriented, and the family depends less and less on my income, I can look forward to easing up gradually, and turn my attention to doing things I love doing more. What I’d love to do most, of course, is what the place I live in has still not grown used to giving me on a large enough scale – mentoring and giving quality companionship to children and those not so young, rather than tutoring for this or that examination; something that I have always been good at and enjoyed hugely, something that I have always considered the best and most important part of my work as a teacher, something that is the essential thing, I believe, that the scores of young people who have been positively affected by my classes remember and miss and keep coming back for, when all the course material that I taught has been long forgotten, something that I have always done for a few people at a time, with and without payment, for ages now, something that I regard as my USP and know for a fact that precious few teachers can provide these days, at the kindergarten level or the university. Let’s see whether I can mould my services more and more into that shape with the passage of years, and whether there grows a sizeable enough market for it. That will be my next big adventure!

And with that I bow out for a while. This may quite possibly be the last post of this year.

More science, less of everything else?

There are certain issues that keep exercising my mind all the time, and the face-off between science and the humanities happens to be one of them.

I should like the reader to go through the two links here; the first to a 2010 news item that I came across only recently, which tells about how a prominent Indian industrialist has donated a large sum of money to set up a liberal arts centre at Harvard University, his alma mater, the second, written by an ex-professor of English at Yale who first majored in science, and writes about how ideally studies in science and the humanities should complement one another – something that I have been insisting on for a long long time, and something that our leaders/educationists seem increasingly to be losing sight of. It is my (I believe very reasonable) fear that without that kind of well-rounded education, not only shall we stop producing mature, civilized citizens who can be equally good at parenting and teaching and ruling the nation at all levels from the municipality to the federal government, but even stop producing any real science at all, reducing ourselves instead to a country full of rude, ignorant, greedy, mentally unbalanced petty technicians of all kinds… hardly the sort of nation with any hope of a glorious future! Last night I heard an old boy – now in  a very renowned engineering college – saying that when he reads the newspaper in the canteen or in the hostel, his friends/roommates taunt him for it, calling him a ‘retired person’ with nothing ‘worthwhile’ to do, worthwhile in their book meaning getting drunk, watching smut on the net, chasing girls, zooming about on  bikes bought by their fathers or loitering in shopping malls, of course, not working in some lab or listening to a scholarly lecture or doing some part time job or writing music or anything like that…

Doth Google protest too much?

Vinton Cerf, one of the so-called ‘fathers of the internet’, senior VP and ‘Chief Internet Evangelist’ at Google, has written this article warning humanity at large about what he sees as a concerted effort by governments around the world to stop the net being free and open to all (he has also posted on the same subject on Google’s official blog). Now about this I am in two minds, not least because it seems to me to be yet another attempt (and by someone representing a very powerful private profit-making organization with its own axe to grind) to portray governments (and more generally, all forms of authority) as fundamentally hostile to human freedom and welfare.

When I think of all the enormous benefits that the internet has brought to mankind in just a little over two decades – not only all the new jobs and businesses it has spawned or enabled to grow big but miracles like email and Wikipedia and YouTube and blogging and online banking and ticketing etc etc – I agree almost without reservation (were it not for the ‘copy-paste’ culture it has encouraged among all sorts of people from schoolkids to post-doc scholars) that the internet has been a Good Thing on a gigantic scale, and I would most certainly like to see it keep growing and developing in myriad hitherto undreamed-of ways. However, when I hear of fears that governments are secretly hatching dark plans to hobble and enslave it, I cannot help wondering, for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, despite Mr. Cerf’s pretensions to historical wisdom (he is a techie, after all, however rich and famous), the fact remains that governments have neither always determinedly fought against progress nor generally succeeded – at least, not for long. To take just two examples from a vast range of choices available to any educated person, slavery could never have been abolished, nor measures of public hygiene for the masses (including everything from networks of regularly cleaned underground sewers to vaccination) would ever have been possible without large scale government support and involvement anywhere on earth: and no one in his right mind will argue that these were not major progressive steps in human development. Mr. Cerf writes correctly in the last lines that ‘within decades of Gutenberg’s creation, princes and priests moved to restrict the right to print books’; what he omits to mention is that they failed despite their best attempts, and the printed word managed to spread fast and wide enough to bring about events as momentous as the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Governments are nowhere and never all powerful; resolute people with clear aims and visions will find ways out of their muzzles and dragnets. Scare mongering of this sort, therefore, might be in the nature of dishonest hyperbole, and we should stop to wonder why it is being done, whose interest is being served in reality.

