Technology in a demented age

What I think about technology and its current state and effects on the world is to some extent outlined in the chapter titled On Nature in my book To My Daughter, as well as in the blogpost titled How My World Has Changed. But I keep thinking about it, and meanwhile new children are growing up into thinking beings (!), and not all of them have read the above (or can), so I think it’s time to write on the subject again – for all who are interested in the way I think, and want to understand why.

First, science and technology are not synonymous. Far too many people are forgetting this most vital point, and a lot of them these days never learnt the difference at all (I can’t blame the young, when they hear of institutions with names like Jai Hanuman College of Science and Technology Management). About this, I have written elsewhere – if you don’t want to read that, a little research on your own will do you a world of good.

Second, technology has been with us for thousands of years: it isn’t something that was born a few decades or even a couple of centuries ago. Indeed, any true scholar of the history of science will concur that the most epoch-making technologies evolved long before proper history began to be recorded: little that has been developed in the last fifty years has had the civilization-changing effects of the wheel, fire, the knife, writing, gunpowder, the compass, spectacles, surgery under anesthesia and the sanitary water closet. Anyone who gushes too much about the ‘revolutionary’ apps available on his mobile phone today is merely betraying the fact that a college education does not these days guarantee that you have greater practical wisdom and sense of discrimination than the average rickshawallah.

Thirdly, technology and computer science/IT are neither synonymous nor coterminous, for god’s sake – as an increasing number of even ‘educated’ (heaven help us!) folks seem to imagine. The prosthetics inserted in people’s eyes, hearts and bones involve technology. Shipbuilding and bridge building and aircraft designing call for technology, as much as cooking and scientific irrigation techniques do (and they all developed long before computers came to the aid of engineers). What an age we are living in when people have to be reminded of such things!... and as I have written elsewhere, the fact that technology is stagnating in so many fields, such as agriculture and power generation and automobile engines and pollution control and water recycling and disaster prediction, so that journalists and pop-science writers have to harp ad nauseam on ‘exciting’ developments in IT says nothing either flattering or encouraging about the state of technology today. As I say when I am in a mood for black comedy, we are heading for a dystopian world where we shall have to see if we can live on a diet of phones and TVs, they having become so cheap and simultaneously so ‘advanced’, seeing that normal food, air and water are becoming increasingly unavailable and unaffordable!

Which brings me to another, vital and connected issue. As a very observant man (incidentally both an engineer and a poet) told me back in the 1980s, jugta bigyaner noy, bigyaponer – it’s an age of advertizing, not science. It is in the mass media’s commercial interest to keep gushing about the alleged constant advancement of technology, and manned by millions of hacks and ad copywriters who never qualified for more worthwhile jobs, it bombards the public night and day with either trivial or pseudo-scientific rubbish (just check out the kind of jargon they use for ads of water purifiers and health drinks on TV, and I learnt not long ago that these days news like Kindle is about to introduce a backlit reader qualifies as a ‘scoop’. In my day a leak about Kissinger’s secret visit to China or about the first planned moon mission would have qualified as such. Judge for yourself). Bernard Shaw wrote a century ago about a time ‘when people had minds to think with, rather than a collection of newspapers’. What would he have said if he were alive today?

Net result – the public has become obsessed with junking their perfectly usable and useful possessions, be they phones or cars or hearing aids, to buy the ‘latest’ gizmos on the market, no matter how silly the little ‘improvements’ are, how useless, and how grossly, needlessly expensive (automatic rain sensors in cars that can turn on the windscreen wipers, you know, probably designed on the assumption that the average driver these days is both blind and deaf). Unless you decide never to grow up – in a most unedifying sense – you can get very tired of it. I don’t want to keep ‘updating’ the operating system on my computer every few years: why must I be forced? I don’t want to be told that the very costly camera I bought eight years ago should be trashed in favour of the newest toy – I had meant to leave it for my granddaughter, as grandfathers did with heirlooms in the good old days. It irritates me when gmail changes its layout and I have to re-learn something so trivial all over again, just because they want to stay cool with tweens all over the world. And I hate it when I am told, after I have used Picasa for three or four years, that the service is being closed down and I must switch to Google Photos now – and evidently hold my breath for the next such ‘exciting’ news a couple of years down the line again (in my case, the consequence is that I shall probably stop uploading photos on the net, and go back to a film camera, and I am not the only one thinking that way). Oh, I know, I know there are many hundred million people in the world today with too much money, too much time hanging heavy, too little responsibility, too empty brains and no real passions of any kind, who need to be kept constantly engaged and entertained this way, but what about the rest of us? Or, when is it going to be officially declared that henceforth technology shall progress not for the welfare of humankind as it was understood for thousands of years (as, say, happened when penicillin was discovered and the Pill invented), but only to keep lazy nitwits happy?

One last issue. I read a conversation among morons where someone particularly demented gushed ‘Technology does not discriminate!’ (having apparently read an ad copy to that effect somewhere – where else can such gifted people find their inputs?) Really? Read the whole history of warfare – war has always cruelly, devastatingly discriminated against the side which lacked superior technology, from the days of the chariot and ballista, and then the longbow and then the cannon and rifle and today the robots and drones. In the field of medicine, every time a new technology is born, whole generations suffer and die watching only the rich being able to afford the new procedures, drugs and gadgets, only praying that their children will be more fortunate (I read somewhere that eighty years ago doctors used to impress their dirty-rich patients by carrying around then-exotic ECG machines, and the eye doctor in my neighbourhood who charged Rs. 13,000 for a cataract operation alongwith lens transplant twenty years ago – that would be the equivalent of at least Rs. 35,000 now – does it for Rs. 3,000 today). India cannot go in wholesale for online examinations yet simply because of the fact that several hundred million students are still computer illiterate for no fault of their own, and the system will leave them out in the cold.  A stage actor works a thousand times harder and earns a thousand times less than a movie star for purely technological reasons. And every time a new technology replaces a vast number of specialized workers – be they calligraphists or painters, bank tellers or manual labourers – just where do those people go? Who takes responsibility for feeding them: especially those among them who are elderly, and ill, have families to support, in no condition to learn new skills, and have no savings worth the name to fall back upon? Need still more examples? Technology does not discriminate, indeed. There should be a law against rich, ignorant imbeciles puking all over the net… 

kaho Kanhaiya re!

I have been sitting out the whole JNU/Kanhaiya Kumar brouhaha, watching silently from the sidelines all this time. And I am not going to break that silence, for very strong reasons of my own. However, I shall take note of two different views on the subject. One, here. The other, I quote from an article published in today's Anandabazar Patrika (Sunday, March 06, edit page bottom, titled Chhilo muri holo michhri):

