Knowledge, science, governance - and minds

Suppose one has learnt quite a bit of high-school/junior college physics, meaning he knows all about things like Newton’s laws and equations of motion, Archimedes’ principle and Pascal’s law and equations that govern the behaviour of mirrors and lenses, and the propagation of sound, and the basics of thermodynamics and electromagnetism and even the way atoms are supposed to be built and to behave – is that knowledge enough to understand all there is to chemistry? Any modern chemist would say no, while acknowledging that much of his domain overlaps with the physicist’s territory: still, you cannot pronounce on the way acids and bases interact to form an enormous variety of salts on the basis of the laws of physics alone, nor how organic compounds transmute from one category to another under the influence of specific chemicals, temperatures, pressures and catalysts, nor how very large compounds, such as amino acids and proteins, can be synthesized and modified. That is why a separate subject called chemistry still exists, and shows no imminent signs of dying out.

When you move on to the study of life – from the composition, structure and organization of individual cells to the specific study of the character and behaviour of tissues and organs and complex organ systems, meaning particular living species, and given that there are uncounted millions of incredibly different living species on earth from bacteria and diatoms to giant trees and whales and homo sapiens itself, it goes without saying that, though physics is still believed to be the most rigorous, determinate, fundamental Queen of the Sciences, and the study of modern biology is sought to be grounded in a good understanding of physics and chemistry, no biologist or medical researcher will dream of asserting that a good grasp of physics or even chemistry alone will equip you to understand life and its infinite variety and complexity: however unsatisfactorily descriptive, non-rigorous, non-mathematical the biological sciences are, they still exist in their own right, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. A ‘Theory of Everything’, that elusive Holy Grail of physics, even if attained someday, will not take you very far in becoming a good student of evolution or a competent doctor. It is wise to keep this in mind, despite the fact that most physicists sneer at the ‘lesser sciences’.

Our doctors, though they are (for most of the time) dealing with only our bodies – the material part of ourselves, hence most accessible to science as we understand it – are most of the time acutely aware, moreover, that we have something called minds (many biologists would claim that so do many other animals, like elephants, dolphins, chimps, pigs and horses, though admittedly of a far less complex and less multitalented sort), and the mind, though centred in the brain but spread throughout the body via the senses and an unthinkably complicated network of neuro-chemical connections, is so inextricably intertwined with everything the body does and feels that it is almost impossible to treat any really serious malaise, from accident-related trauma to heart disease, without involving the mind in the process. And the mind (as Yudhishthir averred two millennia ago and Asimov concurred a few decades ago, the single most complex piece of organized matter in the universe), still for the most part defies comprehension and conscious, rational control, though the cleverest of men having been trying to understand it for thousands of years. Psychology studies it most directly (alongwith, lately, neuroscience, using fMRI brain scanners), but so have all religions (and their insights are not to be ignorantly scoffed at). From what I have read of history, sociology, economics and politics, they are all diverse ways of studying the same thing, and after millennia of effort, no expert in any one of these fields can claim to have anything more than a partial picture, each often having special techniques of distorting and caricaturing the reality in its effort ot make it manageable and comprehensible (economics, especially of the mathematical variety, would fall flat unless it assumes the pathetic hyper-simplification that Man is nothing but a machine coldly calculating pleasure, pain, profit and loss all the time). That should give us some idea of how complicated the subject matter is. Literature (including, very importantly, biographies) and cinema, moreover, are very powerful ways of not only trying to understand the human mind but to explore its seemingly limitless creative powers. As the Bard said, ‘What a piece of work is Man!’, he himself being a prime exemplar.

It is with this mind that we compose Thus Spake Zarathustra, and sculpt Madonnas, and write Hamlet, and work out e equals m times c squared, and love and hate and laugh and learn and dream. It is with this mind that I long for God (who is this ‘I’? Is it an illusion? Does it mean anything? Where is it located? Is it coterminous with the body and bodily life? Why are some few minds so immeasurably more powerful than the rest? Do collective minds exist?...). It is this I which is reflecting while writing this essay…

The long and short of it is, even a fairly good grasp of the fundamental sciences, physics and chemistry, gives you little or no understanding of what is, or should be, the most important thing of interest to all of us, that which, individually as well as collectively, shapes and guides our destiny.

If this is accepted to be true, isn’t it a frightening thing that of late those who are guiding the fates of nations, heads of governments and CEOs of giant corporations, have very little education outside of one or the other of the sciences?

