About luck, again

I notice that it is nearly twenty years since I started scribbling (or rather, typing) these musings in my diary. I was 38 then, I am going on 58 now. My daughter was virtually a baby then, she is very much a grown woman today. Over these last two decades, I have been musing often and again over the role that luck plays in our lives. Of all things, reading Thomas Picketty’s unlikely classic Capital in the 21^st century set me thinking about how luck has affected my life so far, and how it is likely to in the days to come.

 

I, for one, believe ever more strongly with every passing year that luck (or fate, or God’s will, call it what you like) plays a crucial role in everybody’s life (some are born to über rich parents in advanced countries, some are born severely handicapped, some see their lives and/or savings destroyed by war and inflation) – and this, without giving up the firm conviction that every person ought to take some responsibility for his own life, and do his utmost to achieve certain aims he considers worthwhile. And so far as I am concerned, I can look back and see how strongly luck has affected my life, for better as well as for worse.

 

I have been lucky that

 

1.      I have lived so long. In India, it’s hardly something that can be taken for granted!

2.      I have been reasonably healthy and whole for so long: so many people become handicapped, ill or decrepit pretty early in life.

3.      I have had my parents around, fit and active for so long (so many people lose one or both in their youth, or have to carry them as helpless burdens).

4.      I have never had to do disgusting things (like crime, flattery, servility or some essentially mindless, pointless job) for a living, and I have on the whole greatly enjoyed what brought me and my family our daily bread.

5.      My daughter was born healthy and whole, I have been able to give her a good upbringing, all things considered (and absolutely delighted in it) and now she is an active, self-supporting adult.

6.      She still loves and respects me in very apparent ways, and even listens to me most of the time!

7.      A lot of people have tried to hurt me, and many have cheated me, financially, socially and emotionally, but no one ever managed to do really serious damage.

8.      I have been able to indulge my hobbies – reading, writing, watching movies, counselling people, sleeping a great deal, relishing good food, living in quiet, clean and safe surroundings, walking, swimming, travelling for pleasure – for so many years.

9.      I can still quickly strike a good rapport with youngsters in large numbers.

10.  The pandemic did not seriously hurt me!

 

… and I can easily add several items to that list without having to think too much. That was just to show that I am not a habitual whiner; indeed, many honest readers will admit that I attribute an uncommonly great deal to good luck for the way my life has worked out, instead of taking credit for everything I have ‘achieved’. Therefore, when I list some ways in which bad luck has troubled me, no one should decide that I am wallowing in self-pity.

I think I have been a victim of bad luck in the sense that

1.      Despite my parents being more than normally good people, I had a very lonely and insecure childhood, the scars of which still trouble my dreams, and, I think, have made me more permanently stressed and melancholy than I might have been.

2.      If my father had made better practical decisions when he had the choice – and he had far more than I ever did – my life could have turned out to be very different, though I am not saying necessarily better.

3.      If my immediate boss and the super-boss at the newspaper had not almost simultaneously resigned and left just when I was beginning to grow wings, I might have been a heavyweight senior journalist hobnobbing with VVIPs and pontificating on TV and syndicated columns in return for vast paychecks today: again, I’m not saying that would have been ‘better’.

4.      If all those hundreds of old boys and girls who once gushed over me had kept in touch and spread the word around, I would have been a celebrity today. I was just not destined for that sort of thing.

5.      If I had figured out much earlier that that schoolmaster’s job was simply wasting my life, I’d have been a much richer man today.

6.      So too if inflation had not remained consistently high and interest rates had not fallen so much over the last decade and more – things entirely beyond a single ordinary man’s control, and therefore attributable only to bad luck.

7.      So too that I live in a country where there is virtually no social security for ageing self-employed persons like me (though they number in the hundreds of millions), and that I fall in the same income tax bracket as the richest tycoons, who earn thousands of times as much as I do!

 

There have been one or two other things besides, which I do not wish to bring up on a public platform. Or maybe I will, when I am too old to care.

Enough of cribbing. I have always liked to look ahead. So here’s a list of things I wonder about when I imagine  how luck might affect me in the years to come.

1.      Will I be fit and active for quite some time yet?

2.      Will I live long enough to be a grandfather, and be one half as good as my grandfather was?

3.      Will I find one or two good friends in my declining years?

4.      Will I be able to live out my old age in at least modest security and comfort?

5.      Will my passing be quick and easy?

6.      Will I be remembered by some, or forgotten almost instantly?

 

I really do think that no matter what I choose to do from here onwards, it is chiefly luck that is going to decide those answers for me.

P.S.: It is always a pleasure to see some old posts coming back into the most-read list: A most frightening prospect (how the issue has dated and faded from public memory, just as I had sardonically predicted!), A girl who admired her teacher (nothing has changed in all these years) and What sort of person am I? Do look up some of the comments on those posts too: they make interesting reading.

(something's the matter with the line spacing. Readers, please excuse)

Another story

For those who have been asking for more: have you read Satyajit Ray's Septopaser khide? Otherwise, listen to me reading it out here.

Dark days far from gone!

Joe Biden took over as the post-madness President of the United States today. We must not forget, though, that far more serious than Donald Trump the individual is the long-developing phenomenon that brought him to power and the legacy that he is leaving behind.

It is a fact that the inclusive, altruistic, cooperative, farsighted movement in human affairs with a pronounced concern for improving the condition of long-disadvantaged people (from the poor to Blacks, women and the LGBT tribe) started ebbing all over the world after the 1960s, and was rapidly rolled back ever since the rise of the Reagan-Thatcher consensus (conservative in social values, free capitalistic in economic conviction) in the west coupled with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the sharp turn of China towards a no-holds-barred materialistic/acquisitive/me-first culture around the same time (India more or less tamely followed suit, with no strong and separate ideology to guide us: real thinkers with constructive visions of the stature of Rammohun,Vivekananda, Gandhi and Tagore had stopped coming into the limelight a long time ago).That rather drastic shift did pay rich dividends, partly because the formerly mentioned movement had betrayed too many ideals, leaving behind a whole range of negative reactions from terror and horror  to merely a bad taste in the mouth, and partly because the opposite  effort sharply improved living conditions for a vast chunk of the human population within about thirty years, along with making billionaires by the hundreds and millionaires by the hundred thousand – the latter naturally got a huge stake in the new dispensation to want to do their utmost to keep it going unchallenged.

