Khaled Hosseini's third

There are very few living authors about whom I’d say to someone who is serious about books ‘Don’t die before you have read him’. And I happen to know something about books. Khaled Hosseini is one of that elite.

He writes about love and hate, pain and longing, folly and illusion and evil and sin and remorse and redemption and finding out through long, diverse and intense experience who we are, what we were born for, how to make the best of our human condition against the most unfair and unmanageable odds, make peace with ourselves and be glad or at least quietly content when our number is up. Yes, the stuff of the finest works through the ages in every land…old hat. Only, some people do it their own way and very much better than others, leaving permanent footprints on the sands of time, making you thankful that they wrote and you read them.

He knows how to make pain, gut-wrenching pain, more beautiful and beguiling and fulfilling than even the sweetest pleasure. In this mind-numbed, crudely hedonistic age he defies your expectations of gooey happy endings and dares you not to read him. You go back to him even though you know you can’t take it any more. After The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, I had sworn to myself I shall never read a Hosseini again. His new book has come out last month – five years after the previous one – and when Abhirup brought it along, it took me half a minute to forget my resolve: I finished the first hundred pages in a breathless hour-long rush, and I knew I was hooked, and had to finish the book no matter what.  

This book too, originates in Afghanistan; indeed most of it dwells on present-day, war-torn, poverty-ravaged, religion-and-drug-crazed Afghanistan, but it covers a much longer time span than the previous ones, travels all over the world from Greek islands to Paris to Spain to Californian suburbs and even fleetingly to India, and deals simultaneously with a much greater number and variety of characters, most of whom interweave and interact with one another in one way or the other, in the best tradition of grand narratives of yesteryear. There are poor marginal farmers quietly bleeding their lives away in back-breaking labour to keep their families alive and there are corrupt, violent warlords wearing masks before their childen that ultimately drop off, there are beautiful, dissolute, frustrated poets and math PhDs trying to understand them as parents and human beings as they themelves raise families and grow old; there are savaged, ugly but gifted women trying to live decently with a purpose and little boys growing into doctors trying to respect them and love them, there are homosexual masters who are nice but frustrated people and lovelorn servants who wish they knew with their dying breath they had done the right thing; there are ‘good’ men who eventually have to admit to themselves they are lesser human beings than their ‘bad’ siblings, there are faithful daughters desperately trying to find out what is missing from their lives and stern mothers who shame their grown up sons in the dusk of their lives by praising them, there are men and women and children suffering in exile and making do and changing and yet remaining unchanged… but always, also in the grand tradition, everything revolves over and around one basic template: two human beings who loved each other with an uncommon love, cruelly separated in childhood, longing and forgetting and remembering and searching all their lives for each other, and finding each other and bliss at last, more than half a century later, not in a way that makes for fairy tales but the sort that brings a wrenching cry from the heart – oh Allah, who is all merciful, it is not for us to judge, but could it not have been done in a kinder, nicer way? At the same time you are richer and deeply thankful for the experience: a master spirit has shown you what it means to be human.

The quote before the story begins is from Jelaluddin Rumi: ‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there’. Indeed, the book reconfirms the truth of the French proverb, tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner… and reminds us of Jesus’ admonition ‘Judge not, so thou shalt not be judged’. The best writers can do it far more persuasively than your run of the mill priest. And the book ends with a cathartic vision that, if you are capable of appreciating it, you will find it hard to forget.

Hosseini has single-handedly put Afghanistan on the world’s literary map: that is just one of his achievements. He reminded me once again why I read math and science and economics but chose to live by teaching literature, and also why a man may own all the baubles of this world but will die pitiably deprived and poor if he has not read a few good books of this sort. Also, how hard it is to be both a parent and a child. And what love and loving means. Those who know me will understand how hard it is for me to call someone my teacher: Hosseini has earned his place on the pedestal. I wonder what an incredible husband and father he must be. And he is the rare kind of man that I envy in this world – a man who has managed to do well by writing books that can find permanent places on the shelves of the most civilized among us. May God grant him a long and happy life devoted to writing. Visit his website at khaledhosseini.com, and do listen to the video where he talks about his new baby.

Statutory warning: Mutual sibling love of this ethereal quality surviving into adulthood is even rarer in this world than that between a teacher and his student. I should know.

P.S..: The stupidest people write book reviews these days, people who cannot distinguish Chetan Bhagat or E. L. James from Hemingway, Shaw or Shakespeare, and people who basically have nothing to say but are desperate to say it anyway – you can look up a few at goodreads.com  yourself. Talk about chattering apes, and what harm a smattering of education can do…

[And the Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini, Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 402, Indian edition Rs. 599, ISBN 978-9-3829-5100-1]

It bugs me, this

I grew up in a difficult family, and so I had a difficult childhood. Materially we were comfortable till I was in my mid-teens, when my father lost his cushy job with a public sector company, and we discovered he had never saved anything at all for a rainy day. The decade that followed gave me a taste of hardship and poverty first hand, and loneliness too – it went so deep that I have since then always had a profound contempt for people who have known such things only from books and movies, and a special respect for those who have fought their way through these things to a better life, be they day labourers or tycoons. Meanwhile, my academic career, after going excellently upto a fairly advanced stage, suffered a sudden big jolt: that is something I shall not discuss here; only let it be known that had things gone ‘normally’, I’d probably have been a senior World Bank official or an advisor to the Government of India today, as so many others, much less well endowed, have managed to become in my own time. Not that I am sad or envious that I didn’t – I know far too much about such positions and lives to find anything desirable or admirable about them, no real power, money or fame – just saying. My budding career in journalism, too, I quit early, because it paid very poorly in those days (I was desperate to fend for myself and find a little comfort and dignity in my life), and because I tired quickly of talking about what other people were doing and saying. My own life and work was not that unimportant; I had things to say of my own, and I wanted to work primarily for myself, and for the sake of people I personally cared for, and bring about little changes for the better that I could see with my own eyes.

