The time has come

It is nice to see that one of my recent posts (A little slower, if you please)  has not only climbed quickly to the top of the most-read list but also brought back an old one: Is speed always conducive to human happiness?  I was sure it isn’t when I was very young, and the older I grow the more convinced I become that I have been right all along – and how ironical this is considering that as a teacher I have always urged my pupils not to dawdle, dally and procrastinate!

Another beloved post, A small dose of political philosophy, has also got back into that list on its own. As I have said and not once before, I keep wondering what brings people back to certain posts, who those people are, and what they are getting from reading these things I have written.

I hope that more visitors would read the post titled Anne Frank and my daughter, and those who have read the classic Diary of a young girl should get their hands on the new book I have mentioned there, The Legacy of Anne Frank: they are sure to like it.

During my latest trip to Delhi, I visited Banjara Market in Gurgaon, because Pupu needed to buy a large ornate mirror and some other bric à brac, and that is a place where such things can be bought dirt cheap, unlike places like the Cottage Industries Emporium, which have become watering holes for the dirty rich. These tribals have set up quite a little village by the roadside amidst the forest of residential towers in the new city. They live in makeshift huts – though they even have water coolers and washing machines around, I couldn’t figure out what they use for toilets – and while they flaunt smartphones and motorbikes and streaked hairdos, they still dress traditionally, and work and play are simultaneous, with mothers nursing, housewives making roti on open chullahs while scolding their husbands for trying to make foolish deals, wizened grandmas sagely pulling away at burbling hookahs and rolling their eyes at all and sundry. Some of the young girls, covered head to foot in flowing salwar, kameez and dupatta, looked like living Madonnas, putting all the cute and expensively dolled up customers with their assembly-line produced waxed legs, plunging necklines and donkey-like features to shame. They were living poorly and precariously by metro standards, it was clear enough, but definitely much better off than they would have at home in their native states. Interestingly, the wikipedia article on the Banjara tribe says they have enjoyed gender equality for ages. I wonder whether the civic authorities will give them a permanent and better settlement deal someday, or just uproot them with bulldozers and drive them away one fine morning. India is a strange, beautiful, and truly heartbreaking country.

I have been reading in my newspapers that the governments both at state and central level and thinking of ‘getting serious’ about reining in the plastic menace. Why don’t they dig their heels in and simply close down all the factories producing single-use bags and other containers? Talk about arrant hypocrisy. Meanwhile the world gets self-righteously furious that the president of Brazil laughs to hear that the great Amazon rain forest is burning away… and that reminds me, for those of you who are Netflix subscribers, do watch the three-episode show called The Future of Water. If I had my way, I would ask every one of my current pupils and their parents to do so.

My daughter has started her working career with an NGO that concerns itself with the education of disadvantaged children. Twelve years ago I wrote I fervently wished that she would do something meaningful, and not fritter away her life as a corporate executive selling soap. I am deeply thankful to Providence that she has been allowed to go that way, and I have lived to see it. Of course there will be other jobs, more education and new hobbies in the years to come, but I hope she always enjoys doing what she is allowed to do, and finds fulfillment. I have wished the same for all my pupils; alas, most of them and their parents did not even understand what I was blessing them with.

One last thing for now. I have been changing some very old habits with age, though very slowly. For ages I hoped that lots of old boys and girls will keep in touch; for ages I also did all I could to stay in touch. I have accepted with a profound sigh that that doesn’t happen: at least, not to me. Most of them just forget; at worst they vilify me from far away. The best of them gradually drift away after keeping the line alive for many years at a stretch. So these days I have stopped bothering about returning calls. It used to be a habit of mine to reply within 24 hours by email at least with a ‘thank you for writing, will get back at length very soon’; these days I don’t do that any longer with people who suddenly decide to communicate after a gap of a decade or more. It has happened far too many times that they write tentatively, then get back ecstatically once or twice when I respond with warmth and eagerness, and then simply fall off the planet again. It’s just not worth it by any yardstick to get back to such people at all.

[The title of this post, for those who cannot recognise it, comes from a poem of Lewis Carroll’s titled The Walrus and the Carpenter:

“…the time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things,

Of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings,

And why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings.”

I shall not waste my time trying to explain the humour in those lines.]

The population bomb

After Swachchh Bharat, I have reason to congratulate prime minister Narendra Modi for the second time. In his address to the nation on Independence Day, he has dared – as no PM has since Indira Gandhi – to take our most serious problem by the horns and urge the nation to start thinking about how to solve it before it is too late: to wit, the enormous and still-too-rapidly growing population.

