The Mahabharata

                      (manuscript illustration of the battle of Kurukshetra)

“It strengthens the soul and drives home, as nothing else does, the vanity of ambition and the evil and futility … learnt at the mother’s knee with reverence and love, it has inspired great men to heroic deeds as well as enabled the humble to face their trials with fortitude and faith … the Mahabharata discloses a rich civilization and a highly evolved society, which though of an older world, strangely resembles the India of our own time, with the same values and ideals… the advent of the kali age is marked by many breaches of these conventions in the Kurukshetra battle, on account of the bitterness of conflict, frustration and bereavements. Some of the most impressive passages in the epic centre around these breaches of dharma.” (Chakravarti Rajagopalachari)

I had promised myself to re-read our greatest epic thoroughly sometime in middle age, and I have just done it.

I was told the core story (the civil war among the Kuru-Pandava cousins of Hastinapur) very ably by my elders in childhood, and had thereafter read it avidly first in comic book form (Amar Chitra Katha), then in a school Bengali textbook, then went on to read Rajshekhar Basu’s very erudite and competent summary before I went to college. Later I also read Kashiram Das’ famed Bengali version, Kaliprasanna Sinha’s magnum opus, as well as more than one English translation, including parts of the multi-volume ‘transcreation’ by Professor P. Lal. Besides, I have sampled several versions of the Bhagavad Gita in Bangla, Hindi, and English (picking up a bit of Sanskrit, too, along the way). I watched B.R. Chopra’s highly successful serialization on TV in 1988-90, too. So the book has been with me all through. But it is more than 20 years since I went through the whole epic at one go. Meanwhile I have lived out the larger part of my life, and I think I should make my own judgment of its worth in the light of whatever little experience of life I have personally gained so far.

1.      It is certainly, by virtue of its age, length and complexity (Amartya Sen has noted that it is many times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined), one of the most important and interesting books ever written.

2.      It has influenced – and continues to influence – Indians both great and small through the ages, from the names we give to our children to the festivals we celebrate to the customs (even the crude and silly ones) or lokachaar we (at least all of us who are nominally Hindu) follow to this day, in more ways than we are conscious of.

3.      It deserves to be familiar to a far wider audience than it currently is (so Prince Dara Shukoh thought, and therefore had it translated into Persian), and it is a very great pity that most ‘educated’ Indians currently below 30 probably cannot tell the story coherently even in outline. That is indeed a very major and sinister break in our cultural continuity. I am convinced no one can be truly ‘Indian’ without knowing about it, and even to criticize many things that it says one must know it with some degree of thoroughness.

4.      Its historical origins are lost in antique myth. Though ascribed wholly to Vyasa, it was certainly composed in many parts by many different writers over a period of many centuries, taking a more or less ‘final’ form only in the early Gupta era (4^th century CE), although it refers to many historical (if grossly exaggerated-) incidents that probably took place 1000-1500 years ago, at least.

5.      I have read it essentially as a great work of literature (in the grandest sense of the word, of course) rather than as a ‘holy’ book whose every word is sacred and unchallengeable. All my comments must be understood to have been made from that standpoint – without assuming that I am being glibly and ignorantly cynical in an effort to be fashionably modern.

6.      If historically the Ramayana is about the great clash of the Aryans (bearers of sanatan dharma) with the indigenous non-Aryans (‘rakshashas/dasyus’) and the total defeat of the latter, the Mahabharata is about how, after they had spread all over India, these Aryans (by now having reluctantly but deeply intermingled with the non-Aryans), fought fiercely among themselves to establish the right to empire – long before the first historically-confirmed empire (the Mauryan) came into being.

Now these are the things that I found truly remarkable about the Mahabharata in the course of my latest reading:

1.      It is rife with miracles. People got back their lost youth, lived for thousands of years, could change their material forms at will, a woman could get back her virginity after delivering a baby, children could be produced in all sorts of containers, even earthen pitchers, so you didn’t really need a human uterus, the divinely-graced could travel at will between different worlds, many people changed their sex as it suited their convenience (or when they were cursed), even gods could be defeated and humiliated by sufficiently powerful men, and the greatest warriors wielded weapons which have never been remotely equalled in historical time before the 20^th century CE (hydrogen bombs, neutron bombs, poison gas, machine guns, bomber aircraft, long-distance missiles). Which indicates that the people of ancient times were possessed of the most vaulting imaginations or very, very advanced technology (remember Arthur Clarke declaring that any sufficiently advanced technology seems at first like magic)! Being familiar with both the science and the science fiction of the 20^th century, I incline to think that the truth was an admixture of both: at least, the ancients had much more sophisticated technology at their disposal than most of us moderns, enslaved by a linear view of history, are willing to give them credit for (remember Stonehenge? The Easter Island statues? The Ashokan stainless steel pillar now in Mehrauli, Delhi? The Egyptian mummies? The drainage system of the Indus-valley cities?...)