Very few people, not excluding my parents, have ever done anything significantly good for me. The man I shall forever be most indebted to – after my grandfather and Sudhirda, that is to say – was Father Adrian Wavreil s.j., then headmaster of St. Xavier’s School Durgapur, who hired me as a teacher in June 1988. The rest, as they say, is history. I had taught privately ever since I was 17, and I now discovered that teaching was my calling and métier, and plunged into it with all the energy and enthusiasm I could muster. God gives us opportunities and challenges; what we do with them defines who we are. I began to flourish early in my job, as much in pecuniary terms as in terms of pride and self-satisfaction. That was back in the early ’nineties, and it has been up, up, up all the way, though in a quiet, plodding, unspectacular manner. I haven’t been seriously ill for more than 25 years now, and taken ‘medical leave’ for three days only once, God be thanked. I built a house with my father, married off my two sisters and got married myself, had a daughter and brought her up happily. I helped my wife and father in law through major medical crises. I got my own two-wheeler bought with my own money only at age 26 (a few years before that even buying a bicycle would have meant several months of hard saving), and went on to a second-hand car first, then a new one. We began travelling often, and comfortably every year (juxtapose this with the fact that I first ever travelled air-conditioned class by train with my own money only when I went on my honeymoon!). I bought my wife a house of her own, and have decked it up comfortably to her satisfaction. I am nearly done setting up a fund that will take care of my daughter’s college education. If I live more simply than I could afford today, that is only because I deeply regard it as a good virtue, nothing else. Much of this has been done in a ‘jobless’ state, too, and I shall go on insisting that almost the entire urban Bengali middle class – that small part of it which reads me and meets me, that is – will do well to keep it in mind that that alone, besides a lot else, puts me poles apart from them, because they cannot imagine existing without ‘secure’ salaried jobs, all talk of self-worth and self-respect be damned when it comes to the crunch. All this done, too, without demeaning myself before anybody, without ever asking for a favour, without ever offering or taking a bribe, without ever stabbing someone else in the back for my petty immediate advantage. And now, if I can work just ten more years as I have been working all this time, I can retire comfortably…much of my life is done.

All this has kept me more than moderately ‘busy’, as most people understand busy-ness in this country. Now what I want to underscore is the fact that I still have always ‘had time’ for far more. From reading widely on every subject under the sun to writing almost as much (and never utter trivia), from watching thousands of movies to giving my daughter and wife the time of their lives, from doing the meanest household chores to charity to counselling old boys and girls on a more involved and intimate footing than most professional counsellors can dream of, from walking and swimming and pranayaam to helping out people with their doctoral theses. Yes, it has made me well-known to a lot of people, some of whom regard me with awe, some with disbelief, some with exasperation, some with the meanest jealousy. Yes, it has somehow never won me the kind of fame and wealth that could have allowed me to do all that on a much wider scale, for other people’s benefit more than my own: that I ascribe to karma and  nothing else. Yes, it has caused me much frustration and bitterness, seeing how little people remember with affection and gratitude once they have got what they wanted from me. And no, I am not sorry about the way I have lived, because it has helped me know myself as well as a lot of others most uncommonly well – indeed, as I often tell people both young and old, ‘I know you better than you know yourself, as you will perhaps realize someday…get back to me when you do, and then maybe we can spend more meaningful time together’.

What upsets me today, then? Well, to put it in short, the fact that I still haven’t been able to ‘cure’ myself of a certain weakness that people continue to take advantage of. As my wife diagnosed a long time ago, I tend to let people get very close to me – people who are lonely and confused and tired and sad, and show a need for my company and counsel – and sooner or later, they invariably start abusing the privilege, either because they never valued it enough, or because their ‘need’ has been served, or they are by nature too flighty to value a serious relationship, or too scared to get closer beyond a point, or whatever. And then it leaves me with a bad taste in the mouth: why on earth did I give so much of my time and attention and affection to this undeserver? This is a strange thing about my life: I have never really needed anybody to live my life my way, in the sense that I can live pretty well physically as much as mentally all on my own (I said earlier I owe very few things to anybody but God), yet I tend to get involved very intensely when I do, and I expect the same kind of sincerity and intensity in return, and I am disappointed, often very painfully, again and again. Yet I still have trouble accepting that human beings are essentially shallow, and I must not expect much from them. Maybe that is the last step of wisdom I still have to climb… to really accept that everyone counts upto a point, but nobody really matters. After all, somebody is going to burn my remains anyway, for their welfare, not mine – a rotting carcass is a threat to public health. So why should I care?