Even at the turn of the 19th century, the British and other foreigners used to talk about ‘India’s teeming and hungry millions’ (yes, foreign rulers made things bad by not governing in our interest, but can they really be blamed for our huge fertility rates?) For those who do not know, the great divide in India’s population story was 1921: before that, war, pestilence, flood and famine still kept our numbers in some control (albeit in a very cruel way), but then a bit of science and good governance took over, and our population exploded. It is estimated that India’s population in 1947 was around 350 million; that had shot up to 547 million by the time of the 1971 census, when I first become conscious of such things, and since then we have added about 800 million to our numbers – more than the entire continent of Europe! Our worst enemies are those ‘scholars’ and other fools who are still debating whether our population is ‘too big’ or not, ‘exploding’ or not. I suppose they will be convinced only if and when we are reduced to cannibalism. Thank God our prime minister is less stupid than the eggheads, and bolder.

We occupy just 2.4% of the world’s land area, but have to accommodate and feed and educate and employ and keep under some control almost 18% of the global population. We often compare our plight with China’s, blithely ignoring the fact that while we have nearly caught up with her population-wise, she is more than three times as big area wise, so the average population density there is only about one-third! Following in the footsteps of the Father of the Nation (it has been well said that the mistakes of giants are also gigantic) our school textbooks and millions of schoolteachers still continue to indoctrinate hundreds of millions of children with the insane idea that there is nothing called a population problem, because India is supposedly ‘rich’ in all kinds of natural resources, despite the terrible facts that our rivers and groundwater are dangerously overdrawn, our cities are groaning under the weight of people the majority of whom are forced to live worse than animals in advanced nations, our land is underforested and overcultivated, our schools and hospitals and police and transport- and judicial systems creaking under incredible overloads, there is a tremendous hunger even for menial, ill-paid jobs, billionaires cannot afford the kind of privacy and pollution-free environments that very ordinary people can in all the sparsely populated rich countries of the world – simply because there are too many of us around.

Legitimate concerns have been raised at once, of course, as they should in any healthily functioning democracy. If the problem is to be speedily solved, such concerns much be convincingly addressed at the very outset. One is that the southern states are worried they will be electorally punished for being successful with birth control unlike the ‘Bimaru’ states, another is that the Muslim community may be unfairly singled out and targeted, despite the fact that their net fertility rate, too, has been steadily coming down (read this article).

Education, especially that of females, has been shown to be most effective in bringing down the fertility rate. Raising the minimum marriageable age for women to 21 and enforcing it much more strictly by law may be considered too (far too many girls are still married off well before they are even 18). So also significant monetary incentives, especially for the poor, to have one-child families, even if the child is a girl: this, combined with a revived mass publicity campaign involving celebrities could work wonders, especially if the central government can persuade the most errant states to go along. Draconian measures of any sort hurt people far more than they are effective in achieving desired goals, as the Chinese experience has proved, but gentle coercion might go a long way, such as mild penalties for parents who have more than three children.

By current estimates, India’s population is likely to ‘stabilize’ at around 1.7-1.8 billion sometime in the latter half of this century. It would be very nice if it did so sooner, at a smaller number. Then other problems – the problems of richer nations – will kick in, such as a ‘greying’ population, and ever smaller numbers in the working age bracket to feed and care for them. Still, we have time to cross those bridges. Meanwhile, a huge time bomb is ticking away, and the prime minister has rung the warning bell. I hope he takes his own warning seriously, and can persuade  party, parliament,  judiciary, media and the country at large to follow suit, and soon.

Working in Ladakh

Shilpi has written about her recent work-related trip to Ladakh, here.

Read about the kind of work she did, and her friend does, studying marmots. It sounds like something straight out of a Gerald Durrell book. And look at the pictures. If this is work, I'd have loved it. And if this is what Ladakh feels like, I'd finally like to go there. I'd also want my daughter to have experiences like this while she is getting paid for it.

I am glad, Shilpi, that I goaded you into taking up this job!

A little slower, if you please!

About twenty five years ago, long before mobile phones and the internet became ubiquitous, I wrote an essay about whether the relentless speeding up of life is doing us much good. I put it up among the earliest posts when I began writing this blog.