"...রাজনীতি একটা বিরাট বড় ব্যাপার।  চালাক চালাক কথা বলে টি-শার্টের স্লোগান তৈরি করা রাজনীতিকের কাজই না। তাছাড়া একটা বক্তৃতায় যখন প্রতিটি লাইনের পরে ঝড়ের মত হাততালি পূর্বনির্ধারিত থাকে, তখন পাতিস্য পাতি কথাও হাতিস্য হাতি মনে হয়। হাঁ, হতেই পারে, পরে দেখা গেল কানহাইয়া এদেশের সর্বকালের সর্বশ্রেষ্ঠ নেতা। শুধু বলছি, সেটার জন্য বছর দশেক না হোক, অন্তত মাস ছয়েক অপেক্ষা করতে হবে। তখনও ও প্রাসঙ্গিক থাকবে তো ? নিজেকে প্রাসঙ্গিক রাখতে পারবে তো ? খেলাটা তো এক ওভারের নয়। তাই এখন থেকেই 'ওরে মসিহা এসে গেছে, খাট পেতে দে ভাত বেড়ে দে' ডিগবাজি খাওয়ার কিছু হয়নি। ...সোশ্যাল মিডিয়া এসে এই ঝামেলা করেছে: সব লোক সকালে চোখ খুলেই ভাবতে শুরু করে আজকে কি নিয়ে ঘনঘোর উত্তেজিত হয়ে পড়বে। গোটা পৃথিবীটাকে হাইপার করে ছেড়েছে। তার সারাক্ষণ একটা আদ্রেনালিনের প্লাবন চাই। ই কি রে! জীবনের প্রতিটি দিন প্রতিটি মুহূর্তই প্রচন্ড হাই-পিচে বাঁধা থাকতে পারে না কি ? মনের কানের পর্দা ছিঁড়ে যাবে তো!* কে শোনে কার কথা। হয় কাউকে গালাগাল দিয়ে ভূত ভাগিয়ে দিতে হবে, নয় কাউকে এমন পুজো করতে হবে যে শাঁখ ঘন্টার শব্দে দমকলের গাড়ি ভেবলে  একসা। কেন? না, হিস্টিরিয়ায় মেতে থাকলে সময়টা কাটে জব্বর। তাই আজ কোহলি তো কাল কেজরিবাল পরশু কানহাইয়া। সানি লিওন থেকে অফিসের পিয়ন, সব একই তালে নাচছে। ... 'ভাইরাল হচ্ছে, ভাইরাল হচ্ছে!' রব একবার তুলে দিতে পারলে, সেই তোড়ে ভেসে যাওয়ার জন্যে সবার সত্তা চুলবুল করে ওঠে। 'আমাকেও খেলতে নে' চেঁচাতে চেঁচাতে সবাই ছোটে হামেলিনের বাঁশিওয়ালার পেছনে উল্লসিত ইঁদুরের মত। মঙ্গলে হয়ত সেই স্টেটাস পেল কোলাভেরি ডি, বুধে কানহাইয়া। ... সোশ্যাল মিডিয়া তার স্বভাবধর্মে এমন জোরে তার বাণী ছড়াচ্ছে যেন সুরেন বাঁড়ুজ্যে, বিপিন পাল, উইন্স্টন চার্চিল আর ডেমোসথেনেস এক দেহে হলো লীন।  কিন্তু বাপ... মুড়ি আর মিছরির এক দর হওয়া শুধু দোকানির পক্ষে নয়, শেষ অবধি খদ্দেরের পক্ষেও খারাপ।" 

[* in this connection, look up a five-year old blogpost of mine here]

Admission trauma - make believe?

I have been in Kolkata this week, and was witness to the heaviest February thundershower in a century. For those who weren’t here, it was a deluge, I can tell you.  The temperature dropped sharply, which was a mercy. What I found pleasantly surprising was how little normal life was disrupted, and how quickly the city dried up.

I have also done something that I never gave myself the chance to do for donkey’s years: eating around the city. There is a far greater number and variety of restaurants to choose from than in our time, something to suit almost every pocket. Four nights out in a week, trying all sorts of things from shrimp to squid to lamb and varieties of pork: that’s a whole normal year’s quota for me! It’s such fun to have a grown-up and enthusiastic daughter around, and sometimes a few ex-students…

This news item in today’s paper caught my attention: well-heeled parents in the city are breaking their heads over getting their children admitted into the handful of  ‘elite’ schools (didn’t know that Modern High, where my daughter went, had a much lower vacancy to applicant ratio than La Martiniere!). In some ways God has been truly good to me – from prep school to college, her admissions were always a breeze. At two and a half she was invited by a friend of mine in the next street to join her Montessori classes. At the next step, when it was time to go to a regular school, my wife went to enquire with just two schools, and both agreed to admit my daughter without a fuss of any kind (no question of connections and donations and that kind of rubbish); we simply admitted her to the one whose admission date came first. The so-called interview was a joke, no more than the way we had been determined to treat it (I still vividly recall, though, the anxiety writ large on the stony faces of most of the parents around me, as if their daughters were about to be subjected to major and dicey surgery!) Twelve years later (and I know how snooty this sounds, but I can’t help it – these are the cold facts) I didn’t even go to Kolkata for her class 11 admission. Pupu and her mother went by themselves, applied to just one school, and got through without a fuss again, though the interview was much more substantial this time round. Leave alone strangers, even some members of my own extended family made it obvious that they weren’t believing me when I assured them I had pulled no strings, and paid not a rupee above the standard fees stipulated for every student.  Two years after that, Pupu again did mighty little worrying and even less running around, just getting admission to Scottish Church (being my daughter, she had been advised not to touch a certain college with a bargepole) for safety’s sake until the JU admission clicked (despite all the candidates on the first general category list having scored above 90% in their last board exams), and then she didn’t even bother to go sit for the entrance test at Presidency. As for the next step, she has known for several years now that whatever Master’s course she does, wherever, she must do everything by herself, because she would be old and smart enough by then: daddy will do nothing more than signing some forms if required, and paying whatever he thinks he can afford. So there you are – I am a living example of an ordinary parent in today’s India who has managed to ensure whatever carries the tag of a ‘first-class education’ in this country for his child without ever having to lose any sleep over it. Maybe it’s largely due to the fact that unlike the herd, and very like my own parents, I have all through refused to believe that this ought to be a really very serious issue in an adult’s life. If my daughter has good genes and is taught a few good habits (like studying daily by a routine and reading a lot outside the syllabus), she will get as good an education as she is destined for, period. If I have spent tens of thousands of hours moping, consulting and running around, and sackfuls of cash on a thing like that, it’s simply because I never had anything better to do, and my child is an idiot. But imagine, then, what a terrific number of parents don’t have anything to do, and have idiots for children! And apparently this is not a purely Indian disease, either: Pupu herself told me recently that affluent young American parents these days are ready to kill as well to get their toddlers into elite prep schools, as she saw in some TV serial show recently.

I notice the number of pageviews has crossed the 400,000 mark. I obviously have a large regular readership now, and it’s not too optimistic to think that I’ll still be around and writing when the counter tops half a million. I have become a serious blogger in these last ten years, then. Discounting celebrities, I don’t see many bloggers who have crossed even the 50,000 mark. If only my readers were also frequent, articulate and thought-provoking comment writers, this could have become quite a forum! – in any case, I am urging my faithful- (and curious new) readers to browse through some of the older posts again, not just the ones on the home page (use a tab, or better still, a regular computer – a mobile phone is close to useless for serious reading). Also, tell me what you would like me to write about next. This request is especially pertinent to those who have become ex students in the last three or four years and want to stay in touch.

P.S.: The number of dinners outdoors became five on the last evening, at Oudh 1590. Ambience wise, this was the best - they give you a feel of Nawabi dining, Lucknow style, complete with brass service, waiters in embroidered sherwani  and thumri on the music system...

Sudden trip, two glorious days

Just back from a  two-day, 550-km,  almost entirely unplanned road trip. And did I enjoy it!

Yesterday I rose at dawn, scrambled a breakfast, then Firoz and I topped up the fuel tank and set off westwards along NH2 at about eight in the morning. Off the highway at Asansol, and we decided to explore Garhpanchkot first. Nice place, but the Forest Rest House wouldn't let us in without prior booking, which we didn't have, and it was far too early to settle for the day anyway, so we drove away towards Panchet Dam. Funny I saw it for the first time at this age! Lunch off the NH2 again at Dhanbad, and since it was barely past midday, we decided to head for Giridih. Arrived there at about two, and checked into a very nice hotel. A wash, then off sightseeing. First the Usri waterfalls: the same where my grandfather's little sister nearly drowned almost eighty years ago (there must have been much more water then - neither falls nor river seemed very menacing to me), and where Professor Shonku used to take his morning walks (that must have been at least fifty years ago, too, in Satyajit Ray's mind - the forests would have been much denser). Then off 30 km or so in the opposite direction towards Khandoli lake: a very dusty ride, but well rewarded with an azure blue expanse of water and a mellow gold sunset. Luxurious bath, and dinner with tadka and tandoori roti at a roadside dhaba.Lazed in the evening listening to Hindi classic film songs on TV - something I rarely get to do  - and turned in very early. The afternoon had been hot, but at night there was a nip in the air.