What rankles even more is that many of the same people can somehow find time to gush over celebrities, even write glowing tributes about them if they are literate, notwithstanding the fact that those celebs never really touched their lives in any meaningful way. I remember the raucous public mourning by drunken lumpens when Satyajit Ray passed away, I recall a female pupil mourning theatrically when Shah Rukh Khan as Devdas died in the movie which provoked her dad to wonder aloud whether she’d cry as much when he died. Now it’s happening all over again with Angelina Jolie’s mastectomy and Rituparno Ghosh’s death – nothwithstanding the fact that the latter’s biggest claim to fame was his penchant for cross-dressing and some in-your-face verbal mannerisms, who probably killed himself early through a lot of unnecessary medication and surgery (face it: where would Stephen Hawking be without his blessed motor neuron disease?), and he was, in his own words, not to be counted among the world’s five hundred greatest directors, so the less I said about that the better. It is a teacher’s fate rarely to be acknowledged publicly with that kind of respect, affection, gratitude and sadness at parting, I suppose. No matter how extraordinary an impact s/he made on real lives. And maybe that’s the crucial point: a teacher belongs too much to the real world, whereas tycoons and popstars and movie personalities are like the djinns and fairies and princes of old – about those we can gush to our hearts’ content, but how can we emote like that about real people, especially while they are still alive? What will people say? It would be sooooo embarrassing! Maybe I’ll have to die and come back to read the obits. And what makes it all the more painful is the fact that a tiny handful do write and talk in worshipful tones, to the extent that I have to tell them every now and then to pitch it down a bit! Their existence, by contrast, underlines the truth that real love, love which is not afraid but proud to make itself known, is so rare in this world, though so many pretend…see, once more, the post titled 'A girl who admired her teacher' along with all the comments: it is there on my most-read list.

So maybe I’d become a happier man if I really told the whole world, at fifty, ‘Pay me if you want to talk to me’? Or would I? And would that make me a better man to know? Could I have been of so much ‘use’ to so many people if I had become that way in my mid-twenties? If I really did cut off my email connection and took on a new phone number that only my wife and daughter and doctor would know and put a gatekeeper at the door to stop people I don’t want to see from coming in, would that be a nicer thing for everybody who feels it is important to keep in touch with me, yet would never do a few things that make me happy?

P.S. June 06: Well, we all live in a democratic world, a world of free personal choice. Only, as I never tire of telling people, that, without being balanced by other conditions, cannot make for warm, happy relationships. Your choice to play footsie with me, my choice to ignore you - that's democracy. Even my wife was telling me this morning that she hates it when I stop talking to her. Only, like just about everybody else, she can't remember for long that there are conditions: I am not a robot you can press to amuse you at your convenience. You need to give me things, too...

Natalie

In the queer light, in twilight

In April of the year

I meet a thousand women

But I never meet my Dear.

Yet each of them has something

A turn of neck or knee

A line of breast or shoulder

That brings my Dear to me.

One has a way of swaying

I’d swear to anywhere

One has a hat, and one a laugh

And one a trick of hair –

Oh, hints and glints and gestures,

When shall I find complete

The Dear that's walking somewhere

The Dear that I’ve yet to meet?                 

Rupert Brooke wrote that poem a long time ago, when he was a very young man. The poem is titled ‘The Young man in April’. Then he wrote ‘If I should die...’, and then went to war and got himself killed. Lucky boy.  Not all of us have the same good fortune to go early, and leave behind only our works for people to admire and sigh over, and perchance to think “I wish I had known him”...

Now I have been a young man in a certain sense for a very long time, and I am growing old now, and I was also the sort of young man  who read Manusmriti and Arthasastra and Kamasutra and Paradise Lost of his own volition in teenage, and admired old men of the likes of Bertrand Russell and Tennyson’s Ulysses, you need to keep that in mind too. And I have been looking for my Dear for a very long time.

That hasn’t stopped me from having many nice-to-wonderful ‘affairs’ as people call them, a good marriage, a most satisfactory family life, and a daughter I am very proud of.  Yet, as the poet says, ‘always roaming with a hungry heart’, hethaa noy, hothaa noy, onyo kothaa, onyo konokhane... it has been an extraordinarily rich life, in a sense, therefore, but most intensely frustrating too. My Natalie I have never found.

‘Who’s Natalie?’ asked an old boy in his late '30s today, and I reminded him of If winter comes.  I created Natalie, and she has been all that I have wanted from a woman.  In the so-called real world, to paraphrase Russell, ‘I found ecstasy, I found anguish, I found madness, I found loneliness/ I found the solitary pain that gnaws the heart/ but peace I did not find’. What I did find was a lot of gifted and good women, and also crazed ones and foolish ones, obsessed ones and misguided ones galore, women who eventually hurt me more than they gave joyance (to use an archaic word), and yet women I am thankful for having known, however long or briefly. But the fact remains that I didn’t find Natalie. I have had girls asking me to adopt them too, but no one has ever said ‘I want to be your Natalie’. She is my manaskanya, girl born of my mind, and she will go to the grave with me.

I am not sad as I write this. There are feelings much deeper than sadness.  Some people say they know, but of course, that is just a form of words. In the end, we are all alone, and too foolish even to get close to those who have tried hardest...