2.      It is an inexhaustible treasure trove of fantastic stories, often only very tenuously connected to the main plot, but adding immeasurably to the richness of the text. Great authors/actors/playwrights down the ages have mined it for material on which to base their own creative works, from Kalidasa (Abhighnyan Shakuntalam) to Tagore (Gandharir aabedon, Karna-Kunti Shambad) to Samaresh Basu (Shamba) and Shaoli Mitra and Peter Brooke. It is good to see that the tradition continues, in the form of currently popular formats like animated cartoons on TV, but I think much more needs to be done, so that, even if children want to watch only fantasy, they do not have to grow up on a diet of Superman and Spiderman alone. Even something like the Harry Potter series will be far more deeply enjoyed and appreciated by someone who has read this book. Indians don’t know how much India has to offer! And there’s no need for our producers and directors to be hesitant because the Mahabharata is likely to appeal only to Hindus: that is like imagining that Aesop’s fables are interesting only to Europeans, and the Arabian Nights only to Muslims.

3.      There are certain things that it is absolutely obsessed with – worship and aggrandizement of brahmins, sexuality (even the gods and holy men are sex-crazed, and cannot think of any other kind of intercourse with the females of the species), preservation of what they called ‘dharma’, terror of mixed marriages (varnasankara), the ‘need’ for a son which could even justify getting your wife impregnated by another man, the glory of the cow – these motifs occur again and again all through the vast work. Obviously the ‘rules’ were observed mostly in the breach: otherwise the wise men of the era would not have insisted upon them so frantically! I am a male and technically a brahmin myself, and certainly not a celibate, yet at times these obsessions made me faintly sick… much that is warped or weird about Indian society even today can certainly be explained by the way these obsessions have been driven deeply into all our minds (all ‘good’ women simply must ‘belong’ to some man or other like chattel, for example. Even a ‘smart, educated’ girl who imagines herself to be ‘free’ to make her own choices must ultimately only marry and raise children and dress up and gossip and brag about her children’s achievements. If I am a ‘bad’ man among a lot of women because I dared to suggest that they might learn to think differently, I can blame the Mahabharata for it. Attitudes have changed little: witness the double standards vividly portrayed as recently as in Dev D!)

4.      Ordinary folks – always the vast majority of the populace – have no place in the story: it is all about gods, brahmins, sages and kings. Commoners are mentioned only as drudges and slaves or poor artisans, pastoralists and farmers, to be praised or punished according to how well they serve their masters. Female servants, if young and pretty, are merely given away as gifts by the hundreds or thousands to whoever earns their masters’ pleasure.The king regards them patronizingly in good times, and as mere cannon fodder and sources of tax revenue in practice. To think that free India’s founding fathers dared to establish democracy with universal adult franchise in a country like this takes my breath away; that the gigantic ongoing experiment is fraught with flaws does not make me wonder at all!

5.      The ‘good’, defined as those who are supposed follow the dharma meticulously, are frequently shown to be weak, corruptible, devious, dishonest and downright cruel. Yayati cursing his sons for refusing to exchange their youth with his old age, Dushmanta’s wanton abuse of Shakuntala in public long after he had used her to satisfy his lust and got her in the family way, Shantanu’s exploitation of his son’s devotion in order to get the woman he wanted, Drona’s horrible ill-treatment of Ekalavya (essentially because the latter was a beyond-the-pale tribal and had moreover not paid due fees to his ‘guru’), Kunti disowning her eldest son Karna and keeping it a secret right till after his death, which caused him to be undeservingly humiliated lifelong, the Pandavas luring an innocent nishaad (tribal) family to their death in the fire at Varanavat so that people might think they themselves had been killed, the way Indra cheated Karna out of his invulnerable armour, the way the newly-married Draupadi was ‘shared’ among the Pandavas without so much as a by your leave (and later briefly sent to hell for the ‘sin’ of having loved Arjuna – who had actually won her at the swayamvar – a little more than the rest!), Yudhishtir’s utter stupidity in playing the dice and the unspeakable vulgarity of betting away everything, even his wife (only Bhima really protested against the madness of the ‘Dharmaraja’), the inhuman abuse of Draupadi which all the wise old great men including Bhishma and Drona mutely witnessed (because they were in the king’s pay – is it any wonder that in India naukri has always justified any amount of self-abasement and turning a blind eye to every kind of wrong?), and the way Abhimanyu was killed (not the worst horrors of the 20^th century world wars can top that one): anyone can make out a longer list, but I think I have made my point. The best of our ancestors were not really good, leave alone great human beings, no matter what awesome technical/military/scholarly/polemical skills they might have posssessed! That is India’s legacy.

6.      Although the brahmin is extolled ad nauseam as the best of men, and although it is true that there are a few examples of brahmins who lived simple, self-controlled lives devoted to learning and prayer, it is also said over and over again that such ideals were never held in wide esteem; on the other hand, there are also examples galore of brahmins who were insatiably greedy and given to sensual vices/weaknesses of every sort, and no less a sage than Vyasa himself says (right after the Ashvamedha yagna) that  brahmins desire nothing more than wealth, and the king cannot acquire greater merit than by giving away wealth to brahmins! That’s our vaunted other-worldliness for you.

