A very good read...

See Shilpi's recent blogpost: click here.

All those who really love to think are sure to relish this.

You are welcome to comment here and/or on Shilpi's blog.

A future for marriage?

The Statesman recently published the following article on the current status of the age-old institution called marriage
http://thestatesman.net/page.arcview.php?clid=4&id=276042&usrsess=1
It is based on the situation in the UK, and might come as a shocker to a lot of conservative-minded (which is usually another way of saying dull-) people in India still, but those who know a bit about the world will agree, even if sadly, that things are going the same way in this country too.

As far as I am concerned, I am still on the whole happily married, but both my wife and I agree that we have been very lucky, and keep praying that our luck holds. I often quote the old wisecrack in my classes that marriage is a curse for many, a blessing for a few, and a washout for most (one much-suffering father recently told me, pointing at his wife and daughter, ‘I am just their ATM!’, and those two only grinned foolishly. I’m sure a lot of unhappily-married women feel the same way about their families). And I never forget the lines I read in a poem called The Enchanted Shirt in middle school, where two men were lamenting, ‘one wept that he had buried his wife/ the other, that he had not’!

So I have always been wide-enough eyed to know that things often do go very badly wrong with marriage for a lot of people, and having seen so many bad marriages among the young and the old alike, I strongly believe that such marriages are better dissolved than persevered with permanent cold-war or cat-and-dog style, so that people can make a fresh start, however late in the day it might be. And now that the world has grown much more permissive – one sees very late marriages, live-in relationships, increasing numbers of bachelors and spinsters who seem to be happy enough living by themselves (and frequently changing girlfriends and boyfriends … not just college-goers but people my age and older), increasingly frequent divorces and common second or third marriages (even for women), same-sex relationships and what have you, perhaps the halo around this most hoary of social institutions has really lost its sheen (provided the fundamentalists don’t get the upper hand again: then God help us!) I think only two things are really keeping marriage going still (apart from social pressure, wherever it is still strong) – a lot of women still do not make a living for themselves, and a lot of people cannot imagine who else but family will look after them in extreme old age. As solutions for these problems become more commonly available, marriage is sure to fall into disuse. Far too many people have always felt, after the first excitement evaporates (which might take a few days or a few months, but certainly never lasts a lifetime for anybody!) that it’s just not worth it: it takes too much out of you and gives back too little.

I think Indians have always known this instinctively. That is why they have put so much emphasis on being ‘chaste’ before marriage, and on the occasion of getting married (all the noise, lights, raucous music, gorgeous clothes and jewellery, lavish feasting and swarms of guests…): since you are being let into (presumably) a lifetime of boredom and drudgery and making-do, at least have some pleasant memories of one day in your life when you were special in a fairytale way to help you cope with the gloomiest hours that are coming, because they are sure to be many. That is why, also, unlike in the more liberal ‘developed’ countries, people are so reluctant here to admit that their marriages have been failures, and to look for solutions. I think it’s the same mentality that sends people in droves to sadhus for counsel, but avoid shrinks like the plague – the former is considered ‘safe’, the latter is likely to brand you as insane! The obsession with children (and corresponding indifference to spouses) is one thing that lets the cat out of the bag – what can you say about women who go to the extent of leaving home to stay with their college-going children rather than continuing as they have done for two decades to live with their husbands (who probably need them more – or do they?) All you can conclude is that they don’t just ‘care’ for their children, but are relieved that they are at last rid of the ‘burden’ of housekeeping for their husbands, and found a way of doing it which does not meet with strong social disapproval. I have seen elderly women looking much happier and healthier after their husbands passed away. And the growing phenomenon of married women coming back to live with their parents once they have got a child is further confirmation that many women have never liked living with husbands for long (though it is the men alone who have traditionally been blamed for sowing wild oats!) I have always said that women who are really interested in their husbands as human beings cannot devote so much of their time to brooding over children’s marks and dolling themselves up for kitty parties. Of course, the same goes for men too: it makes me sick to see how many men grow cold toward their wives – the same women whom they had courted with celluloid gusto only a few years ago – to the extent of cutting them out of their ‘personal’ lives almost completely. (I don’t know, though, whether the other type isn’t even more horrible – the ‘devoted’ spouse who treats his/her partner as absolutely personal physical property, and snoops on him/her night and day for a whiff of ‘infidelity’. Such folks often make their spouses want to cop out of marriage at any cost, even through madness, violence or suicide).

A lot of people in my one-horse little town condemn me roundly for talking about these facts of life before my young pupils: the common accusation is that I am making them grow up too fast (knowledge of physics or math or chemistry, on the other hand, never poses the danger of making them 'grow up')! But I thought it fit to write this essay because so many of my ex-students (still in their 20s or early 30s) are at least once-divorced already, even while the current crop of teenagers are mooning over their ‘heartthrobs’ as silly teenagers have always done, utterly confusing raging hormones with love and devotion and eternal fidelity and all that sort of rot. No one who warns them of what lies ahead, and advises them to keep their feet firmly on the ground, can be doing them a bad turn.

Juvenilia

I mentioned something about juvenile people “15 or 55 years old” in an earlier blogpost, and someone wanted to know what I meant by juvenile. Well, in my book, you are juvenile if:

· You think you can (or should try to) please everybody,
· You imagine that money-making is all-important,
· You have no ideas of your own about what to do with your money but blindly follow your local herd,
· You obsess over marks in school, and looks, and what your neighbours and relatives will say,
· You go starry-eyed over celebrities, and they are all of the non-cerebral types,
· You have no concern or appreciation for good books, music, art or philosophy,
· You act and talk as if you will be young and healthy forever, and never die,
· You think using abuse and slang makes you smart,
· You think you will be respected and admired (rather than envied and reviled behind your back) for being rich and famous,
· You rely on your job designation and calling card and car and house to give you an identity, rather than the nature and quality of your work,
· You think your credit card and mobile make you smart,
· You believe you can ignore the doctor and eat like a pig and live without a routine and still stay healthy forever,
· You think you can do well in examinations by studying for just a fortnight before they start,
· You believe in keeping children ignorant, silly and dependent till their mid-twenties,
· You grow up into your mid-twenties thinking that parents who kept you dependent like that are wonderful rather than disgusting,
· You are sure that engineering and law and accounts and medical texts teach you more important things than Aesop’s Fables and the Panchatantra and the Jataka Tales and suchlike,
· You cannot imagine relying on your own resources and keeping your own counsel and avoiding crowds, and you think that quiet people are merely being arrogant,
· You don’t think you need to learn a lot and become a better person before you can even start becoming a good parent, worker, neighbour and friend,
· You call yourself ‘busy’, yet spend most of your time in malls and pubs and parties, or before the TV or playing games on the computer or chatting for hours on the phone or sleeping till almost mid-day,
· You are confused about whether it would be better for your daughter to become a fashion model than a scientist,
· You expect respect from people merely because you are older than they, without ever having done anything to earn that respect.


Think of that list, and then look around you. By these yardsticks, how many mature people can we see around us? It is no wonder that Sri Ramakrishna used to say to his flock of disciples again and again ‘tomaader chaitanya hok’, which, loosely translated, means ‘get some sense into your heads’!

A troubled fortnight

A protracted harrowing experience shakes one out of the ever-deepening stupor induced by routine-bound, ‘normal’ everyday life – and, in our family at least, nothing does that better than a medical emergency (perhaps because we do not obsess over weddings and parties and children’s school-examination scores and shopping and looks and meeting celebrities and other trivia of the same sort, as most people do these days!).

My wife was being prodded by her doctors to get a hysterectomy done without delay for quite some time, and we together (that includes my daughter, whose opinions are given far greater weightage already than most parents I know give to 18-year olds) decided that it should be done in one of the supposedly best (and most expensive) hospitals in Calcutta, because my wife had liked the ambience, and even more so, the surgeon who had dealt with her. We firmly believe that since most senior surgeons have more or less the same academic ‘qualifications’ and a couple of decades of hands-on experience, it is the way that they talk to patients that should decide which of them we should entrust with a major operation (an open-abdomen hysterectomy has become more or less routine these days, especially if the patient’s vital signs are okay, but one keeps hearing horror stories about things that can and do go wrong now and then that can keep one’s teeth on edge for days on end, give one sleepless nights and several score grey hairs within the space of a week!)