Rituparno the noted filmmaker has died suddenly of a cardiac arrest. He was just about my age. I could very easily be marked for the axe, too - my doctors assure me I am a prime candidate! There are many who delude themselves with the thought that there's lots of time in hand to make things right. Of all the saddest things ever written, nothing is sadder than the words 'It might have been'.

                                                    

Anniversary

I am in the Big Bad City again. My mid-year break.

We drove along the national highway very early in the morning.  I had a kind of grim satisfaction from proving to myself that what the legendary Chandragupta Maurya could do in his early twenties, I can still do in reality at fifty: I am still a man.

I do not need great luxury and out of the way activity to enjoy a holiday. Just a break from routine (remember, I've been working non-stop since January 03), and lazing and sleeping and the glory of knowing there will be no classes to take, no homework to mark, no visitors to talk to and no phone calls in the line of business is ‘paradise enow’ for me. Especially when you have this kind of rainy, squally weather all day. There is a depression over the Bay, the dark rolling clouds have been hanging low, the wind is actually whistling and howling through the little gaps we have left in the windows, and we were chilled enough to turn off the fan and pull on the coverlets this afternoon, in end May!

And even more especially when you are located where I am.  My block of flats is minutes off the great Eastern Metropolitan Bypass which is choc a bloc with traffic at almost all hours, and lined with some of the snazziest and busiest new high-rises in the city, and yet my immediate neighbourhood still retains a certain rustic charm, with a vast water body on one side and an endless line of greenery on the other, when I look Bangladesh-way from the rooftop (which would be ten minutes flying time from here, I think). So I can think poetry from here, and dream of entropy, and wish my Natalie were here with me. While my wife and daughter are happily pottering away in the new home that they have lately decked up for dad to see.

Nice way to spend one's seventeenth anniversary. Things might have been better, and some readers will know how, but I am not complaining. God says 'This I am giving to you. Enjoy if you can. If you cannot, you lose.'

                                  (Three pix of the vistas from my roof)

                                                                                           

Last dream

Why are the very best of my ex students so scared to take up teaching as a calling/vocation?

It goes without saying that since I have been a teacher by conviction, and have taught all sorts of things to people over a wide range of ages for more than three decades, and it has given me so much satisfaction, pride, an unusually wide reputation, a very great deal of respect, and a  comfortable living besides (which could easily have been upgraded to affluent if I had worked harder, and in a metropolitan city where the fees are far higher), I do very badly want a lot of good and bright young people – especially those who have learnt from me what teaching might be – to come into this profession, and especially so at the school level, where most of our real education takes place for most of us. Some say it’s too risky, some that it requires too much knowledge always ready at hand, some are too frightened to face students’ criticism and questions, some insist that it calls for too much self-discipline, orderliness, assiduity and patience, considering which it doesn’t really ‘pay’ enough… and it doesn’t make me happy. Partly because I know they are not right, and partly because even if all that were true, some of them, some of the best of them, should, must take the plunge: because it is a truism that without many good and a few great teachers, no country can hope to progress and prosper, because teachers make every other kind of men, be they politicians or tycoons, doctors or engineers, artists or scientists, parents or policemen…

My last and best dream is that I should be able to start a small thing with my most favourite, best persuaded old boys and girls, then spread out a countrywide chain of enfranchised tutorials – the only difference from the familiar sort lying in the two facts that a) we would teach how to live good lives, not merely how to get a ‘good’ job, which after all is a trivial aim of education, and b) my colleagues/partners would be committed to teaching as religious men are committed to worship, not merely in it to make a fast buck: though, the way I see it, if the thing does come to fruition some day, there will be more than enough money going around to make us all deeply contented.

How many of my ex students are game? You don’t have to commit publicly on the blog. Use email if you like. This year I shall want to lay the foundation stone, even if only metaphorically speaking, meaning that I want to get the most interested ones chatting and planning together on the net to start with. All else can follow. That, by the way, would be both the best way to express their love for me and pay me gurudakshina…

This is my last and best dream. I might die with the dream unrealized, but so what? It is good to die with a good, clean, big dream. And I know that my fellow countrymen don’t stand to lose anything if my dream does come true. Besides, it would be sad if I could not pass on the baton when my time’s up.

P.S.: In the few hours since I posted this one, several interested people have been talking to me already, via phone and chat and email. I want to start the thing properly off by setting up a discussion forum, to which membership will be only by request or invitation. What would be the best way of doing that? Launch a new, separate blog? Or...?

P.P.S., May 28: Well, no time like the present. I am taking advantage of my mid-year break to set the ball rolling. I have now set up the forum in the form of a blog, which readers can access by invitation only, and I have sent off invitations to a tiny set already. Now I am waiting for responses...

ICSE 2013 and us

Well, my daughter has passed the secondary level public examination called ICSE with close to 92 per cent marks in the aggregate. Which is on the one hand more than her dad did, and on the other hand no big deal at all, because a) these days, owing to massive ‘marks inflation’, a lot of candidates have scored as much or more, including many I know who are far inferior students, which will become apparent by and by as they study at higher levels and appear for tougher examinations, and b) if she had scored a few percentage points less or more, it would not have made the slightest difference to her career in the long run. All that matters is that she has crossed one major milestone in her life, and a great deal of growing up is ahead of her.