7.      The book is full of other self-contradictions. Who is the greater god: Vishnu or Shiva? Is woman on the whole deserving of worship or the vilest contempt? Which is the greater sin: killing your mother or disobeying your father? What is the ‘right’ age for marriage? Does the author sincerely believe that ahimsa is the highest religion? Does one become a brahmin by birth or by virtue of his work and character? Is it good or bad to eat meat and drink liquor? What is stronger, fate (daiva) or character (purushakar)? If the gods and brahmins commit all kinds of heinous and base crimes, why are they said to be better than the rest? – My guess is that the contradictions have crept in because a) different things were written by authors with very different views at different times, b) the authors found the world itself so confusing that they couldn’t feel confident about laying down definitive laws and standards, and c) many different social interest groups fought in the minds of the authors to have their say recorded in the great history of the people. The end result, therefore, is bound to be fraught with contradictions, and only the narrow-minded fanatic will choose to quote bits and pieces from here and there (in favour or in opposition to child marriage, for instance) and try to impose them rigidly upon society as a whole because ‘the immortal gods have said so’. Every man must make up his own mind after giving these issues serious thought, and be willing to tolerate wide differences of opinion, and thereby allow an open, liberal, secular society to flourish. At the same time, society as a whole must allow for some degree of confusion and contradiction to exist along with strong and definite views on many subjects, because that is much healthier than putting all of us in a stifling moral/cultural straitjacket: that is the essential teaching of the Mahabharata. As long as the weakest are not bulldozed by mainstream opinion – that too, has been said every now and then, and when giving us all his famous ‘talisman’, Gandhi, I think, understood the message of the great epic particularly well, even though it is pitched at a rather low key.

8.      Shanti-parva and Anushasan-parva – where the very old and very wise Bhishma gives his parting advice to Yudhisthir on just about every subject under the sun, can, despite much thought-provoking matter, in the end only be called hilarious (and my advance apologies to anyone who might be scandalized by my choice of words). The warning against astrologers and necromancers has, of course, never been heeded in this country. Some of the rules you must follow in order to live a long and healthy life are, of course, sane and sensible enough (don’t stare at the rising and setting sun – we know now why that is very bad for the eyes), but what can you say when you are warned ‘never bathe in the nude’? And why on earth ‘must’ you obey parents and elder brother even when you know them to be evil, and patently wrong? And why mustn’t you give alms to someone who has contracted tuberculosis, or has been bitten by a dog, for heaven’s sake?!

9.      The end is rather sad. ‘Not with a bang but with a whimper’ – that’s the way it happens. The Pandavas grow weary and gradually lose their powers (so does the ‘divine’ Krishna, by the way, and dies in a rather pathetic fashion); world-weariness ultimately persuades them to set off heavenwards (was this the pleasure and glory for whose sake they had fought the greatest war known to mankind?). All but Yudhisthir drop off along the way for one sin or the other, he alone reaches heaven’s gate. Then he has to pass two more ‘tests’ of moral strength and integrity, following which he is joyously reunited with all his loved ones in heaven. It is strange that he alone emerges as the ‘perfect’ character; the same man who had been reviled as weak and vacillating and even a liar by those who loved him most in his lifetime, while far stronger characters are vanquished by their weaknesses! In any case, I think the final moral of the story is a) it is not good to live too long, even with all sorts of miraculous attributes, and b) all things pall, and all things eventually pass, so it is unwise to aspire to live too grandly, especially if that involves hurting the environment and one’s fellow men too much – let all dictators and tycoons take heed!

10.  As for Krishna, all I shall say here (too much has been said by too many already!) is that, despite the almost maniacal emphasis on his divinity throughout (some scholars are of the opinion that the whole work is meant to gradually convince the reader about the divinity of Krishna) is that he does not impress me too highly. In the Mahabharata itself some people accuse him of not really having tried hard enough to prevent the war, because he had already made up his own mind. Besides, he comes across as much less godly than a very shrewd politician using everybody to further his own (often inscrutable-) ends. It is undeniable that he often took recourse to cruel subterfuge and deception to get rid of those he disliked and help his favourites, explaining it all away whenever questioned with the catch-all ‘it was so ordained by fate’. And I simply cannot overlook the fact that he never could convince Arjuna about his duty and the ‘right’ course of action by worldly example and reason alone: he silenced all doubt by miraculous revelation (the vishwarupa). It was largely because of this unresolved doubt in everybody’s mind (except perhaps Bhima’s) that, even after the carnage, no one could be quite sure that the right thing had been done, and so no one could be really happy… if I adore Krishna, it is not the Krishna of the Mahabharata who gets my heart’s devotion, but the loving, naughty, caring, childlike God of the puranas, of Meera and Sri Chaitanya.

[Here are some links that the interested reader can explore:

 http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/maha/

http://www.gita-society.com/bhagavad-gita-section3/mahabharata.pdf

http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Sanskrit_in_Classics_at_Brown/Mahabharata/MBh2Biblio.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata ]

Letter from an old boy

Below is an email I received from an old boy who had been in my class nearly a decade and a half ago. With his permission, I am reproducing it here just as he wrote it, with only his name withheld. I love to get letters like this, if only because they tell me that I did leave strong memories behind on thoughtful and sensitive minds. The contrast with a lot of people who gushed when they were in my class and have now fallen entirely out of touch could not be starker.