This morning the day started early again. Drove to Madhupur to see the place so many of the Bengali gentry and not a few Englishmen used to go to once upon a time for 'a change of air'. Some of the old crumbling palaces deserve to be preserved.  Another two hours took us to Deoghar. Lacking piety and hating crowds, I gave the old Baba Mandir (Baidyanath Dham) a miss (visited it 42 years ago: enough for one lifetime) and went straight off to Trikoot Hill, of the Tapovan on top of which I still have vague but nice memories. There is a ropeway now, but strangely it wasn't working because of a high wind (first time I heard the excuse). We could have waited, but Firoz is scared of cable cars, and I have ridden enough not to be excited anyway. Climbing a mile of stairs was out of the question, so we drove away. Another lovely ride through beautiful countryside, the sal forests blazing, palash and krishnachura in full bloom, and the rich, sweet, heavy smell of mohua in the air: no one who hasn't taken in a lungful of it will ever know what wickedly-delicious languor means. Lunch just outside Chittaranjan, then we were on the highway again, and it was hardly four p.m. by the time we were back home, after having given the dear car a well-deserved wash on the way. 

This was the first time I have travelled without a plan and all by myself in my own car, though I have had a car for sixteen years - can you believe it? It could have gone horribly wrong in a dozen different ways, but the point is it didn't. The roads almost all along were smooth as glass (kudos to the Jharkhand government); also, my car drove like a dream. And if you can shell out the money, you can get good food and fine hotels almost anywhere you like. I really must do this more often. Is Firoz likely to evolve into something like Sudhirda? One thing I have discovered: one good friend is all one needs. And unless it's someone like Pupu, I'd much rather have a man with me.

This is also the first time that someone wished me well for the trip before I made it and wrote about it. Thanks a ton, Tanmoy.

For photos, click here. Videos, only face to face.

There is something else that I must mention here. The grinding poverty so painfully described in Bibhutibhushan's Aranyak is gone, or at least hardly visible. I saw hundreds of even girls going to school in very remote villages. But the forests are nearly gone, too. We must do something about it while there is still time. Other countries have managed, even some with dense populations, like Germany and Japan. Couldn't we stop aping the Americans before disaster strikes?... and even if it has to be America, can't we remember, no matter what our monkeys think, that America is also about the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (who signed the National Parks into existence), and not just folks as trivial as Steve Jobs?

Whoever looks after me from Up There, thank you for the treat.

P.S., March 14: The US National Park Service is celebrating its centenary this year. In this context, read this essay. As I have observed, America was not always technology drunk, and I firmly believe she was a greater America then...

Flowers, travel, and interesting women

Here are a few samples of my maiden effort at gardening, ably assisted by a friendly elderly maali. I started late this season, and the vagaries of the weather didn't help. I am wishing myself even better luck next time.

Another 16-year old whose wisdom eye has just opened told me today, 'You know Sir, you are right, just about everybody, no matter what they claim to the contrary, is guided by the herd instinct in everything'. 'Attaboy', I said, and promised myself to write about it here soon.

Since I have got a sudden holiday because all school examinations have begun, I am going to go a-wandering tomorrow morning. Just the car and driver ... haven't decided where I am going yet! I wish I had a few (male, it goes without saying-) ex students to take along. Happy memories, Saikat and Arko?

Summer is about to set in. I am dreading the admission rush, slated to begin in a month's time. But there will be the swimming pool to compensate.

Reading White Mughals. Here is a description of an 18th century Hyderabadi courtesan of high repute: "Mah Laqa Bai (was)... the most celebrated beauty of the age.... (she) was not just glamorous and seductive: she was widely regarded as Hyderabad's greatest contemporary poet (in such a completely so-called patriarchal age, mind you - SC)... she built a famous library... and commissioned the Mahanama, a major new history of the Deccan... later she became an important patron of poets in her own right... such was the Nizam's reliance on her wisdom that alone of the women of Hyderabad she was given the rank of a senior omrah... she also accompanied him to war...and gained a reputation for her riding skills, her accomplishments with the bow, and even with the javelin." (pp. 172-3, Penguin India paperback edition, 2002). Where have all those women gone? (look up Abigail Adams, more or less this lady's contemporary, in my post titled 'Those who love')

Nine Lives – in search of the sacred in modern India

By William Dalrymple

Published by Bloomsbury, Great Britain, 2009, ISBN 978-1-4088-0061-4. Hardcover, £20, pp. 284

[synopsis: Dalrymple has taken a close and sympathetic look at how some non-mainstream people are coping, through religion, with the violent changes that are sweeping through contemporary India. Nine people, located at different points in the sub-continent – one already dead of her own choice since being interviewed – tell him how their traditional faith and practices help, but they do not pretend that life is easy. This book is sure to compel even the well-informed reader to modify his or her views about what really is happening to India, and perhaps make us worry.]

India is in the throes of massive and multi-dimensional socio-economic change. That has already – in some circles at least – become cliché. Also, a lot of people are determined to call this change unqualified progress, a clear sign that India is poised to take her ‘rightful’ position at the world’s high table soon. They make it sound as though everything about India, until very recently, was merely shameful or pitiable; there was no culture before Shahrukh, no technology before IT, no wealthy men before the Ambanis, no philosopher before Nandan Nilekani, and it is only since Manmohan Singh launched his programme of reforms in 1991 – before which there was no history either! – that things started changing suddenly and swiftly for the better. At the same time, a lot of people (myself included) keep pointing out again and again that many things both good and bad about India don’t ever seem to change at all, and that it is blind and silly to claim that every aspect of the currently ongoing change ought to be called progress of a sensible kind. When I read books like Jim Corbett’s My India, written 57 years ago, for instance, I sigh to think where all those proud, hardy, diversely-learned, simple and good folks have vanished – or did they only exist only in Corbett’s imagination?

In Nine Lives – in search of the sacred in modern India, published earlier this year, William Dalrymple of White Mughals and The Last Mughal fame says that if you care to look beyond the neon signs of snazzy and burgeoning metros, some of that India still survives, though maybe more doubtfully than in the past. Instead of poring over historical archives, he has, for a change, dived into the maelstrom of India’s roads to pick out a few non-mainstream (but still quintessentially Indian) people and find out what they have been doing with their lives – a Jain nun calmly starving herself to death in the time-honoured way, a teller of folk tales in Rajasthan who keeps thousands of pages by heart, a builder of idols in Tamil Nadu who has been keeping alive a tradition that dates back to the 11^th century, a female sufi practitioner from Bihar who has settled at a shrine in Pakistan, a devadasi whose lot is now much worse since government made the custom illegal, a blind baul at the great mela at Kenduli, West Bengal … nine of them in all, nine highly-skilled, highly interesting people who are struggling to live life and even enjoy it and contribute meaningfully to it without being swallowed by the postmodern-urban-consumerist-passive-apolitical-technodrunk monoculture.