The point I wish to make here is that she did it all without living the kind of hothouse-plant life that virtually everyone of her contemporaries and classmates has done. She has wasted very little time on worthless tuitions, she has never been bullied or harried to ‘study hard’, she has not been held prisoner in the house at all times unless she was going to a wedding feast or some shopping mall with her parents, she has slept and exercised a great deal, she has tried singing and dancing and karate and swimming and painting and handicrafts and cooking, she has read widely and watched a lot of good movies with the active encouragement of her parents, she has had some fun  with boys, she has handled money, she has spent days away from her parents, she has surfed the net thoroughly and written her own blog, she has spent thousands of hours chatting about all sorts of  interesting things with mom and dad, she has made good friends across a wide spectrum of ages…in short, she has had a rich childhood, and without sacrificing anything significant at all that her contemporaries have enjoyed. Good genes, yes, but I shall take a great deal of credit for it, too, and as a teacher I do believe that a lot of parents would become much better parents if they swallowed their silly egos and learnt from my example. I am proud, and again, I know I have reason to be. I also believe that the way she has been brought up, she will be able to live much more richly, in the broadest sense of the word, than 99% of her contemporaries, only God willing.

So today I am unfazed about my daughter’s ICSE results, again unlike the parents of most of her contemporaries, for whom it is very big news: they will be preening or moaning in their own tiny circles for weeks and months while we get on with life. So unfazed, in fact, that my phones have stayed switched off or unanswered all day, because I was keen neither to hear a lot of people tell me their scores, nor to tell them my daughter’s. Those who are really interested in us will know that we have far better things to think and talk about: we always do. And if they like us or love us, they will wish us things that really count.

Saradha and me

Sudipta Sen of Saradha fame seems to have a very long reach, even though he might currently be in police custody and awaiting trial. Not only are more bits and pieces of his vast ill-gotten fortune coming to light, but people are committing suicide right and left, unable to bear the financial disaster and/or social humiliation that he has brought upon them. And the tide has spread so far that it has even affected me: a man who has always worked and saved steadily and assiduously all his life, avoiding all get-rich-quick schemes like the plague.

The father of one of my pupils came over yesterday to beg for a fee waiver. He has been working for Sen’s company for many years, presumably at a very low level, clerk or field agent or such. And now they have downed shutters, and employees like him haven’t been paid for almost three months, and they are virtually reduced to scraping the barrel. ‘They are only talking of saving the investors, Sir. Who will look after us? What are we going to eat?’ He really looked like he was in dire straits, or else he was a fantastic actor.  I couldn’t be hard hearted enough to refuse the little help I could give him, though I was inwardly furious at the way people like us are being forced to pay for others’ sins of stupidity and greed – and also for the way some politicians are forcing us to pay even more: ‘Smokers, get ready to pay more taxes to bail out all those poor investors who have burnt themselves badly’!

Through a long teaching life I’ve given partial or full fee waivers to a lot of people, of course. Especially when their parents were going through hard times. My overall experience has not been edifying at all. Most of those have been indifferent students; not one ever showed any signs of being deeply interested and influenced by my classes; few (students and parents alike) have ever got back with respect and affection; I haven’t heard of many who have spoken of me elsewhere with lasting gratitude. Some have duped me with made up stories about hardship; a few have actually bad-mouthed me. Whereas my most favourite old boys and girls have paid their fees in full. So if I did an act of charity today, I certainly have no reason to feel good about it: I am calling myself a sucker. And I am praying that more Saradha victims might not queue up at my door…

About Urbi's new post, and about books

My daughter has written her first post about how she is adapting to her new environs, separated from daddy for the first time in her life at the age of 16. To some people, such writing should be important, interesting and thought-provoking. I'd like the most decent and humane of my readers, old boys and girls especially, to write back to her telling her how they feel; it is sure to warm her heart.

Personally, I am trying to cope with enforced quasi-bachelorhood in middle age. Some people of the same age group and of both sexes have told me they envy me, but I don't think I am enjoying this at all. A kind of purgatory, at best, and the cheeriest thing I can think about it is that perhaps it is washing away a lot of accumulated sins! And though I am doing my classes with as much regularity, earnestness and cheerfulness (on the surface, that is) as ever, I am only looking forward to my mid-year break, which should be sometimes towards the end of this month.

It's the first of May.We are bang in the middle of the worst season of the year. After two successive years of roasting us, the weather gods have decided to give us a very muggy summer for a change. I could never decide which is the worse of the two...

One sad passing thought for now. As I must have said in some old blogpost, I have stopped routinely lending books to my pupils to read  for a variety of reasons, but when some of them keep begging, and sound really earnest about reading a good book, I sometimes relent. Lately I have been finding out that all that eagerness is fake or a momentary enthusiasm at best: even if they insist that they have read the books, it takes them ages, and still when I quiz them afterwards, it takes me only minutes to discover that they haven't really read at all in my sense of reading. Of course, they routinely give the explanation that they have been busy. I suppose they are all sure that they are talking to the only man in the world who has nothing to do but read and think. I wonder what is worse here too - that most people don't read, or that some people pretend to?