However, from the time that seminal book Globalization and its discontents was written (and actually much before that, as readers of J.K. Galbraith and Robert Lekachman know), it started becoming plain to the most clear-eyed observers of world affairs that all was not well with us. a) The physical environment was becoming rapidly and dangerously polluted as an unfortunate but apparently unavoidable spinoff of the kind of high-consumption lifestyles that more and more people were adopting; b) crime and social dysfunction proliferated, even at the family level, everywhere in the world as more and more people insisted that freedom and democracy meant not civilized negotiation, gradual compromise and quiet living but an aggressive attitude of grabbing, self-advertizing and thrusting forward in every sphere of life – every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost began to be taught as ‘wisdom’ in virtually every business school, not just in criminal gangs; c) people by the hundred million, feeling cheated, rootless, culturally disoriented, utterly insecure about the future in a scenario of ultra-rapid change (change which visibly and grossly benefited the already privileged), began to be attracted more and more to every kind of religious demagoguery that promised meaning and stability and community and certainty of better things ahead (even if that meant martyrdom as a terrorist!); and to control all this flux and chaos, d) more and more it became obvious that authoritarian rulers offering neo-fascist dispensations and miracle cures were becoming popular all over the world: they alone were confident of where they were going, they alone knew all the answers, they alone could lead their country towards a new heaven on earth. Their shrill, hyper-exaggerated (and plain lying-) messages were intensively, ceaselessly propagated to their increasingly blind and devoted followers through the bullhorns of social media, which gave them direct, continuous and relentless access to tens of millions of people in a way that Orwell would have marvelled at, and it became the despair of the regular, old-fashioned mass media which decided to become ever more noisy, trivial and sensationalistic to stay relevant. It is against this background that the rise of Donald Trump has to be understood, along with so many other ‘strong men’ all over the world.

It is one of my pet theories – buttressed by a lifetime of close observation and reflection – that any kind of excess in social manners and mores invariably provokes an excessive reaction in the opposite direction. Also, that nobody has the whole truth, nor does anybody tell the whole truth as s/he knows the truth all the time. If you accept these two premises, you will agree with me that democracy, if it is to remain healthy and effective, must always function in the spirit of tolerant debate, adjustment and compromise, consciously avoiding all extreme positions, every participant willing to obey the basic rules and to accept the majority decision taken without threat or coercion – however unpalatable or unsatisfactory it appears to him or her personally. Now a lot of people might dislike my saying this, but that does not change the fact that in the name of change and progress and improvement, far too many people of too many different persuasions have pushed the limits of civilized discourse too far for too long. To take a few examples, those who call themselves liberal democrats in the US and secular liberals in India have, all the while paying lip service to the ideals of democracy and free speech and tolerance, insisted that they alone are always right, and all those who disagree with them must be derided, shouted down, isolated and if possible ostracized, put beyond the pale. Therefore you are instantly branded racist if you so much as mumble that a lot of black people do take to drugs and crime too easily, and need to be dealt with firmly by the law, though never abused; you immediately and forever become a sexist if you dare to say publicly that women can be bad people too; you are instantly branded a religious bigot if you point to statistics which show that members of a certain religious community take to violent terrorism far more than others; they shut you out completely as a heretic if you suggest that capitalism (or socialism, depending on which circle you are rubbing shoulders with) might have a lot of faults; why, they call you a grammar Nazi if you insist on the importance of correct and polite language! ‘(I have every right to mangle a language as much as I please’). Notice, those who take most pride in calling themselves enlightened and civilized created this atmosphere: ‘You only have the right to agree with me: free speech for me/us/what is politically correct right now, not for anyone else’. How dare you say you don’t particularly thrill at the idea of homosexual love, when we in our own little ghetto have decided to worship it?

Top this off with the increasingly ominous development, hugely exacerbated by social media (which have become a major phenomenon only in the current century), that most people neither know nor respect facts any more. Democracy, or indeed any form of civilized discourse and decision making, depends crucially upon people basing their opinions on reason and facts. Now facts have always been difficult to ascertain, fluid and protean: science in the broadest sense has tried to, and hugely succeeded in, widening the ambit of facts that we can be more or less sure of, but, while its success with the natural world has been truly remarkable (physics, chemistry, even biology), the application of the scientific method to social affairs has been far less so. Things have not been improved by the fact that there are far too many ‘experts’ around on every subject these days muddying the waters, so that any fool of a bigot can call upon any number of experts to buttress his opinions, however far-fetched they may be (learn from the pandemic-scare experience). So there are still endless debates over simply what the facts are: are women really weaker than men, are Blacks really lazier and stupider and more criminal minded than whites, are Muslims intrinsically more fanatical and violent than others, are most Mexicans rapists and drug dealers, did China spread the virus to terrorize and dominate the rest of the world? And as these questions have become more and more politicized, so have the debates grown more heated, more acrimonious. The confusion is worse confounded by the fact that more and more people base their opinions on social media inputs (which are known to spread deliberate misinformation with mischievous intent), naively accepting the most extreme opinions disguised as facts most likely to be true, which makes for a very volatile, very explosive situation.

Now consider a third most unhappy development over the last generation: the kind of ‘democratic, egalitarian’ education that has been dished out to hundreds of millions of young people all over the relatively-free world was designed to insanely boost everybody’s self-esteem: everyone was talented, everyone had great potential, everyone could be tycoon, rock star or president; nobody could be called stupid, lazy, delinquent, undisciplined or unsocial any more (especially if he has made big money!). Everybody is, or has to be, a winner, no matter whether that is in a school track race or in a race for the Nobel Prize (people were encouraged to forget that winners need losers much more than losers need them: you can’t win something unless one or many others have lost!) Teachers’ criticism was muted by fiat, examination standards lowered and scores raised to absurd levels for the hoi polloi, at least up to the college level, so that Everyman could develop a swollen ego, brought up to think that they are all wonderful creatures and the world exists to serve their pleasure. No one, from street lumpen to cabinet minister, must say sorry and back down in acknowledgment of being wrong or unfair; self-assertion is the be all and end all. Just look around you, and maybe at the mirror, to check out whether I am right.