Dear Mr. Chatterjee,

I stumbled upon the story of the monk carrying a wet beauty across the river, in your blog some time ago, and it brought back a dash of memories. Yes, I do follow your blog closely, albeit anonymously (I can almost hear the lusty ‘boo’ that you just sounded out in your head), enjoy doing so as it makes for excellent reading, have often considered writing to you apropos the same, and then shelved the idea. Not least because I feared it might get lost as just one more hosanna sung by yet another awestruck ex-student from your Tendulkaresque fan following. J

But the sudden flashback made me realize that this letter might just turn out differently, given that I was neither one of your favourites nor one of the sycophantic hangers-on (Please do excuse my somewhat uncharitable choice of words. It’s not a blanket verdict.), who were always glued to your table in the Xavier’s library for reasons other than a love for books, and because not all of my memories associated with you drip of milk and honey.

So here goes, dear Sir, the story of a superbly charismatic teacher and his ‘uncommunicative’ student, the way I lived it.

My first memory of you goes back to my early impressionable years in St. Xavier’s (I must have been about 9 or 10 at the time) when the school souvenir was published. It carried an article of yours which ended with a prayer; that the school  be forever spared from ‘Father Time’s ruthless scythe……’; the words have stayed with me for almost 18 years now, and I remember wishing, as a young boy who loved the English language with a rare passion, that one day I grow up to be able to write the way you do. Well, grown up I have, write like you, I can’t, but it has been a worthwhile pursuit all this while and will continue to be so.

I do remember running into you a few times in the library during 5^th, 6^th and 7^th grades, ever so briefly. I loved reading books but the solemnly heavy, disciplined air of the library was a tad overwhelming, not to mention the possibility of ending up on the wrong side of the librarian’s legendary temper. So my visits to the library would be few and far between, more like short, fast reconnaissance missions, probing the place to see if it held a reward commensurate with the risk. I remember the strong smell of cigarettes, the sweet scent of old books, and the fact that while you were in charge, you loved the place with a fierce sense on ownership, as only a true aficionado could. Nevertheless, it was a fortress of sorts and I kept my distance.

And then one day our Physics teacher called in sick and you stepped in to fill the void.  It was brilliant. Because suddenly, paying attention was not painful any more. I sat there, riveted, to words that came out eloquently in a perfectly neutralized accent, without a stutter, woven effortlessly into strands that made all the sense in the world. Physics had never been a bad boy, but that day, it was a walk in the clouds, it was fun, and felt like an old friend. And to think that throughout those 40 minutes, you never felt the need for a piece of chalk or paper. I also realized with some satisfaction that I am not a habitually bad listener, just happen to have choosy ears.

I do not remember if that class had anything to do with it, but I started frequenting the library a bit more after that. And one day, ran into a wall of bullets. I went to return a book a day too late, and while explaining the same to you, ended up saying ‘tomorrow’ instead of ‘yesterday’ without realizing it of course, only to have you snap back with “TOMORROW has not come yet. What are you trying to say?” Sensing trouble, I repeated myself but this time, correctly. Fell flat. “Then why did you say ‘TOMORROW’? Did you or did you not? ” Unsettled, I barely squeaked a reply in the negative when the heavens burst asunder. “Are you trying to say that I am a LIAR? First you come to return a book late and then you have the cheek to call me a LIAR?” Words were flying past my ears now like gunshots and I, quaking in my boots, thought through a haze of shock, surprise and fear, “Is the man out of his mind? I am half his size, am just a pupil with my heart in my mouth here while he is a teacher with all the power in the world to make the rest of my tenure here absolutely miserable. Why on earth would I ever dare to say or suggest anything like that?” Struggling to retain composure, I quickly apologized. That visibly calmed you down, and the onslaught ended with a parting “That should have come in the first place. Keep the book back in its place.”

Once outside, I promised myself, never ever again. Borrowing books was just too dangerous.  It was the most unfortunate experience I had ever had with a teacher other than the time when the Late Rev. Albert Wautier whipped my backside blue (he had caught me and a friend boxing during the recess) and a most forgettable episode involving a trigger-happy, brutal oaf whose name I will not disclose here.

So when the first day of Class X came around and I found myself in 10A, I lost no time in muscling my way to the last bench and promised myself that over the next year I would maintain a kind of discreteness a Mossad agent would be proud of, would never open my mouth unless it was absolutely necessary, would not wear a wrist-watch in class, kill myself before I yawned, keep my nose to the grind and of course, listen like I had never listened before.

Game-changer.

The next eight months were just fantastic. I remember waiting eagerly for the English lessons at the start of each day, and even more so for those priceless moments when you would digress slightly and wade into a delightful little anecdote or tell us about the lives of great dictators, painters, scientists, engineers, of warriors, poets and warrior -poets, stories of wealth, tyranny and conquest, about Cortes and Pizarro, Churchill and Himmler, and so on. It helped that you were easily the most charismatic teacher around, had the kind of diction like you do and blissfully for me, during those forty blessed minutes every day, acing exams was put firmly in its place and life was good. My initial apprehensions too faded away over time although I kept my guard up, being the burnt, wary child I was. I did badly want to talk to you after class on many an occasion and get to know you a little better but then there was always that impenetrable crowd of your fans to be dealt with. And I have never been very good at working my way past crowds. Please do not be offended. Some of those who flocked around you were indeed smart, gifted young people who always knew what they were doing. It was the presence of the sycophantic rabble of yes-men that put me off and kept me away. I did realize that I was the one missing out but then it ensured that I became an absolute sponge in class.