Except when in the midst of a full-blown emergency I absolutely refuse to break my seven-days-a-week work schedule, so my wife (poor dear) ran to and fro alone first to confirm the date of admission and surgery, and then, two weeks later, to deal with the insurance details and submit the results of some last-minute critical tests. We eventually left town, the two of us, the very same day she was to be admitted, leaving our 12-year old daughter behind with an elderly couple next-door, because she had her annual examinations in school to attend to, and she had herself suggested and permitted us to use this twelve-day time slot because I would not have to miss classes then, since all my pupils had their own exams, and had therefore told me they wouldn’t attend classes (so no parent – believe me, there are lots of them – would have a chance to complain I was charging fees without doing all the classes I should).

The operation took place the very next day. God is (sometimes, at least) kind to those who have hardly anybody but Him to rely upon – so not only did the surgery go swiftly and smoothly (the lady in the bed next to my wife wasn’t half so lucky!), but the patient, who looked half-dead when she was being wheeled out of the O.T., and was in considerable pain the whole of the rest of the day, recovered dramatically over the next 24 hours, and was already eating solid food and hobbling about unaided within two days: the hospital discharged her on the fourth day, the stitches were taken out three days after that, and she came back home to Durgapur last night without any great discomfort. She will have a final checkup a week down the line, and will have to live under some strict restrictions – which has turned me and my daughter into round-the-clock domestic helps for the time being! – but the only thing that matters is that we have got back our priceless mother, and she is not only alive but showing every sign that she will be kicking within a fortnight.

However, since as I said before, I have my hands full (ably assisted by my daughter though I am), no one makes me angrier than those who, despite having some idea about the state of affairs in my home, want to come over for idle chatter or to get some little urgent favour – the same people who are otherwise too ‘busy’ for months on end even to ring and say hello! Such people had better beware of a very nasty tongue-lashing: you have been warned. The same goes for those who call on my cellphone though I have not personally given them the number.

Now here are a few observations regarding everything that passed through my mind over this last fortnight:

The new, much-widened, much-improved NH2 which now links Durgapur with Calcuttta is a marvel, and travelling along it in a swift air-conditioned Volvo bus is a dream. But I wish this improvement had happened 20 years earlier – today I am old and tired, and even with such luxury, coming and going six times along that route within ten days was a drag.

I have been to many metro cities around the world, from Calcutta to New Delhi to New York, and I hate them all with the same cold, implacable hatred, because of the congestion, the pollution, the slowness of traffic, and the heartlessness of people all around you. That said, Calcutta today is just a wee bit better than it was 25 years ago, when I went to college there.

I was terribly lucky that the doctors and nurses didn’t just smile and charge the earth for their services – so far, every sign indicates that they gave me excellent service (though not without giving me a few nasty and irritating moments!). I know very well indeed how horribly things can go bad with people seeking serious medical care in this country, and hospitals with the most excellent credentials often make a hash of their jobs even while they make you pay through the nose. I fear that until our mothers start teaching their children that they shouldn't become doctors solely to make money (show me such a mother and I'll show you a pink elephant), or the Consumer Protection Act really begins to bite, most of us will have to count on luck, even if we have a lot of money in the bank. But that reminds me: lots of people who should know have assured me that the state of medical care even in the US leaves much to be desired (I shall be glad to take questions on this point). No one has yet found a really good substitute for prayer!

I am grateful to all the people, young and old, who gave me help, sometimes just by being beside me (even if only via the net and telephone from thousands of miles away) to render moral support. They are too numerous to name individually here, but I am saying a heartfelt thank you to every one of them, and I am not the sort of person to forget such kind favours. At the same time, I could not but take note of how many people knew but simply didn’t bother even to ask if they could help in some way, or did so in such tones of cold formality (some took care to do so only after the event) that it was only too evident I was not expected to ask for anything. Many such people, mind you, have got unstinted help from me when they were in need. Their baseness, too, I shall long remember. Their ranks, by the way, include some family members. I was born in a truly wonderful family. No wonder P.G. Wodehouse wrote in his ripe old age that one key requirement for happiness is ‘loved ones’ being far away.

Finally, my daughter worked a miracle I shall ever be wonderstruck and grateful for. For almost a fortnight she stayed with neighbours (actually in her own house, alone for most of the time, attending to all kinds of household chores and studying all by herself for her annual examinations at school, and even doing more than reasonably well). How grown-up she has become I can judge from the fact that very few parents I know would dream of putting so much pressure and responsibility on their 'immature' children in class 10, 12 or (in extreme cases I know) even in college! To say I am proud of my daughter would be an understatement, and no matter what her school exam-results are, I know she has passed a far tougher examination with flying colours, and to me, nothing matters more.

Every disturbing event like this changes a man ever so little, and today I am certainly a somewhat changed man. As a lot of people will find out, soon. I am not sure they will all like what they see.

Small request

I am back after a busy and stressful fortnight-long hiatus, though it will take a while yet to get back into my normal stride. Please bear with me...

Meanwhile, a request. Please visit Shilpi's blog and Amrit's blog, read and comment there. I do not easily endorse other people's work. Unless you are a no-brainer (in which case you shouldn't be visiting this blog either), you will find these blogs rewarding, thought-provoking and even disturbing.

[Disclaimer: all my recommendations do not apply to juvenile people, whether they are 15 or 55!]

My orkut community

I had grown disenchanted with orkut long ago (see the post here titled 'orkut, anyone?'), but I feel a little nostalgic about the community called The Good Life! which I had nurtured there for almost two years now. That community is now almost defunct, because virtually all the participants have lost interest in participating - or maybe they just don't have anything to say any more - but some of the discussions were long and substantial, and I don't want to lose them all by deleting the community. I want some suggestions regarding how I can somehow salvage that discussion forum. Can the readers of this blog help?

New blog!

I have just launched another blog. To visit, just click on the link given at the very top of the right-hand sidebar...

Ingratitude and karma...

If there’s one thing I share with Shakespeare, it’s my hatred and contempt for ingratitude – which is, alas, a very common human failing. Here are a few quotes to show how strongly the Bard felt about it:

I hate ingratitude more in a man
than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness,
or any taint of vice whose strong corruption
inhabits our frail blood.
(Twelfth Night)

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude.
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude...

Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
That dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot.
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remember'd not...
(As you like it)

O, see the monstrousness of man
When he looks out in an ungrateful shape…
(Timon of Athens)

All the stor'd vengeances of Heaven fall
On her ingrateful top!
(King Lear)

Ingratitude, more strong than traitors’ arms,
Quite vanquish’d him,
Then burst his mighty heart…
(Julius Caesar)

The man must have been hurt beyond expression by ingrates again and again for the iron to have entered so deeply in his soul! And if you think that it was only Shakespeare who had a bee in his bonnet about it, try the following link:
http://www.worldofquotes.com/topic/Ingratitude/1/index.html

It’s not my idiosyncrasy that ingratitude hurts me almost more than anything else: in every land and age, sensitive people have suffered greatly from it.

It doesn’t hurt everybody equally, of course. Some people (and it strikes me as very odd that some people are like that from early childhood – it’s probably in the genes) go out of their way to curry favours, and forget their benefactors promptly, and even malign them right and left behind their backs once they know they cannot expect any more favours; at the same time, they never do anybody any favours if they can help it, unless they are sure of getting back much bigger favours in return, and never let you forget it if ever they did you even the most trifling of good turns, and are endlessly inventive in wriggling out of situations where they have been asked to do something for somebody in need. But there are also people who are simultaneously too proud to ask for favours and very eager to be of help to others when they can sense some need. If they are stoical and saintly, they of course expect nothing, not even gratitude in return, so it doesn’t hurt when those whom they have done good forget them or badmouth them, but alas, most of us (myself certainly) have not learnt to become so saintly and stoical yet, so it feels wonderful when people show by word and deed that they remember old favours, and hurts like the dickens when they cut you dead, or strain themselves to give you a bad name.