Then think quietly and calmly: what happens if this goes on for too long? All those who feel left out, cheated, marginalized, humiliated, even many gentle and reasonable folks among them, begin to yearn for a leader who would articulate their long-suppressed grievances, who would make the world look simple to negotiate again, who would restore at least some old-fashioned values (work hard, take responsibility, don’t abuse the elderly), greatly raise their self-esteem even if they didn’t deserve it, painlessly usher in either a return to a mythical, lost golden age (‘Make America great again’ is the war cry of a man who neither knows nor cares that America looked greatest in the world’s eyes just after she became the generous rehabilitator of half the world, having won a world war before that on behalf of tolerance and democracy!) or a new, crudely imagined heaven (where only upper caste Hindus prevail, or Bible Belt white Americans).

Donald Trump, like Hitler, did not appear out of thin air. Alas, we have stopped reading serious history – that is another great failure of the current era – or we would have known and recognized the processes by which such ‘leaders’ rise to power, over and over again. The most successful leaders, those who rise most meteorically, are the most cunning, most shameless, most callous and most opportunistic: they are guided solely by the raw will to power, and they know how best to knit together the angst of all the disparate disgruntled elements into a tsunami of reaction which will raise them to the throne. And if the volatile, explosive mix that I mentioned above lasts, Trump will be back again (remember, 70 million-plus voted for him still, after four disastrous years!), or someone even worse, because there will be vast numbers of fanatical idiots eager to raise him to power. Also remember, a lot of people manage to be content, if not actually happy, even under regimes like the Nazis and the Bolsheviks – until their nearest and dearest are put on the chopping block. As in ancient Rome, so in today’s world; as in the US, so in India. It bears worrying about.

P.S.: Nishant Kamath’s long comment on my last post on the subject clarifies a lot of things about how someone like Trump came to power. The book I am reading now, the latest from Pankaj Mishra (Bland Fanatics), goes some way to explain the phenomenon in greater detail (though of course I do not condone all his views), and also why it is not going to vanish with the departure of Donald Trump from the White House: the rot is very old, and runs too deep.

A most delightful evening

I hugely enjoy old boys dropping in for a chat, but I spend most evenings alone, or only one visitor like that turns up. So it was most exhilarating to see several of them knocking at my door today, one after another, just after my classes were over. There was one from the '94 batch, come to consult me about how his son should handle his studies, one favourite from the 2002 batch and another from 2007 who has almost become family, another from the the 2016 batch and another, 2019. We chatted gaily over cakes and coffee, and then went out together for my regular walk. It was all topped off by a phone call from Kolkata, someone else who has kept in touch ever since he left school in 1998. I wish I could enjoy more evenings like that: I'd have looked and felt fifteen years younger.

It was Swami Vivekananda's birthday today. Google ferrets out so many relatively obscure Indians with no very great claim to fame to feature on their doodles, but evidently he was not found worthy!

Trump: going, going, not yet gone...

‘Horrified’ is a word that falls far short of expressing what I felt when I heard that Hillary Clinton had lost the US presidential election in 2016, and that a creature like Donald Trump was going to occupy the Oval Office for the next four years. Unlike the vast majority of Indians, I have known something about him since the time he tried to build a casino called the Taj Mahal, you see, and along the way somehow became a billionaire most of whose businesses had failed.

‘How much must even American women voters hate Ms. Clinton?’ ‘What has gone wrong with their electoral process that this kind of candidate can be put up by either party and this kind of result produced?’ ‘Has a large part of America become so stupid, so vulgar, so violent, so embittered with their lot that they actually think a dirty rich, nearly uneducated (his vocabulary could give many of my current pupils a superiority complex), boorish hustler/con-man/thug with zero political experience will solve all their problems by waving some sort of magic wand?’ These were some of the questions that stormed through my mind when I first heard about it, even as I hunkered down to endure the next four years, gloomily aware of the sad fact that an American president can not only mess up his own country’s affairs but still seriously affect the rest of the world for better or for worse.

And I have not been disappointed, though I’d have been glad to be. This man has reduced the image of the US presidency to the dust (compared to him, earlier fools, duds and manipulators like Dubya Bush now look like sages and saints), predictably failed to solve any of the problems he had promised to solve (echoes of New Delhi since 2014?), and nearly demolished the whole edifice of American democracy as we knew it before losing out on a second term. I guess we should be glad that he did not precipitate a third world war: but maybe we have only his instinct for self-preservation at any cost to thank for it.

For the whole world, he has set new standards of in your face arrogance, shamelessness, mendacity, self-serving, and total deafness to the most reasonable and valid of criticisms. Also, about how to live perpetually in an echo chamber, listening to his own endless self-congratulation* over every fictitious or petty success (even stooping to highlight Modi’s campaigning for him!) when he is not gorging on the blind, ignorant adulation of his small but noisy cohort of fanatical, mostly redneck or wheeler dealer tycoon-supporters. The whole sorry fiasco of a term ended with a resounding defeat (70 million plus more Americans voted for Biden!), which, like a pathetic, very badly brought up child throwing tantrums he refused to concede in the face of the clearest of facts (or harking to ‘facts’ that only he and his ragtag army of devotees seemed to be aware of!), even in the face of a reprimand from as august an institution as the Supreme Court (loaded with a Republican majority of judges, too, some even of his own choosing), simply refusing to quit until very serious anxiety began to mount whether he would try to thwart the Inauguration of his legitimate successor and would become the first ever President to be physically arrested and dragged out of the White House by the police or the military – and maybe thrown forever into an asylum for the pathologically insane or feeble-minded.