OK for now. Remember, my daughter's latest blogpost.

Chit funds, cheat funds

Once more a ‘chit fund’ scam has exploded over West Bengal, large sections of the public are furious, and a few heads are beginning to roll, while many others are praying that they are too high and mighty to be singed.

I have been following the pattern since I first started reading newspapers – aeons ago – and some things never change. Let me put them down categorically.

Everywhere in the world (remember Ponzi schemes and Bernie Madoff?), some people want to get seriously rich quick.

A fool and his money are soon parted, so the less foolish among these wannabes make money by exploiting the greed of the more foolish: typically by telling a lot of people they will get back far higher returns than banks and other legitimate/mainstream financial institutions offer if they ‘invest’ in the various ‘business projects’ that these companies claim to have floated. Typically also they are engaged in areas like real estate, movies, sports, the stockmarket, the tourism/entertainment industry, TV/newspapers and so on, if not also in gambling, drugs and the flesh trade.

These scamsters bet on the long established truism about human nature that there’s a sucker born every minute, and mankind in the large never learns from history, so they will never run short of prey. The majority of their victims are poor and lower middle class people – your typical small farmer, rickshaw puller, petty shopkeeper, construction worker, door to door salesman and the like, who could be pitied for lacking the kind of education that would make them cautious about the Big Bad World (and who therefore deserve, and get too little of, protection by the government), but, tragically, there are also a lot of people who claim to be ‘educated’ and ‘experienced’ (at least before their children) and yet are led by their greed and gullibility into burning their fingers badly. Thousands of them in my own town!

As I wrote in a blogpost in connection with Lalit Modi two years ago, you need only four things to get rich quick – arrogance, shamelessness, violence and greed. Well, maybe I’ll add one more: connections in high places.  Absolutely no other qualifications required, and all you need to keep praying for is that luck might not suddenly desert you until you become too big to fail, like the directors of Citibank (or Sahara India?). Within a few years or at most a decade, you will move from slum to five star environs, from your dad’s rickety cycle van to a spanking new Audi or BMW, you will have legions of minions, from armed thugs to trained lawyers and CAs and MBAs to protect your back and do all the legwork and dirty work for you (people who have been to IIT and consider themselves ‘successful’ because you pay them at most a measly couple of lakhs a month: think of those who work for Vijay Mallya or Anil Agarwal of Vedanta fame), you will have sexy bimbos swooning on your arms, you will throw parties where the champagne flows like water even though you might never have passed class eight and you owe billions to millions which you have no intention of ever paying back – and much of society (read the mass media, including and especially the parts of them you personally own) will be going gaga over you as a great success, even a great man. And that success will keep begetting success, because nothing attracts prey to you as the smell of big money being squandered on a lavish scale, no matter how it has been made.

It is not good or wise to blame it all on the politicians, for a number of reasons: a) politicians do not tell people to be both stupid and greedy, b) some politicians actually try to fight the ever-present menace of sharks devouring minnows, and get little thanks for it, c) a lot of people feel politicians have no business trying to teach them to restrain their greed and tell them to be less foolish, d) in a society where almost everybody is trying to get rich quick (so why not the politicians too?) – and given the fact that it has always been very hard to make big money quickly by honest means – a lot of such ‘human interest’ stories will keep happening, because most ‘successful’ people do get rich only by duping the foolish and the greedy, e) politicians, alas, can thrive and even get some good work done only by winking at, if not actually being hand in glove with, the sharks whose sole aim in life is to make money no matter how, that’s the way the world is, f) too few people notice that many of the money bags become politicians themselves, and play a not insignificant role in breaking, bending or changing laws so that they can keep playing their dirty games with less and less to worry about. And to those who say – at age 20 or 80 – that ‘come socialism, and the world will become paradise’, this incorrigible sceptic will retort ‘Ho hum. Read history, or keep dreaming.’

Meanwhile, I started earning my living early, and am nearly high and dry, having followed my own three maxims resolutely: a) make just enough for your needs, keeping an eye on the far future, b) don’t envy and slaver after big money, c) don’t listen to anybody, however fancy his car, his office or his calling card, who offers to make you rich in a year or two. When I have needed worldly advice, I have taken it from the likes of Shakespeare and Ben Franklin and Tagore, not your hot-shot twenty something MBA in finance, be he from Harvard or IIM…and I cannot pass on better advice to those who are coming after me.

'fatherly' concern

It’s been five years since one of my most beloved students, with whom over a period of 19 years I had developed a very close relationship after his father died in his teenage, abruptly broke off all connections with me and vanished from my life. The wound has not healed yet – not least because it keeps being rubbed raw every now and then, and maybe also because I have not succeeded well enough in making myself immune to the vagaries of human relations, because I take people too seriously, give them too much space in my life to work mischief in. So I was remembering how many others have been temporarily – usually for a few years – so filled with fascination and affection for me that they started, like this old boy, not only to call me a ‘father figure’ but, carried away by a sudden upsurge of emotion, publicly declaring that they loved and respected me even more than their biological parents. Trust me, there have been not a few, though most of them male (females have their own problems, which I have learnt to accept with a sigh; they generally stick with ‘silent admiration’, which I have dealt with adequately elsewhere). When I get that sort of feedback, I grin wryly inside my mind, and wonder how many months such ardour will last, how soon I shall fade into oblivion. I am rarely surprised.