And this is where thoughts of karma come into the picture. At my stage of life, having done and seen a lot of things and remembered a lot of things (I am cursed with a long and vivid memory – my own family members have long forgotten hurts they gave me years ago which rankle cruelly still!), I am convinced that it is some people’s bad karma that they can neither stop trying to be nice to others, nor stop hurting that others care so little about it (khel khatam, paisa hazam, they say in India: what is done is forgotten). Lest any reader should think that I am indulging in self-pity over imaginary hurts, let me put on record that my wife, who has been observing my life closely for almost 14 years now, and once upon a time used to say I imagine these things, has come round to the view that I am truly extraordinarily unlucky in this regard. Not only does Murphy’s Law work like an ironclad rule with me (‘if something can go wrong, it will’ – even to the extent of cheques bouncing again and again because some stupid bank clerk could not spell my name right!), but I shall compulsively go on trying to help folks who tell me their sob stories – folks of all ages, from teenage pupils to beggars and businessmen much older than me, and help of all kinds, from lending a shoulder to weep upon to giving shelter to lending money – and end up lamenting a few years later that all my concern and help has produced some more ingrates (these include family, one-time friends, colleagues and numerous ex-students: I hope some of those people I have in mind are reading this, and can make out that I am talking about them)!

I thrill with delight when some people get back with return favours, even if it be something as minor as returning a debt, or giving a small gift, or just dropping in to say hello and put on the nosebag together of an evening for old times’ sake, just to show that they remember and care still. But I cannot tell you how few and far between these joyful experiences are, and how common and frequent the other kind! … among the cruellest are those who averred for years and years how much they loved and admired me, and were thankful for everything I had done for them, and then, one fine morning when it seems to them that I have said something they don’t like to hear, they promptly give the lie to all the nice things they had been saying and cut the line for good – all the ‘love and respect’ vanishing into thin air, as if it never existed. No apologies, no reflection that I might not have been wrong after all, no consideration of how I might deserve a little leeway even if I have been wrong, taking into account all the good things I have done before; no understanding, even, of how grossly they were cheapening themselves in my eyes (and in the eyes of everybody I talk about them to) by making such about-turns: just gone with the wind!

Following my wife’s counsel (‘people will forget or speak badly about you anyway, most of them most of the time, and those who want to do good and speak well will do so regardless of how you treat them, so stop bothering about being nice and good to all and sundry…’) I have of late been trying to become a more cautious person, less overtly willing to be a sucker, more ‘professional’ in dealing with people, much less expectant of goodness in return than before. It goes against the grain, so I cannot say it makes me happy. But at least I have the consolation that I will not have to lament as before that I did so much for people and got no good vibes in return. Meanwhile, the word seems to be going around that I have become much more selfish and hard-hearted than I used to be. I leave it to the reader’s judgment, and to the consciences of all those who know they have not treated me well!

Of chance, fate and karma

Of late, many things have compelled me to ponder deeply over two things – this thing we call fate or kismet or naseeb or bhagya or karma, and about gratitude and the lack of it.

Watching a brilliant little 2008 Hindi movie called Amir, which is about a young urban professional trying just to live a simple and honest but decent life like millions of others, and believing that he is the maker of his own destiny, who suddenly gets caught up in a very nasty spider’s web of a terrorist conspiracy which manipulates him in the direction of self-destruction totally against his will and utterly beyond his capacity to do anything about it, brought back the question of whether or not it is character or opportunity (luck/fate/kismet) that makes for success in life. This was incidentally the topic for an essay in the ICSE examination some years ago, and for years I have been helping pupils to write sensibly on it (in the way I described in the post titled ‘Moral Science’). I like to speak positively, encouragingly to young people, so I never tell them it’s all written beforehand, or decided by the stars or stuff like that: it would not only be saying something that I can never be sure about, nor fair, because it might depress them and sap them of the will to fight life’s battles boldly, which is so very important. But I cannot help telling them also that character does not decide everything: the most talented and determined and hard-working man can do little more than live an obscure and hard life and die bravely if opportunities do not present themselves for him to exploit. What would Sachin Tendulkar have done if he had been born in China, what would a man with innate high-level software-writing skills have done if he had been born in the middle ages, what handicaps doesn’t a talented man suffer if he is born poor in a backward country? (Ramanujan and R.K. Narayan would never have been heard of beyond their little personal circles if they had not found powerful western patrons…)

I also tell them it is a pernicious doctrine that today’s parents and teachers drill into them night and day, claiming that success is ‘guaranteed’ if only they work long and hard. That’s not only a shameless lie (all those people are old enough to know better) but it only ensures that the inevitable disappointments and frustrations later in life will make those youngsters suffer far more than they need have, because they have not been conditioned from childhood to expect frustration despite deserving many good things by virtue of their talents and labour – the Gita says do your best but don’t count on the results being the way you want them to be, and no modern parent and teacher should claim to know better.

The truth is, no matter how clever and wise we are, no matter how ‘scientific’ our predictive models might have become, there are countless things that happen in everybody’s life, both good and bad, that simply cannot be foreseen and accounted for. No ordinary man who goes out to work knows whether he’s going to be run over by a car today, no mother knows whether her daughter is going to have a happy marriage, no general knows for sure that he is going to win the battle, no film director can say with certainty that his latest oeuvre will sweep the box office, no inventor knows whether his brainchild will make him rich and famous. We can indeed only do our best, and accept what life doles out to us thereafter: this is just as true for examination candidates as for householders and leaders of nations. Of course it is important to do your best, if only so that you do not have to die with a guilty conscience, and of course it is true that far too many people who lament their bad luck will be forced, when the chips are down, to admit that they stopped short of doing their best most of the time – never studied hard enough, never looked for jobs hard enough, never saved when they had enough money, never walked while their paunches were growing, never disciplined their children when there was still time – and so they do not really have any moral right to whine or expect pity and help from their fellow men when they get into trouble (though I have noticed with chagrin that such good-for-nothings usually get far more pity and help than those I have always considered the truly deserving, the fighters, the planners, the folks who have never shirked responsibility … life is not fair at all!)

Even if we do not believe in predestination (and mind you, there’s no definite proof that it is nonsensical), we might be eventually be forced to believe either that everything is blind chance (such a fundamentally ‘unscientific’ idea that Einstein famously retorted that God does not play at dice…, and furthermore, if you believe that, then you are likely to lose all hope that you can make a difference with your own efforts, and therefore elect to give up in despair and withdraw into a shell: I leave it to the reader to imagine what would happen to civilisation if the majority started subscribing to that doctrine!) or in what the Hindus and Buddhists call karma: that you are simply suffering/enjoying the cumulative consequences of your own past deeds, and simultaneously deciding (though not necessarily consciously and deliberately) through your present actions what is going to happen to you in future. But this doctrine poses its own problems: you can see for yourself that a great many nice and even gifted and diligent people are not getting what they deserve in this life, while a lot of utterly undeserving folks (lazy, stupid, ignorant, uncouth, greedy, deceitful, malicious, you name it) are living it up. Ah, the traditional pundits will tell you, that is easily explained, provided you allow that one lives many successive lives, and the accounts are not squared in each lifetime but carried over from one to the next. So a lot of seemingly undeserving people are enjoying this life by spending the good karma accumulated over previous lifetimes, and, if they are living badly, they are darkening their own future life-prospects (which probably ‘explains’ horrors like children without arms and legs being born to poor parents, and little girls being raped, nasty as the explanation is). Now from the utilitarian point of view this is a good theory – or at least better than believing that all is blind chance – in the sense that it gives some consolation to those who suffer (to my mind no pain is greater than not knowing why I am having to suffer), and some encouragement to living a good (in the sense of ethical-) life in the hope that one is improving one’s own prospects with every passing day. It helps me a great deal in both ways, at least, and I have counselled a lot of people to look at life this way and see if it makes them feel somewhat better about living. I am nothing if not a pragmatist: I know what I want out of life, and I shall try anything provided I have reasonable assurance that it works, whether it be a machine, a computer program or a philosophy. But there is one thorny problem left: the Hindus at least believe in a soul which can migrate from one body to another through death and rebirth, but the Buddhists don’t even believe in a soul, and I have not been able to figure out yet how they square that with the theory of karma. Temporary body and no soul, so whose karma is it anyway?