At last, as many millions like me I’m sure were praying, he went too far. On the day the Congress was to meet to vote on whether to put the most sacrosanct stamp of certification on Biden’s election, he egged on a gang of armed goons calling themselves Republican supporters to besiege Capitol Hill and browbeat the legislators into stopping the certification process. There was some violence, some policemen and I think Congressmen were hurt or badly rattled, at least one person was killed by a police bullet while rioting, and then the vast majority of lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats alike, closed ranks to condemn them and ‘(the) injured pride of a selfish man’ (Republican Mitt Romney’s words) who had provoked them, unbothered about the momentous likely consequences. The Constitution and democracy were in danger, they decided promptly – democracy too easily degenerates into mob rule incited by mad demagogues, they remembered – and that was a far bigger concern than what Donald Trump wanted. So the rabble was taken care of, and the stamp of certification granted. In the face of that final ignominy, compounded by a sharp rebuke from his own vice President Mike Pence, the nut still in the hot seat has said there will be an orderly transition on January 20, though, like all losers who know they deserve to lose and cannot bear to face it, he says he still ‘totally disagrees with the outcome of the election’. Believe it or not, even Modi in a tweet has condemned this attitude, and twitter has locked his account in response to his latest barrage of flagrant lying claims of victory. (see this news article).

Now we can only hope he at least knows what a promise is, and that it is important to keep promises. I won’t be surprised if he forgets it completely by tomorrow, or threatens to hang himself from the White House front balcony instead of leaving – he is that sort of animal, he’d be thrilled to know that he made one final front-page-hogging splash before he vanished into richly-deserved oblivion. Also hope that, since it has been said that Trumpism, that hodgepodge of mad dreams of the sullen white trash in an economy in slow but terminal decline, will long outlive Trump, I pray that Biden will be at least halfway successful in bringing some peace, reconciliation, the spirit of decent compromise and collective enterprise with common goals back to America.

And for us, half a world away, it is high time to reflect on this sordid drama, and on what lessons we should learn from it before it is too late, in an India that is increasingly Bharat…

[P.S., Jan. 09: *Despite everything that has transpired lately, he has publicly called his own tenure 'the greatest presidential first term in history'. Of course, his followers are probably apes who could never have heard of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts or Kennedy, and he talks only to them. He has also firmly demanded in his last days in office that no 'disrespect', meaning arrest or prosecution, should be shown to the vandals and looters who had stormed the Capitol: in his eyes, only they are true patriots. Remember someone saying that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel?]

First post of 2021

One of many reasons why I find it increasingly difficult to write new posts on this blog is that I am more aware than ever before that I have serious readers of vastly differing mindsets – from what I know, my youngest reader is a fourteen year old boy in my own town, and the oldest is an eighty two year old woman in the south western part of the United States. How do you write things that might appeal to, or at least not bore, either of them?

I know I am repeating myself, but I cannot restate how delighted I am to be able to hold offline classes every day of the week again. And already, like the pain of a broken leg, the memory of how I survived those seven horrible months has faded into something that I just cannot remember in any detail, try as I might.

I am trying, after a very long time, to socialize again but with a caveat for myself (see last paragraph). And God be thanked, the experiences, few as yet, have been uniformly rewarding. Several old boys have conveyed a desire to look me up too, or done so already, so that’s there. Some of them, like a few favourite kids who are currently my students, have averred that it’s difficult because they find me ‘intimidating’: I wonder, could that really be true, and if so, why on earth?

It’s been freezing cold in Delhi for a while, and then it has been damp and rainy lately, while Durgapur is having rather mild weather, with the sun actually hot at midday. Very disappointing. I hope there will be one last chilly spell before the season turns, and that a few more flowers would bloom in my garden…

Thanks to Nilanjan Halder of the 2007 batch, I have got my hands on Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the twenty first century at last. For someone like me, it promises to be engrossing reading, all 750-odd pages of it. Here is a good, critical review of it already, though it's a bit dated.

My senior batch is likely to be dissolved at the end of January, along with the juniormost. So February and March are going to have a light work schedule again. I am not worrying, because the worst, touch wood, is past, and the vaccine (even if it has only a placebo effect, as is highly likely) is around the corner, so I am looking forward to a normal (fully offline) next session in April, or at most a month later. Before that, a longish sojourn in Delhi with my daughter again, perhaps, and even a little holiday trip thrown in.

Going on 58, I am actually looking forward to becoming a senior citizen with eager anticipation and relish. If only because, as this otherwise ghastly year has taught me, I can now afford to revv down to a lighter workload. From the next session onwards, I am going to shrink the size of my batches. At least I hope I can, if people would let me!

My sole resolution for the New Year is about reviving and maintaining relationships: I shall stop trying so hard and so one-sidedly. That, I have decided finally and at long last, is where I always went wrong – I tried too hard. I shall expect my interlocutors to do most of the trying from now on. Let’s see how that works out.

Goodbye 2020, and don't come back

2020 is finally drawing to a close. Virtually every human being will agree that it has been a year like no other in living memory: much worse, even, than the years of world war, I think, because the vast majority of humankind then went on with business as usual, and did not stay cooped up at home in mortal fear, though they knew that tens of millions, no, hundreds, were dying or becoming maimed for life, or destitute, or losing loved ones. It has been tumultuous, infinitely wearisome, difficult and utterly disorienting – on that, too, most people would agree. A relatively small number have also enjoyed it hugely, one way or the other (it is incredible how many people can actually be quite content staying at home doing virtually nothing other than chores for months on end!) and even made sudden huge fortunes or reputations (like ‘experts’ whom nobody had ever heard about before crawling out of the woodwork to luxuriate in their moment under the sun spewing every kind of nonsense and insanity to fuel and sustain the panic). I shall not make a survey of the thoughts of vast swathes of mankind here, though, only put on record bits and pieces of my own experience and reflection.