In my newspaper today, I found Professor Samantak Das of  Jadavpur University warning and lamenting about what is happening to us in a world that is always ‘connected’, and everybody is always busy and determined to form and voice instant opinions on everything. I had a very strong sense of déjà vu. These are things that I have noted and commented upon long ago, when I was still a young man, and unlike Das, who might be about my age, I made up my mind about how to handle the situation long ago too, much before mobiles and the Net apparently ‘revolutionized’ our lives. Have very few friends, do not stay connected all the time except to the handful of people who really matter, give yourself time to think before opening your mouth, and, heeding advice given more than four hundred years ago, ‘give every man thy ear but few thy voice’. Actually, in my case, it’s ‘give few men thy ear and even fewer thy voice’ – I stopped talking unless I am getting paid years ago.  While travelling in the US almost thirty years back and meeting a lot of very diferent kinds of people, from factory workers to doctors and policemen and teachers, journalists and university scientists, it occurred to me that I could have meaningful, thought-provoking conversations only with folks below ten and above seventy. If anything, that is what has come to India with a vengeance. As Shakespeare also said, and I have listened, ‘how every fool can play upon the word! I think the best grace of wit will shortly turn into silence, and discourse grow commendable in none only but parrots.’ Want to bet that our internet era wouldn’t have surprised him?

There are many kinds of ‘busy’ men, with or without phones. There are the Zomato/Amazon delivery boys. I thank Providence every day that I wasn’t required to make a living that way. There are cabinet ministers and business tycoons, who handle great affairs all the time. I am glad I wasn’t chosen for a life like that: I have greatly enjoyed spending my time mostly my way, at peace, at leisure, all by myself and a few loved ones. And then there’s the most numerous, most contemptible aam admi, with all the time in the world, dressing up, partying, boozing, quarrelling, zooming about on bikes, shopping, obsessing about acne or children’s marks, living utterly empty lives of the mind, furiously 'busy' spewing all their filth all over the internet. Imagine a wise Martian monitoring our radio waves. What conclusion would he draw about the nature and content of our ‘civilization’?

Hermits have the best lives, I have often thought. And in this day and age, when you cannot withdraw to lonely hills and forests, you can live a good life only if you can make a hermitage of your own mind…

Professor Das has said that it is important to think. I have been a compulsive thinker all my life; if anything I think too much (a trait that my daughter has inherited!), and of late I have been consciously trying to revv down, to let my mind rest now and then. So his lament makes me smile wryly.

But in an age when even great policy matters are being decided and disseminated instantaneously via twitter, can civilization, or democracy (as distinct from majoritarian tyranny) or even sanity survive? In an age when most 'educated' people, such as doctors and engineers, won't even understand what that question means? 

Quick getaway

My daughter had an incredibly busy year from July 2018 to June 2019 – classes at 11 p.m., assignments to be submitted by 5 the next morning, that sort of thing. Naturally we could keep in touch only electronically, besides my running off to Delhi every now and then so that she could spend at least a night or two in the weekends with me. Well, now we are over it. I insisted on her taking a month’s break after that course ended, and mercifully she herself came around to seeing how valuable that could be, so she has been able to laze at home for several weeks at a stretch, and now it’s time for her to get back to Delhi and begin her working life in earnest.

This last week of her vacation I took three days off, 23^rd to 25^th. On Tuesday morning we drove off to Mukutmanipur. The staff at the WBFDC Sonajhuri resort there was as friendly and welcoming as I had found them to be in March last year, but this time Pupu and Ma were with me, and we had no trouble booking cottages (Haritaki and Amlaki, the ones with the best views) online beforehand, so it was heavenly. Since it was mid-week and ‘off season’, we had the resort more or less to ourselves. We decided within hours of arriving that we wanted to extend our stay for another day. The first day was stiflingly hot and sultry, and the only saving grace was the early-evening boat ride on the sadly depleted reservoir, but the next afternoon a thunderstorm arose out of nowhere, followed by torrential rain for an hour, which sharply brought down the temperature, and the drizzle continued till almost nine p.m. The meals were simple and very Bengali but sumptuous, so my cup was full. I think Ma enjoyed it quite as much as Pupu and I did. Sudipto the young manager couldn’t have been more insistent that we should visit more often.

Pupu likes big city life, but she also loves silent hills and forests. I cannot thank God enough for that. What would I have done with a daughter who didn’t love books and good movies, who didn’t do charity, who couldn’t tell the difference between music and monkeying, who couldn’t talk philosophy with me, but was crazy about shoes and clothes and makeup and parties and ‘likes’ on Facebook instead?

