I love Lalit Modi!

He personifies so self-assuredly, so brazenly, so happily, everything that is true about the contemporary Indian wannabe high-profile success (shades of Harshad Mehta, Ramalinga Raju, and others too numerous to mention, including thousands who, more wisely in my poor opinion, stay out of the media glare…).

Here, in a thumbnail sketch, is his ideology:

1. Money buys everything, including fame and the power to dodge the clutches of the law, so nothing else is worth aiming for;

2. Use the money to live the high life of luxury yachts, private jets, fleets of limousines, armies of bodyguards, an endless supply of nubile and willing bimbos – and the ‘public’ (read mass media) will simultaneously envy you and admire you as they used to admire gods in the olden days;

3. Use whatever your native animal cunning is best at manipulating to make and squander money – be it sports, politics, crime, IT, real estate, movies, healthcare, education or the stock market: it makes no difference at all.

4. When in trouble, be even more brazen than before, and chances are 1000 to 1 that you’ll be able to ride it out. And even if you can’t, what harm can a few months in a five-star jail specially built for you do? A long holiday, all comforts paid for, while the public forgets why it was mad at you, and then you can happily go back to your shenanigans. After all, this is India: no big-time crook ever gets seriously punished!

And – except when their stars are bad – these are the sort of ‘great’ men who will make India proud as a great nation soon: about that our prime minister is still firmly convinced. baaki sab bakwaas…

(If the reader is interested, I recommend her/him to a series of essays I wrote through September and October 2009 on this blog, titled Poor little rich thug, Ministers flying cattle class, Counterculture and Counterculture: postscript. The search bar will help you. It might strike you that in India, a truly democratic country, literally anyone can be ‘successful’ these days, whether you are an ex-rickshawwallah or a friend of chief ministers, if only you are shameless enough, arrogant enough, violent enough and greedy enough. Absolutely no other talents required. The parents of all my students and ex-students should take note. Why waste time chasing the JEE? Your children will be serving masters like these anyway!)

P.S., May 05: Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri, sometime head of the department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, has this to say about the IPL mania and its social significance. Most readers are not going to like it!

A father's abiding woe...

When does a dad go wrong? And when he does, can he ever forgive himself?

Pupu was born a more than normally lively and intelligent child. She loved to listen to stories, yet she was already past two and having difficulty concentrating on making the effort that every child must make to start on the long journey to literacy – learning the alphabet. Being persuaded that it was best to start with the mother tongue, my wife and I had been trying gently, but with ever increasing anxiety, to get her to start reading on her own (we didn’t believe in relegating even such basic responsibilities to those cram shops that call themselves by the fancy name of play school). Already precocious at that early age, she had memorized all the writing in her first picture book by simply listening to us chanting the rhymes over and over again, and naughtily tried to pass it off as ability to read! Naturally, she was caught out when we switched books. And one evening, when her mother had complained after several months of fruitless struggle, I lost my temper.

I had always been, both by training and temperament, a firm believer in Asimov’s aphorism ‘Violence is the last resort of the incompetent’. Never in two decades of teaching had I ever hit a pupil. Yet that evening I put her firmly on my lap and gave her an ultimatum: ‘I’m not letting you go until you have started reading on your own!’ I find it agonizing to recall the next half hour, though more than a decade has passed by – it seems like yesterday. I scolded and threatened, even cuffed her on the head and boxed her ears two or three times (I am ashamed to say I probably even slapped her once), all the while holding her tightly to my breast and urging her ‘Go on, go on, keep trying, again, again, again, you can do it…’ and she sniffled and sobbed and wriggled and kept whining ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t’ and went on trying desperately, poor child. I had almost given up in despair when I saw that the miracle had taken place without either of us noticing it: she was reading fluently, and quite unconscious of the fact that she had done it!

I stopped her short in mid-rhyme and said, ‘Look, darling, you can read now!’ And you should have seen her look of startled, unbelieving surprise, and then the lovely, heavenly smile of delight and pride lighting up her tear-stained face: ‘Oh, yes, daddy, I can really read now, can’t I?’ and we hugged each other as though we had just been declared lords of the world…

It has been years, and now Pupu is a very grown-up sort of teenager, big and smart and talkative, a voracious reader in two languages far ahead of most people of her age, and learning two more languages with hardly any prompting on daddy’s part. Every time I ask her for forgiveness, she says, ‘Oh, come on, Dad, I should say thank God you took a firm line that day!’

So did I do the right thing after all, and can I be forgiven when I stand before the Lord’s Judgment seat?

[That was mum and daughter studying together a few months after the nightmare was behind them...]

Bangla new year: a nice feeling

Right from the morning we have been inundated with Bengali shubho noboborsho greetings - by phone, email, e-card, and lots of personal visits - from literally scores of people, and literally from around the world. It makes one feel good. Happy New Year to all, and many, many thanks to all who took the trouble to wish us well. A pity that I couldn't respond to everybody personally...

It's the money, honey

Of the millions of words being said and written in the mass media following the Maoist-organized massacre of CRPF policemen in Dantewada, Chattisgarh, this particular news item caught my attention. Look at the last paragraph. It seems that the families of the jawans who were killed will receive a total of Rs. 38 lakhs (3.8 million) each as compensation, besides one job per family on humanitarian grounds.