I experienced early (semi-) retirement. It has been enough for the rest of my lifetime. I have vowed to keep working till my dying day hereafter, so help me God.

The single bit of joyous good luck that I revelled in was that circumstances allowed me, after many years, to spend five whole months with my daughter in three installments: something that only a ‘pandemic’ could have arranged at this stage of our lives. I shall be ever grateful for it.

I was also, thanks to learning about how to conduct ‘online classes’, somewhat freed from the iron shackles of routine that had bound me tightly for three decades: as I have noted before, I shall always stay in touch with my pupils via the internet in future, so that there would be no serious interruption of studies even when I take it into my head to make quick, short and unplanned getaways.

I was even more deeply embittered about the mass of mankind that surrounds me than I had become over a long working life, as I gradually found out how many people – parents of students – are shameless frauds, and will cheat a teacher of his fees after taking advantage of all he has done for their children for months on end. This, after I had voluntarily reduced fees and accommodated every single parent who talked about difficulties by telling them to pay only partially at long intervals. Since I was not keeping tabs and not forcing them to pay regularly online (not having imagined that this absurd shutdown of the entire educational sector would continue for so long, nor that so many people could be so disgustingly dishonest), I was taken for a ride by many ‘clever’ folk. Thank God there were many others of the decent sort, who have supported me loyally all through these difficult times, so that I tided over the crisis without any really serious financial hardship. I do wish we lived in a country where the old, old rule dushter domon ar shishter palon (suppression of the wicked and nurturing of the good) was imposed with an iron hand. I am also truly glad that a lot of parents, and even some students, the more interested and sincere among them at least, are beginning to agree with me that exclusively online studies just do not work over any length of time.

I went travelling to Bangalore and met up with a few old boys back in February. I mention this because it seems to have happened in another time and place…

My daughter had just started on her first job when, after seven months, the lockdown began. Ever since then she has been working from home. She and her contemporaries are going to have a very different experience of life than our generation, that is a dead cert. I hope they cope well.

Pupu has said that their entire circle of friends have decided to forget 2020 once and for all when the new year dawns. It would be nice if that pledge can be kept. I shall look forward with a vengeance to the return of normalcy in 2021. And since everything else has more or less opened up, from tourism to transport, from malls to gyms, from factories to beauty parlours, I shall pray that the schools and colleges too would open up, and soon.

Pupu is twenty four today. Quite the grown up woman. Have a very happy birthday ma. It’s been many years since we were apart on this day. I wish you godspeed with all your enthusiasms and endeavours in the year ahead. Above baba, there is only God, and may He dispose generously.

Pandemic, indeed!

Ten times more people died prematurely in India owing to pollution-related health issues in 2019 than fell victim to the so-called coronavirus epidemic this year. Remind me: was anything shut down nationwide for any length of time to avoid that scourge?

Look up this link before it is taken off the Net.

Digha, four years later

I might not be Rabindranath, but I am peripatetic enough: stuck for a few months in my house and town, I get breathless. So I announced a three-day break and took my mother along on another trip to Digha on the 16th, almost four years since I last visited with Pupu in January 2017.

I won’t write a travelogue here, because my daughter did that already in 2017, and we virtually visited the same places over again. I shall instead make a few remarks on the changes I noticed, especially in this (almost) post-pandemic season.

The road is good, even excellent, in patches, but there are long stretches where it is narrow, or in poor condition, or simply too congested, passing as it does through little market towns where people neither know nor care about traffic rules, their only catch-all solution when there is an accident being to beat up the driver of the bigger vehicle if they can catch him. There were two heart-in-mouth moments, one on the journey outwards, when a man thumbed down a bus and suddenly ran across the road, entirely oblivious of the traffic, and our car missed him by an inch or two, and once on the way back, when a truck tyre blew up right in our faces while both vehicles were going at high speed. The blast was a real shocker, and it’s a wonder that our windscreen remained intact. The trucker went on driving unconcerned, he having 15 or 17 wheels to spare, but we stopped briefly to take deep breaths, and some bystanders came running over to check whether we were okay. Google was quite right in predicting that the average driving time each way would be six hours and a half, but given better road conditions throughout, it can be done in an hour less with far less anxiety.

We put up at the renovated Tourist Lodge this time, and it was good for the price overall – much better than most private hotels in the same tariff range – though the food, which is very good, is rather overpriced. The secure parking and the lush garden were part of the bonus. If you prefer to eat out – there are cheap eateries aplenty within a stone’s throw – this might just be the best place to stay. You cross the road, take a hundred steps, and you are on the beach.

Digha is swarming with happy holiday makers, and for once I did not even mind the noise. We were told that it would be still more crowded during the weekend, and even more so during the year-ending holiday week. Good to see that a lot of people have decided enough is enough, and gone travelling with family and friends. We heard sad stories galore about how badly business had been hit all through March to September, including one from a smart and affable young man selling tea on Mohona beach, who lives in nearby Contai, used to work as a cook in Mumbai, came home at great expense and trouble during the lockdown, and still cannot see any prospects in venturing back. So I am truly glad that things are getting back to normal again, and I curse all those who not only stayed at home all through the year but were quite happy that they could eat well, the rest of the world be damned. My moral sights have become very clear: the biggest problem with the world today is that there are far too many people who can not only afford to ignore the misery of others but even pontificate about how everybody should emulate them. Ministers, doctors, journalists, pensioners, or rentiers, they are fundamentally sick, and bad for all the rest of us who, for economic or mental health reasons, cannot ‘live’ (if that is called living) like them.

The Saikat Sarani walkway, not having been maintained for over a year, looks rather down in the mouth now: many structures could do with repair, replacement or at least a fresh coat of paint. New Digha has become overcrowded with hotels. The entire beachfront from New Digha to Oceania Park to Udaipur was a treat for sore eyes, but we liked best the Mohona point (where we saw gigantic lobsters on sale, along with a huge variety of seafood) and Tajpur, which – besides Mandarmoni – has the only extensive sandy beach available, all the others having been dumped with boulders and laid out with concrete to prevent the sea eroding away everything. Lunch with freshly caught pomfret (when will Bengalis learn to pronounce it correctly?) on the beach was a moment to remember, and we lazed around till almost sunset, watching the white light slowly mellowing to golden and then red, and the horizon vanishing from sight… ma was content, too, because she had not visited these sites the last time she was here, back in 2013, she told me. Dad and she had come to Digha to mark a quiet golden jubilee.