Long post, that, and most readers have very short attention spans. So, about ingratitude, perhaps in the next one. Cheerio!

Poems

It’s been a very long time since I posted some of my favourite poems here (in fact I have done it only once before; see 'Fafaia'.) 

Here are three at one go.The first, by Robert Frost. It’s called Fire and Ice, and goes like this:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I have known of desire,
I hold with those who favour fire.
But – if it had to perish twice –
I think I know enough of hate
To think that for destruction ice
Is also great,
And should suffice.

The second, by Walter S. Landor:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.
Nature I loved, and next to nature, Art.
I warmed my hands before the fire of life:
It sinks,
And I am ready to depart.

Only the most supremely self-possessed of men can close their accounts so quietly; the worst that life and fate and the fear of death can do cannot break their spirits.

The last one, by Francis Bourdillon:

The Night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one,
But the light of a whole world dies
When the sun is gone.

The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one,
But the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.

One test of genuine goodness is that its appeal never palls, never fades. I read all three poems in my teenage, and I adore them quite as much still. The only thing that has changed is the quality and depth of my appreciation: in connection with the third poem, for instance, I realize now (though I had suspicions even when I was very young) that the romantic affection between two young people is the commonest, cheapest, most evanescent variety of love; a higher love is that of parent for child, higher even is the love that keeps a true scientist going through adverse and discouraging circumstances, vastly higher still is the kind of love that makes patriotic martyrs and Florence Nightingales, and most sublime of all is the love of God.

Lefties specially gifted?

In the link below, Khushwant Singh has been musing over whether southpaws (left-handed people) are somehow genetically conditioned to be higher achievers than the rest of us, right-handed people, on the average:
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1090131/jsp/opinion/story_10461413.jsp
(see the sub-title ‘Point to ponder’)

I have no problems with lefties; despite Singh’s reflections, I don’t think there’s sufficient hard evidence that they do have special and big inborn advantages, and at the same time I regret the still common fact that so many parents and schoolteachers (at least among the sort of Indians I know) imagine it’s some sort of defect and force children to master writing with their right hands – I think it’s a silly and quite unnecessary irritation for the children.

Given the way new (or recycled) myths/superstitions tend to catch on in this country (witness vaastu and feng shui and numerology etc etc), I fear that if too many people get to read (or, what is much more likely, to hear from their gossip circles, because Indians are not famed for being readers) stuff like Khushwant-ji’s article, a reverse custom of compelling right-handed children to practise being lefties so that they might improve their chances of becoming tycoons, presidents and other kinds of stars might spread like wildfire!

Good CEOs, bad politicians?

I have got the following message forwarded to me again and again via email, and I thought it’s time I responded to it, once and for all:

Salary & Govt. Concessions for a Member of Parliament (MP)

Monthly Salary : 12,000
Expense for Constituency per month : 10,000
Office expenditure per month : 14,000
Traveling concession (Rs. 8 per km) : 48,000 ( e.g. for a visit from Kerala to Delhi & return: 6000 km)
Daily DA /TA during parliament meets : 500/day
Charge for 1 class (A/C) in train: Free (For any number of times)
(All over India )
Charge for Business Class in flights : Free for 40 trips / year (With wife or P.A.)
Rent for MP hostel at Delhi : Free
Electricity costs at home : Free up to 50,000 units
Local phone call charge : Free up to 1 ,70,000 calls.
TOTAL expense for a MP [having no qualification] per year : 32,00,000 [i.e . 2.66 lakh/month]
TOTAL expense for 5 years : 1,60,00,000
For 534 MPs, the expense for 5 years :
8,54,40,00,000 (nearly Rs. 855 crores)

AND THE PRIME MINISTER IS ASKING THE HIGHLY QUALIFIED CEOs WHO PERFORM OUTSTANDINGLY TO CUT DOWN THEIR SALARIES.....

This is how all our tax money is being swallowed and prices hiked on essential commodities.
And this is the present condition of our country:
855 crores to make their lives liveable !!
Think of the great democracy we have..............
PLEASE FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO ALL REAL CITIZENS OF INDIA ...
************************************************************

Now I could write a book on this subject, but I hope light will dawn after reading just the following observations:

1. When you call an MP ‘unqualified’, you not only ignore the fact that he has become an MP by fulfilling all the qualifications laid down by Parliament, but that he has been voted for by several lakh, or even million citizens. By insulting him, you insult the judgment of so many of your fellow-citizens! Are you so stupid that that never occurred to you? Or do you consider yourself vastly superior to all your fellow-citizens? If so, why?

2. Besides, who told you that all MPs are unqualified, even academically? How many MPs do you know? Let me name a few – Manmohan Singh, P. Chidamabaram, Pranab Mukherjee, Somnath Chatterjee, Lalu Yadav (IIM Ahmedabad students felt like little ignorant children when he lectured them – don’t you even read the papers?), Arun Jaitley, Subramanyam Swami, AB Vajpayee, L.K. Advani, Ajit Singh, Montek Ahluwahlia,… have you ever bothered to find out about their qualifications? I could name dozens more. (Oh, I forgot to say this: many big-ticket CEOs are MPs too, Anil Ambani and Vijay Mallya for example. Does that automatically make them 'unqualified' and 'corrupt'?)

3. And at the same time, who told you that all CEOs are very hardworking, clever and highly-qualified people? Again, read some papers and magazines. Many CEOs become CEOs simply because they have very well-connected parents (often the founders of their companies: look at the Ambani brothers) – many, after somehow managing to scrape through their school finals, bought an MBA from one of hundreds of (even well-known) B-schools around the world which gladly give such degrees to duds in exchange for a couple of million dollars. Grow up! And when those CEOs sink their companies, they always run to the government for help – look at all the bank CEOs and carmaking CEOs in the USA right now, read about Enron and Arthur Andersen, about Kenneth Lay and Madoff, about Lehman Brothers and Satyam and Raju and PWC! How are their immense ‘qualifications’ serving their companies and their nations now? And don’t you even know how many hotshot ex-CEOs are currently serving jail terms for plain cheating and robbery, or have narrowly avoided prison by spending millions (of stolen money) on lawyers’ fees and bribes?

4. And what exactly do you mean by ‘qualifications’ anyway? How ‘qualified’ were Edison, Bill Gates, Jamshetji Tata, Tagore, Vivekananda, Ramanujan and Satyajit Ray? How qualified was Akbar? How qualified were some of the greatest presidents of the US? Why are you so fond of using words you don’t understand?

5. And now, coming to the issue of pay: a mere bank clerk has a basic salary greater than that of an MP. You sure Rs. 12,000 a month is too much? How much responsibility and risk does a bank clerk or call-centre employee or airhostess or hotel receptionist carry compared to an MP? (are you sure you even have any idea at all about the work that an MP has to do?) What sort of basic salary would you ask for in order to want to become an MP? We both know the answer, right?

6. Even if the total (Rs. 32 lakh) expense on an MP per year looks big, think: much of that goes on phone bills and travel bills and office expenditure. Are you sure it’s not actually too little? Have you any idea how much an MP has to travel and talk just to keep in touch with both parliament and his own constituency? And if you were an MP, would you honestly volunteer to travel second class instead of a/c., or pay for those thousands of phone calls every month from your own pocket? Why are we all so hypocritical, ignorant as well as silly?

7. Finally, if the total expenditure of the country in five years on all MPs taken together (Rs. 855 crores) sounds big, compare that with a few facts: Indians spend more than a thousand crores each year on private tuitions for schoolgoers, smoke and drink several tens of thousand crores every year, a single year’s defence budget is over Rs. one lakh crores, and our 100 biggest companies spend almost that much together on office parties in a year, as any tax-official will tell you. Compared to that, we spend Rs. 855 crores on about 800 people who are literally responsible for the lives and deaths of 1100 million Indians (it’s the same in the US, by the way, check out this link: http://people.howstuffworks.com/midnight-regulation1.htm). You still sure that’s a lot? Managers who oversee the sales of Barbie dolls and cola drinks get paid ten or twenty times that much. Suppose I suggest that before we even dare to call for harder work and greater efficiency and honesty from our MPs, we should first raise that figure at least twenty times?