I have been lately meditating on death, and love, and solitude and things like that. Also, on being a father (interested long-time readers will remember earlier posts I have written on the subject, such as A father’s abiding woe and The world we are making for our children). Not only because I have dealt with very many different kinds of fathers professionally all my life but because trying to be a good father has been one of my strongest and most abiding ambitions since the moment my daughter was born (it’s not a very common ambition, I know too: far more people want to be ‘successful’). And now a major phase of my life and hers is over: she’s gone to live away from me. For the rest of our lives, I shall have my memories, and she will have the opportunity to judge for herself, from a distance both mental and physical, what daddy did for her and meant to her…

As I was saying, I have dealt with a lot of fathers in the line of work, and I would be the last person to generalize about what they mean to their children – especially after the children have grown up. I have routinely met highly irresponsible, uncaring, uninvolved, uninterested fathers, who believe their job is only to supply the money and make occasional pious or threatening noises when the kids seem to be stepping out of line, period. I deal with complaints about absolute bullies, control freaks with warped outlooks whose sole (or at least major) aim seems to be to make life miserable for their children. I meet with doting ninnies who raise pampered brats who will never, mentally speaking, stand on their own feet. I counsel fathers who take limitless lip and worse from their ill-brought up wards because they are too ‘afraid’ to draw the line. I also happen to know some generally nice people, but I have met precious few fathers in my life whom I can admire and call worthy of loving and respecting, unless you confuse ‘respect’ with fear, old habit, greed (of property to be inherited in due course of time) and socially required hypocrisy. Remember that quote from Oscar Wilde?

And I do not merely criticize other people, either. My own father was a miserable specimen. The most charitable thing I can say about him is that he neglected me instead of tyrannizing, and so he didn’t entirely succeed in ruining my life: I grew up my own way, by my own lights, learning everything from my own mistakes and follies and people whom I had elected to look up to, and that has given me a degree of freedom and confidence and self-respect that most people of my age and milieu can only timidly dream of. Also, my grandparents on my mother’s side were my real parents, and much of my ideas about what good parents should be like I imbibed from them, as well as from great fathers both historical and fictional, men like Tagore and Atticus Finch, some absolutely sublime teachers among them.

So I have long had unusually clear ideas about what a father should mean, and what you should mean if you say you love and respect him, what kind of commitment it entails, and how careful you should be before you call someone a father figure. Few people feel any genuine enduring love even for their own fathers: why drag other people into that sacred precinct unless you mean serious business, and have the spiritual strength and depth to carry the burden of that seriousness for any length of time? What’s the point of my seeing more of the Sudipto Basu and Stotra Chakraborty types anyway: haven’t I seen enough, are there still lessons to learn?

Love, I have said a thousand times in my class, is the most used and most abused word in the world, even when applied in the commonest contexts, as between romantic couples as well as the parent-child relationship. Martin Luther King jr’s autobiography is tellingly titled Strength to love. Loving requires wisdom as well as strength of character. Lacking these, no one can ever truly love anybody: one will pretend to oneself, make believe with the so-called loved one, vacillate, gush one day and drop off the next, cheat, suspect, blame, hurt, restlessly keep looking for ‘better alternatives’… in short, do everything in the name of love but love.

As some people with eyes may have noticed and even reflected upon, I have put ‘father’ even before ‘teacher’ in my one-line self-description which is permanently fixtured on top of this blog. Also, my conscience is clear: I have always believed that as with money so with love, one must give before one can even hope to receive, and I have tried to give of myself, as a true teacher must, unstintedly to thousands over a very long working life. Hundreds acknowledge their debts fondly but don’t venture too far in declaring their love and fealty; a far bigger number forget, because they never found anything of lasting interest in me; a few score bad-mouth me. To the first category I openly declare my loving gratitude over and over again; the others I, too,  ignore and forget, because the lack of interest is mutual. But those who make me write this sort of stuff I can neither forgive nor forget…

Susan Patton's wisdom

A woman named Susan Patton who graduated from Princeton University in 1977 – now divorced, a corporate professional with sons currently at Princeton themselves – recently wrote a letter to The Daily Princetonian which has gone viral on the net. I read about it in The Telegraph of Kolkata on April 02, and the article had been lifted from The Times of London. In it, she gave some (unsolicited-) advice to girl students at Princeton: the gist of which is, ‘a) girls, you need to get married, b) you can’t afford to wait too long, you have a much shorter ‘shelf life’ than men, c) find a good match in Princeton itself, because never again will you have a choice of so many smart young men to pick from, remembering that as Princetonians, we have already almost priced ourselves out of the market’. She has been furiously criticized by feminists of all hues for spreading retrogressive ideas – some have even said it must be an April Fool joke – but she has stoutly defended her views, saying she has only girls’ best interests at heart ( see this link, and this).

So here’s my take. And this is only for level-headed people to comment upon, not loony sexists of either gender, mind you.