And what would have I done if my mother had also been a common woman?

 our cottages

 when it was raining hard

the storm was really violent

Madam Sheila Dikshit, RIP

One of India's strongest women for decades yet quiet and self-effacing, Ms. Dikshit, three times CM of Delhi (who should have returned to the seat once more), has just passed away. She was exactly my father's age. Here is the obituary that India Today has posted.

She showed that you can be traditional yet very modern and progressive. She showed that you can be a firm go-getter with a suave touch. I don't think she ever had much truck with firebrand feminists, yet she proved that a woman of mettle can make her way in a man's world: it's only the good for nothings with huge senses of unearned entitlement who whine and rant. She showed that even in India, a land of ingrates and inveterate fault-finders with very short memories, some few people can leave marks that everyone salutes, friend and foe alike. She deserved the PM's chair far more than lots of others who have sat on it or aspired to it.

I admired and respected her. India needs far more like her, in every field, but politics most of all. I cannot pay a greater tribute than saying publicly that among contemporary Indians, I have put her on my list of ideals for my daughter for a very long time...

Choicest picks

Now that I have been writing here for thirteen years, and there are 570-odd posts, and more than 630,000 pageviews already, I have begun to think of culling those which I consider the best (or at least, most readable and/or significant) of the lot, in the hope that someday someone might want to turn the collection into a book. Roughly one out of every ten posts has been so honoured. Consequent upon this decision you will now see a tag called 'choicest picks' along the right hand sidebar. Click on them to read or re-read some of them. You might also let me know whether you feel that certain particular posts did or did not deserve to be labelled with that tag.

Anne Frank and my daughter

Five years ago I wrote a post about how my daughter had been invited over to Amsterdam by the Anne Frank House organization for an all-expenses paid international students’ conference. I still feel bitterly sorry that I had to refuse permission – because I was too scared to let her travel absolutely alone. The memory rankles. But there has been a wonderful sequel.

Gillian Walnes Perry, co-founder of the Anne Frank Trust UK and its executive director till 2016, got to hear about Urbi’s work as a peer-guide trainer and contributor to the Anne Frank House newsletter, then read Urbi’s blogpost on the subject of her experience, got in touch with her, and has mentioned her extensively in her new (2018) book, The Legacy of Anne Frank. I cannot resist the temptation to quote from the book (Chapter 27, Anne Frank in the Indian Sub-continent, pp. 249-252), a signed copy of which Ms. Perry has been kind enough to send over to us:

“Urbi Chatterjee was another one of the peer educators trained in Kolkata. She described reading Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl in primary school (at my behest, it goes without saying – SC), and how she still sees the book as an important part of her childhood. However, the Peer Guide training workshop  gave her the opportunity not only to learn more about one of her favourite characters from literature, but also the larger, social, economic and political situation of Anne’s era, ‘such an important and infamous time in history’. When I read Urbi’s blog and saw that she wrote very much in the spirit of Anne Frank, (my highlighting – SC) I emailed her to get to know more about her experience of the Anne Frank project. She did not disappoint…. (and then Ms. Perry goes on to quote extensively from my daughter’s blogpost, concluding with the following lines – ) Am I alone in thinking that Urbi writes in her blog in the spirit that Anne wrote her ‘blog’ of seventy years before? Anne, described by her maths teacher Mr. Keesing as ‘an incorrigible chatterbox’ and who by her own admission loved to chatter, and Ms. Urbi Chatterjee, whose own childhood was so marked by Anne’s writing. I believe that these two girls, Miss Chatterbox and Miss Chatterjee, living nearly a century apart and a world away, could have become the firmest of friends.”

My daughter is, to a very much larger than common extent, my lifelong and singleminded labour of love. And, to a very much more than common extent, I am today a proud father. I brought her up to believe from the bottom of her heart that getting a real and good education is supremely important, that it is meant for things infinitely more important than doing well in exams and getting decent jobs early in life – and look! I have been totally vindicated, in the sense that not only has she done excellently in academics right till her post-graduate course and got several of the kind of jobs that tens of millions of parents in India are willing to kill for, but also, at the age of 22, been mentioned in the same breath with a world-renowned and revered figure. Maybe I have managed to be a real teacher to no one except her, but I shall still sleep content.

Midsummer writer's block

I currently have writer’s block – and the terrible heat is largely responsible. Whenever I have a little time to spare I can only think of snoozing. It’s not that I don’t have things to write about – there are lots of things, really – but I simply cannot summon up the energy for it. If only the rains would come… they are saying that the monsoon this time will be both late and weak. Alas for the likes of me!