As Dalrymple says in the introduction, the urge to know such people was born in him one day during a trek to the shrine of Kedarnath, when he found out that the naked sadhu who was walking beside him was the son of a well-off politician, an MBA and a marketing manager with a well-known consumer electricals firm in Delhi till only a few years ago. While trying to get under their skins and find out what makes them tick, he has been neither patronizing nor judgmental: he has allowed them, as far as possible, to tell their own stories and justify their existence in their own eyes. And that is precisely what makes the book both readable and disturbing. These characters, for all their strength and adaptability, for all their esoteric skills, can no longer be happy or even at peace, free to live their lives their own way… they are all, like so many birds and beasts, threatened by the bulldozer of ‘development’ and in danger of becoming extinct. The devadasi has got AIDS, the tantrik has been prohibited from giving interviews by his ‘scientifically-educated’ offspring because they find him an embarrassment in their professional circles, the bhopa is chagrined to find that the literate young can no longer memorise tomes, the idol-maker is sad that the lure of easy money has made his son long to become (yet another!) computer programmer, the dalit theyyam dancer who becomes a god for a few days when he is possessed spends the rest of the year digging wells and guarding a prison full of psychopaths for a pittance, and the red fairy will probably be swallowed and crushed soon by the onrushing tide of the Taliban sweeping across Pakistan, who want to cleanse their faith by purging it of heretics who sing and dance and preach an easy universal benevolence…

I have read biologists and environmentalists lamenting that, thanks to rapid and rampant deforestation, we are losing thousands of species of wild flora every year, and very soon the world will be a much poorer place, because we shall have lost so many forms of life whose great utility (as in making medicines) we never had time to explore. Reading this book gave me the feeling (the same feeling I had when I was reading Carlos Castaneda’s The Art of Dreaming, and while watching the movie titled Australia) that the human world is also losing too much of its rich diversity too fast, and it will live to regret it – or, worse still, it won’t. While the UN, I hear, is trying to collect and preserve the traditional skills and wisdom of myriad indigenous peoples around the world, we in India (which, among other things, has the largest and most diverse tribal population in the world), are doing our best to wipe them out, with threats, oppression, neglect, exploitation and blandishments – the siren song of the laid-back, high-on-consumption-low-on-thought culture that is likely to produce such horror scenarios as portrayed in movies like Matrix and Wall-E. And, most disappointing of all, so many of the best ‘educated’ Indians are unconcerned; they find all knowledge of their own peoples and traditional ways ‘backdated’ and ‘uncool’ without ever having tried to find out! I don’t know how many foreigners will read Dalrymple’s work, but I hope a lot of Indians do, and feel ashamed, and go out and meet and learn about some of their fellow-Indians who are not like them, but perhaps better, cleverer, more talented people, even if they cannot write software or manipulate the stock-market and grow fat on bribes in government jobs. And I wish some Indian writers would follow in Dalrymple’s footsteps, rather than in Chetan Bhagat’s.

Postscript: It seems some intellectual types in India are trashing the book as yet another western attempt to stereotype Indian exotica, to portray us in a poor light. I doubt whether such folks have taken the trouble to read the book. They are the same types who criticized Pather Panchali and Slumdog Millionaire for the same reasons, and they believe that we can be proud only to the extent that we can clone all things western (or, more specifically, American) … though I notice that they are not as keen to take over the American attitude to work, and punctuality, and good manners in public, and fondness for museums and libraries, and concern for the cleanliness and beauty of their physical surroundings as they are keen on more Macdonald’s outlets and mobiles and big cars and bigger bombs to bash our neighbours with. India can do better without their wisdom. All I shall tell my readers is, read the book and make up your own minds.

 I reviewed this book shortly after it was published for culturazzi.org at their invitation. Their website seems to have gone phut. I thought I'd post it here for the record.  The book is now available much more cheaply in a paperback edition. Read it.

Dalrymple sent me a thank-you note by email too:

williamdalrymple@gmail.com	12/6/09
to me

Suvro, it's a lovely and perceptive review-- thanks very much indeed. As you note at the end, there have been some slightly bizarre reviews, and it's great to know there are also some appreciative and perceptive readers out there!

Keep well and thanks again,

Will
Sent from BlackBerry® on Airtel

Go, girl!

My daughter made my day two days ago by telling me she's won a prize at a college fashion show (see this and this) as well as topped her class in the most recent exams. God is being kind to a lonely old dad...

Grandmother's demise

My grandmother on my mother’s side, Srimati Manimala Devi, whom I referred to once as ‘that utterly wonderful grand old lady’, passed away on the night of Monday, the 25^th January, almost exactly eight years after my grandfather did. She too had a long life: married at fifteen, died nearly 88. Her great grandchildren are now grown up. We shall not have the same good fortune, people of our generation. She had been bedridden for years and almost lost her mind lately – though apparently she had a lucid interval hours before she died – but she went peacefully in her sleep, so for all practical purposes it was a blessed relief, and yet I cannot help feeling desolated. They don’t make grandmothers like that anymore. As my mother reminded me, I used to say she was my first love, and I guess she will remain the greatest, barring only Pupu and my yet unborn grandchild.

Born into great wealth, possessed of a rare beauty which gave her no end of trouble, reduced to poverty and humiliation after marriage, struggling lifelong to make a new hearth and home with her husband and three children (having lost yet another), giving shelter and succour to countless people over many decades, ruling her little imperium with an iron hand yet showering love and care with abandon, fighting a debilitating disease since her late youth – she will never enter the history books, yet her life could be the stuff of legends. She became a grandmother at the ripe old age of 35 – women go about in tank tops and tights or miniskirts at that age nowadays, women vastly less pretty and less substantial too – and although I never saw her dressed in anything but thinly bordered white saris without an ounce of makeup or jewellery, she had an aura of dignity and grandeur I have never seen surpassed, and I have seen a few women up close in my time. As for her relationship with my grandfather, I can only refer you to Dad and Mum in How Green Was My Valley…

My relationship with my grandfather was much closer, more immediate and more intimate, and yet I got far more from my grandmother by way of quiet affection, indulgence and wisdom than I realized at the time. My memories go very far back indeed – right back to the little aluminium tub in which she used to bathe baby me – and a strange and beguiling mélange they make. She took ten-year old me along as an ‘escort’ when she went to see her favourite thakurmoshai at the Kalighat temple; the first time she saw me with a cigarette (I guess I was 17 then) the first thing she thought of asking was whose cigarette it was! and it irked my mama-s no end, grown up as they had under her very conservative rules, that she gladly tolerated how my girlfriends walked into my room and shut the door behind them. No one ever nagged me as much about if and what and when I had eaten as she did, God bless her soul. And yet she was the embodiment of calm efficiency when she nursed me the night I came home bathed in blood, having been involved in an accident while trying to take a hit and run case to the hospital. She was very fond of my short story Sushama – probably because it brought back many memories about my father and grandfather; she always said I reminded her strongly of her youngest brother the polymath, and thrice she was involved in matchmaking for me, twice because I could not imagine who else I could take along if I needed to have an elder with me at all. Oh, I could go on and on. She mothered me in a way that drove a very deep affection and regard for all womankind into my mind lifelong, something that so many bad and trivial women have still not quite succeeded in erasing. (Incidentally, she was one of those women who never tired of cautioning me against women!)

From 1980 to ’85 I lived directly in her care. Then unfortunate circumstances forced me to move out. Two years later, I returned to Durgapur – for good. But she remained a very important figure in my life for long after that. She was very much a presence at my wedding, and my daughter was cuddled and blessed by her hands (see photograph). The years flew by, but the contact never broke, though my visits became more infrequent – more so after dadu passed away in 2008, because the visits hurt too badly. Lately my mother actually told me not to visit, because I wouldn’t like what I saw. And now she’s gone. I hope she is happily reunited with her beloved father and husband, wherever she is, and I pray that her soul will find eternal peace. I know of few people who have earned it better.