Of course it is not my case that all our MPs are learned, and wise, and hardworking and dedicated to the progress of the nation. But if a lot of them are worthless and crooked, I insist we think about these things: that a) they reflect us, all of us with nice self-images who think nothing about cheating in examinations and stealing office stationery and spreading nasty gossip and defrauding our own relatives and submitting forged certificates to get jobs and promotions, b) if the political world has gotten filled with incompetents and crooks, it’s because all the ‘good’ people have chosen to play safe and stay away, simply because deep inside they know perfectly well it’s too much risk and trouble and hard work for too little, c) there’s nothing sacred and holy about businessmen/CEOs, for heaven’s sake. They are out to make money out of you, period. If a businessman can make money by selling penicillin, he’ll do that; if he finds he can make more money by selling water in the name of penicillin, he’ll do that instead. It is for politicians and the government to see that he can’t make money by being crooked. The father of the modern free-capitalistic economic ideology, Adam Smith himself, wrote that businessmen never get together, even for relaxation and merriment, but the conversation ends in some contrivance to raise prices or some trick to fool the public! More than 200 years later, the new President of the USA has admitted in his inaugural speech that greed has contributed largely to the current economic mess in that country. Woe betide a nation where so many young ‘educated’ people either don’t understand what government is about, or why it isn’t working well, and don’t care to do a thing to change it for the better, but are so eager to say nasty things about it!

One last thing. The private sector of ‘great’ businessmen is not only full of crooks but loaded with incompetents, as I can vouch from a lifetime of disgusting experience. Lots of back-office boys and girls, armed with MBAs and working for this bank or that mutual fund, can’t copy my name right from a cheque that I have drawn, they get paid 15-30,000 rupees a month for doing precisely that sort of job, and they dare to call themselves educated hardworkers. And I have been cheated by my own ex-student who fobbed off a bad insurance policy on me by counting on my trust, so that the commission may go into the down payment on his new car. I tremble to think of what is going to happen to this country when these duds and frauds become CEOs. Think about it, all.

[P.S., Jan. 24: I couldn't resist adding on this relevant link:

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1090124/jsp/opinion/story_10431554.jsp

For those who mightn't know, Sunanda K. Datta-Ray is a veteran journalist, one-time editor of The Statesman, and now a respected columnist with wide international experience of business and politics.]

P.P.S., Feb. 01: And it's not just our PM, either. The world's political leaders currently gathered at Davos, Switzerland, to discuss a rescue package for the world economy, have not bothered to invite corporate bigwigs this year - it being now understood once more that such people are only good enough to swindle us out of our money in good times and hide behind government nannies in bad times! - and President Obama has snarled at financial fat-cats in the US, calling it 'shameful' that they extend the begging bowl to government with one hand and reward themselves huge pay packets with the other...

see http://www.telegraphindia.com/1090131/jsp/frontpage/story_10465834.jsp

Update, April 11: In the cartoon on the business page of today's edition of The Telegraph a character says "I'm used to big pay and no work ... I've always been a CEO"!

Moral 'science'

It’s been ten days, more than 500 visits and 20 comments since that last post, so I guess it’s time to move on – though, of course, readers who are late in catching up are welcome to continue to write comments on that post (or any older one for that matter).

I shall urge all visitors not only to read and comment on what I write on my blog, but also to visit those I have provided links to here (scroll down the right sidebar until you reach ‘Blogs I often visit’). Some of these people write well, variously, and often, Tanmoy, Supra and ‘wannabewodehouse’, for instance: they really deserve more commenting upon. You won’t be wasting your time. I shall also be glad if readers directed me to blogs that I might find interesting to read. As I suppose you know by now, my interests are wide.

I was wondering what exactly I should write about this time round. So many subjects swirl around in my mind all the time, not all in coherent and finished form, that I have difficulty in choosing from them. I could write about a biographical collection of the letters and other writing of the great scientist Michael Faraday that I am currently reading, or about the delightful illustrated book about orchids that a pupil’s father has kindly given me to read – such a wonderful world exists there among people who love trees and flowers and can find time to care for them. But let me give you a peep into the kind of thing that goes on in my class.

I encourage the boys and girls to think and write as much as they can, offering them model essays, reading out good ones written by older students, and correcting the things that they write. If you can do nothing more, I tell them, find challenging topics from workbooks and old question papers and bring them up for discussion in class: we can pool ideas to make good essays, and sometimes I can throw in a few of my own. Yesterday someone mentioned a topic they had asked candidates to write on in last year’s ICSE examination – ‘Moral science is the most important subject taught in school: give your views for or against’. Well, I had handled this topic several times before, and so I knew what the reaction of the class would be: predictably enough, some murmured that M.S. was a ‘useless’ subject, some admitted they had no idea what to write. Several in the previous batch had, I remembered, written essays on the same subject earlier, and they were all marked by a singular lack of ideas, an aridity of thought, a sense of total confusion – they had usually tried hard to agree, because, they have been taught, that is the thing to do, but they had done so mechanically, without conviction, without being quite sure what they were doing, and with an almost total lack of examples from the real world to buttress their arguments, such as they were. I don’t blame the poor kids: a lot of their schoolteachers, themselves quite unconvinced, clueless and dull, have made such a hash of the subject that the children have grown up with the unanimous belief that it is both useless and boring. And now a fresh batch of youngsters was asking me what they could possibly write.

I started by telling them that to say something is 'important' is not the same thing as saying it is the most important (one of those obvious things everybody knows but never thinks clearly about until they are pointed out!) Next, an important subject might seem boring because you don’t understand it, or hate to memorise things, or fear the examination, or the teacher has done a bad job: thus lots of students grow up finding math, or history, or environmental studies boring. That does not make the subject unimportant. Third, they have only been told repeatedly that this or that subject is important, but without proof: is physics important because you can score marks easily in it or because your parents are convinced it will make it easy for you to get a job? And is biology important because it is part of ‘compulsory’ science or because you have realised that it helps to reveal lots of mysteries about this wonderful world, and about your own body, and about how to stay healthy? And what is moral science all about really? Is it only about making posters about how model children should behave and singing silly hymns in school to a deity nobody really believes in (except in a superstitious way), or does it offer practical tips and tricks about living well? If you aren’t sure about that, how on earth can you go on to argue whether or not it is important, leave alone most important?... and as I spoke, you could see it clearly in the eyes of the children that they were listening, groping, treading on strange and alien territory. No one had raised such questions before.

So I didn’t dictate an essay for them to cram: I still remember how candidates for the UPSC examination had to cram essays about Gandhi, Nehru and Tagore – mountains of words they neither understood nor cared for – just to get through and occupy bureaucratic chairs, and it sickened me. The least of morals we can teach our young is to avoid unnecessary hypocrisy and empty verbiage. Instead, I told them to think of a few things:

1. When you go under anesthesia on the operating table, do you trust your doctor’s marks and degrees or his honesty that he will do his best to save your life, and not remove one of your vital organs to sell off in the black market?
2. Why is it that weird things happen in board examination results – very good students sometimes fail, and very mediocre ones get superlative scores – is it because our examiners are not educated, or because they don’t do their work sincerely (a moral failure, not a technical/institutional one).
3. We are often told by our elders that money should be the sole yardstick of success. Do those elders ever think what would happen to a country where all policemen and judges took them at their word?
4. Why does a man who has made a fortune out of dealing in narcotics lament if his own son becomes an addict?
5. Unless we are mad and sick, we all expect kindness and consideration and understanding and help from others when we are in trouble, don’t we? So what is wrong with us that we think it is not important to give the same to our friends, relatives, neighbours?
6. When highly educated people get caught for fraudulent dealing, we say we don’t expect such things from educated people. So what is education supposed to give us – information and skills, or something else, something more important?