Don’t we need much more broadly educated people at the helm of affairs than we have right now? And doesn’t that beg the question, what does being ‘educated’ mean?

Just thinking. Swarnava, it is budding physicists like you who give me the courage to wonder publicly like this, those who, despite loving their own subjects, already know that ‘this is not all there is’. Who know and respect and wonder over the fact that some of the greatest insights in science, too, come in dreams…

Travelling, on holiday

Ever since the heady days of childhood silliness ended, I have always been quite sure that if you want to really enjoy a cricket match (as distinct from the primitive tribal intoxication of participating in artificially stirred-up crowd madness), you should watch it in your drawing room - or, better still, bedroom - on TV. You will get closeups, and multiple angles, and expert commentary (with the added blessing of being able to turn that off anytime they get on your nerves), without ever stirring yourself, or having to jostle with hordes of noisy and sweaty people, getting your feet trodden upon, your shirt torn or your pocket picked or your bottom pinched if you are female. If you are watching a pre-recorded video, that is better still, for you can pause it when you are bored or have something urgent to attend to, then come back and resume where you left off when it suits you again.

Visiting the Taj Mahal for the fourth and, I hope, the last time, I had exactly the same feeling. The crowds are getting more insufferable by the decade; videos on YouTube give you the same tour without the expense and the hassle, and any good coffee table book (there are hundreds available) will offer you a treasury of beautiful photographs most of which you will never be able to see with your own eyes, and certainly not in one visit - such as from the air and from the river, at dawn, afternoon and on moonlit nights. Likewise, thanks to some old boys, I have been seeing lovely photos of several different countries, including, most recently, Serbia and Austria, and while I am thankful to them, I am quite sure that I'd not like to spend several lakhs to visit the same. For me, pictures and videos are good enough: one who can see sees with his mind. It's like people telling me that you can't really enjoy watching TV unless you have a jumbo flatscreen. Just because they can't doesn't mean that I can't either. As for the 'been there done that' crowd on Instagram, they can keep on entertaining their own little captive audiences: I know for a fact that that usually means only family and a handful of office colleagues, unless you are a serious celebrity. And visiting someplace like the Vatican City (see this video) is worth it - for me, at least - only if I were some VVIP or super-billionaire, for whom they would make exclusive arrangements, no ordinary tourists allowed while I am taking in the sights... if I simply want to stare hungrily and worshipfully at Michelangelo's Pieta, to my mind the greatest sculpture ever made bar none, I can do it here well enough.

At Itimad-ud-Daula's tomb, the real attraction was the tiny museum, where they have set up lovely videos that show you everything much better than walking around the campus can. In fact, the mausoleum looks much better on the screen than in reality: evidently all the renovation and refurbishing has been done only digitally! What made me sad was that all the squirrels have vanished.

Sikandra made me sigh, as always. That fellow Akbar speaks to something truly deep in me: it's like reading In Search of England. Never fails to bring to mind Kipling's magnificent poem. That one, and Gunga Din. And the novel Kim, and the incredible short story titled The Miracle of Puran Bhagat. But I must live in an age when asses with PhDs know that Kipling did not respect India, and Dickens was such a pathetic misogynist....

It would be remiss of me if I did not mention Sandip Solanki, young owner of Indian Homestay and garrulous biker. Though ma and Shilpi rolled their eyes when he claimed that he too has been a teacher of English in his time, I loved the way he and his wife Asha hosted us. God bless. If Durgapur had been a hot tourist destination, I certainly would have run a similar facility on the side.

Pujo has been wonderful. Because I didn't have to see or even hear any of it. Pupu, who is just back from Kolkata, has said দূর থেকে কল্পনা করতে ভারি ভালো লাগে !

P.S., Oct. 09: Another of my dreams fulfilled. I had a wonderful time today, hosting lunch for Pupu and her lovely young colleagues at their office. Ma and Shilpi were there too. My cup runneth over...

Oh, and do look up what my daughter wrote recently about 'Adulting'. I have written about lots of things in my time, but never about this. I somehow became adult without ever finding time to think about it :(

Gandhi, 150 years

Albert Einstein said 'Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.'

In Lage Raho Munnabhai, he says at the end 'Soch lo... do you want to listen to what I am telling you to do, or prefer to sit below my hallowed portrait on the wall and do the most despicable things?'

And this time round, all the political parties are vying frantically with one another to claim him as their exclusive inheritance.