My daughter is right now picking and choosing from among several job options. She’s in a hurry to prove herself in the world of adults. To me, it seems like a dream: I remember bringing her home from the hospital three days after she was born as though it was yesterday! God willing, the most fun time in my life is going to begin soon.

Rajdeep has just sent me this link to a newspaper article about how the young scions of ultra-rich families around the world are being trained to make socially valuable investments which are likely to make them even richer (if that is conceivable, leave alone desirable), while also earning them the gratitude of the 99.99% people who will never have one ten-thousandth part of that kind of money. The greatest proponents of the socialist ideal must be turning in their graves.

Here is another link to my Bengali newspaper, without comment, where the writer laments what has happened to Bengalis. My Bengali readers might be interested.

A little boy who has just joined made my day three days ago by telling me on his own that he is deeply interested in history. Imagine! In this day and age!

Enough for tonight. If I can still breathe, I shall try to add to this post tomorrow morning.

P.S., June 12: Oooh... it rained tonight! 
I am going to sleep the sleep of the just.

P.P.S., June 15: With reference to Subhasis's latest comment on this post, here is a link to an article in my Bengali newspaper, dated June 13. Something I have been saying for ages. I also wrote a post on this very subject some time ago.

Narendra Modi, round two

BJP 303 seats, NDA 351. Next biggest party, the Congress, 52, the third and fourth, DMK and AITMC, 23 and 22 respectively. Very clear, decisive mandate. Even the Congress has immediately conceded defeat without petty carping and bickering. To that extent, democracy is still safe, and all disgruntled elements must accept the janaadesh, live with it, and, if they really, strongly dislike the current dispensation, try their utmost to change the public mind by open, legitimate means over the next five years.

The era of Indira Gandhi has returned. This election was not really about the BJP but about Narendra Modi. We are definitely going to become a far more Presidential rather than parliamentary state.

The upsurge of the BJP in Bengal is quite as surprising as its virtual non-existence in all but one of the southern states. This is polarization with a capital P! And Ms. Mamata Banerjee has slipped up very badly, seasoned and canny political player as she is: the future might be grim indeed for her and her party unless she can very quickly put her house in order and go on the warpath with a far better strategy in mind.

All inconveniences over things like Aadhar, demonetization and GST have apparently been forgiven or forgotten by the masses. Nor did the Dalit discontent or the farmers’ matter in the end. Whereas Pulwama and Balakot, tragedy and theatrics notwithstanding, have certainly helped a very great deal. Let lessons be learnt from this by all parties concerned.

The political discourse has turned very definitely towards a far more jingoistic and religion-oriented outlook (Rahul Gandhi has been visiting shrine after shrine, and all Didi could do was to keep reiterating that we don’t need Ram and Hanuman, because we have our own Durga and Kali to bow to). Simultaneously, leftism as we have known it has been definitely wiped out. We must not only accept that, but ponder over the why, and over the likely consequences in the medium- and long run.

If politics has always been far more about perception than about hard facts, the opposition must learn, if it wants to survive and bounce back, that its image needs a complete overhaul. The parties involved, barring perhaps Patnaik’s BJD in Odisha, have etched such a deep-seated image in the public mind about being venal, incompetent and fractious, that they never had a chance against the BJP bulldozer. Above everything else, the Congress Party will die as the Left has unless it can shed the albatross called the Gandhi family from around its neck.

The young – educated in science, aspiring to be doctors and engineers – voted BJP in droves. That too, needs to be understood by every party which is hoping to have a future.

Will our Constitution and our higher courts survive? That will be one of the biggest questions that need to be answered. As for the media, I have no hopes – as was said when Mrs. Gandhi declared an Emergency, ‘they were asked to bend, and they crawled’. Especially when I know, from very painful and intimate experience, what kind of scum have become mediapersons over the last twenty years.

Would it be wise for me to don my upabeet (sacred thread) again?