Now I have no intention of belittling or insulting the soldiers who die fighting for the government (notice I didn’t say ‘for their country’, though), but a few reflections are in order:

1. A lot of people work in very harsh conditions ‘for their country’ (postmen and firemen and ordinary policemen and teachers in private schools – who are usually paid much less than their government counterparts – and coolies at construction sites, to name just a few), and cannot expect even a tiny fraction of that kind of reward whether they die at work or live beyond normal retirement age;

2. Given that these policemen come from humble or even poor backgrounds, the compensation is truly princely – now I know why there’s never a dearth of people eager to sign on, despite the risks;

3. Since these people know they can look forward to that kind of reward for their families in case they are killed on duty, don’t expressions like ‘they made the supreme sacrifice for their country’ sound a little hollow, not to say pretentious?

4. Make a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation. The government doles out several tens of crores in such compensation to the families of dead soldiers/policemen every year. Mightn’t it have been a better idea to spend that money on the kind of genuine and much needed development of those most backward regions of this country where mass discontent is the breeding ground of militant rebellion?

5. A few years ago the father of a pupil of mine, a civil engineer working for the army’s Border Roads Organization, had volunteered to work on a highway construction project in Afghanistan, despite the huge risk from resurgent terrorists there, because, he said, the pay was really good. Since these people love money more than their lives (remember, the man was, if not rich, quite comfortably off here, and nobody had forced him to go), do we really need to shed copious collective tears over them when they are picked off by terrorists or brigands? Why do we want to have our cake and eat it too?

6. I have been a teacher all my life. For the last eight years I have been entirely self-employed. The government happily takes income tax from me every year, but promises my family no reward, no compensation of any kind should I die early. A beautician charges ten times what I do for a tenth of the kind of work I do, whether you count mental skills or physical exertion (of late my doctor has been urging me to take it easy). Everybody in this country pretends to ‘honour’ teachers and the work they do. Yet there are so many people who say behind our backs that we teachers have become 'greedy'. Whereas Shah Rukh Khan is not, and Sachin is the pride of India, and fashion models 'deserve' to be paid little fortunes for posing in underwear, and soldiers make ‘supreme sacrifices’ killing their own countrymen. (Just to silence armchair cynics, I'd be glad to 'die for my country' anytime provided I knew that my family would be comfortably off as a result for the rest of their lives. And I wouldn't care whether people called it 'the supreme sacrifice' or not.)

Any comments?

Shilpi's latest

Go to this page and read, and reflect, and comment.

National treasures?

This editorial in today’s edition of The Telegraph gladdened my heart as few things do these days. I have immediately shot off the following congratulatory email to them:

Sir,

I have been reading The Telegraph since the day it was born, and no editorial ever made me so happy as today's first - Icon Fever (TT, Wednesday, March 31). It so happens that I have been harping on the selfsame theme for more than a quarter century in my humble capacity as a teacher, to no avail. Judging by their icons, Indians have grown immensely smaller indeed. They don't seem to be even aware of it, leave alone feel ashamed, more's the pity. And it all stems not only from a total confusion between ideas of greatness, excellence and mere popularity, as you quite rightly say, but the fact that we can no longer imagine that without material success of a large sort, anybody can deserve respect or emulation. The lot of the Satyen Bose, Ramkinkar Baij and Bibhuti Banerjee types was bad enough in their own time, but it would have been far worse today, because to the hardship of penury would have been added the humiliation of near-universal contempt and ridicule. And that speaks volumes about how much this country has 'progressed' in the last half century, culturally and morally speaking. Good to see that your editorial writer takes the role of conscience keeper seriously sometimes. More power to your elbow.

Yours truly,

A book worth reading (I think)

Pawan Varma, IFS, a most erudite man and a felicitous writer, has become one of my favourite commentators on the way the Indian cultural scenario has been evolving. I thoroughly enjoyed his sympathetic yet scathing analysis of the ways and mores of The Great Indian Middle Class, and his second book, Being Indian (published in 2004) was just as interesting to read, and thought-provoking. So much so that these days, when anybody wants to discuss matters cultural in the Indian context, I ask her whether she has read Nirad Chaudhuri, Khushwant Singh, V. S. Naipaul, Mark Tully and Varma, at least; otherwise it's likely to be an idle and pointless conversation.

Varma has now authored yet another book, Becoming Indian: the unfinished revolution of culture and identity. I have just read Kanchan Gupta’s interview with Varma about this book, and I am looking forward to reading it myself.

To my mind, Pawan Varma belongs to that old tradition which has been coming down from the likes of Rammohun Roy: close observers, vigorous thinkers, who want India to become a truly great country, who can see her great potential, who are also aware that a lot of cultural baggage is holding her back, and who can criticize all our faults (not even sparing icons like Rammohun himself!) unsparingly though not cruelly, and always with constructive ends in view. In short, a man after my own heart. Do read his books, all, and get back to me about them. I like to think that I too am an argumentative Indian in the sense conveyed by Amartya Sen, and that there are still some such people around…

'Very serious' issues

A young man was chatting with me and mentioned how terrorism, he thinks, is a 'very serious' problem facing India. I fell a-musing about this... how the mass media decide which issues will be uppermost on people's minds, and which will permanently stay in obscurity. A few hundred people killed yearly by terrorists is a 'very serious' issue; several hundred thousand killed or crippled by reckless or drunk drivers is not! IPL cheerleaders are an item, good teachers and doctors who work quietly, day and night, for the common good are not. A new BMW model introduced in the country is hot news, millions permanently malnourished is not. More shopping malls is development, more people who can spell correctly (with or without college degrees) is not. Millionaire footballers are heroes, highly-decorated soldiers are not (be honest - how many Param Veer Chakra winners can you name?)