[There are two more photographs, here]

Up Darzling way

Just back from another holiday. I missed out on 2015 entirely, no thanks to the broken leg, so this one was overdue. It was the north Bengal and Sikkim hills again, daughter and dad: we can’t seem to have enough of them. I went off to Calcutta on Friday the 8^th, and that night we took the Darjeeling Mail to New Jalpaiguri. I actually had to scold a troupe of grown men (many in their 50s and 60s) in a very schoolmasterly way before they stopped chattering, and that was way past midnight: thereafter it was a quiet ride. The fog delayed us by a few hours. I had booked a car for the entire trip, and the driver – Dambarji, he became a friend over the next six days – took us in hand at the station. It was very cold already, unlike in the plains, and it grew ever chillier as we went up into the hills. We lunched on the way on poori sabzi and coffee, and arrived at Kalimpong just after one p.m. The hotel was lovely, and what made it even more enjoyable was that Pupu had managed to book a package at half the usual price online. We were welcomed with traditional khadas, and after freshening up a bit we went for a drive around town, though it had begun to drizzle.

The Orchid House – one man’s lifetime labour of love, so rare in this country – was spellbinding. The Golf course and its environs, Morgan House and the rest, is beautifully maintained. A visit to the local monastery is de rigeur in these parts, and I successfully negotiated the challenge to my legs. The evening in the hotel garden, fairy lights twinkling, was a feast for the senses, and it was rounded off with a perfect dinner, the service worthy of being called pampering. So also the buffet breakfast next morning, following which we visited Dr. Graham’s Homes, the famous residential school, which was closed, but offered some good photo ops. Then off to Deolo: that Tourist Lodge could be another lovely place to stay in. We took in the Science Park next – ho hum at my age, though the landscaping is good – then it was off to Lava, which was not only piercingly cold but also gave me a chance to buy a deerstalker cap, and then Rishyop, which gave us some fabulous views of Mt. Kanchanjungha, it being a bright and clear day. In the evening Pupu treated herself to the spa, and watching Jeeves and Wooster with my feet dipped in hot water was a fun way of rounding off a happy day.

On Monday we went off to Darjeeling, taking in Lovers' Point, Lamahatta (the pretty new roadside park built at the CM’s initiative), Ghum railway station and the Batasia Loop war memorial on the way, and then the wonderful zoo and the Mountaineering Institute (funny they make no mention of Reinhold Messner, or did I miss it?). The ride on the new ropeway was good: probably the longest we have done yet. This time the hotel was just so-so for the price, but right beside the Mall (which was as deserted as the marketplace had been crowded, the vacation season being over as I had hoped!). We snacked in the evening at the iconic Glenary’s restaurant. Pupu won’t have to say she had grown up into adulthood in West Bengal without having seen the Queen of the Hills.

A police blockade resulting from a ‘Half Marathon’ event next morning delayed our departure for a bit. Then 85 km on the road to Pelling in Sikkim, to a new hilltop resort set up by a friend, via Jorethang, Zoom, Soreng and Kaluk. Some of the ascents were hair-raising even for a seasoned hill-traveller like me, and some parts of the road were pretty bad, but the end justified the means. It was bitterly cold but beautiful, and what with us being the only guests, and the friendly young staff, and the lovely cottage and the bonfire and the barbecue, it was pure wicked self-indulgence. Two days zipped by in a flash – I wondering all the time why it didn’t snow despite the chill – and then another long drive via Rinchenpong and Melli (we heard of a massive landslide on the Kalimpong-Gangtok route, and were stopped briefly where road extension work was in progress) to NJP, where I am sure our driver was a trifle sad to let us go. My favourite rest in a retiring room, and then it was the Darjeeling Mail again. A sleepless night, alas, spoilt by a monster who snored in the most noisy, bizarre and nerve-wracking fashion all through the journey, and then it was back to Calcutta. A day’s rest, visits and a bit of practical work, and on Saturday afternoon I was back at home to take a class. Ola Cabs, I have discovered, are doing a great job these days: I don’t think I’d have to keep a car in the city after all. No hanky-panky about paying through the Net.

This was my fifth visit to Darjeeling, after 1971, 1983, 1990 and 1993. I think I’ll stop now, unless the next time it is at the invitation of some friend there. The famous ex-world war Land Rovers have all but vanished; Sumos and Innovas rule the roads now (an Innova, by the way, is by far the better choice if you want to travel in safety and comfort). I wish the trains didn’t dawdle so much on the way. The hills are quiet after a long spell of political disturbance, thank God: apparently the leadership has realized – touch wood – that scaring off the tourist traffic virtually destroys the local economy, and sooner or later makes them highly unpopular. There is a lot of governmental advertizing and some visible work in progress to make the places cleaner, but much more will have to be done to reverse the damage and start approaching European and Japanese standards. Hill Cart Road in Siliguri is a driver’s nightmare – avoid it if you can. Young people are drinking much more beer and whisky and much less of the traditional chhaang, and the long traditional women’s skirt called bakhu has nearly vanished in favour of the ubiquitous and by-now (to me at least) achingly boring tight jeans. In Siliguri virtually everybody – Bihari, Bengali and Marwari included – can speak Nepali. Liquor shops are far easier to find than teastalls, and, what has always fascinated me, they are not grilled cages as in the plains, and are run by women and often even children! And far more Bengalis are visiting even during the cold season than in the days of Gangtokey Gondogol, when Sikkim was still a rather exotic location, and only Feluda could instantly figure out what the stranger meant by his question ‘apnaara ki Dang na Kang na Gang?’

Good times always pass too quickly. Pupu deliberately slowed down the pace by doing away with a sightseeing trip so that we could simply laze around for a whole day at the resort, and it literally zipped by, sleeping and eating and chatting and walking and warming our toes at the bonfire. I do think that on future trips I should keep aside more such days and run about a little less. Dyakha hoy nai chokkhu meliya…

So much for now. I might add a paragraph or two later. For photographs, come back again in a few days’ time: I’ll have to do some sorting and editing before I upload them. This year is the first in my adult lifetime when I have booked the next trip even before this one was done. We are coming, Kashmir! This will be the second time for me after 1977.

Ahem...: Dear 'Amorphous', it is a policy of this blog never to publish anonymous comments, laudatory or otherwise.

Jan. 21: Et voila, the photographs at last, here.

Child prodigy, birthday, and brilliant policies

A ten-year old girl came to see me with her dad and elder brother, having heard a lot about me from the latter. For a space of fifteen minutes or so, she bombarded me with questions – ‘How did magic originate? Do you believe in the curse of Tutankhamen? Does the universe have a beginning or end? Do you think Antonio in The Merchant of Venice was really a good Christian? Did the Red Sea really part? Do swans really sing before they die?’... I hope you get the drift. I cannot say when I last met a child of this kind of mental calibre, and how much I am looking forward to having her in my class. It goes without saying that she, unlike 90% of Indian children, is a voracious reader, and that most of her teachers regard her as a dangerous pest. I was reminded of Sigmund Freud’s aphorism that I myself have fixtured at the bottom of this blog, and I blessed her by saying, ‘Ma, grow up into a human being, not a mere female’.

My daughter became nineteen today. We celebrated with lunch at a fancy restaurant, and the crème brûlée for dessert was especially good. The waiters were superbly trained: they brought the customer feedback slip for my daughter to fill in, and the bill to me. Which is just as it should be in a world where girls were not stupidly dying to be treated as ‘equals’. The day I start treating women as equals, I shall not look back to see whether they are having trouble with heavy luggage, flat tyres, roaches, shortage of money or perverts harassing them on the road. And I shall expect them to talk politics, economics, psychology, history and philosophy with me. That will be the day.