Mr. Cerf has also been careless enough to let slip his opinion that the inter-governmental organization called the ITU is not wholly a Bad Thing, since it has greatly helped the net to multiply quickly, smoothly and seamlessly through global cooperation; only, his gripe is that governments alone have a right to vote in it; ‘engineers, companies, and people that (sic) build and use it have no vote’. He may have a point there (though it is also true that engineers and companies are not traditionally asked to vote on the need to build bridges and cities, either – that kind of decision making has always been the preserve of governments, for the simple reason that nobody and nothing else has been found to represent the ‘general public interest’ better than governments do, all except the very worst of them anyway). So it may be okay to demand that the deliberations of this meeting being held today at Dubai be made public knowledge, and that governments do not take draconian measures without informing and consulting their respective peoples, but it is absurd to say that governments should not hold such meetings at all!

Then there is this matter of there being so many governments which block the services of Google and other companies either temporarily or permanently, and that being portrayed as a very Bad Thing. Sign the petition at once, don’t stop to think, the article and the blogpost are telling us with shrill urgency, otherwise the sky is going to fall on your head. It is at such times, when howling mobs instigated by wily and ruthless manipulators with hidden agendas call for bringing down all kinds of established standards, norms, conventions and institutions (the trials of Socrates and Joan of Arc, and the effect of Mark Antony’s speech at Julius Caesar’s funeral are telling cases in point) that people who value reason, balance and fairness need to hold on most tightly to their sanity and their own right of judgment, whether they are private individuals or people in positions of public power. Yes, okay, many governments do monitor, filter and even ban many kinds of content – so what? Doesn’t every sensible parent do it with their child’s range of internet access (and don’t give me the corny crap about adults being in general more mature and knowing what is good for them – remember that most adults would rather watch dancing girls or go to kitty parties than attend learned seminars, remember Auden’s apocryphal ‘unknown citizen’, who ‘held the proper opinions for the time of year/ when there was peace, he was for peace, when there was war, he went’; remember the inimitable Humphrey Appleby in Yes Minister demonstrating with panache how ‘public opinion’ can be manufactured at will by any sufficiently cunning and powerful authority…)? Doesn’t Google do it itself (how many outside posts criticizing their policies have they put up on their own blog)? I know a little bit about my own country, and the kind of things our government has occasionally banned or blocked – personal abuse of high level politicians, for example, and vicious and completely irrational hate mongering websites vilifying certain religious communities, designed to raise tempers and provoke barbaric riots – have been found to be okay by most level-headed citizens; occasions when governments went too far have been quickly remedied (as with the recent Facebook incidents in Maharashtra and West Bengal), so where is the terrible urgency to remove all powers of supervision and censorship from the hands of governments?

As for the worry that several regimes want a ban on anonymous posts, I happen to hold very strong views in favour of it, from my own experience on the net, especially with blogging. Somebody on my  blog has sought to justify it on the grounds that a lot of people like to post anonymously – I hope I don’t have to belabour the point that that is one of the stupidest arguments in favour of doing or not doing something. My experience is that only ignorant and unreasonable people who want to abuse me out of pure personal spite (and know that very well themselves, and are therefore scared to expose themselves to the same kind of abuse!) as a rule feel the need to send anonymous comments to my blog: no friend needs it, and no civilized critic does, either. Blogger itself (a tool owned by Google) currently offers a facility to block anonymous comments, and I have availed myself of it after enduring for many years the ‘comments’ of vulgar cowards whose real problem was a lack of education coupled with envy and having very little work to do. No man who has a real opinion and courage of conviction, I shall maintain this to my dying day, will be afraid to put his name to it – Luther wasn’t and Gandhi wasn’t, I myself have never felt the need for it, and the ‘opinions’ of the faceless crowd should never be given an overblown importance, otherwise there is the end of competent government and decent social life. Besides, why doesn’t a writer who insists on the importance of ‘transparency’ to the net fail to notice the basic contradiction with the position that anonymous posting/commenting is okay? You can’t have your cake and eat it too, Mr. Cerf!