When we were strolling on Digha beach at 9 p.m., it was still crowded with tourists and vendors selling an incredible variety of snacks and knick knacks. The lights twinkling form the trawlers far out at sea gave me a very strange feeling: this is one of those very, very rare cases when I am at a loss for words! Believe it or not, we had to use the ceiling fan at night (after pulling on a blanket, though) in mid-December.

We returned in the afternoon of the third day, yesterday. The class in the evening had rather more pupils than usual, because I had punched classes together, and they were all in a chirpy mood, happy to see friends after a long time, having had to make do with the incredibly tedious and lonely ‘online studies’ nonsense for so many months on end. I was deliberately lenient with them, so we had a little less of studies than usual, but the happiness going around was well worth it.

I’ll see later whether there are some worthwhile photos to put up.

P.S.: Last night, 18th December again, it suddenly became very cold. Weird coincidence this, the very same day as last year!

Two eternally favourite poems

 ... in my own voice.

The first, Dushsomoy (Dark Times) by Tagore,

and the second,

Crossing the bar, by Tennyson.

The socialism of my dreams: a postscript

A little chat with an old boy (not really old, but one who reads my posts intelligently and thoughtfully) led me to think that I should write a long postscript to the last one I wrote on the question of bringing back, or re-imagining, socialism (Socialism, capitalism and human nature). If ever a good socialist society is to be built, the designers will have to keep in mind some very important things, to wit:

1.      Power must never be allowed to be concentrated in the hands of one person, or one small (and fairly homogeneous – like old white males of the same caste, race or religious background) group: it is bound to be corrupted and turned into tyranny very soon. That is one of the few ‘iron laws’ of social psychology. If this cannot be ensured at start, better not to attempt it at all, because it is too costly to undo it at a later stage, in terms of human lives ruined and destroyed. Never again must Stalins and Maos and Pol Pots be allowed to take up the reins.

2.      Though socialism avowedly aims at doing away with all kinds of extreme and unearned privilege, it is the inherent tendency of human society to reconstruct ever new forms of privilege even as old ones are weakened or destroyed. So in Russia we got the commissars and apparatchiki fat cats in place of the nobility of Tsarist times, and in China we got a whole generation of high-living communist ‘princelings’, while in India, we got ministers and bureaucrats milking public sector organizations dry to live the high life, in exchange for guaranteeing their employees assured cushy jobs, however incompetent and ill-mannered and plain unnecessary they were (so government-run industries came to employ three or four times as many people as they actually needed, and kept them in gravy even while they piled up huge losses year after year). Let us get this clear: it is not only traditional aristocrats and priests and rich capitalists who want to live off the fat of the land but almost all of us, and most of us are always looking for a chance to do exactly that – socialism must not create new opportunities for them. Leaving aside only perhaps very old and ill and handicapped people, for all the rest Tolstoy’s interpretation of the Gospel should apply: ‘He who does not work shall not eat’. Remembering always, though, that it is not only farmers and factory workers who ‘work’: great artists, scientists, poets and social workers do, too, and without all their contributions, we should all be still living in the Stone Age.

3.      To ensure that over-concentration of power simply cannot happen, we must retain such ‘bourgeois’ facilities as citizens’ rights enshrined in written Constitutions, as well as elected parliaments, independent courts and a free press – if only because we have not yet discovered any better alternatives. Precisely why I admire the successful social democracies so much: they early realized the deadly folly of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

4.      Carrying on from the previous point, government should not run businesses. Encourage, regulate and tax, yes, to a greater or lesser extent (though how much may be debated and changed frequently), but run, no. They simply cannot. If we still haven’t learnt that lesson after nearly a century of failed experiments in countless countries, we shall never learn, and go on to commit the same folly again. It may still be argued that in times – necessarily short periods – of special exigencies, as after major economic devastation caused by things like war (and, as was in the case of India in the late 1940s and 50s, Partition and extreme poverty and a very small and weak pre-existing private sector), government may briefly step in to organize the fundamentals and ‘prime the pump’ as it were, but as soon as the economy has returned to an even keel, it must step back. And it NEVER makes any sense whatever for governments to run things like hotels! On the other hand, schools and hospitals, yes, because leaving them entirely to profit-seeking businessmen can only spell disaster. But schools and hospitals will be allowed to survive only if they can live up to certain standards of efficiency and sincerity of service: they must not become havens for millions of unsocial job-seekers and petty bureaucrats.

5.      Socialism must never try to crush and exterminate religion. That only builds up titanic forces of reaction, which are bound sooner or later to burst and destroy it. The need for spiritual sustenance and inspiration, no matter how polluted by silly tradition, ritualism and superstition, is too deep and too widespread and too permanent (if the last few thousand years are any guide) to be done away with any time soon. The best that a progressive socialist government can do is to try to keep religions from going for each other’s throats, and to make them as socially beneficent (by way of running hospitals, schools, poorhouses, orphanages, old age homes and relief operations at the time of natural disasters, for example) and as little dependent on utterly nonsensical as well as harmful faith as possible.

6.      Finally, something about women. They do, indeed, make up half the human population, and an increasing fraction of them are now educated, and economically independent, and even in positions of influence and power. Without co-opting them in very large numbers into the neo-socialist movement, it will never succeed in today’s climes. And here I feel wonder at the best of times, despair at the worst. Can women even be made interested in such things? I have personally heard of no major female figure in the socialist movement since Rosa Luxembourg, though I am willing to be educated, and it is my eternal regret that I don’t find women who are willing to discuss such things with me, face to face or via this blog. I am ever willing to engage, except, as I have said before, with loonies – be they male or female.