I let it go at that point. In a two-hour class, I have to attend to many things, not just discuss one essay. But do you think I can look forward to a few good essays now?

P.S.: Faraday and Louis Pasteur and Albert Schweitzer and Norman Bethune, all very eminent men of science, were highly moral, if not also deeply religious men. Science does not necessarily make men stupid and immoral (or uncaring about morals) – we must look elsewhere.

A girl who admired her teacher!

The following is a recent conversation on google chat between a teacher (T) and a female ex-student (X), now in her mid-twenties.

X: Good Afternoon Sir and Happy New Year. I was in office the other day so couldn't talk to you.
T: ... and now?
X: At office again but no meetings as of now so I am happily chatting.
T: So tell me something I can chat about. You people fall so completely out of touch for so long that I don't know what to say when you suddenly pop up to say hi!
X: That is true Sir. I read your travelogue. It shows you love the hills. What about your plans for the trekking? The last time I had a talk you said you were supposed to go out for trekking with your daughter.
T: She's still too young, and by the time she grows up I'll probably not be fit enough any longer!
X: Sir that's not true. I still remember I never could actually pace up with your fast steps before our tuition class.
Have you visited Auli? I would be going for skiing there.
T: It's been many years since then! I still walk faster than most of my old boys, but these days my knees hurt, and things are slowly getting worse.
X: But I remember you were very keen on keeping fit.
T: …and ex-students make me feel older than I am by cutting off all contact after leaving - scores of them, year after year...
I try to keep fit, but fate has ideas of its own, too!
X: Sir you must be deeply hurt with some of your ex-students, each time I talk to you or go through your blogs it clearly shows the anguish.
T: Of course. So many forget instantly after leaving, so many can only think of abusing me, and so many who seemed so loving and impressed seem to decide that I no longer matter!
X: I pity them and so should you.
T: By contrast, a tiny handful continue to warm my heart - as my latest blogpost will tell you. And wait for this: almost all of them are boys!
The girls gush much more, but forget much more completely.
X: I do not mind hearing this because that's true and more heartswelling as girls were equally close to you.
T: I cannot, after teaching 27 years, think of three girls who will be glad to do the sort of thing that Y and Z and W recently did for me (all boys)!
X: and they do disappear!
T: And so these days I have become openly cynical about girls in my classes, and the girls dislike me for it. Bad luck for them!
X: Cynical?
I don't believe Sir.
T: No, really - I frequently say that I expect nothing from girl students except their fees...
All the respect and caring and help will come from the boys.
X: If somebody cannot be like the three it doesn't possibly mean they do not care for you at all.
T: Ah, don't give me that corny line, X: I am sick of hearing about girls who have always cared 'secretly' for me. You cannot imagine how many girls have told me about that. They won't be any use to me in my lifetime!
X: are you saying "use"?
Isn't that corny too?
T: All my life I needed the warmth of loving company, and in my old age I shall need help... that's what I mean by use, and I have almost always got that only from the boys. Whether it be waiting for me at a station or taking me to hospital, I can only think of turning to boys.
That's what I have got after teaching girls for 27 years! That's what I mean by use.
X: I understand, but each time I talk to a girl about you the only view they have is you have deliberately and desperately changed.
T: …and if that meaning of 'use' sounds corny to you, we don't speak the same language, do we?
Yes, I have changed: the girls have taught me a lesson hard enough to make me change. I expected much more than fees from them for years and years: I don't any longer.
X: You have actually formed a shell and true to say I like many do need to break the shell to reach the core inside to reach the loving teacher we so admired.
Language? I didn't understand Sir?
T: 'Admiration' means giving back, X. Somehow boys know that instinctively, and girls refuse to understand.
You employed the word use in a snide sense, and I didn't like the innuendo. So I clarified what I meant by that word, that's all.
X: And what about silent admiration Sir? Isn't that counted in your language?
Should admiration always be very flowery? Should admiration have to be shown? Else it is not there?
T: No. And yes. I have already answered that, and you simply did not bother to read!
Admiration that is not shown is not admiration at all.
X : Giving back?
T: Anyway, no one who doesn't wish to listen will ever hear anything. Bye.
X: I have bothered to read Sir.
But fact is that you never heard the silent admirations. Well, leave it Sir, the "sir" I worshipped would remain somewhere in the mind's altar, your three precious souls can never understand nor you, Sir. Sorry for this. Take care.

(end of conversation)

Any comments?

Two observations, and a question

1. One more time, this: no comments are accepted from anonymous sources (including people with weird pseudonyms such as 'Hobo') and from those who have nothing to say beyond 'Nice post' or 'I've been there too'.

2. It is important that someone who is going to write a comment read up the earlier comments first. Otherwise, I see that many new comments are mere repetitions of what has already been said earlier, or irrelevant, or confused.

3. Over the last couple of months several people have been asking me to write on the causes and likely effects of the ongoing economic 'meltdown' worldwide. I have desisted so far not because I don't know anything or don't have anything to say but because many people are likely to take offence at what I will say. That's because there's no other way of saying it: this disaster has happened essentially because too many people at all levels in society, in the US, India and elsewhere, got too greedy and hoped the party would go on forever. Well, do people want me to write on this? I shall see how many affirmative comments I get here.

Travelling once more...

It seems only the other day that I sat down to write about my holiday trip Himachal way, and already another whole year and another grand vacation has come and gone. How fast time flies. All that is sweet in life lies in looking forward to happy things and relishing their memories afterwards in the soft, warm glow of recollection. Thus passes the glory of this world!

This year wasn’t a good one for me – to put it very mildly. Not much about that here: those who know (my wife knows much more than anybody else) don’t need to be told; others don’t need to know. Suffice it to say that unlike most years this time round I wasn’t too sure until only a few days before whether I would be making that long-overdue holiday trip or not. My two old boys Arani and Aakash, both currently working and sharing a flat in Delhi, kept up a barrage of incessant requests, telling me again and again that I was coming over to stay and travel with them in end-December, and it is largely owing to their steady, eager urging that I finally decided to go because it would be churlish to say no.

Subhadip Biswas, my ever-faithful pointman in the capital (what wouldn’t a cabinet minister give to have a secretary as loyal and dependable as he! God grant him a great career; whoever employs him, in whatever capacity, would be lucky indeed), was there to receive me at the railway station for the fourth year in a row; this time so were Arani and Aakash to give me a right royal welcome and ride home. What with Arani’s doting and enormously hospitable parents hovering over us, it was really like being home away from home (only the third time that way in Delhi for me). We lazed around the city a bit, taking in the lights, then pushed off the same evening by an ‘A/c-special’ train to Dehradun. Arriving at about 7 in the morning, we hired a car that made a three-hour trip (part of the road in a hair-raising state of disrepair, thanks to frequent landslides) to drop us off at a lovely and cosy little hotel in a quiet, out of the way hamlet called Chakrata nestling in the Garhwal hills at a height of about 6500 feet, offering a magnificent panorama of a huge range of snowclad Himalayan peaks, including the Yamunotri range. Mercifully, those two days we stayed at Chakrata (and only those two!) were blessed with bright, crisp sunshine, and we had the best suite, so the views we had took our breath away. Being a military cantonment where tourism is definitely not encouraged, Chakrata remains one of those (vanishingly few) hill stations which are still unsullied by the curse of overpopulation and ‘development’ – despite the fact that the local literacy rate is close to 90 per cent! It is located on a thickly wooded hill, in sharp contrast to the moonscape-like terrain of rugged and bare hills all around, so it offered very lovely walks too. The delightful chill in the air gave us the excuse to indulge in a real log fire at night (a first for my daughter), and the service was excellent and the meals were mouth-watering and the conversation as rich as I could ask for, and all of us were in good health, so that’s as close to heaven as one gets, I suppose!