Our leaders have finally woken up to the deadly threat of pollution, it seems. So one genius of a chief minister has ordered only odd- and even numbered cars to come out on the roads on alternate days, and another district magistrate of similarly sharp intellect has ordered that one block in his district will be closed to all private vehicles every day. It seems only our rulers cannot figure out the either disastrous or ludicrous consequences of the decisions they take. In the 1980s I was already writing that the way things were going in this country, lack of land for any kind of developmental activity and overwhelming pollution of the soil, air and water would eventually spell our doom. I quote myself: ‘By the time China and India catch up with the American standard of living, there won’t be enough oxygen left in the air to breathe’. Woe to this country that a few years after I wrote those lines in a national newspaper, our government embarked on a policy of wholesale Americanization of – if possible – every walk of life. Whereas if sanity had prevailed, we should have gone with the European/Japanese model as far as we could. In the sphere of transportation, for instance, a poor, overpopulated, resource-scarce country should have made an all-out effort to develop public transport, not indulged the latent craze for private cars. And now that today the floodtide of cars is threatening to overwhelm us, we are trying absolutely crazy ideas to control it. God help us.

As the year draws to a close

Towards the end of the first ten years of this blog, I have started making a few small changes. There was a widget called Members/followers till recently. I have been winnowing the list there, having discovered that being a ‘member’ has no meaning at all: most so-called members never write in (many have probably forgotten about it entirely), most of my readers are non-members, and one doesn’t need to be a member to read the blog or to comment on posts. I have never been a trophy collector on the net anyway (so many ‘scraps’ on orkut, so many ‘likes’ on facebook). So I have now removed that widget. Nobody has to be a member any more.

It’s 21^st December, and very pleasantly cold. My work schedule is now much reduced, so I am in the relaxed mode. On this day every year for more than a decade we used to dash off on a holiday trip – this year has been different. My daughter has just finished her ‘end-sem’ exams and is living it up with her friends. The holiday has been postponed till January: I am hoping that with all schools and colleges having reopened, I am going to have a far less crowded experience this time round. So I am already breaking a routine that was set for almost two decades – taking classes right through the end of the year. I must see how the kids cope with it. Most have told me they’d rather not miss classes…

My leafy babies are giving me a headache. They are growing and blooming, but too slowly, and they have given me occasion to resent my fellow bipeds even more – did you know how many thieves there are who prowl the streets at dawn to steal flowers from people’s gardens, so that they can make offerings to some deity with the same? And you can talk yourself blue in the face without being able to persuade them that there is something wrong about the habit. I lock the gates every night, but that keeps out only the old and infirm among the miscreants. I’ll try this season through, then probably give it up as a bad job if the harassment and plunder is too intense to bear.

I have a diary where at each year-end I jot down the most memorable things that happened. The list starts with 1969, and I haven’t missed a single year yet. This year will be noted for just three things – my home loan was paid up in full, Pupu went to college, and I found out first-hand what being a cripple feels like.

The newspapers announced yesterday that Air India is beginning flights to Delhi from Durgapur airport. More flights, and to other metros, will presumably follow. Good news for a lot of people, including me, because when my daughter goes to live farther away, she can come and go faster, and so can I.

A rash of new schools has also come up – all of them privately owned, all of them expensive, all affiliated to the CBSE, all equipped with ‘smart’ classrooms and promising to turn every kid into a ‘genius’ (read engineer from some private college). We shall see a lot of fireworks in the near future. I hope I can just sit back, watch the fun, and say to a lot of people ‘I told you so’.

Robi Thakurer golpo

কালার্স বাংলা টিভি চ্যানেলে "রবি ঠাকুরের গল্প" নামে ধারাবাহিক ছবি দেখাচ্ছে। এখন পর্যন্ত দেনাপাওনা, সমাপ্তি আর মণিহারা  দেখিয়েছে, এ সপ্তাহে স্ত্রীর পত্র হওয়ার কথা। খুব যে উঁচুদরের পরিচালনা বা অভিনয় হচ্ছে তা বলতে পারি না, তবে এতে করে অশিক্ষিত নব্য-সভ্য বাঙালি যদি নতুন করে নিজের সাহিত্যকে চিনতে শেখে তো মন্দ হয় না, আর আমারও আবার করে গল্পগুচ্ছ নিয়ে বসার ইচ্ছে হলো।  রবীন্দ্রনাথের লেখা নিয়ে বেশি কথা ছোট মুখে বলার ধৃষ্টতা করতে চাই না - ওটা মার্কন্ডেয় কাটজুদেরই সাজে। আপাতত শুধু এইটুকু ভাবছিলাম :কত গভীর পর্যবেক্ষণশক্তি থাকলে, কত নিরাসক্ত, নির্মোহ চোখ থাকলে, সাহিত্যের প্রতি কতখানি আনুগত্য থাকলে তবে একই লেখক নিরুপমা, মৃন্ময়ী, মৃণালদের মত মেয়েদেরও সৃষ্টি করতে পারেন, আবার মণিমালিকাদেরও - "যাহাদের হৃতপিন্ড বরফের পিণ্ড, যাহাদের বুকের মধ্যে ভালোবাসার জ্বালাযন্ত্রণা স্থান  পায় না, তাহারা বোধকরি সুদীর্ঘকাল তাজা  থাকে, তাহারা কৃপণের মত অন্তরে বাহিরে আপনাকে জমিয়ে রাখতে পারে।" তবু বলব - হয়ত যুগোপযোগী ভাবেই - ওনার মেয়েদের প্রতি পক্ষপাত দোষ ছিল।  হয়ত আরো পঞ্চাশ বছর বাঁচলে ওনার আর অবরুদ্ধ পরাধীন 'অসহায়' মেয়েদের প্রতি অত মায়া থাকত না, হয়ত দ্বিতীয় কিসিমের চরিত্রই অনেক বেশি করে সৃষ্টি করতেন? বিমলা-জাতীয় মেয়েরা স্বাধীনতাকে কিভাবে কাজে লাগায়  সে তো তিনি একশ' বছর আগেই দেখিয়ে দিয়েছিলেন! 

আমি এককালে কিছু গল্প লেখার চেষ্টা করেছিলাম।  বলতে লজ্জা নেই, কারো কারো পড়ে ভালোও লেগেছিল। রবীন্দ্রনাথের চেয়ে আমি অনেক বেশি দরদী রোমান্টিক ছিলাম: মেয়েদের আমি তরলমতি, স্বার্থপর, কর্কশ, সুবিধাবাদী বানাতে পারিনি। আমার লেখায় তাই কষ্টকল্পনাই বেশি ছিল। বয়স বাড়ার সঙ্গেসঙ্গে বাস্তবের নিষ্ঠুর আঘাতে সে স্বপ্নময়তা কেটে গেছে, কিন্তু তার পরিবর্তে যে তিক্ততা এসেছে তাকে আর সাহিত্যের রূপ দিতে মন চায় না।  তাই অনেকদিন হলো সেধরনের লেখা বন্ধ করে দিয়েছি। 

[The misspellings are Google's fault, not mine. But my apologies, still]

End of November

So yet another year has passed by, and yet another batch is going to be ex from next week. I have written goodbyes before, so look them up if you like, all: I cannot think of something new to say to your lot. One of those posts, I seem to remember, was titled Bye-bye time again. Use the search bar, will you? And remember: I shall look out for the few who keep sincerely in touch, and forget the rest soon.