Remember, Tagore first called him 'Mahatma', and Subhas Bose habitually addressed him as 'Father of the Nation'.

Meanwhile, senior journalist Sankarshan Thakur wrote this article in today's edition of The Telegraph of Kolkata. He is the one with whose my own views concur, most darkly. You won't remember me, Sankarshan-da, but we sort of rubbed shoulders once. Thank you.

Mahalaya again

আজ আবার মহালয়া। আকাশ মেঘাচ্ছন্ন, ভোরবেলা থেকে বৃষ্টি হচ্ছে, কখনো টিপটিপ, কখনো ঝিরঝির।  তিন-চার দিন ধরে এই চলছে, তাই হাওয়াটা বেশ ঠান্ডা, জলটা কনকনে - এরকম মহালয়া আগে কখনো দেখেছি বলে মনে পড়ে না। 

আবহাওয়া দপ্তর বলছে পুজোর দিনেও বৃষ্টি হবে। নতুন খবর নয় অবশ্য; গত কয়েক বছর ধরে এরকমটাই হচ্ছে। হোক, আমার আপত্তি নেই - রাস্তায় কিছুটা হলেও মানুষের বাঁদরামি কমবে, আর তাছাড়া আমি তো এখানে থাকছিও না! শীতকালটা যদি একটু তাড়াতাড়ি আসে তাতেই আমি খুশি। এবারে গ্রীষ্ম শুধু পাগল করে দিতে বাকি রেখেছিলো। 

এই দিনে আমি জন্মেছিলাম। ছাপ্পান্ন বছর হয়ে গেলো! মা বলছিলো সেবছর নাকি দুবার দুর্গাপুজো হয়েছিল। খুবই আশ্চর্য ব্যাপার হয়ে থাকবে - আমার জীবনকালে আর একবারও দেখিনি। 

বাবা চলে গেলো তাও দুবছর হল। কোথায় আছে কেমন আছে কে জানে। আমি তো লোকদেখানো আচার-অনুষ্ঠান করি না, তা এই আমার তর্পণ। আমার মেয়েও আমার জন্য ফি-বছর এইটুকু করলেই হবে। 

বহু ছবি স্মৃতির পর্দায় সরে সরে যায়। তবে অনেক ছবিই ঝাপসা, অনেক ছবি ময়লা, কদর্য। সেসব যদি মুছে ফেলতে পারতাম তাহলে আজকের এই অনেক পরিশ্রম, অনেক ধৈর্য, অনেক প্রার্থনালব্ধ আত্মপ্রসাদটা আরো নিষ্কলুষ হতো - সেটুকুই যা আক্ষেপ। তা নাহলে বলতেই হয়, বেশ আছি। 

Writing on the wall

Two years ago, in a dark and anxious mood, I wrote a post here titled Farewell to Tagore? Do look it up. And in this connection, read Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri's very bitter satire in today's newspaper regarding how dangerous it is becoming to read and quote and swear by Tagore these days. History repeats itself in very unexpected and sinister ways...

But as I said before, I actually wonder about a far deeper malaise. Does this entire country - or at least that vast part of our population which is below 35 - care? And the way they have been brought up, does civilization and culture mean anything to them at all, anything worth respecting and preserving? Whether I look at youngsters 'living it up' in pubs or politicians of all hues bickering like the most vulgar of riffraff in our most august institutions, universities and legislatures, I tend to think not.

Besides, who says that we must lament because the liberal-democratic ethos is under threat from authoritarianism of various hues? My view, which has been hardening over the last two decades at least, is that liberalism was a very big lie anyway, always was: they are liberal only when they can have their own way, unchallenged. So whether they are free traders or feminists or gays or vegans or environmental activists or whatever, and however loudly they scream from the rooftops about their commitment to the sacredness of personal freedoms and the right to free thought and expression, when the chips are down they only allow you the freedom to agree entirely with them - and if that is not intolerant authoritarianism in the flimsiest disguise, what is? Now one of my strongest beliefs stemming from a close reading of old and contemporary history is that when any ideology inclines too far towards insanity, it invariably provokes insanity of the reverse kind in reaction. So now all over the world a lot of straightforward strong men (mostly men, yes) unfettered by sympathetic consciences have begun to call a spade a spade, and are going all out for a return to honest, in your face authoritarianism - the way the world has been run for millennia, actually. Who pretends to be surprised, and why?

Still more cars and bikes?