Things were no different when the time came for us to collect autographs and say our goodbyes. There was hardly any breathing space around your table and from the back I could hear you complain, “Ami aar parchi naa. Ekta baani-generator hole bhalo hoto. Ghuriye jetaam aar shundor shundor kotha beriye ashto.” I feared that when my turn would eventually arrive you would be at a loss. But then the expected never happens, does it? You almost snatched the diary right out of my hands and your pen sprinted across the page without pausing for so much as a moment.

My schoolbag and with it that diary were stolen that very day but I do remember some of the words that you wrote for me:

“….You were so uncommunicative that I could never really know whether you liked being in my class or not. But I enjoyed having you there and hope you felt the same way…..”

Those words prompted me to go right back and tell you why I had behaved the way I had and more importantly to let you know that the months spent under your tutelage had been nothing short of an absolute delight, a beacon of knowledge and sense amidst a mad scramble for marks and one-upmanship. Understandably, you found it incredible that I had carried all that baggage around for such a long time and as a parting cure, told me the story about the Buddhist Monk who scandalized the wits out of his pupil by carrying the beautiful damsel in distress across the river on his shoulders.

I hope to remain, 

Sincerely yours,

***

PS: If any portion of this mail, especially where I have used uncharitable language to describe some of my schoolmates, has offended or hurt you in any way, or if the sheer length of it has by now got on your nerves, it's not what I intended and I proffer my sincerest apologies. 

Those were the days

I read the following in Amartya Sen’s autobiography at this website: “…much of my childhood was, in fact, spent in Dhaka, and I began my formal education there, at St. Gregory's School. However, I soon moved to Santiniketan, and it was mainly in Tagore's school that my educational attitudes were formed. This was a co-educational school, with many progressive features. The emphasis was on fostering curiosity rather than competitive excellence, and any kind of interest in examination performance and grades was severely discouraged. ("She is quite a serious thinker," I remember one of my teachers telling me about a fellow student, "even though her grades are very good.") Since I was, I have to confess, a reasonably good student, I had to do my best to efface that stigma.”

As the recollection notes, there used to be a time when students who did well in examinations but were basically intellectual duds and mere bookworms were thoroughly despised by teachers (morons could not, obviously, become teachers in those days). To be considered talented, one had not only to have a questioning mind and sharp intelligence, but wide knowledge of lots of things ‘outside the syllabus’.

Sen was in school more than sixty years ago, and I, more than thirty. Sadly, I can identify much more closely with this ‘dinosaur’ than with my own contemporaries, leave alone those who are in school now – barring rare exceptions, the ‘best’ ones among the latter can only be called pathetic: their ignorance, their dullness as well as their complete lack of interest in things cerebral takes my breath away. Forget what they don’t have in the syllabi: most cannot even recall what they ‘learnt’ two years ago, be it history or literature, geography or biology, as I have checked in my own classes a thousand times over (their parents and teachers – and, strangely, future employers – are happy enough with that, as long as they ‘did well’ in their exams by cramming the night before and throwing up on the answerscripts!). I have a friend my father’s age, a civil engineer, who can still quote from both Tagore and Shakespeare – most of today’s newly-minted engineers will think that’s a fairy tale (and most of them can’t even do arithmetic quickly inside their heads, leave alone write sensible essays on any subject under the sun without copy-pasting things downloaded from the net). Yet never before in India’s history have parents and teachers gushed more about how ‘brilliant’ their wards are… Aryabhatta was brilliant, and Satyen Bose was brilliant, and every cretin who gets into Infosys or TCS deserves the same badge too.

What can you do in an age when gizmos and juvenile thrills and eating and dressing up are valued more than knowledge, and marketing is everything?

Writing an essay

The Educational Testing Service under Princeton University (which conducts college- and university level entrance tests like SAT and GRE worldwide) has long believed that asking candidates to write an essay is one of the best ways of judging overall mental ability (vocabulary, grasp of idiom, GK, logical thinking, structured expression, power of persuasion… so many things can be assessed simultaneously). So does the Union Public Service Commission in India (which conducts the entrance tests for the civil services, including the IAS). And so schools still give pupils practice in essay writing, and so do I.

            Over a long tenure of teaching, one thing I have noticed is a very sharp drop in the quality of essays that schoolgoers write. I have documentary proof of this, because I have kept some of the best and worst essays written by boys in one of the best-known ‘English-medium’ schools in my town since the 1970s.

Below is a sample of the worst kind. It was written as homework by a boy in class ten a few years ago.

Ragging

What does the word ‘raging’ means. Its a practical joke played upon somebody. It means micking and jocking. The word ‘ragging’ is a word of panic to every fresher in medical and enginnering colleges. The custom of ragging is much old but the custom of hurting, injuring someone is a new one.

            Ragging is mainly done by seniors on juniors. Its like showing powers of a senior over juniors. When these torchered juniors become seniors they take the same policy. Most of the ragings do not hurt. But as sometimes risky ragging are also done. It some times affects the body of the person who is torchered, sometimes it causes injuring, even sometimes death. These types of happening are growing day by day. These types of happenings occurs due to personal grudge on somebody.

            To students the word ragging is controvertial. Accroding to seniors ragging is a good practice and according to juniors ragging is a evil practice. One boy in enginnering college had to walk on railing, one had to smoke continuously for two hours. These some times affects the body and causes death too.