Funny country, India.

Or is it like that with all humankind, more or less?

A good campaign

"Earth Hour is a WWF initiative which sends across an inspiring message of hope and action for Climate Change. At 8.30pm on 27^th March 2010, cities, towns and municipalities across the world will turn off their lights for one hour – Earth Hour – sending a powerful global message that it’s possible to take action on global warming. "

So started the email from campaigner Poulomi, urging me to talk about the coming event (which they want to make the largest mass-participation event in history) on my blog.

What they are essentially doing is to create mass awareness about the need to be less wasteful in our use of energy – and thereby cause less pollution. An initiative like this deserves everyone’s support, I think. It doesn’t cost anybody much to switch off all gadgets for just an hour on just one particular day. While the energy-saving from that might be minuscule compared to the amount we consume annually planet-wide, I believe that a) every little bit counts, and b) the real benefits will start pouring in when people in the hundreds of millions (including people like teachers, judges, journalists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and all our educated youth) start thinking seriously about not only energy conservation but also taking really serious steps towards harnessing alternative, less-polluting, renewable sources of energy on a scale large enough to say goodbye to coal and oil within a few decades…

Go ahead and do your mite: not just by switching off the lights at your own house on March 27 at the scheduled hour, but persuading at least five other people to do the same.

And I hope they will do likewise in Las Vegas!

You can find more details about this effort on the official Earth Hour website. Also look up their campaign on Facebook, or even follow them on twitter here.

Join this debate!

My readers are the young educated elite of India, largely in the age group of 15 to 40. I am sure they have a lot of complaints as well as aspirations about their country. I would like many of them to write in on the theme of ‘Emerging India: failures, problems and hopes’.

Which way do you see this country going? What are the good signs, and which signs bode ill? Restrict your comments to 500 words, and avoid putting all the blame on the usual whipping boys, such as corrupt politicians. Try to be as personal and specific as possible about what ‘development’ or ‘progress’ means to you. Compare with other countries/cultures you have seen.

And in this connection, take a look at this article and this one to give you some ideas…

P.S., March 11: Must admit to a feeling of disappointment. Here I had offered a chance to my readers to vent their opinions, without me imposing anything on them, and it's such a perennially interesting issue too, so naturally I had expected a deluge of comments to pour in. You visitors are really funny...

P.P.S., March 22: Good to see that more responses have been coming in since that last prodding. But I want many more, knowing that so many other people are reading without commenting. Indeed, I think that this mental lethargy (or simply not having anything worthwhile to say on any serious issue) among our so-called educated young is one of the worst things about contemporary India...

Avatar the movie

Just watched Avatar. Not on 3D, thank you: I’ve seen enough 3D-movies before, and I am rather tired of special-effects, having been watching them since the days of King Kong and later Star Wars (Roger Ebert is not. Try Rotten Tomatoes too), and anyway, this movie is not one of those which should have needed the special effects to be called good. Most certainly it’s a whole lot better than Titanic, whose global success made me gawk when it was released, and which I still cannot swallow.

I find some details of the story line a bit silly (a precious metal called ‘Unobtanium’, and giant blue humanoids with tails – how creative can you get?) compared to the many truly great works of fantasy I have read and seen, and I consider Messrs. Cameron and co. lucky for having made such a big splash, as I have always considered them lucky who can make fantasizing pay as a career. Lots of details have been hijacked from other movies, too… I wonder what the director of the Matrix series is saying about it, to name just one obvious source of ideas.

The plot is very in-your-face green, and pro-native peoples, and anti-war and anti-corporate capitalism: the reason I love America is that probably nowhere else on earth can artists make anti-establishment works so freely and even expect to be applauded and richly rewarded for it! It is a little kinder towards science (as distinct from technology, which is portrayed as crudely and overwhelmingly destructive – cocking a snook at the founders of Google? – and contributing to humans becoming drunk with power like little children), but it also underscores the idea that so-called primitive people could be repositories of much more wisdom and skill than scientists are trained to credit them with, so it is both wrong and stupid to hurt and destroy them or even mock them instead of trying to understand them and learn from them (as the old shaman says, ‘you can’t fill a cup that is already full’).

For me the chief reason for liking the movie was that it gave me occasion to recall a great deal of history, and to discuss some of it with my daughter. It has all happened before, right here on earth, with the white commerce-obsessed, technology-reinforced imperialists discovering, exploring, and bulldozing indigenous peoples to the point of extermination in all the far-flung corners of the planet in their quest for new territories and natural resources to feed the engines of industry. It started on a large scale in medieval times with the invention of ocean-going ships and cannon, and it is continuing to this very day in south America, Africa and various parts of Asia and Australasia. Just read oil, copper or timber in place of Unobtanium. You don't have to venture into outer space for it: but maybe the storyteller is saying that we humans will never learn to mend our ways! The fact that the invaders cannot understand why the natives are neither interested in nor grateful for the opportunity to be ‘improved’ is entirely historical, and has been an issue since Shakespeare raised it in The Tempest, though it will be simplistic and unfair to believe that the imperialists did only harm, as it is now fashionable to believe in certain intellectual circles (the British banned sati and introduced scientific education in India). It was also good to see the idea of reverence for all sentient living things has been given such good press (Gaia is called Eywa here). Can we hope that the fact that such middlebrow works are entering and winning huge applause in the sphere of popular culture is an indication that we are likely to enter an era of greater gentleness and wisdom among all humans and among humans towards nature as a whole?