Thank you, Aveek Mukherjee, for coaxing me into writing this post.

P.S.: I personally consider these essays on socialism so important a part of my work that I have now put all of them together under one tag on the blog.

P.P.S., March 04, 2022: I happened to read a most relevant essay on the subject today by Yogendra Yadav, one of our rising young politicians, and I thought I should provide a link to it for the benefit of like-minded readers.

November notes

It’s early winter, quite the nicest time of the year for me. Mercifully there are very few anxieties and pressing problems bugging me at the moment, and I am more delighted than I can say that my normal at-home classes have slowly got going again, so I have been luxuriating – hence the long delay between posts.

Also watching a lot of movies and TV shows. I actually like Young Sheldon more than The Big Bang Theory, believe it or not. (Oh, did you know that they mention Byomkesh Bakshi in episode 18, season 7 of TBBT? Made me feel good. Maybe Indian culture is really beginning to go places at long last). Newton made me wonder that there are weirdos like that in this country, too – people who make a crazy fetish of taking work and punctuality and personal responsibility seriously, I have seen a few such in real life – maybe that’s one of the few things that make us go on ticking! At a young pupil’s insistence I tried to watch The Haunting of Hill House, but gave it up quickly: ghost stories usually only make me yawn, and that combined with dysfunctional, cantankerous families is more than I can take. The Bureau of Magical Things is OK, but I am actually keenly waiting for the next movie after The Crimes of Grindelwald). The Crown has brought in a new series, but the next few episodes are going to be about the whole sordid Diana saga, so I think I’ll break a habit and go over to the next season straightaway. I watched Bettany Hughes presenting Geniuses of the Ancient World (Socrates, Confucius, the Buddha) and Geniuses of the Modern World (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud) one after the other, but one-hour capsules on titans like them couldn’t really teach me much beyond what I already knew. I guess, though, that in these Dark Ages a lot of people, especially those below thirty, might find them both interesting and instructive…

I have promised myself that I won’t write anything more connected with the so-called pandemic until the crisis has become history, so I won’t, but just one thought: is the whole species going to withdraw once again into hibernation mode if another virus begins to spread far and wide just two or five years down the line?

Diwali night is usually fun night at my house, with a lot of current and ex students visiting. But it was rather dull and depressing this time round without any fireworks. Ah, well…

A visiting old boy showed me the words of blessing and advice that I had scribbled in his notebook on the last day in school, twenty years ago. It made me proud to think that I wouldn’t have to change a word in it, and that he said he wished he had listened more attentively then.

To current pupils especially, do look up the posts under the tabs headed Books and Movies and Travels. To older readers, I’d strongly recommend those under Education.

Bye for now. Maybe I’ll post something again soon.

the rangoli that my mother made for Diwali

P.S.: A pupil reminded me today 'Sir, you haven't told a story online for two months!' Made my day.

Mayhem at barrage, water crisis

(men at work at the damaged lock gate)

 (the gate cordoned off to dry)

Many hundred thousand residents of Durgapur – including myself – went through a harrowing week after water supply from the Damodar Barrage was suddenly cut off on Saturday the 31^st October, following the collapse of one of the lockgates.

Mercifully we are only two people in our household at the moment, and I immediately filled up my little reservoir (unlike most of my neighbours, my father never built a magnum tank underground), the overhead tanks and the oversized bathtub before the taps ran dry. Then the endurance test began.

Repair and restoration work, involving the Irrigation Department of the government of West Bengal (which runs the barrage), DSP engineers and the municipality started apparently on a war footing immediately: but, of course, ‘war footing’ means something very different in India from what it signifies, say, in Germany. In any case, they had to wait four days for the river bed to run dry, cordoning off the affected gate with massive piles of sandbags (very low tech, I think… aren’t there faster, more efficient ways in this day and age?). Then the repair work itself took nearly two days, then they started releasing water from upstream (Maithan dam), and the water level in the feeder canals had to rise to a certain height before the pumping stations could start working again. The water supply was restored at about 9 p.m. on Friday the 6^th. I filled up the tanks again, running the pump at midnight, and since then I have kept my fingers crossed, lest something untoward happens (someone has already told me that the hurried repair has been in the nature of patchwork, and the damaged gate is leaking) and the supply is cut off again.

Why does this sort of thing have to happen? The barrage was built in 1955, and the tremendous pressure of water that it has to withstand (including especially abnormal times, such as the great flood of 1978), combined with the extremely corrosive properties of our river water, makes it a given that the gates suffer slow but cumulative damage over the decades: you don’t have to be either an engineer or a professional administrator to know that, and give warnings and take timely preventive action. A very similar mishap actually occurred three years ago; it was quickly mended, but that should have set the alarm bells ringing. It seems from newspaper reports that a decision was taken to repair eleven of the gates which were visibly in poor shape, but till date only four have been taken care of. Now, after this second scare they have decided to replace all the gates one by one, but, given the speed at which our authorities work once  a crisis is past and forgotten, heaven knows whether that, or the next disaster, will happen first… and I wonder why, in an increasingly more populated town which aspires to be tagged ‘smart city’ soon, we should go on depending on a single source of water. The luckiest people in town were those who had their own wells and tube wells, but, since people like me happen to live in one of the ‘smartest’ (read ‘planned’-) parts, we are not even allowed to dig wells of our own, because that will severely lower the water table soon. Granted that is a valid argument, but then, why are we still depending, this entire Bidhan Nagar area, on one small supply tank built half a century ago, which runs out of water within a single day, when the population of the area has increased at least fifty fold over the same time period? [P.S., Nov. 09: I am delighted to read in today's newspaper that in this one instance, at least, the municipal authorities are doing some serious forward thinking. Better late than never, certainly.]

Another thing I learnt is that Bengalis – they have always been know-alls, however uneducated and socially insignificant they might actually be – have become absolutely confident about talking absolute nonsense. I heard so many authorities on TV and in newspapers, I met so many on the street, and they all told me with total certitude that the water supply was going to be restored on such a date and at such a time, and most of them got it dead wrong (indeed, according to someone in uniform at the local police outpost, we are not going to get any water at all till Monday, the day after tomorrow)!