            Government have taken initiatives to stop ragging in large scale. Much of it is stopped but some still remain which we come to know from the daily. To me Ragging should stay to such a limit that there exists a brother hood relation among seniors and juniors. There should not exist an evil practice.

…..

The prescribed length of the essay was 350 to 400 words, to be written in 35 minutes. The boy wrote only 239 words, and took nearly an hour to do it. As any literate adult reader can notice, not only is the grasp of language pathetic, but the work is too short, shot through with repetition, self-contradiction and confusion, and basically lacking in content: he knew virtually nothing about the subject, and could hardly think of anything to say.

I keep copies of such work, and read them out to successive classes to correct, comment and mark (because I have found that it is educational: people are far more keen when they are asked to find fault with others’ work than to notice their own). They laugh heartily at first, but it dies down to uneasy titters when I first tell them that most of them write no better than this after eleven years of high-class schooling, and then inform them that this boy, too, has grown up to be an engineer and MBA…

Liberated women?

One of my older ex-students was telling me, with shock and disgust in her voice, that she had encountered a married woman of 22 who died in a government hospital in Kolkata recently. She had been burnt alive by her husband and mother-in-law, and lived only long enough to accuse them of murder. I hope the law will exercise its full majesty and wrath in punishing the criminals in this instance, but that is not what I wanted to say here.

We know that the law now tilts heavily in favour of the wife and her folks when it comes to cases like this; in fact, it is no joke that a lot of in-laws actually live in terror of their sons’ wives, and we even hear now and then about women who are taking unfair advantage of the law to lord it over their husbands and in-laws in a way that even other women find objectionable.

How then, in the same social landscape, do atrocities against married women still occur with such disturbing frequency? We can’t even blame illiteracy and poverty here, because such things keep happening to urban, educated women with well-off parents, too, and, though it takes some believing, even to women who earn their own (and quite adequate-) incomes! Doesn’t it all boil down, however politically incorrect it sounds, to the fact that even in supposedly enlightened families, most parents of daughters are still not only desperate to get their daughters married off to ‘suitable’ grooms (and suitable always refers to age, caste, looks and pay, never character), but equally desperate to keep those marriages from failing in the eyes of society – no matter how horrid the in-laws make life for the girl at home? And isn’t it true that most girls are so brainwashed and terrorized that they keep trying to ‘adjust’, and thus encourage growing atrocities – it being one of the most rigorous laws of human nature that the docile are always abused by the powerful – until it sometimes ends up in murder?

Let’s face it; murder outright shocks enough sensibilities to have become newsworthy, and to draw the might of the law upon the perpetrators, but don’t many women who have not been and are not likely to be killed by their in-laws/husbands actually live lives so miserable that death would be a welcome release (tragically, even women who married for love, pretty often, as I happen to know)? Isn’t it a fact that a ‘moderate’ amount of wife-beating is, if not openly condoned, at least winked at and ignored by ‘society’ which prides itself on an enlightened Constitution that guarantees basic human rights for all? Isn’t demanding dowry just short of universal (I have actually heard a girl student saying her father would get back twice what he would give for her when he married off her two elder brothers)? Isn’t it a fact that a lot of women are taught to be happy if only their husbands don’t beat them, and give them money for shopping now and then, and restrict them to obsessing over their looks and kitty parties and children’s examination scores – no greater independence is either sought or granted (my wife has been told by jealous friends that they cannot dream of their husbands allowing them control over money, so that they pick their husbands’ pockets routinely and without shame)? Two decades after Paroma  and eight decades after Tagore’s most ‘daring’ works, don’t the vast majority of our educated males and females alike accept it that married men flirting or even having an affair now and then can be tolerated with a bit of regretful clucking, but for ‘good’ women it must be an absolute no-no? Except when they are dolling up for parties and feasts, aren’t most married women simply living lives of unpaid sex-slaves-cum-domestic helps: and not only okay with it, but insisting that their daughters become exactly like them, so as to uphold ‘family honour’ and ‘respectability’?

For whom did women’s liberation occur in this country, and how far has it really gone? Leave alone men (most of whom are understandably scared witless by the prospect), how many of our ‘cultured’ women can think of liberation in all its dimensions without a shudder?

And if they cannot, what is wrong with things as they are – just so long as husbands don’t actually kill their wives?

Odd jobs...

I have been trying to remember some of the very many things I have done ever since I started, in a very small way, to fend for myself in mid-teenage. It’s because I worry these days that I might be beginning to forget, so it would be a good idea to write them down, if only for the sake of my grandchildren.

I have been tutoring school- and college kids all through,

I helped a teacher of mine to prepare her notes for a B.Ed. degree when I was myself in high school,

In college, I once helped a judge to pass his Master of Law examination (which he had been failing repeatedly and so couldn’t get promoted to first-class magistrate) by summarizing an entire thousand-page book on jurisprudence into one sheaf of foolscap handwritten paper in simple Bengali,

I wrote articles, reviews, news and stories for numerous magazines in both English and Bengali, and a few daily papers,

I designed a greeting card for a major public sector firm once, and a publicity brochure for a diamond merchant,

I translated a famous author’s novel from Bengali to English at very short notice so that he could read it out before a panel of fellow authors at the American Center in Calcutta,

I have edited, at various levels of detail, many people’s PhD theses on very diverse topics,

I have traded in encyclopedias on commission,

I have been paid by hundreds of people for counselling them and/or their children,

I have ghost-written speeches for a lot of bigshots,

I have hosted quiz contests,

I have conducted ‘grooming’ classes for college graduates about to appear for job interviews,

I have contributed ‘lessons’ to textbooks,

…

Some of that work has gone unpaid, or paid what I would call beggarly rates now. And despite making money in so many different ways, I have still jealousy guarded some time and leisure for fun, as well as for work of a purely charitable nature.