Or – as I fear is much more likely – is it just a nine-day wonder, to be completely forgotten as soon as the next blockbuster comes along, which is sure to be in a few months’ time? Does 'interest' go even a step beyond childish special effects these days? And does anybody really think and remember anything any more?

P.S., March 09: I am glad that Kathryn Bigelow's low-budget, far more serious movie Hurt Locker has beaten Avatar to the Oscars (delicious irony that Bigelow is Cameron's ex-wife!). As someone wrote on twitter, 'it's a reaffirmation of basic human decency'. Or at least that even in today's world big money and high-tech, low-IQ extravaganza can't always buy up everything!

P.P.S., March 22: Now that I have seen Hurt Locker, I must say it hasn't impressed me much either, compared to many other Oscar-winning movies I can remember, including those about war and its horrors.

Just musing...

I had written a post titled To those about to become ex-students a while ago, and expected a lot of old boys (I don't count girls) to write in and tell me, as well as the youngsters, what sort of memories they have of my classes, and give the current pupils some tips about how they could best benefit from them. I guess I was mistaken: not many old boys have either the time or the inclination. Funny how many of them gush over the phone or by email and even face to face about what varied and wonderful experiences they had! Is it all make-believe, then, designed to please me with a false sense of satisfaction?

Serving up on request

I have added a new blog to my blogroll: that of my old boy Sreejith. I think readers will find good stuff there. I take this opportunity to urge my readers to try out the blogs on my blogroll whenever they visit mine, and to comment on those posts they like – that would be a great encouragement to the writers. I also urge the blog writers to write more frequently. Only Tanmoy and Shilpi write often enough. Those who don’t write for months on end I am sadly forced to remove from the blogroll. I shall also request all to let me know now and then about any interesting new blog they have found - I shall be glad to visit them. And one other reminder: nobody is stopping you from visiting older posts and commenting on them!

I was thinking about the various requests that have been made lately regarding what people would like me to write about next, and wondering whether I could write something that addressed several of those requests simultaneously. Anirvan asked about how to raise children well; Harman (who himself lives a frighteningly busy life as a neurosurgeon based in New York) was musing on the need for solitude (and even provided a link to an article which I want all my readers to look up and reflect upon), and Subhajit asked about how to empower individuals and be of some use to mankind. Too divergent questions to answer at one go?

Well, yes and no. The fact is not only that peaceful solitude is vanishing from our lives (except for those like the handicapped and the very old and the very young with no guardians to look after them, who might have too much of it!), but children are actually being brought up in such a pressure-cooker atmosphere that they are not only not learning to appreciate the immense value of occasional solitude, but actually to be afraid of it, to regard it as some kind of sickness. It is not that they are having to work or study all the time – indeed, compared to the amount of regular studying good boys used to do in my day, these creatures hardly study anything at all except at exam.-time, studying anything ‘outside the syllabus’ is equally anathema to both parents and children, and it is a rare child which is both trained and encouraged to do regular household chores in this part of my country, at least in the social set that I deal with. But going to school every day (regardless of whether much learning happens there), attending sundry tuitions, doing the same kind of homework, watching the same sort of stuff on TV, playing the same sort of computer games, having the same sort of birthday parties, giggling over the same kind of jokes, swooning over the same celebrities, being seen in the same kind of clothes, being programmed to desire the same sort of status-symbol gadgets – and never being allowed to be alone with their thoughts – it often strikes me that in an apparently democratic society which makes a huge fetish of free choice, children today are actually being raised in concentration camps designed to produce hordes of clones (tellingly, hundreds of them even make exactly the same mistakes of grammar and spelling!), with only the starvation and physical brutality missing. Not needed, I suppose, since brainwashing works so much more effectively. Half a century ago, lots of children could think on their own; today I can see my old boys (and that too, only a small fraction of them) beginning to think now and then after they are past their mid-20s, if by thinking we mean wondering why things are the way they are, and why they are being told lifelong to do the things they are told, and trying to figure out whether they could live better, more meaningful, more rewarding lives. By that time most of them have their careers and lifestyles unchangeably decided for them – alas for all those who then start feeling that this is not what they wanted!

Another awful thing that has happened (and this has to do with Subhajit’s concern with ‘empowerment’) lately with children is that, in the process of being brought up as described above, they have actually been taught to feel helpless without parents, tutors, formatted syllabi and routine examinations – more and more with the passage of time they are being convinced that they cannot do, learn, think, feel or achieve anything on their own. Where are the Tom Sawyers and Indranaths, the Dickens-es and Faradays today? They cannot possibly learn anything without tutors (I am tired of telling parents their wards, especially when they are doing well by themselves, don’t need me); they cannot travel anywhere on their own until they are past 20 (and sometimes not even then!), they cannot be trusted with money, they cannot go out to play with their friends (the parks in my town are either empty or occupied by old men or kids from the slums – lucky kids!), they cannot learn by themselves to deal with the opposite sex (too ‘dangerous’), they cannot even ‘afford to waste precious time’ going shopping for their mothers (though I know as they do how many ways they have devised of wasting time…). And this is becoming self-fulfilling. After five years of college, MBBS doctors say they are not yet ready to treat patients on their own, so they need a further diploma for ‘hands-on’ experience; graduate engineers are having to be 'trained' in elementary good manners and language skills before they can become job-competent; PhD scholars are passing off others' earlier work as their own ‘research’ and getting their papers ghost-written, housewives with master’s degrees cannot teach their primary-school going children, I personally know married ex-students whose parents still virtually run the household, and I read about actresses pushing 30 being chaperoned by their mothers on the sets. Does empowerment merely mean giving poor people some means of making money? I often discuss with my wife and daughter that the girls who work as our maidservants and simultaneously take care of younger siblings at home are far more ‘empowered’ than their more ‘fortunate’ brothers and sisters - all they need is better wages!