Concerning the fear that governments are planning to impose some kind of toll on content providers and other net users for reaching out to audiences beyond borders, well, what is so novel or wrong or traumatizing about the idea? Governments need money to make vast outlays on providing many kinds of services to people which the latter may imagine to be free – piped and chlorinated water to many homes in India, for example – and so they try to impose tolls and taxes. People speaking for vast corporates like Google are usually committed to the ideology of the ‘free’ market when it suits them (where, ironically, all things should be priced for them to be produced and distributed ‘efficiently’); when it doesn’t, they scream blue murder. People pay computer hardware- and software manufacturers and internet service providers for accessing the internet, so why shouldn’t they also pay a little to governments which protect them (as with anti-cyber crime laws)? The fact that most net users have gotten used to accessing virtually everything on the net for free (except porn – for which millions pay gladly, a very telling point) is not an argument to justify that this should go on forever, else the net is doomed. Speaking for myself, I am quite willing to pay a toll for net usage of the kind which I find useful, so long as it is small and fair, in the sense that I willingly pay tolls for the use of the national highways, but find it objectionable that someone driving a small hatchback is required to pay as much as someone driving a top of the line BMW.

And finally, look at the cartoon on top of the article. One banner says ‘Fear me, I am free’.Talk about mindlessness having a field day. These are the same people who want to be free of the fear of government. I don’t want to rub it in, but what kind of ugly-minded pinhead can say that since everybody has a right to be free, someone needs to fear him so that he can be free of fear? For the reader who finds that flying over his head, here’s something simpler to think about: if you found an alligator or a tiger on the road holding up a sign like that, wouldn’t you ring at once for someone to come rushing and put the beast in a cage? Remember, then, that humans can be far more annoying and dangerous than any dumb animal…

New minister, old hat

Sunday’s newspapers gave wide coverage to the expensive religious fanfare with which the new Union minister, M.M. Pallam Raju, entered office very recently. Not only was absolutely everything rearranged on the advice of ‘vaastu experts’ but everything from the priest to the laddoos was specially flown in from Tirupati, so as to ensure that the Lord Himself would look benignly upon the new incumbent and give him a long and trouble-free tenure in the high profile Ministry for Human Resource Development (which looks after everything educational, from the anganwadi schools to the IITs and IIMs, among other things). Just as a matter of fact, Mr. Raju is a very young man by conventional standards in politics – a mere fifty – and he is both an electronics engineer and holder of a ‘phoren’ MBA to boot.

My observations:

So far as outlook on life is concerned, if you call this superstition, an engineer cum MBA these days obviously comes from the same cultural level as any coal thief in Ranigunj who quit school after failing class 8 twice on smelling the money. You have got to judge a man by things other than the degrees he has, the office he holds and the car he drives – a point I have underscored again and again. Which of these differentiated Tagore from any lala in Burra Bazaar – or any ‘successful’ pickpocket for that matter?

I can only wonder what kind of educational future India has under the stewardship of men like these. Are we going to produce Satyajit Rays and Subhas Boses and  C.V. Ramans by the thousands now, or an endless stream of cybercoolies, shopping mall supervisors, credit card salesmen calling themselves ‘business executives’, factory foremen, low grade journos and hotel receptionists who get very angry whenever they are told that if they consider themselves ‘successful’, they must by the same token admit that that apocryphal coal mafia don is fifty times more so?

It is a pity, too, that there were intellectual giants like Humayun Kabir and Triguna Sen in the same position in the early days of the republic, working under the guidance of no less a mind than Jawaharlal Nehru, a man who was in close intellectual touch with literally the finest minds in the world, from Einstein to Tagore, from Joan Robinson to Vikram Sarabhai (everything from the IITs to the Lalit Kala Akademi was set up in those halcyon years). How far we have ‘progressed’ in the last sixty years, indeed.

Finally, in defence of the likes of Pallam Raju (and his one-time predecessor Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi, a physicist who wanted to introduce regular courses on astrology in all leading universities), maybe it is better on the whole to believe in things like God than in Lady Gaga, iPad apps, credit cards, massage parlours and shopping malls, after all! (see my post titled ‘Post modern enlightenment’, alongwith with Suvro Sarkar’s witty comment on it). At least thinking of God tries to lift you up from the muck, while these trappings of contemporary ‘civilization’ only push you down deeper into it…until every moron with a third-rate college degree, a Rs. 30,000-a-month job, endless time to waste and a ‘smart’ phone with an internet connection thinks he can ‘debate’ with people immeasurably his intellectual and moral superiors simply by spouting a few words of abuse, drunken rickshawwallah style!