Ancient Egyptian records claim that Rameses II was ‘very old’ when he died; modern tests on his mummy indicate, however, that he was only 52 – just my age. Well, perhaps in those days people grew decrepit very quickly (in Bengali we have a saying about girls: ‘kurir agey chhunri, kuri perole buri’ – she’s a lass before 20, and a crone thereafter – and men only get a few decades extra) – though our epics tell a very different story. Anyway, I felt very old when I was 17, and surprised that I had survived to be 40, and now I see ancestors carrying on into their 80s, so I don’t know what to think any more! In fact till my mid-40s I could outwalk old boys fifteen years younger, and the little paunch has become prominent only because following the accident I have been virtually immobile for six whole months: maybe once I get back to my usual exercise routine I’ll be able to trim it down again to something respectable enough compared to the rolypoly teenagers I see around me!

Ageing is also to a very large extent a matter of mental condition. I certainly have much more grey hair than I did in early 2013, and no wonder: these last two years and a half have been one of the most traumatic periods of my life. There is a  chapter in To My Daughter with the title Expect the Unexpected, but it is always hard to take your own advice, so I have had trouble coping, and that is now showing in many little ways. My knees creak and hurt much more these days, too. Who knows if there’s a turn for the happier around the corner, I might be looking younger again in two years’ time, despite those knees…

I have been thinking aloud in class about how I am going to change my style in the years to come. Fewer girls as the years pass is one very strong possibility. Another is giving more time to stories and movies and games and quizzes. A most exciting option is going out on holiday trips with a largeish gang, provided some dads come along to help – and mothers strictly stay away (unless someone is a most exceptional mother, a type of whom I have seen hardly five in my whole lifetime). More frequent breaks, as my daughter travels farther away and I want more and more to go to stay with her. It will amuse me to see how this town adjusts to my changing outlook. Meanwhile, this year I have turned my mind to gardening, and there might be a dog in the offing.  A new car, too, maybe, and a trip abroad. But most of all I am looking for a housekeeper – remember Holmes’ Mrs. Hudson? Short of having a Watson around, that is the best I can think of.

An old boy – one of the few who have come back to this town with a decent job – took me out to dinner the other day, and I enjoyed it hugely, despite the fact that I have never much liked eating out, however fancy the restaurant. It was all about the company. Thank you, Abhik. I wish, so wish that many more like you could have come back to settle here. And until that happens, nothing bar nothing is going to convince me that Durgapur is ‘developing’. What they did instead the other day, as a small step I suppose towards making this a ‘smart’ city (how I hate that word!), was to bring a bulldozer and flatten some of the shanty shops along the main road near my house: shops selling all sorts of things from fruits to snacks to washing services. I know all these people – they are perfectly nice, harmless folks working hard to eke out a living in a country where government and society use them but don’t care a whit whether they live or die. Not like the fortunate few million parasites who have been lucky to get cushy jobs in non-performing public sector companies and government departments. I like them, I identify much more with them than with the brash, uncultivated but snooty, lazy, greedy, irresponsible, unsocial middle class. The only option they have is to turn to crime or beggary. Of course their shops were eyesores, and so this draconian step by those who wield power (all safe and comfortable themselves) can always be justified in the name of ‘beautification’ – they were littering the surroundings and bringing down real estate prices, weren’t they? Well, nobody ever took care of the root problem of an exploding population, and nobody seems to be even interested in making them permanent places to work out of, from where they can run registered businesses and even pay some taxes. Talk about poorly thought out projects. Naturally all those shanties have mushroomed again within a week. Where else would they go? Why don’t the big talkers in the ruling parties learn how it should be properly done – from a country like Japan, for instance, which too has a very dense population, and has managed to grow rich and stay spankingly clean at the same time? What a tragedy that a country which breeds ‘successful’ professionals by the million cannot produce leaders who can lead, who have even cared to find out what it means to lead!

Private tuitions, anyone?

My daughter has written after ages, a review of Go Set a Watchman. These days I often don’t have to do things because she can do them well enough for me.

One of the many ironies of my life is that, despite having been a private tutor all through my working life, I have been very ambivalent about private tuitions at best and a strident critic at worst – as thousands of my current and ex-students can vouch. I made a (modest-) living giving tuition to school and college students all through my own years in college and university; then came the long stint at school. In all those years I sent hundreds of parents away, unwilling to take their wards into my private classes because either I was emphatic that they didn’t need it if they were already attending my classes in school, or because I wouldn’t take in beyond a certain number (though alas, under ceaseless pressure over decades, especially since I left the school, that number has gone up much beyond my liking, and I still annoy a lot of people every year by turning their children away). I justified my own ideas to myself through my own daughter, who had a single tutor during the last two years of secondary school and none at all at the higher secondary level, and still managed to do perfectly well by just being somewhat more than average intelligent and studying by a routine every year. And my greatest sorrow is that I have been able to do virtually nothing to stem the tide, though the practice has kept me in gravy all these years. And today’s parents are the children of the generation I taught thirty years ago!

In the days when my father was young, teachers gave private tuition – mostly to very weak students, especially whose parents couldn’t coach them at home – to supplement pathetically meagre incomes. Already when I was leaving high school, the average quality of school education had taken a sharp nose dive, so lots of pupils were relying increasingly on private tutors, many of whom had begun to make significant money, especially in the metros. Medical and engineering college aspirants were signing up with coaching classes like Brilliant and Aggarwal’s in droves. Depending on whose point of view you adopt, things have grown much better/worse over the last three decades.

Contrary to common perceptions, it is not only the children of the affluent urban population who attend private tuitions; it is very widespread among the indigent and rural folks, too. Plainly, nobody trusts schools (or even colleges) to deliver the goods any more. Instead, a vast and vicious cycle has been created: a) the (very few) good and sincere teachers in school are roundly ignored, because the pupils are all attending private tuitions already, b) most schoolteachers don’t care to teach (or even to find out how to teach) because they know that nobody bothers, all the real studying is done at tuitions, c) the competent and ambitious among them take up jobs only to build up large private practices, after which they quit, d) parents are having to pay through their noses, though, at least in public schools, education is supposedly free, e) children waste many hours every day in school, and much of the rest of their time is eaten up running from one tuition to another (millions attend five or six regularly), so they have neither time nor energy left for rest and relaxation, leave alone reading outside the syllabus, with highly imaginable consequences, f) private tutors are now seriously rich, especially those who run statewide or countrywide coaching institutes (in West Bengal, it has been a dry joke for decades that no business really works here except for real estate and private tuitions!)

So if I happen to be one of those who have been able to take advantage of the situation, why am I complaining? It is because I wanted to become a good teacher and not just make some money; I also wanted to contribute to making teaching a respectable and aspirational profession again. And I don’t think I can boast of very much success with regard to either. I have got too little feedback in this lifetime about how deeply, lastingly and positively I have influenced my students’ lives – so much for knowing whether I have been a good teacher or not. So far as hard facts are concerned, I believe people come to me in droves to enroll their children for very mundane, immediate, temporary reasons, which I have listed in an earlier blogpost. And though they together pay me enough not to make me envious of the average doctor or engineer or government official, I never managed to get rich, partly because teaching is (still-) not highly paid in this country (consider for comparison’s sake how much a doctor charges for a service as basic as putting a leg in plaster, to cite just one example), and partly because I have always been too lazy to work round the clock, and had moral issues about running sausage factories (there are countless tutors who run classes of hundreds at a time, and so can easily afford BMWs – not that I ever wanted one!). As for the other ambition, virtually none of my good students have opted to become teachers, especially at the school level (with Vivekananda and Tagore and Russell, I have always believed that that is where most of our vital education takes place: afterwards it’s just imbibing facts, technical details and sales tricks), despite knowing full well that competent and hard-working teachers are minting money these days. Part of the reason I know – that teaching still does not assure that precious combination of security and social status that is so dear to the middle class (which is where the vast majority of teachers come from) – but somehow that seems to be neither adequate nor satisfactory.

In the few years left to me, I can’t do much more to become a good teacher, or to enthuse my pupils to follow in my footsteps. Should I then shed all inhibitions and focus on making money?