On the third day we drove off to Hardwar via Mussoorie, a long and expensive trip, and the driver was surly and unhelpful, but the scenic views greatly compensated for all that, and the drive down from Mussoorie to Dehradun, followed by the one that takes you through Rajaji (Chilla-) National Park on the way to Hardwar from Hrishikesh, charmed as much as ever, though I was doing it for the fourth time. As in Delhi, it was (surprisingly) hardly cold in Hardwar, and there was disappointingly little water in the Ganga (it was even worse at Lachhmanjhula!), and far too many people, but we got the best possible hotel right on Subhas Ghat, a stone’s throw from the famed Har-ki-pauri – twice before, looking up at the lights while walking along the riverside, my wife and I had sighed to think it would be too costly for the likes of us to afford, so this time, having dared to find out, we were most pleasantly surprised. We moved around quite a bit, of course, but we could have happily lazed around on that balcony, watching the day’s routine scenario unfolding before and below our eyes, from dawn to dusk without a whiff of boredom. Arani had to leave for Delhi a day early, but Aakash kept us company, and vowed that this first visit of his would be a very satisfying memory. I think every one of us thoroughly enjoyed the Ganga aarti ceremony at evenfall, chokingly overcrowded as the ghats were. There was a long midnight wait at Hardwar station for the train that took us to Delhi, and when we arrived at dawn, the drive home in racing autorickshaws through fog so dense you could hardly see the tail lights of the cars ahead of you was enough to satiate my middle-aged appetite for adventure. That day, too, we had an MUV at our disposal, and Subhadip took us around to see some more sights. We took in the National Gandhi Museum, the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid, lunched at Eatopia in the India Habitat Centre, strolled around the lovely Lodhi Gardens (though Arani swore they had been far more lush only a couple of months back), snacked at Chocko-la in Khan Market, and then made a beeline for home; we were falling asleep on our feet! Dinner at Arani’s place was a treat that we could hardly do justice to.

Then it was back to Kolkata. A day’s rest, and my daughter’s birthday quietly celebrated. A very dear old girl, who had come over from the US to get married, very kindly took the trouble to see us off at Howrah station, and embarrassed us by literally shoving a load of lovely gifts into our arms (my best wishes to her and her husband for a long and happy married life). A swift, untroubled trip back home, and again we were received by two favourite old boys – one of whom, Stotra, had been generous enough to keep a watchful eye on my house and garden all the time I was away. And as usual, we were united in feeling that while the trip was much needed and much enjoyed, it was good to be back home!

Those who are interested in photographs might look up the following link (best seen in slideshow mode, with the timer set to 10-15 seconds). I haven’t bothered to upload videos.

Now here are a few observations by way of summing up:

1. The Rajdhani Express is a pale shadow of its former self. I wish we had better trains in the luxury segment, even if they cost more. Faster, more comfortable, quieter, and less filled with newly-rich riffraff. I have always loved trains, but now I’m having trouble coping.

2. There are simply too many people – and crooks, con men and beggars – everywhere these days, metros and holy places included.

3. The sons and daughters of the idle, uncouth, ostentatious super-rich are the same disgusting types everywhere. I wish there were a law against them, like they have laws against stray dogs in some countries.

4. Among the curious sights I saw this time round, sadhus fighting tooth and nail over alms was one of the most remarkable.

5. There used to be an old and long-standing complaint among Bengalis living in Delhi that you can’t get good fish anywhere, unless you shop in Chittaranjan Park. No longer. Arani treated me to some of the most delicious fish I have ever eaten, and I am no great fish-lover, either!

6. A large number of ex-students got together to make this trip particularly heartwarming for me. I often feel blue to think of how little people remember me and what I have done for them in years gone by, but some people might quite possibly envy me: few teachers these days can boast of so many old boys who care, and care so much. My most grateful thanks to them, and blessings. This year’s good experience has gone a long way to help me live down the distressing events that followed my last trip. Those who have dropped out of my life I regret no longer: there are still apparently plenty of others who are only too glad to warm the cockles of my old heart. More power to their elbows. I hope they enjoyed doing everything they did. They can take satisfaction from the knowledge that these year-end trips fill me with new vigour and enthusiasm to cope with the almost-thankless drudgery through the year ahead.

There's just about an hour and a half of 2008 left as I publish this post. I wish every reader a very Happy New Year!

Parents a decade from now!

A teacher called Charles Sykes has written some wonderful advice for youngsters graduating from high school these days. It gives me nightmares to think they will start becoming parents within a decade from now! He had American kids in mind, but I am sure  it applies equally well to the ‘smart set’ of the same age group in India (some people were passing it off as a spoof on the Net, claiming it was a speech that Bill Gates has recently made. It wasn’t Bill, but that doesn’t take away one whit from the truth and importance of what is being said):

Rule 1:  Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2:   The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3:  You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4:   If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5:   Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you “FIND YOURSELF”. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one!             

If you agree, pass it on.

If you can read this - Thank a teacher!

Contrast the attitude manifest in the above sermon with the reality about today’s youngsters (again, I don’t see much difference between American kids and their wannabe Indian clones…): watch this sad and shocking video song on youtube: http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=7uSlqI1AVUk

I am thankful to Sion Chowdhury, in his third undergraduate year at Jadavpur University, Dept. of English, for kindly providing me with the above link. Do watch the video: you won't get the point of this blogpost without reflecting upon it!

          
  

Forests, tribals and sombre thoughts

Someone has posted something about our beautiful forests and the tribals who live there on his blog recently which brought a variety of interconnected thoughts flooding into my mind. 

1. In connection with the beauty of our natural surroundings: here in India we have some of the most picturesque and spectacular places in the world, but, unlike in ‘advanced’ countries we (by we I specifically mean the educated, rich and powerful – the whole middle class included, politicians, bureaucrats, engineers, doctors, accountants, lawyers, journalists, teachers and all) don’t collectively value and therefore don’t have any serious desire to preserve them; rather, whatever the dread hand of ‘development’ touches is immediately despoiled, polluted and ruined. That applies to all our forests and wildlife; very soon, all the experts sadly say, there will be little of either left: we shall only have forests of shopping malls and multiplexes and housing estates and steel mills and IT-‘parks’ everywhere instead, and I am sure most of us will be perfectly happy. We have become a vast race of philistines: what a wonder that some of us still boast that we have inherited one of the oldest and richest ‘cultures’ of the world! What a wonder that one of the most hauntingly beautiful of Sanskrit poems, Abhignyan Shakuntalam, speaks so eloquently of how deeply humans can love trees. To us, ‘modern’ Indians (unlike, say, to the French, Germans, Japanese and even Americans) that is so backdated, so uncool! It’s neither sms text nor Britney Spears nor quantum mechanics, after all.

2. The plight of the wretched of the earth – our tribals prominently among them – never seems to change, despite all the rhetoric about socialism and welfare, despite all the grand governmental plans, despite all the money supposedly earmarked year after year, decade after decade, despite all the good work done by countless selfless people for their upliftment, despite all the magic formulas chanted night and day by comfortable and secure votaries of the free market. In what I consider one of the twenty greatest books of the 20^th century written anywhere in the world, Aranyak (The Forest’s Tale), Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee spoke with shame and dismay about a very old tribal so poor that he had walked all night through dense jungle to eat a large bowl of rice when the manager-babu of the zamindar’s estate was giving a feast for the likes of him. That was more than eighty years ago. And today, after more than sixty years of ‘development’ as a free country, we hear that the mass of such tribals still live in the same kind of indigence, helplessness and hopelessness. And we the ‘moderns’ are not a whit ashamed to boast of our mobile-revolution, and automobile revolution, and of how many of our whizkids are contributing to the software industry. Cry, the beloved country!

3. Blame it all on illiteracy and the population explosion: that is how the know-it-all ‘intelligentsia’ has been salving its conscience for so long. Well, if those were the only factors responsible (rather than the stupidity, callousness and greed of the most privileged classes), why didn’t we take drastic enough steps early on to ensure that they no longer remained serious issues in 2008? When shall we ever say ‘it’s high time’? Why have we – as a nation – focused so maniacally on only furthering the narrow and selfish interests of the most privileged classes, so that development has come to mean only urban luxuries for those who continue to stay back in India (luxuries that make us and our children ever fatter, ruder, greedier and stupider – not those that make us healthier and wiser, like parks and libraries and good movies and museums, for instance), and opportunities for millions of them to flee permanently to ‘better’ countries?