I wrote a post here about the massive BJP victory back in May 2014 with a broadly congratulatory and hopeful attitude. It was titled Dawn of a new era, but there was a question mark at the end. The last five years, the most levelheaded and non-partisan observer will agree, has been a mixed bag at best. The BJP has worked a miracle at the hustings this time, no question about that: as so many have already noted, it’s the first time a ruling party has beaten the anti-incumbency factor so resoundingly since the early 1970s. Surely it would be churlish to deny that Team Modi-Shah have won a thumping approval from the electorate. And certainly, although they have been greatly helped by luck – as all winners must be – they must be admired for their determination, steadfast vision, organizational skill and incredible campaigning energy. Now it remains to be seen what they will do with this huge mandate. There have been bigger ones before which were largely wasted: Rajiv Gandhi’s 1984 victory comes to mind. And no position at the top of the pole can be held for very long, especially in broadly democratic setups: contrary storms rise sooner or later and sweep the most impregnable fortresses away. The PM knows this. He has said, immediately after learning of the victory, that his responsibility has increased manifold. And I believe it is true that he does want to turn India quickly into a really big and powerful economy, so that she can emerge as one of the global leaders on his watch. If only because that would allow him to strut as much as he wants to on the largest of all stages. If so, he will know better than anyone else, that the government needs to focus ferociously on an agenda of domestic peace, stability as well as all-round and inclusive progress. Therein lies the hope for the likes of me.

If I do vote in the general election of 2024, I shall be a senior citizen then!

[P.S., May 26: I should like to link this editorial in The Hindu for reflecting my own mood of cautious hopefulness. On the other hand, here is a harshly critical and grim criticism of the state of affairs in India. If and when the incumbent government takes steps to shut the writer up or worse, I shall know that my worst fears are beginning to come true.]  

SHAME! ....?

Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar’s statue has been contemptuously demolished – again, fifty years on.

The last time it was ultra-left ‘intellectual idealists’ who did it; this time the blame has been pinned on ultra-right lumpens, no doubt egged on by their masters who incidentally lay no claim to either knowledge or wisdom of any kind beyond blind worship of what they call ‘tradition’, and are actually motivated by the only thing that has ever motivated rightwingers: naked lust for unbridled power.

Apparently the ageing ‘naxalites’ who perpetrated the horror fifty years ago are deeply ashamed now, (same day, same newspaper) as their inheritors today just might be, fifty years later. Thank God the sublime greatness of someone like Vidyasagar does not depend one whit on what they think and value.

But – a little, shameful reminder. Have average Bengalis (even the formally educated among them) ever really known and respected Vidyasagar? Remember how he who struggled to enlighten and succour them for most of his life ultimately gave up in disgust and despair, turned his back on them and went off to vegetate in his old age among Santhal villagers far away from the big ‘happening’ city? Yes, too shameful to remember, perhaps. Having been a teacher myself all my life, having worshipped Vidyasagar in the same breath with the likes of Socrates and Confucius, and having found out exactly how much we (including the teachers among us) respect this profession, I don’t think what has happened really matters. We couldn’t show more disrespect to a man like that merely by smashing a statue of his. Who are we, obsessed with Messi and Deepika and Virat, and GoT and PubG, and Amazon and Zomato and Apple and Uber, to either respect or disrespect someone like him? Do candles matter to the sun?

P.S., June 12: Look up this link in today's newspaper. As I was saying.

Waiting

The father of a little girl who has very recently been admitted to my class was saying this evening that one my ex-students, who later became his student at a local engineering college and is now working in Germany, has said, and not once, that he owes everything good in his life to me. I have heard such paeans again and again over a long life of teaching, but the pleasure never palls, especially because Providence has so arranged things that every now and then – once in a few years, at least – I will also hear about vulgar ingrates who remember me only to vilify me with fantastical accusations of neglect and worse, and every time that happens, it sours up a lot of good memories.

A few girls who went to Carmel School and have become my ex-students recently came over to see me, and pointedly said, ‘Look, Sir, you said Carmelites never visit, but we have!’ I smiled, though I know they’ll fall permanently out of touch soon enough. ‘Take the cash, and let the credit go’.

‘Some are born to endless night’, wrote Agatha Christie, quoting William Blake, and I know exactly how it feels. You know what fate has been like to me? Only yesterday I stepped out of my house to find a little boy waiting after my class for his father to come and pick him up, so I gave him company and shared a bit of jhaalmuri with him from the streetside vendor who whips up a very tasty snack. Ten minutes later I felt that I wanted a bit more, having had only a fistful, so I stepped  out again to ask the same vendor to make another packet for me: and he was winding up for the night! I only thank God over and over again that He in His infinite wisdom has let me off with myriad such minor irititants, and allowed me to avoid a lot of far worse things that happen to a lot of people…

My old boy Swarnava, who is reading Physics because he loves it, has written a blogpost on Richard Feynman. I hope a lot of people will read it and write encouraging comments.