I am now getting fed to the gills over the collective breast beating in the media about the slump in automobile sales. There’s so much stupidity, ignorance, bad faith, sheer cussedness and hidden agenda sloshing around in the muck that it is enough to make any sane man want to throw up.

First, they are terribly worried that the slump in auto sales – which now apparently makes up half the organized manufacturing sector – is a sign of deep rooted malaise in the economy as a whole. The GDP growth rate is slowing down, and that is apparently an unquestionably BAD THING. Who says so, and why should an economy keep growing very fast endlessly? It’s not as if we are not growing at all; in fact, even the worst doomsayers are admitting that we are still growing at almost 5% per year, which is much faster than we managed for the four and half decades before 1991, and much faster than all the richest economies are managing to do; as the GDP keeps growing bigger, it becomes increasingly harder to maintain the same growth rate year on year, as anyone with basic common sense and primary school math ought to understand (5% of 10,000 is a much bigger figure to attain than 5% of 100!) – obviously journalists don’t fall into that category;  that a single sector slowdown could so badly affect the overall growth rate should be a matter of worry and shame (why have all other sectors taken together, including that darling of the pinhead millennial generation, smartphones, failed to shoulder a bigger part of the burden?), and why do we still not understand that limitless high growth in a finite world might actually be a deadly disease (in the human body it is called cancer)?

Who are the people who are predicting doomsday – mindless journalists apart? One class is those who are unthinking votaries of the endless growth ideal: I have already mentioned them, and I’ll come back to them shortly. Another is those who pretend that their hearts are bleeding over job losses, though the much more likely fact is that they stand to lose vast fortunes because they hold huge chunks of shares in auto companies (the billionaire quoted in The Telegraph report could well be a case in point): it makes me sick to see tycoons shedding crocodile tears over the loss of some of the most miserable jobs in the country (recall the complaints of the workers who went on strike at a Maruti-Suzuki plant a few years ago). The third is those who were thrilled to bits that we had grown a very large auto manufacturing industry, imagining in their blissful ignorance that that would mean being recognised by the world as a technologically ‘advanced’ country, though the fact is that all the technology we use in our factories, from engines to windscreen wipers, is borrowed and copied from foreign sources, German or Japanese, Korean or French: what we do is what they disdainfully refer to as ‘screwdriver technology’, merely putting together according to their instructions what they have imagined, designed, tested and put on the roads. The fourth would be those who will happily wield any stick to beat the Modi government with: it’s all that wretched man’s fault, and he’s going to ruin us all! I don’t carry a brief for him, and I don’t think very highly of the way he is running the country, but this is reaching absurd proportions. They make believe that all our previous PMs were paragons of virtue as well as competence, and that is very, very far from the truth! Suppose there had been twitter in the era of Deve Gowda or Charan Singh?

Why do we need to keep on producing endless millions of cars and two wheelers every year? When shall we start giving a thought to how they are clogging up every street and alley, how they have made traffic jams an insufferable permanent feature of life in every city, how they are killing and maiming hundreds of thousands every year, how much they are polluting the air, how they have caused our oil import bill to balloon, how dependence on them instead of on foot and bicycles and the like is leading to an obesity epidemic, and how most cars, countless surveys show, stand around idly on roads or in garages or parking lots for most of the time?

I should argue that it is a good thing that the demand for private motor vehicles of all sorts is slowing down. I hope it is a permanent phenomenon. The slowdown might not be directly a result of an overall economic slump at all, but due to the fact that demand has reached a saturation point. As it is, we know that demand has been artificially pumped by criminally lax traffic control laws and too-easy credit, quietly encouraged by governments hungry for tax revenue, coupled with the fact that from Audis to Bajaj Pulsars, cars and bikes have been status symbols cutting across all social divisions for a long time. So every fly-by-night businessman wants to flaunt a fancy limousine as much as every slum-dwelling unemployed young son of a rickshawallah wants to zoom around on his own two wheeler, with all the nasty consequences listed above. Who will gain from that continuing endlessly? And perhaps the steam is running out of that artificially-inflated demand balloon – perhaps the bad loans are now piling up too fast for the banks to keep dangling the carrot of cheap loans any more? And perhaps there are too many fancy cars and bikes on the roads already for them to be aspirational any longer? As the banker Uday Kotak has wisely counselled the auto industry, they should start thinking seriously of other kinds of business, because cars are no longer an aspiration in this country: even his own son, a billionaire’s heir, apparently finds it much more sensible to depend on Uber and the like.