To start off, I do think there are both biological and psychological differences between men and women that cannot be simply wished away, and it is wise to take them into account while making life’s most important decisions. Smoking does harm women more than men in many ways, for instance, and men as a rule can handle loneliness much less efficiently on the whole. I do believe also that, as far as possible within the limits dictated by the minimal indispensable needs of social cohesion and stability, individuals should be free to make their own choices relating to matters like higher education, friends, careers and family life. I further believe that a lot of women, especially in the rich liberal western democracies, have been swinging too far on the side of material/professional achievement at the cost of private pleasures, and ending up often richer but unhappier in the long run, so it’s good that some people should tell them to go for a reality check (Reader’s Digest recently covered a middle-aged jet setting US government official who chose to quit her job to get back to the intimacy of family life which she had been missing sorely). And I have no sexist bias in this regard: I have always believed that too many men also sacrifice too much for the sake of career advancement, and for most people it turns out to be a bad bargain, seeing that they get ulcers and early heart attacks and broken families, and most don’t even end up at the top of the pile, where the big money and real power are. Billionaire and/or cabinet minister compensates for a lot of things, but imagine ending up as a retired faceless deputy general manager/vice-president of some company manufacturing nuts and bolts?

Having cleared the air, let me get down to some serious criticism of Ms. Patton’s views.

1.                  Girls just need to get married? Jane Austen is breathing down our necks with a vengeance. Sure, marriage is a wonderful thing – I am one of those who have always said so, and encouraged all my old boys and girls to get hitched once they are past their mid-20s and found a good partner. But putting marriage over and above everything else, and saying women need it much more than men? What utter rubbish! I can vouch from a lifetime’s experience, including my own, that if it’s a question of ‘need’, men on the average, once their youth is behind them, ‘need’ it far more than most women do, at least in our milieu! I wonder which planet Ms. Patton is coming from…

2.                  ‘Shelf life’? Yes, yes, I understand perfectly, of course, and sadly admit that for the vast majority of people it is probably a very valid and important concept too: if a girl is nothing more than a commodity to be transacted, if she is being hired on a long-term basis as a cook/housekeeper/childbearer/comforter/social trophy rolled into one, youth does give her some advantages which vanish rather quickly as compared with men, so… but what a tragic insult to all, men and women alike, who have even briefly dallied with ideas of love, or even mutual affection, regard, willing dependence, caring and being there for each other! God has been kind to me, and helped me know a few women including my wife who have near infinite shelf life: I cannot imagine they will grow less attractive and interesting to me with age; indeed, it is rather my prayer that I may still remain halfway interesting to them as I grow old. So I have an aching pity for the millions upon millions of young women who need to bother about their diminishing shelf lives, and it seems they are not restricted to ‘backward and orthodox’  countries like ours, either. This is the United States, in 2013!

3.                  This one is asinine, on at least three counts. a) Only Princetonians are smart? Since when? I can rattle off thousands of names of über smart people who never went to Princeton (or even Harvard or Yale or MIT or Stanford or Oxford or the Sorbonne for that matter). What sort of IQ/EQ/GK and level of self-esteem do you think they have who need to call themselves smart publicly, and link their ‘smartness’ to the educational institutions they attended? b) How much does smartness have to do with formal academics at all? There are thousands of top level writers, artists, sportsmen, criminal masterminds, generals, statesmen, scientists, philosophers and tycoons living and dead who have never gone to elite colleges (or dropped out because they found it boring and stultifying) – but they have had a lot of salaried types in the Princetonian mould working for them as glorified drudges! It is the same IIT myth of India on a much larger canvas: those who are really smart do things to change the world, those who are mediocre but have timid souls as well as brittle egos go for ‘elite’ institutions in the hope of being hired by the former tribe…unlike them, I am truly ambitious for my daughter, and I would much rather advise her to walk in the footsteps of a Dhirubhai Ambani than tell her success lies in getting into an IIT (or Princeton-) so that she may be given a job in one of the Ambani-run companies, or what is worse, marrying an IITian (or Princetonian) with a mid-level executive’s job with no real money, no more character than a cog in a wheel and no life to call his own! c) Ms. Patton, divorced, blames her failed marriage at least partly on the fact that her ex-husband was not a Princetonian. How pathetic so many people’s ideas remain right into old age, really. I read a book when I was a boy, titled Married to genius, which details how sad marriages between extraordinarily gifted people have often been – Tolstoy and Einstein and the Lawrences and Curies and Woolfs, besides analyzing the reasons why. Check out if you like the failed marriage of Stephen Hawking, too. And it goes without saying that I am talking of people who are vastly smarter than anything Princeton can ever ‘produce’, unless you think being a mere investment bank executive is an index of smartness, which of course any sane man will dismiss as rank idiocy. Then look around (which means, above all, read books!) and find out for yourself how many marriages between so-called ‘common, ordinary’ folks have been deeply satisfying lifelong, if not pure bliss, and you will begin to realize how much is needed from both parties besides smartness, and indeed how little that kind of ‘smartness’ counts, to make a happy marriage. If Ms. Patton’s marriage has been a failure, I can bet my shirt it had far more to do with lack of empathy and shared goals and mutual respect and interest in each other above all than any difference in their college grades and IQ levels can indicate.

These are the grown-up people peddling life-skills advice these days. I hope my young readers will appreciate even better after reading this essay why I insist on saying ‘A fool, when s/he grows old, merely becomes an old fool’…

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.]