To return to the need for solitude, it has been my lifelong conviction that one needs a lot of it not only to become one’s own man, sure of one’s strengths, tastes and goals, not only to become truly creative in any field, art or science or philosophy, but even to enjoy all the many good things of life. You don’t need cackling company to enjoy a baby's hug or a beautiful sunset or a grand symphony or a good movie or a great book or a fine wine: in fact, unless it is genuinely congenial company, you are much better off without it. It’s a terrible pity that today’s children hardly know all the enjoyment they are missing, with adults as well as peers breathing down their necks all the time. Thoreau’s solitude in Walden is not for everybody, but we all desperately need some of it to live good lives. And those who think they don’t perhaps need it the most!

P.S., March 03: Try this article, it's a must-read. And I swear that I didn't write it myself. The writer is a very successful American social entrepreneur.

Great fighter aircraft, and...

Arthur Lundh, 71 and of Swedish ancestry, alongwith his erudite and very caring wife Bernice were among the best hosts that I had during my two month-something Rotary Club-sponsored trip in and around Arizona, USA, back in the summer of 1991. Very quickly Arthur and I discovered a deep and informed shared love of aircraft (he had been a bomber pilot during the Korean war, and I had got my first serious assignment with a major English newspaper based in Calcutta after wowing the editorial staff with technical information about top-of-the-line fighters around the world that I could reel off from memory in an emergency). As a very exclusive treat (in which none of my travel partners were interested) he drove me to Luke Air Force Base out in the desert, and to the remarkable Champlin Fighter Museum in a little town called Mesa, and we had a whale of a time together: chatting up the museum staff and air force personnel about their magnificent machines. It made my day when I managed to pose beside the most famous fighter aircraft in all history - the Spitfire which won the Battle of Britain. A real plane, not a mockup model, and in ready-to-fly condition (God doesn't grant all our dreams: I didn't get to fly in it!) Click here to look up a few photos...

Arthur had started off as a restaurant waiter in his youth, gone on to join the air force, left it to study architecture and used that skill to become a senior engineer with Greyhound Bus Corporation, and in his old age, he had joined college once again to cultivate a talent he had newly discovered: painting. He isn't likely to be alive today, and we became friends before the internet and email became all-pervasive. Sometimes I really feel sorry that certain kinds of technology arrived too late. In case you are around and happen to read this, Arthur, you'll transport me to the seventh heaven of joy if you drop a line. If not, God rest your soul.

Thanks, and another request!

I am delighted to see that so many people have already responded positively to my last request, with suggestions for writing and with enlistment on the followers list. Thanks very much indeed. I am not the conceited sort who says ‘I write only for myself’ with a haughty air: I write because I want to communicate, and I want to draw like-minded people close to me, and I love to know, again and again, that there are many like-minded people in the world. It is with that purpose that I have been writing since mid-2006. Now I have a target which excites me. As you can see, the number of visits has crossed 40,000 (actually one must add about 4,500 to that, because that was the number when I last accidentally uninstalled the counter), and the number of followers stands at 112 at the moment of writing. Will you all help me to celebrate the fourth birthday by pushing up the number of followers to 150 and the number of visits to 50,000 (that needs only about 5000 more visits by July – a not impractical target, I think). That will really give me the feeling that I have become a serious blogger now! Think about it, all, and pitch in.

And meanwhile, keep the suggestions flowing. Every now and then a bright idea will spark off something in my head, and presto, a new blogpost will be in the making!

This and that

A few things that come to my mind:

First, knowing that a lot more people read my blog often than have enlisted themselves as ‘followers’, I request those who haven’t done so yet to go ahead and enlist: it will help me better to keep in touch, and know which people are serious enough to communicate with.

Second, looking at the geographical spread of my readers on the map linked to my blog, I keep wondering… who reads me from Ulaan Batar in Mongolia, from Bogota in Colombia, from Ghana, from Madrid, from Dubai, and above all from Mountain View, California, home of Google Inc.? I’d really, really love to know.

Third, about comments. Why is it that so many people who assure me face to face or over the phone or by email that they read my blog regularly feel so hesitant or lost when it comes to writing comments? As I have said before, you don't have to be old and wise to do that: even asking questions and expressing appreciation or offering additional information on the subject which I and all other readers could profit from would be welcome comments. Long ago I quit journalism (despite getting paid for it, which isn’t the case with writing this blog) because though I knew that theroretically lakhs of people were reading me, a direct response through a letter to the editor came only now and then, and it made me feel I was writing in vain…

Fourth, I ask my readers once again to write in and let me know what they would like me to write about next. I shall try to oblige within the limits of my interest and ability. Knowing that there are eager people waiting is always a pleasure and a strong motivation.

Fifthly - as Ayan and Pradipto from the ICSE '99 batch found out like so many others a few days ago, anybody who wants to get back to me, even after a long hiatus, via email, phone or personal visit, is assured of a warm welcome and an enjoyable chat, just so long as they are polite and friendly and make their eagerness apparent. You need only to reach out...

Finally, this is just to tell a lot of people that I have broken my heart over a 2004 Iraqi-Kurdish film called Turtles can fly by Bahman Ghobadi. I won’t write why, because so few people seem to be interested in what I write about books and movies – but I shall say do go and see it for yourself.