4. Wildlife will vanish, because they cannot fight back to make a change for the better. Humans, alas, can. I do not find it a cause for wonder that tribals are organizing and rising violently against all the humiliation, deprivation and oppression heaped on them for ages – in the name of development, too (at least the Mughals and the British made no such pretence!), rising all over Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Orissa, West Bengal and elsewhere. I find it wonderful, rather, that they are still not rising in large enough numbers, and violently enough, to make a real difference. I also find it sad and futile that they take out their wrath on the least privileged of the privileged classes – ill paid police constables, local level politicos, junior field engineers, very petty bureaucrats and so on. Even killing thousands of suchlike will not change anything in the corridors of power, anything in the mindset of those who make big decisions, those who take away 99 percent of the benefits of ‘development’ every time. The killing fields will only grow bloodier, as the state hits back to wreak blind vengeance on behalf of those who matter: cabinet ministers, tycoons, film stars, cricketers ... and their families. In a democratic country, only "VIPs" really matter (does anybody honestly think that there would have been a tenth of the uproar if the terrorists had attacked a large dharmshala instead of the Taj? Remember, 30,000 plus perished in the Orissa cyclone, and the tsunami of December 2005 killed more than 150,000!) Very many of us non-VIPs and our near and dear ones will perish in the crossfire. Alas, none of us will have the moral right to call ourselves ‘innocent’ victims. Remember, by their definition the British CID was quite justified in calling Kshudiram Bose a ‘terrorist’, because, after all, his bomb killed two ‘innocent’ British civilians, a defenceless woman and a child at that! And if making a prediction like this brands me as an enemy of the people (as defined by Ibsen and Satyajit Ray), so be it. One does not have to sympathize with the 'Maoists' to understand where all the anger is coming from.

5. One last thought. As any social psychologist knows, science itself has a culture and a history: what people choose to study and why depends a very great deal on the social mindset in which they grow up. Perhaps that is precisely the reason why most of our ‘good’ students want to study science, and that too engineering or mathematics or physics, rather than zoology or botany, leave alone history and economics and law and political science and literature and philosophy? Perhaps it’s not just because the first category leads to easy and well-paid jobs quickly, perhaps the more important reason is that in their subconscious they and their parents know that the latter category deals with far more difficult and messy problems which are best avoided? – If that is true, fine, but just how long can we keep running away, how many of us, and how far? Can our 300-million strong middle class migrate en masse to America or Europe when there’s nothing left in India to exploit, and it has grown too dangerous to live in?

Honesty, our style

A prosperous shopkeeper is asked by his little grandson, 'Grampa, what does honesty mean?'

Grampa chooses his words carefully. 'Suppose a customer overpays me Rs. 100. I should share half of this with my brother, who runs the shop alternately with me. He would never have known if I hadn't told him, but I should. That's honesty.'

'But grampa - what about the customer? He overpaid, didn't you say? Shouldn't you...'

'Don't bother about the customer, boy. That's not our concern. He ought to have been more careful.'

[I got this gem from a little book of witticisms written in Bangla by Tarapada Ray. And I shall be the first to admit that I know a lot of shopkeepers who are not like that!]

Terror in Mumbai

I am not unaware of or insensitive to significant current events, though I might not often write about them here. In connection with the ongoing violent mess in Mumbai, I have commented at some length on Tanmoy's new blog (link provided in Blogs I often visit): please take a look.

P.S., Dec. 03: Sumitha Kurien has opened a good blog on this subject recently; visit

http://letusunitenow.blogspot.com

Creating a 'knowledge society'!

Sam Pitroda (successful IT enterepreneur based in Chicago, one-time technology mission adviser to PM Rajiv Gandhi, credited with ushering in the ongoing telecom revolution in India, and currently, at Manmohan’s Singh’s behest, head of India’s National Knowledge Commission), has publicly regretted (as reported in The Statesman, 16th November, first page) that India is doing far too little to become a true-blue ‘knowledge economy’ and a leader of the world. And by way of proof, he has held up the following kind of data: that compared to the US and even China, India has pathetically few young people pursuing doctoral and post-doc research programs. He has also suggested a slew of measures to increase those numbers significantly over the next few years.

While having no quarrel with the facts or with Mr. Pitroda’s suggested reforms, I should like my readers (most of whom, I am sure, regard themselves as highly educated or in the process of so becoming) to think about the following posers:

1. Are doctorates very good indicators of who is knowledgeable and who is not any more? Bertrand Russell joked long ago about how American PhD scholars gaped at the erudition of mere master’s degree holders (such as himself) from Britain who came over to lecture them; many of us know that what passes for ‘research’ these days is mere re-dressing and regurgitation of old hat, with very little in the way of major new discoveries and novel ideas thrown in, or quite insignificant additions to the existing corpus of knowledge, no matter what the subject is, from physics to economics to literature (Sir J.J. Thomson got a doctorate for as momentous a discovery as that of the electron: these days people get PhDs for describing a hitherto overlooked step in the reproductive cycle of the hydra, or some slight tweak in game theory, or suggesting the 164th risk-factor for heart attacks, or that Shakespeare may have had gay leanings). And I hear from my college-going ex-students all the time how unintelligent, boring and utterly uninformed outside the narrow area of her specialisation the average PhD lecturer is these days: so much so that a hotshot math prof cannot help out her own 14 year old daughter with her geography or chemistry or English lessons, and has to look around desperately for tutors to make up for her shortcomings!... and haven’t some of the cleverest men of the 20th century been non-doctorates? (forget about titans like Ramanujan and Bill Gates; even Mr. Pitroda’s doctorate, I think, was given honoris causa!). On the other hand, I know for a fact that a lot of doctorates in my own state are so lacking in energy, enterprise and self-confidence that they eagerly sit for examinations to qualify as bank clerks and middle-school teachers. Is Mr. Pitroda juvenile enough to imagine that a nation can grow great on the shoulders of such pathetic ‘knowledgeable’ people?

2. What exactly does knowledge mean? What did Socrates or the Buddha know in comparison with, say, someone with a BTech in electronics or an MA in English?

3. Is knowledge only that which is saleable? In that case, of course, Shah Rukh Khan and Sachin and the average lawyer or surgeon and fashion model ‘knows’ infinitely more than a great art historian or astronomer can ever think of knowing, right?

4. Doesn’t a sincere and hardworking schoolteacher whose efforts not only made thousands literate and numerate, but got them interested in history and geography and biology and painting and music ‘know’ anything mentionable and valuable?

5. What kind of a ‘knowledge society’ is it that cannot produce ten Nobel Prize winners in 60 years? And where 'educated' people rarely buy books or visit libraries?

6. If we were so keen on creating a ‘knowledge society’, why do we reward our teachers so poorly at all levels, in cash as well as in social regard – so poorly that no modern Indian parent wants his son or daughter to choose to be a teacher?

7. I have always said that there is no better test of who knows how much than asking people to take an impromptu general quiz, and write an essay and speak in an intelligent, informed way for ten minutes on a topic chosen at random, and my entire teaching experience assures me that 95% of all the ‘educated’ adults I know would fail such a test miserably. This, also, bears thinking about.

8. What kind of knowledge is it that becomes obsolete in ten years? If we truly believe that life is precious, and all of Warren Buffett’s wealth will not bring back five minutes of our lives, are we sure we are investing our time well when we pursue such ‘knowledge’ (remember, when Ernest Rutherford was asked in his old age what he would do if he could live his life all over again, he said ‘collect more butterflies’!)

9. Why is this country’s newspapers full of stories about the worst sort of crimes consistently committed by ‘knowledgeable’ people – from peeing by the roadside to fighting in queues to killing female foetuses and abusing child labourers and spreading gossip and superstition?

10. Why did Tagore – not exactly an ignorant man himself – lament that the world needs good men far more than clever and learned ones?

Maybe it is too much to expect the likes of Mr. Pitroda to think so much, and of so many things, but is it the same with all my readers?