I have long cried myself hoarse saying that so far as transportation – especially road transportation – is concerned, a poor, congested, oil scarce, socially undisciplined country like ours should have followed the European or Japanese model of development, and most certainly not the grossly wasteful American one. Alas, we chose to do just the reverse, and we are now reaping the bitter harvest. But maybe we are beginning to learn some lessons at last. All future developments in India in this sphere should be aimed singlemindedly at improving public transport all round (everything from a/c buses to metro rail to Uber/Ola to e-rickshaws), and discouraging private vehicles so strenuously that they gradually become extinct. The overall social benefits would be so huge as to be nearly incalculable.

As for those who think that a slowing GDP-growth rate is the worst of all imaginable evils, I can only click my tongue with pity and contempt, and tell them to go and read books like J.K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society or Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics. For a long time, we have needed redistribution much more than endless growth: those who will not listen simply don’t deserve to be reasoned with.  

Addendum to the 'Population Bomb' post

If India’s population could have been held down even to the 1971 level (around 550 million – which would be gigantic by any standards already), we could have been two and half times richer per capita as we are today at the current GDP level, which would have put us firmly among the middle-income countries in the world. Reflect on that, please?

There would not have been the kind of unthinkably huge unemployment, underemployment and disguised unemployment problem as we have today: two million plus candidates sitting for school service qualifying exams when there are just a few hundred or at best few thousand vacancies, and people so desperate to get jobs with a modicum of security, even with very modest salaries, that MBAs and PhDs routinely apply for teaching positions in primary school, or as peons and clerks in government offices, knowing that there are tens of millions who are far worse off, cleaning sewers manually, hauling building materials at construction sites for a pittance, or working as virtually bonded labour, whether that be for old fashioned roadside eateries, vehicle repair workshops and domestic service or with new fangled body shoppers like Amazon. Only those who have lived mollycoddled and secure lives insured by their parents – that would be barely 10% of the population – can live in denial of this elephant in the room. I am ashamed to think that 99% of my ex students belong to that category!

We are still producing nearly 50,000 babies a day (half the babies born on the planet are Indian: did you know that?), adding anything between 4 and 12 million to the job-seeker army every year, on top of the vast existing army of the unemployed, mind you – no country, not the ones with the best technology, most capital, brightest ideas and most intense political will can keep on creating jobs for that kind of number year on year – as both Amit Shah and Mamata Banerjee have publicly admitted in their more candid and despairing moments. We are happily oblivious that we are sitting on a recipe for surefire social disaster: an enormous number of this virally growing army is sure to turn to every kind of unsocial and antisocial behaviour, from beggary to crime and organised political thuggery, just because those are the only ‘careers’ open to them, until our country becomes entirely dysfunctional, where nobody except the biggest tycoons (a few ten thousand people in a land of 1.4+ billion) can keep their lives, dignity and property safe any more. It takes a very special faculty to be blind to the fact that this is already happening!

One of the stupidest excuses I hear is ‘why should we mend our ways when the rich western countries are eating so much more and polluting so much more?’ I have grown tired over four decades as a teacher telling little children that pointing fingers at others’ misdemeanours never takes away your responsibility for correcting your own. Even if that contrary argument were true, 60-65 million Germans, however hard they try, cannot drink more water or shit more than 1400 million Indians do! As I have often said in many other contexts, you can be so open-minded that your brains fall out.

As for the old canard that India continues perpetually to be ‘rich’ in natural resources, this is either so ignorant and naïve or so bloody-minded that I hate to even engage with it. One simply needs to look up hard data from the best sources to find out what population pressure has already done to our forests and wildlife and groundwater reserves and soil fertility, and what the most conservative projections show for 2040-50 if we still merrily go the way we are going.

Finally, addressing the request that I should take cognizance of the ‘many other serious problems’ that we are supposedly facing – such as endemic corruption in politics and government at all levels – I would like my detractors to name three which do not either stem directly from overpopulation or are grossly exacerbated and sometimes made totally intractable because of it (the inability of governments in the most densely populated states to acquire land for the most urgently needed public projects, from hospitals to roads, is a glaring case in point).

Ultimately, if it all boils down to the fact that there are lots of supposedly educated people around, even among my readers, who have already closed their minds and will not be swayed by fact and reason, I am all the more convinced, most gloomily, that we are fated for a very nasty future.

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.