Subhas Bose

A man called Subhas Bose was born this day, in 1897.

I wonder if it matters to many Indians any more. Nationalism - and everything else that he stood for - has become so passé, and history is so uncool! We remember our loyalty to our nation only when India plays cricket with Pakistan, and when anybody points out any of our myriad flaws.

And I wonder how he would have coped in this era of shopping malls and vanishing education and the obesity epidemic and twitter and trophy wives and designer babies…

3 Idiots

While I did enjoy the movie (many of my old boys have told me 'Sir, Aamir has used many of the very words and examples you have been saying for years!'), and would like all of my pupils and their parents to see it, I also liked this thought-provoking critique of it. I wrote the following comment there:

"As a teacher for 29 years, I agree with your take. Only, you should have stressed the idea that becoming a wildlife photographer or musician requires the same degree of both talent and hard work. Even more than becoming anti-intellectual, anti-studies, the Indian middle class has become anti-anything that doesn't lead up to so-called 'centres of excellence' like the IITs and IIMs, ignoring the fact that the overwhelming majority of our biggest achievers over the last 50 years never went to either of them, and looking down on anybody who doesn't go in for science at the plus-two level. If we produce Tagores and Satyajit Rays again, it will not be due to but in spite of our IITs and IIMs. Also to be noted: a few dozen corporate honchos and a sprinkling of social do-gooders yes, but how many global product/process patents and Nobel Prizes and the like have these 'centres of excellence' produced since their inception? I think that is what Aamir/Rancho has been asking."

By the way, someone who is an IIT-IIM alumnus wrote in a supportive comment on Sagarika's blog moments after I posted mine!

P.S., Jan. 28: I found this critique of not just 3 Idiots but how Bollywood cinema is evolving most engaging. Any comments from serious aficionados?

A gem of a wit

I was thrilled to read a sarcastic article titled Happy New Havate in the robibashoriyo pullout of Anandabazar Patrika of January 3, written by Parimal Sengupta. I provide my own (somewhat free-) translation of the same herebelow. I could have used louts or layabouts for ‘havate’, but I decided to stick to ‘uncouth’ instead.

Let’s call a spade a spade. In Calcutta Christmas and New Year these days mean carte blanche to the uncouth. So I stay away. A lot of people are going to be up in arms the moment they read this, but I don’t care. I owe nothing to either Santa Claus or to the magi (half-literate Bengalis pronounce the word as maagi), so there’s nothing to be gained by glowering at me.

There was a time when people like you and me really knew a thing or two about ‘western’ culture. I am not talking about heavy stuff like they store in the Asiatic Society library. I am talking of the days when Bengalis who rode in Fiat Mini Centos, Standard Heralds, taxis, or merely trams and buses, and who looked a bit like Nirmal Kumar, N. Vishwanathan, Sumita Sanyal, Subrata Chattopadhyay, Hemanta, Soumitro, Subhendu or Pahari Sanyal, knew the difference between rock, jazz and tango. They could promptly tell you the names of four movies in which Marilyn Monroe or Omar Sharif had acted. They had heard about Billy Halliday, and knew that Charles Lorton was a great actor.

Even then the whole of Bengali society had not become divided into the panchayat and promoter classes: the one addicted to mindless flicks like Punter wife and Hunter Hubby, the other falling drunkenly asleep before websites pandering blue movies. Then Christmas had some meaning. The more we have become ‘English-medium’ en masse, the more we have taught our children to parrot dad and mom for baba and ma, the more our Christmas has become merely an occasion for the uncouth to freak out. The ‘cultured’ Bengali of today is thrilled to bits over rotting chicken drowned in chemical-soaked soya sauce; there is sure to be trouble at home if biryani from Babur’s is missing from the Christmas Day menu. Earlier in very middle-class families our mothers had mastered with difficulty the art of making passable stews, soups and puddings at home. As Bengali midriffs keep swelling, so does ignorance about good food. You can’t have chicken without piling it over with kheer and cashewnuts and raisins and khobani … they call it value addition. One family I know recently went overboard by throwing a few prawns into the chicken curry. Having plastered the flat with marble and force-fed the kid into looking like a mini sumo wrestler, we are now hell bent on adding value to our dining table, too. How else would others like us get to know that we too have made money without getting an education? This new breed actually eats money. Perhaps they ought to be labelled mudra-rakshash?

It is this ignorance combined with gluttony that swells like a tidal wave at Christmas and New-Year time. At the celebratory hot-spots it’s a free for all between the haves and the have-nots. I am not talking about the Marxian rich-poor divide: it’s the difference between those who have females on their arms and those who don’t. The have-nots, again, are of two sorts. The first type consists of those who are too young, but with bloated egos, and strut as though they are quite sure they can pick up any female they want anytime. They are the uncouth of the first degree. Then there are the permanently drunken older louts: those with and without vast beer bellies. Many of them, having failed to hold in their lust, had got married to females even more ignorant than they when they were 21, and now, in their early forties, resemble nothing more closely than the 300-year old tortoise at the zoo. The wives, having gorged for decades on fatty delicacies of the worst sort, are just as vast and as ugly. Any kind of intimate contact, physical or mental, among such couples has of course long become out of the question. But these people have a lot of money, too, and they are adamant that their money can buy them all the pleasure with all the nubile bimbos who catch their fancy. They buy everything, from land to trade permits to lobsters and meat, so why not bimbos? ‘Let me know. How much? Know who I am?’ What self-righteous fury. And seconds later they are throwing up their last dinner all over you. They are the second-degree of the uncouth. All these types need the third degree if you ask me.