Now, if I am growing lazy and unwilling to work unless I am paid the kind of money that I want, I wouldn’t like people to hold that against me.

I wrote this just as an explanation for why I seem to be so unhelpful these days to a lot of people who come to ask me to do them all kinds of favours and go away disappointed (only last week I shooed away two profs from a local engineering college who had come to importune me to host a quiz show for them. As always, the only thing they refused to mention was payment). I think I have earned the right to have grown allergic to work that brings me neither love nor money! Salaried people will never understand the sentiment, whereas I trust that any businessman or self-employed person would go to the other extreme and call me a fool for having allowed myself to be exploited for so long. When I think of the countless ingrates for whom I did work for which I could have charged hefty sums but didn’t and who have long forgotten me, I keep telling myself I shall never let my daughter be suckered like that if I can help it.

If you are reading this, Tanmoy, that might be one way in which I have changed over the years...

Pages from a travel diary

[The following is a twenty-year old excerpt - late 1990, actually - from my diary. Some of you might reflect that you were in my class then, and some that this happened before you were born. By the way, I was a poor man then, and it happened before the era of the internet and cellphones, if you can believe there was ever such a time…]

Friday night: The last month passed in the twinkling of an eye marking school examination papers. In the midst of it I did something upon a whim, in consequence of which I have suddenly leaped to one corner of this vast country immediately upon the end of that ordeal. After school yesterday I caught the evening train to Calcutta, snatched a few hours of sleep, then took the early morning flight to Jorhat, Assam. After checking into this hotel, a bath and a quick lunch, I loitered about aimlessly in the streets through the afternoon, taking care of a few chores, then, once dusk fell, I crawled wearily back to my room, locked the door, shoved my legs deep into the thick blanket, leaned back on a pile of pillows and settled down to savour as deeply as I could this delicious little bit of unexpected leisure after a long time.

            You really can make things happen very fast in this scientific age when you have a mind to, fast enough for any ease-loving, contemplative person to lose his breath, so that one marvels at one’s own antics. I can hardly believe I have so abruptly moved so far away from my usual routine and usual haunts, and that too, to such a very unlikely place. Let me try calmly to arrange the pictures and look them over. Mental pictures are quite like pictures on paper – a single browse gives you neither full understanding nor satisfaction.

            A senior friend in Durgapur had asked me conversationally one day about a month ago whether I might be interested in Rotary Club’s Group Study Exchange program. Some ‘smart’ people of my age would be taken to the USA for six weeks or so as ‘cultural ambassadors’ for our country. Well, it sounded like fun – I hadn’t thought of such things for ages; rather, only last year I had gone to a great deal of trouble to send a young pupil of mine to an International Children’s Conference, and now this invitation all of a sudden for me! I felt a sudden urge; yet such was the pressure of work that I had little time to spare for it, so I filled in and sent off an application form in an absent-minded hurry. Then in good time the local club filed nomination papers for me – after which the next thing I heard was that I was to appear for final selections in Jorhat, of all places. It is so located that it could take ages to reach by road or rail, and those who should know warned that the journey would be gruelling, so there was no choice but to take a flight. Hence a luxurious and expensive self-indulgence, almost twenty years since I last flew.

            Flying is a rich man’s sport, so everything has to be done in style. There were umpteen extravagant expenses ever since I took a cab at daybreak. If only there were some compensations… but alas, the airport at Dumdum was hot and crowded, and the flight was delayed by a whole hour – think of how cheaply thousands of commoners enjoy such pleasures at Howrah or Sealdah railway station daily! Since I hadn’t lost all the anticipatory exuberance of childhood, the flight itself was not bad, despite the lack of leg room, cramped seats and incessant noise of the engines. And I could have done without the excitement at the time of takeoff and landing; not a massage for the heart or nerves. At Tezpur I had sent a message to an air force officer friend stationed there to come and see me inside the airport, at which the captain laughingly assumed I was after cheap liquor, while the mustachioed security man patted me all over, and apparently disappointed at not having been able to discover something seriously incriminating, contented himself with confiscating a box of matches – luckily there were only two matches left in it. The other, full box came back safely with me: a government functionary is too lazy to  pat all one’s pockets conscientiously. God works everything for the best. The trip would have been a complete write-off but for a very sweet stewardess who charmed me with a winning smile: not the kind of dry, mechanical, official smile that they normally greet you with, but the real thing. I must have earned it by thanking her very earnestly for a small favour, because she looked pleasantly embarrassed. Later, when I was watching the clouds from my window, she called me again and again when she came round to serve breakfast, but I couldn’t hear her. When she finally tapped me on the shoulder I pulled out the cotton wool earplugs and grinned broadly, at which she too couldn’t help smiling back in a most unofficial way. Nothing more happened, but I did get one last dazzling smile while getting off which made my day.