One last thing. I saw my neighbours – the same people who have far bigger reservoirs at home than I do! – queuing up before mobile water tankers morning and evening from the third day onwards, and buying large plastic bottles of drinking water every day on top of that. My mother and I had simply decided to avoid all usage of water except the bare essentials, drinking, cooking and washroom use, and our stored supply sufficed to tide us over. How much water people must be habitually wasting, really! I wish the government would finally get it into its thick head that instead of charging flat water taxes, which encourages waste, water supply should be metered, as electric supply is metered and charged for – which is what the World Bank very sensibly advised decades ago. But no, we shall wait for real, nationwide disaster to strike before we take wise, farsighted decisions of any sort. We are Indians after all.

[By the way, whenever I provide a link to some old blogpost, so many people visit it that it quickly gets into the Most Read list. It has happened with my review of the movie The Bucket List this time. Why on earth don’t visitors explore older posts on their own?]

One truly new experience

 I had – guess what – a full body massage today. No news really, except for the fact that I had been mildly curious about it for decades, my daughter has been nagging me for years to get a taste of it, yet this was the very first time in my life at age 57, and yes, it was good. In fact, much more than good, else I wouldn’t have bothered to write here about it. 

I have always hated (or rather, felt embarrassed about-) anything that smacks of self indulgence, so always tried to avoid anything which attracts that label, though I have wanted my loved ones to enjoy them, so long as they didn’t do it to excess. Getting a massage, to my mind, has always sounded like gross self-indulgence, so I limited myself to the head massage that barbers sometimes offer (once upon a time when barbers were content to be poor they came free: now no longer!) I had always thought that such things were for effete zamindars, sybaritic politicians and fat, corrupt policemen. Halfway through life I learnt that some people within the extended family needed such treatment as part of recuperative therapy after some forms of serious and prolonged illness, and that massages were good for the circulation and the heart and for reducing stress; besides, I had started to develop all kinds of aches and pains myself, so I began to waver. That wavering, however, had gone too far… for more than a decade, in fact. But the mountain had to come to Muhammad, so I waited, and waited, until a young friend who had qualified as a physiotherapist, and had treated me as well as my parents, set up a clinic a stone’s throw from my house, and asked me to come over for a first experience at a time of my choosing. So I did this evening, and it was grand.

For half an hour, in a dimly lit and lightly perfumed room, with slow and soothing music playing softly in the background, I was pushed and pulled and pressed and kneaded and, well, subjected to the entire bag of tricks in the professional masseur’s repertoire. I cannot pay him a greater compliment than to put two things on record: that I nearly fell asleep, and that my heart rate had become slower afterwards than I have ever seen in the last twenty years! I really must do this again, preferably soon.

And maybe it’s time that I started seriously to draw up a bucket list for myself. Would it be a long one, I wonder? Most things I have wanted I have got and grown tired of; others, I know, will always be beyond my reach, and not always merely for lack of time, money or facilities available nearby. But maybe there are a few things that can be done without too much trouble, and would give me just as much fun?

Filling in my diary

Back in Durgapur, daughter with me, because after two months alone in Delhi, she decided that if she has to work endlessly from home, it’s best to stay for long stretches with the parents. I am not complaining! Delighted that Andal airport has reopened: it makes travelling so much faster and cheaper. The Air India flights have been replaced by Spice Jet, and they fly at decent hours, so no more getting up at ungodly hours on bitterly cold winter mornings.

Would like to start classes, at least with the senior year, in November. I hope it works out, but I am not being too optimistic: best strategy against avoidable disappointment. (The crowds on the roads these pujo days have given me some reason for cheer, though).

Delhi was already cool, so I found Durgapur hot on the first day. There was also a very dense cloud cover: I could see the ground from the air only when the aircraft had descended to a few hundred feet. We had to use the air conditioner the first night, while we had been shivering in the morning! But the change in the weather, though very slow, is still perceptible. The sky is azure, the breeze is gentle, and though the sun is still hot, the evenings come sooner, and there is a nip in the air if you go out in the late evening on a two wheeler in shirtsleeves. The IMD has predicted a long winter with several cold waves, I have noticed.

This was the first time since it was built, back in 1988, that the house had been under lock and key continuously for a month. We are still busily cleaning up. I was glad that some current pupils visited me on the very first morning after my return.

Vegetable prices have gone through the roof here. I wonder why. The newspaper says people are eating much more fish and meat instead: exactly the opposite of what the doctors would recommend amidst the ongoing pandemic!

One very good recent development that I noticed in Delhi is that a lot of people have taken to riding bicycles again, and not only poor folk either. I think the government should strongly encourage the trend – one way would be to subsidize bikes for poor people, another to mark bicycle lanes along the sides of roads. I badly miss good, smooth footpaths in Delhi as much as in Durgapur, though otherwise both are so good for walkers. Delhi, at least, has huge parks galore, but here we don’t even have that much, something I keep grouching over endlessly…

Our prime minister has been growing his now-snow white beard ever since the lockdown days began, as I am sure lots of people have noticed. It has given him a distinctly wise-old-sadhubaba look. Is it simply because he has been avoiding the physical closeness that a barber’s work entails?

I read somewhere recently that China’s economy has been growing, albeit slowly, all through this year – the only one among the ten biggest economies to do so in the coronavirus year, while all others have gone into a tailspin, India included. And China is where the pandemic began! What do the Chinese know and do that we don’t? It is high time the whole world started studying them seriously without bias and preconceived notions (such as that capitalism works best without state involvement, or that the price in terms of oppression of the masses in such a regime is not worth paying) – much more seriously than we have done since the People’s Republic was established. If we cannot learn and follow quickly in their footsteps, then, regardless of what any non-Chinese thinks, wants or likes, no one will be left in any doubt by 2050 that this is definitely going to be the Chinese century…