If this is your idea of a festival, go ahead and celebrate without me. A long time ago a babe was born in a manger. When he grew up they killed him in the name of a king. That sort of thing calls for politics, not festivals of louts. And as for New Year, both you and I know that nothing’s going to change. We have seen a lot of dadagiri, now it’s time for some didigiri, that is all. 2009 wasn’t a ‘new’ year for Bengalis; neither will be 2010.

[P.S.: Formal permission for this translation is pending. I hope they will grant it gladly, because I am only giving the paper and the author some free publicity before a non-Bengali audience - and also lots of Bengalis who don't/can't read Bangla. In case they let me know about any objection, I shall take this post off my blog.]

On twitter

This is just to let everybody know that despite strong misgivings, I yielded to a friend's request and have just got into twitter. You can search for me by name. Let's see what follows. If (as I expect) I get bored stiff, I'll quit in a month or two.

Year-end diary

This time I won’t write the usual travelogue, because I did not travel far, and did not visit any place remote and exciting – merely Puri, along with literally tens of thousands of other Bengalis – and lazed a great deal for a few heavenly work-and worry-free days in Kolkata. Let me instead just jot down a few random impressions.

I arrived in Puri by train for the second time in my life after a gap of exactly forty years. Same train, same snail's pace in the last single-track stretch as it was back in 1969! At the beach, the sand was warm but the water cold, except briefly at midday. The sea and the beach, alas, are getting visibly more polluted every year. The hotel we stayed in, upmarket but not posh, served pretty good food. I wish, though, that boarders would stop shouting all the time and at all hours of day and night in hotel corridors – about absolutely private matters, too. If only this country learnt a few good manners… And the sight of an open and busy crematorium right in the heart of a throbbing marketplace was something to remember for the sheer disturbing incongruity of it. The drive to Chillika lake and the three-hour boat ride was pleasant, and we saw dolphins frolicking and people selling pearls which they were taking out of live oysters (though I do suspect some sleight of hand there), but hardly anything of the fabled flocks of migratory birds, hard luck. The locals are gentle souls, though they sound like they are fighting when they are chatting heartily among themselves. Cars are still definitely much cheaper to hire than in tourist spots in western and northern India. I noticed that the gentleman from whom we rented the car, and who apparently owns seven or eight of them, is basically a private tutor just like myself – I fleetingly wished Durgapur were a tourist hotspot! We were granted darshan by the lord of the world without suffering a stampede, crowded though the temple precincts were (and much more heavily guarded than before).

One big bonus was meeting an old boy, Anirvan Choudhury – ICSE 1991 batch – who works in Bhuvaneshwar and came over all the way with his mother in tow to see us. We spent a very happy Christmas afternoon chatting in the sun, re-living olden times. Nothing gratifies me more than meeting ex-students who have such obviously rich and grateful memories, and who have grown up to be such decent and cultured human beings. I wish his whole family long lives, health and happiness, and hope to meet them again and again, especially the delightful little daughter of his, whom we missed this time round because she was too ill to travel.

On the trip back to Kolkata, I wished, for once, that the train had been late. I hate to get up and going at daybreak, and that too in cold weather: Kolkata had become unusually chilly in the few days we had been away. I spent a large part of my time eating heartily, sleeping, dozing in the sun and watching TV, a routine I cannot afford for 340 days a year. Also, meeting some people I had badly wanted to meet, and having very nice experiences, except for one … but then, you win some and you lose some, and I hadn’t expected much better anyway, knowing the sort of person I was trying one last time to build bridges with. Then there were all sorts of chores, like collecting a prize for something my daughter had written for a newspaper, and getting tooth cavities filled, and airing the new house, the sort of stuff nobody wants to read about, I’m sure.

We spent New Year’s Day lunching out with a family of very good friends. The next morning we came back to Durgapur. I fear for my daughter's future, because the moment we were back she said ‘There’s no place like home’. And it is wonderfully cold here, so though I am back to the old grind already, I am enjoying myself still, especially while the sun is bright and warm and when it’s time to snuggle inside the blankets, and I hope to God that this absolutely lovely spell lasts a while yet. If only there hadn’t been so much coal dust in the air, I could have been living in heaven.

No luck?

Watching the 10-11 p.m. show on NDTV called Entrepreneurs Extraordinary on December 28, I heard both Ratan Tata and N.R. Narayana Murthy concur that luck plays a critical role in deciding who will succeed in this world, and how much (see this post of mine). While Murthy quoted Louis Pasteur that 'God helps the prepared mind', he also said that he has known a lot of very talented and hard-working men who haven't been able to go far, and their failure can be ascribed to nothing but bad luck.

No wonder trying to change one's luck artificially (through astrology, costly prayers and yagnas, fairness creams and what have you) has always been big, especially in this country. Alas, while I believe in kismet or Providence, I cannot believe that it can be manipulated: 'God is not mocked'! I guess the best we can do, knowing this, is to cultivate the high art of stoicism, in happiness and sorrow alike. And pray...

Signing off, for now

This is to say bye to all my readers and friends for this year (or maybe not...). I'm going on holiday, and might be off the Net for the next ten days. Have a happy time, and stay safe, all. This has been a good year for me as a blog-writer. I hope to get more readers/followers/comment-writers next year, and make more friends. Meanwhile, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year in advance! May there be peace on earth, and goodwill to all men. I love you all, though some of you find it hard to love me back...