The election results will come out in two weeks’ time, and whatever kind of government is cobbled up in Delhi, I believe the outlook for the India that our Founding Fathers dreamed of is grim. Are we eventually going to become a Hindu version of Pakistan, and mired in everything that was bad about the middle ages, because that is what we democratically desire?

At around this time every year, I wonder in a very crabby mood why hundreds of millions of people made this God-forsaken country their home and then bred into a billion. Does muggy heat attract humans as much as it does lizards and roaches? To love India is hard, and nobody understands that better than someone who has quietly tried to do it all his life.

I last went to Delhi for three days on April 01, and I’m going again this Friday. Can’t wait.

Cyclone Phani and after

Well, cyclone Phani came and went, and here in West Bengal - especially in my district - it was a gigantic non-event, though the scare had been spread so widely, intensively for so long (a whole week, whereas at the time of Ayla back in 2009 we hardly got two days' notice, and far more lowkey at that) that the whole state went into holiday mode, so several million mandays of work were lost for nothing. I must admit, though, that if that rainstorm had struck Kolkata head-on the story might have been quite different.

But Odisha bore the brunt, and came out with flying colours. The last time a supercyclone struck - that was in '99 - ten thousand died; this time, thanks to early, strenuous and intelligently coordinated government efforts (how we blame them for every little peccadillo, yet are strangely stingy with our praise when they do wonderful things!), just three people died, and one of them of a heart attack. Shows we can do wonderful things when we really want to, and I certainly want to insist that this is a far more significant and praiseworthy achievement than sending a Mangalyaan up into space - honestly, which of us ordinary Indians have benefited a busted nickel from that non-event: something that the Americans did more than forty years ago? (our PM's boast is that we did it far more cheaply. He forgot to mention that that is largely because Indians are paid a tiny fraction of what Americans, laborers and scientists alike, are paid for the same work). Even the most advanced countries cannot do better when really big natural disasters strike.

Two other good things to note. In our state our CM personally supervised all planned relief and rescue operations all through the anticipated crisis, and it went like clockwork - so I am cocking a snook at all those envious idiots who keep ranting after her eight years in office that she was a very good opposition leader but is hopeless as a ruler. And secondly, I was delighted to read that in the face of a vast looming natural disaster, the BJP officially called a truce in the midst of the election season and joined hands with the TMC government to do their best for the people. Maybe there is still hope...

End of April notes

Can anybody tell me why they always hold elections in this blazing (or sweltering -) heat?

And while we are on it, why, in an age when we are doing so many things via the internet, can’t they arrange things so that everyone can vote that way too, using their laptops or mobile phones from the comfort and safety of their homes?

This town goes to the polls the day after tomorrow. Given the heat, I am probably not going. [P.S., April 29: I did go and do my civic duty after all, but only because the polling station was peaceful and I had to wait for hardly ten minutes at the booth. Once again, I feel the greatest pity for all those, especially the policemen, who have to work in such horrible conditions all through the day: the temperature has soared beyond 40 degrees C by 9 a.m.! I hope the people who make such decisions will stop torturing so many millions sooner or later.]

I have observed this before: for children time apparently passes far more slowly, so that they are often bored to tears. At least that was my experience. The seventies and eighties seemed to crawl, despite my having lived a life so busy that most teenagers and young adults these days can’t begin to imagine it (those who think they are ‘cool’ because they have started keeping house and visiting pubs at 22 and had their first real sex at 25, often only after marriage!), and then between 1987 and 2019 time has passed in a flash: how did it happen, and why? Or is it only because in childhood one’s memories impinge much more deeply and numerously upon one’s brain, so that while reminiscing it seems so much more ‘happened’ in those days when the world was very young… and then one simply gets tired and bored and busy with routine and stops noticing a lot of things, because one has grown a thick hide and a dulled sensibility? It is a fact that I can remember well a lot of students of the previous generation, while those who have passed through since 2005 have become a blur: most of them anyway. It is only when I see all the white hair and that my insurance policies are beginning to mature one by one and there are girls giggling in the classroom whose mothers were doing exactly the same a while ago that it comes back to me with a resounding sense of amazement that all those years have passed by!