Devipaksha

Mahalaya tomorow. The day I was born, a long time ago. All through my childhood I used to wake up at dawn and wait with eager anticipation for the Mahishasurmardini programme to be aired on the radio, formally marking for millions of Bengalis the start of devipaksha. For many years now I have been sleeping through it, and not missing it much. The older you grow, the fewer things matter…

I have always been a reflective person, but now I can indulge it with far less feeling of guilt. I have done more than my fair share of work and shouldering responsibility, and I am now well and truly in the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. More and more I just look back to smile or grimace. In Toni Morrison’s book Love, the narrator, now an old woman, says ‘Nowadays silence is looked on as odd… now tongues work with no help from the mind… back in the seventies, when women began to straddle chairs and dance crotch out on television, when all the magazines began to feature behinds and inner thighs as though that’s all there is to a woman, well, I shut up altogether… barefaced being the order of the day, I hum’. That’s just the way I feel.

Swami Vivekananda used to say ‘All is character’. The world is as it is, neither good nor bad I suppose, though some have called it a vale of tears. Be that as it may, the fact remains that our experiences differ because according to our characters we react very differently to what we see happening around ourselves, and happening to us. Some find fun and laughter even in concentration camps and hospital beds, I have heard. And some crib over examination marks and acne as though these are life-changing events. Maybe I am the cribbing and worrying sort, though God knows how much laughter and sunshine I have tried to bring into how many lives. And that is why, despite all the blessings that I have always desperately kept counting, life has seemed a grim, relentless, and often futile struggle most of the time.

Here are some things I have missed badly or rued, not because I have never got them, but the good ones happen so rarely, and the opposites are so much more common.

Lack of politeness and courtesy, if not compassion, for people around you. Is it that we as Indians – especially in the class to which I belong – put too little store by those things? What rankles is not just the absence of these markers of high civilization, but the fact that most of us are too ready to flatter and fawn when there is the slightest possibility of advantage to be gained, or danger of harm to ourselves if we get into someone’s bad books. I have had a surfeit of it as a mere teacher, so imagine what politicians have to handle! God knows they wouldn’t have survived without growing ultra-thick skins, especially because they know that the very same people who are falling all over you now will forget you as soon as you have become ‘useless’ to them, and even rejoice loudly if and when they hear that bad things have happened to you…

People pretending. It ties up with what I wrote in the last paragraph. And my God, I have seen far too much of it, among boys and girls, men and women, family and strangers… why do they do it? Why do they tell you things that they don’t believe themselves, or they will forget within days or months of saying? I love you, I respect you, you mean so much to me, you have given me such a lot to treasure. If that has soured me up very badly, can I really be blamed for it?

Contempt for, or indifference towards people who have no money. That, coupled with blind awe, if not worship, of anyone who has money by the sackfuls, no matter how he got it. This has to some extent always been there in our society – I have read Al Beruni lamenting over it, and that was the 11^th century – but it has become virulent across all social classes, now that the most admired country, to wit the US of A, is globally triumphant, and dominated by the same outlook. America was not always like that.

Too little cleanliness and greenery around me, too much noise and litter and rubble and foul smells – and the fact that so few people care, as long as they have cars and houses of their own, and can spend hours at the shopping mall and beauty parlour.

Nothing called social security outside the corporate sector – and that employs a tiny fraction of the population. We the self-employed are entirely on our own since the day our parents let go, and till our dying day, unless the children care: society and government have done virtually nothing for us. Slightly lower tax rates at least for those who have no non-salary perks, and slightly higher interest on public provident fund deposits? But who cares? Certainly not the last ten finance ministers, unless my memory is failing me.

The fact that the best loved of my ex students go away, so far away. One of my dreams has hardly ever been fulfilled – getting them to come and talk to my current classes, speaking from their own recent hard-earned experience, telling the children how much they would gain if they listened more to me…

People calling and expecting me to remember them, though they were here many years and many thousands of pupils ago, and haven’t kept in touch for years.

Girls growing into utterly disappointing women.

That I could never persuade the vast majority of children in my care to read good books, and these days I cannot persuade them that the internet is good for far more useful things than Facebook and whatsapp. So the best among them score pitifully on impromptu quizzes I give them, and the essays they write are of a standard I once (in the days when I wrote If Winter Comes) would have associated with ten-year olds or younger. And yet they go on to land cushy jobs with Google, Amazon, HSBC, Bloomberg and suchlike, leaving me to wonder what such jobs take, intellectually speaking. My common taunt these days, when I am particularly disgusted with someone’s performance, is to assure him or her that s/he too will get a job like that, no fear. Who cares if you are literate as long as you can do sums and have the periodic table by heart? Besides, bosses rarely hire people who can show them up...

On Gandhi Jayanti

When one is handicapped, one gets nasty scares and also feels absurdly proud about doing very little things. This morning I cleaned the bathroom thoroughly for the first time since the accident – I mean thoroughly, not only scrubbing the wc and the washbasin but also the entire floor and even the drain pipe and grille. I nearly slipped and fell on the soapy floor once, and God alone knows what would have happened if I did, my leg still being held up by a plate screwed into the bone. Then I thought it prudent to kneel on the floor. After the first ten minutes the pain started becoming unbearable, and I began sweating like a pig, but worse was to come: when I tried to get up, I found I couldn’t! And I was entirely alone, it goes without saying, without even a phone in my pocket. I’d have died before I would scream for help. Anyway, to make a long story short, I managed to scramble up eventually by using both hands, the door handle and the towel rod – thank heaven one of them didn’t come off at just the critical moment. If this is a foretaste of the future, it is sombre indeed… of course I shall cope till I can’t cope any more, but karma could have been a little kinder.

Rajdeep sent me a couple of links that have made me sombre too. I just read a book about Japan going through difficult times, now that growth has slowed to near zero for decades. And yet an Indian who visited Japan recently found this. I am quite sure now that India will never catch up, not in a decade, not in a century. Meanwhile, what do Indians do? Well, an ex-justice of the Supreme Court goes around abusing Subhas Bose (can’t even think of original insults!) – someone who has personally achieved nothing in his life that will put him in the history books, too – while Tagore’s ancestral house is being allowed to degenerate into a slum, Arvind Kejriwal has (quite predictably) become a hugely forgettable sick joke, and while India ranked 135 out of 187 in the Human Development Index 2014 after 67 years of trying, the sickest (read most privileged-) part of the population is going gaga over how Zomato is ‘conquering’ the world and how our dollar billionaires are proliferating. And the absolutely real problem with this section is that they feel neither retarded nor ashamed. I would so like to know that a few of my old boys and girls are doing something meaningful for the India that matters: the billion people who still just keep scrounging to keep their heads above the water. One particularly moronic ex-student actually wrote that Facebook deserves 'respect' because it has a billion users. Respect. Respect.

The parents of a current pupil came over to discuss her progress, and in the course of the conversation told me that they run a clutch of family businesses, one of which has 700-odd employees. That impressed me, and I am not easily impressed. But what really made my eyes light up was hearing how much the lady’s old and ‘retired’ father contributes still – from managing the finances to looking after the household to dropping off the child at school and tuitions when the parents are not around: the woman tearfully and gratefully admitted that ‘without my father none of this would have been possible’. If I have any prayers at all, I would pray that I can be that kind of father to Pupu in the years to come.

It’s October now. How quickly the year has flown! The days are still muggy, but the nights are much less so: it’s time to start hoping that we’ll have a long, chilly winter. It rained heavily today, but that didn’t much help to get rid of the sweltering heat, so I am sulking.

When I narrated my ordeal of the morning to a class in the evening, several girls laughed. Yes, they laughed. Not one boy did.

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oh, what the hell.