The Fire-bird

Book review: Aagun Pakhi (The Firebird), by Hasan Azizul Huq

Dey’s Publishing, Calcutta, 2008

Price: Rs. 150, pp. 252

Language: Bangla

ISBN: 978-81-295-0820-1

winner of Ananda Puroshkar 2008

A very ‘common’ woman in rural Bengal, who grew up just before World War II, and lived through the weird kind of independence-followed by communal war-followed by partition that destroyed millions of lives and twisted and broke millions of others forever out of shape, narrates her own story. There was joy galore, and peace, and fun and tumult and horror and savagery and sorrow in huge dollops with disconcerting frequency: she has seen it all. In the simplest of rural patois, without the slightest affectation (which is a wonder, considering that the writer himself is a highly-literate male urban scholar) she tells it poignantly, and unforgettably. She has remained quiet, uncomplaining, wondering, half-comprehending, living the life of endless, backbreaking yet strangely-sweet drudgery that is the lot of daughters/wives/mothers in all so-called male-dominated and backward societies of the world, but because she has never stopped observing, thinking and feeling, she has continued to mature lifelong, and though she remains near-illiterate and in a sense simple forever, she simultaneously becomes far more of a sophisticate than most urban, educated, well-off and ‘liberated’ young women can even comprehend today (I am reminded of the quip: “Twenty million Englishwomen stood up and said ‘We’ll no longer be dictated to!’ and promptly went out and became stenographers.” Today we should read BPO workers). And in the end she does something awful – she chooses, in her habitual quiet way, to be free to live and die absolutely on her own. Her teenage far behind her, she decides to find out who she is. It is time now at last, she believes, and she can handle it, all by herself. Having done so much for so many for so long, she owes the rest of her life solely to herself: not even her husband, whom she has served and obeyed without question all her life may have a share in it against her will, leave alone children and grandchildren and surviving siblings. 

In the last page, she says she made that decision to give up all she ever had for the sake of the land she had always known to be hers, because no one could convince her that there was any meaning in carving out Pakistan from India when she had grown up happily Muslim among Hindus all her life till they were told to turn upon one another, and when those two countries still harboured both Muslims and Hindus, after all the horrifying bloodletting. I am sure no man alive is wise enough to convince her that she was wrong. But the mulish determination – despite all her self-questioning – that compelled her to give up even on her family is beyond explanation, and almost beyond belief. In Raja Rao’s short story called Javni, the last line says about the central character that she seemed ‘recedingly real. Who was she?’ That was the question that arose in my mind as I closed the book. But of course, it is an author’s privilege to create alternative realities, and still truth remains stranger than fiction of the most fanciful kind…

Since Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan and Bhishm Sahni’s Tamas I cannot think of any other Indian book that has portrayed the mindless trauma of the Partition of India so searchingly, hauntingly, with such disarming yet searing condemnation (if I am missing something, readers, do remind me). Few authors anywhere in the world have depicted the subtly nuanced interdependence of the marital relationship so well either, even where it is outwardly so heavily gender-biased. Since the great Banerjee-s stopped writing, I haven’t known any other who was able to see life so intently and so well in both its glorious highs and its abysmal lows. And the book confirms my deeply held belief (which is echoed not only in the most hoary Hindu shastras but in sources as diverse as Shakespeare and D. H. Lawrence) that woman anywhere, at all times, is inferior only insofar as she yields willingly, or under the weight of unendurable restriction, deprivation and oppression, and even then she retains a core of fierce strength and independence which men cannot fathom nor crush, though they might destroy her only too easily. My respect for women is greatly restored: only, my heart aches that I can see so few of the type in my contemporary urban milieu, least of all among the smart set who talk of ‘happening’ lives.

I have long been lamenting the decline of great literature in Bengali, and I hadn’t read Azizul Huq before. I am sorry I hadn’t, and I want to put it on record that my heart is full. I didn’t know that such powerful, wonderful writing is being done in Bengali still. In various ways I was reminded of Tagore’s Strir Patra, and Ashapurna Debi’s Pratham Pratishruti, and Gorky’s Mother, and Llewellyn’s How Green was my valley, and many more profound and beautiful novels which have permanently enriched my life. I wish Aagun Pakhi could be translated by able hands into the ten most widely spoken languages in the world. Professor Huq would then most certainly, even in this grossly deluded and superficial age, be hailed as one of the great authors among us today.

[My earnest thanks to Subhadipta Mukherjee for persuading me to read this book]

Reading to be forced?

This recent news item tells me that some educational authorities in India are slowly waking up to the realization that merely cramming a handful of textbooks through school and college cannot make educated and socially valuable citizens, and TV and net-surfing are not solutions, people need to do a lot of diverse extra-curricular reading from books the traditional way since childhood: and given the kind of country India is, maybe even that has to be made mandatory before people will do it (a lot of my pupils have to borrow books to read from me on the sly, because their parents regard it as a habit far more obnoxious than doping, and, unlike TV, the net, shopping and attending parties, a serious threat to what they call 'studying'!) I urge my readers very strongly to visit the thread called ‘Books and the good life’ on my orkut community to ponder over the things that have been said there, particularly the post where I wrote ‘leaders are readers!’

Now contrast that with what is happening in school and elsewhere by reading this and this. I could cite dozens of other examples from what I read and see with my own eyes. Of course, as you will see on those sites themselves, there are dissenting opinions, but judge for yourself.