I have been watching a lighthearted Netflix series of somewhat eccentric taste called Brooklyn Nine nine. As always, even when I watch things mainly for a laugh, I notice serious things compulsively. So they work very hard to be politically correct, in the sense that they feature a police captain who is black and openly gay and all his colleagues go around strenuously behaving as if he is just one of the guys… and yet it seems that in today’s climate, where such things are to be taken as perfectly normal and okay, nobody minds using the kind of language that would get them kicked out of my house (I would have said any civilized house, but these days I won’t bet any more) in a jiffy: bosom friends of both sexes loudly calling each other ‘you bitches’ and ‘you whores’, for instance, and constantly, casually, referring to the act of fornication the way middle-class Bengalis exchange notes about their bowel movements! What is the world coming to?

It’s been a long time since I wrote stories. I wish I hadn’t got writer’s block. In which connection, my mother and I have been listening to Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s Sadashib stories on Youtube. I didn’t know that B. wrote them in 1957, at Rajshekhar Basu’s request (look up this blogpost from ten years ago). I was born in 1963, so when my mother first told them to me, they were pretty new! And what lovely stories too… Bandyopadhyay could give Conan Doyle a run for his money if they had a level playing field. They are so cinematic: why hasn’t that occurred to the directors who are obsessed with Byomkesh?

I read in today’s newspaper that they are going to start daily flights to Mumbai from Durgapur from June, and Chennai flights will follow. So that’s one of my wishes coming true. And I have bought a hookah in Delhi and just started getting used to it. I might eventually install one in my classroom. Some people have been urging me to revive my pipe too…

This post was just to tell people who phone or email or send ‘How are you doing?’ messages on Whatsapp. It bores me to repeat myself, so to the likes of them, keep an eye on this blog.

Browsers, Netflix, books

Google’s Big Brother-type surveillance of all my activities on the Net has begun to bother me seriously. I don’t know how aware my readers are about what they do, but believe me, ‘intrusive’ does not begin to describe it. And even if they are doing it for a very innocuous purpose, like profiling me so they can send me ‘tailor-made’ ads only, I don’t like it at all: it seems I can’t call my life my own any more, they don’t want anything called privacy to be left in this world.

Others – many others, including a lot of canny as well as savvy people – are beginning to be equally worried. And they have begun to take remedial steps, and advising us about it. I have started listening to them.

For starters, I am using the Mozilla Firefox browser along with the Duckduckgo search engine on my computer now, and the latter browser on my mobile phone for choice. These promise a higher order of privacy, at least, if not something perfect. I haven’t uninstalled the Chrome browser yet, but I might, and soon. 

If you subscribe to Netflix, I would urge you strongly to watch the new documentary series Our Planet, with voiceover by the redoubtable David Attenborough. Even oldtimers, who like me hugely enjoyed his old BBC presentation The Living Planet should love it, for the truly spectacular visuals if nothing else. And I was glad to hear the few words of commendation that India received for her efforts at wildlife conservation in Season One, Episode Five.

Summer has set in in right earnest. Can’t complain: it was balmy right till the beginning of April, thanks to a spate of nor’westers. Today is the second day of the Bengali New Year, and my swimming session began today. Thank God for swimming pools and airconditioners! The older I grow, the more I hate the heat. If I were lucky, I would be able to spend the whole summer in the hills…

New academic session, too, and I have my hands full, as usual. Not far to go before I am sixty, and I can finally, officially declare that I am a senior citizen and ready to go into semi-retirement! More and more old boys are accosting me on the street, asking with great concern ‘What is going to happen to my kid?’

The general elections are round the corner, but there seems to be a strange apathy in the air this time: only the media are crying themselves hoarse over what the public has apparently decided to be a non-issue. I wonder why.

My old boy Sayan Bhattacharya has just published a new book, Ancient Cities of India. You can locate it here. I wish him luck with his readership.

I am amused to see that the old post on Rani Rashmoni has climbed back into the most-read posts list, after briefly vanishing. Who knows what brings so many readers (back?) to it!

Readers in Bangalore

I often see that two or three people have been reading this blog simultaneously from Bangalore. I know one or two old boys are among them that I am fond of - Aritra Roy and Subhadip Dutta, to name just two; maybe Nishant Chaudhary and Nishant Kamath's parents as well, and some others who haven't told me. Many ex students have said "If you stand at the MG Road crossing for an hour, a dozen of us are sure to bump into you." But most of them wouldn't dream of 'wasting' their time reading my blog, I'm sure. 

A thought that gives me the creeps: is the person - a female - whom I despise more than any other creature in the world, also among those visitors to this blog? Ugh!