            This town is nothing to write home about – there are thousands of identical towns all over India, the same drab, dusty dinginess, the same mindless immemorial workaday routine. Most of the better hotels have been commandeered by government officials on one pretext or another. I found this one almost at the end of a seedy by-lane. There are three hotels in a row, mine being the newest – one wing is still under construction, in fact, which is why I got a decent room on the cheap, considering all the dust and noise around. There’s a huge pond clogged with green algae just outside my window and a slum beyond it, and a few scattered shanty shops; it gets very quiet after seven in the evening, barring the music from a transistor radio blaring somewhere. The power goes off every now and then, and the mosquitoes are terrific. The food is just about okay, and cheap if you stick to a vegetarian menu.

            You step out of the lane and there’s the main bus terminus. The bazaar stretches for a mile or so along the main road, pouring into side streets wherever it can. A special kind of relaxation is possible when you have ample time on your hands, so I sat on a bench in a roadside cobbler’s shop on the pretext of getting my shoes shined and whiled away half an hour in the afternoon, chatting with him and other customers and watching passers-by. Then I ferreted out the local Rotary Club district governor’s house and presented myself: here I am, so is the interview going to be held on schedule? He is an amiable wealthy elderly Marwari who has built a very nice, sprawling garden villa for himself; I made friends with both him and his son quickly. The son is about my age, and has his own business in Jaipur; he has a pretty wife and an equally pretty sister.

            I am well set-up for the night now. It’s been a long day. Getting very sleepy, too: had better stop scribbling for now.

Saturday: If there’s nothing else to be said for working hard over long stretches, one must admit that it makes the occasional idling truly a treat to cherish. This is the profound truth I have been happily reflecting upon the whole day today. I do hope there won’t be a price to pay later on! I lazed in bed till eight in the morning, got up for two leisurely cups of tea, paced about in the sun on the roof for a while, then shaved, exercised, ploughed through a hearty breakfast, bathed and went out for another stroll. The walk put a keen edge to my hunger again soon enough, and I satisfied it like a good boy, put some sounff in my mouth, came back to my room and got into bed – next time I looked at my watch it was four in the afternoon. I went out for yet another walk around, what else? – exploring the town until the sun set. Schools, hostels and government offices are a dime a dozen here. I took a good look at everything from the deputy commissioner’s bungalow to the workplaces of the census taker and the ‘malaria officer’ – heaven knows what the last mentioned functionary does! I watched with the delightful ease of someone who doesn’t have anything to do a snub-nosed traffic policeman busily earning his daily bread. I read signboards for a long time until it became clear to me what they meant, because the Assamese use the Bengali script with innovative touches of their own. As dusk began to settle I timidly crawled back to the hotel, since the streets are rather dark, everyone is a stranger, terrorists often go on the rampage without warning, and the truckloads of soldiers swarming all over the place are on a hair-trigger alert, with a tendency, apparently, to look askance at bearded youths like me: why ask for trouble? I sat doing nothing by candle light in my room for an hour, there being a power cut again, then wrote a little, and listened to some music. Wrapped heavily in blankets, I reflected on this chance to enjoy an extended winter: back at home, seven long months of blazing summer were waiting for me. The interview is due tomorrow, the thing that I have come all this way for; I wonder what fate has in store. I put on the blazer and knotted my tie before the mirror and took a good look at myself. It’s been ages, so I have gotten out of practice, but I don’t look too bad, really.

            It’s eleven in the night now. I had better pull down the mosquito net and call it a day.

Monday evening: This is the way things go: easeful idling doesn’t last long! The laziness of the first two days has been more than compensated over the next two. Ever since I walked out of the hotel in the morning yesterday, nattily attired for the interview, it’s been one hectic roller-coaster ride, until now, past eight in the evening today.

            The ‘Garh-Ali’ neighbourhood is the Chowringhee of Jorhat; the venue of the interview was the upmarket Eastern Hotel there. It being a Sunday, and having arrived early, I found most shops still closed, and had some difficulty finding a packet of cigarettes. Diverse kinds of candidates had appeared for the interview – from a humble government engineer to a noisily garrulous journalist from Manipur with an uncanny resemblance to Ho Chi Minh. Sitting around for four hours, we were virtually forced to make each others’ acquaintances to while away the time, so we were all pretty much relaxed and the conversation was flowing freely when I was called up at last. The bar had been modestly re-decorated for the day to serve as the interview room. A panel of five gently smiling middle-aged gentlemen asked all kinds of non-too-serious questions for a space about fifteen minutes, to which I gave prompt and rather bland replies. They seemed in a bigger hurry to get through it than I was, which was most convenient for me. When the question of my knowing French arose, someone mumbled ‘Comment allez vous?’ apropos of nothing – probably the only bit of French he knew, poor chap – and I shot back ‘On va bien, merci’ in the best Parisian style out of pure reflex, which seemed to satisfy their curiosity entirely. After two or three more questions they sent me away saying ‘You have to wait some more, please don’t mind’. Two more candidates were checked out, after which they conferred among themselves for an hour before reading out the list of selected candidates – and lo! yours truly had found a place in it, as had Laba from Manipur, Goutam who runs a toy shop in Guwahati, Langba who heads a watchmaking factory in Shillong, computer scientist Ojha from Vishwa Bharati and civil engineer Mukul from IISCO, Burnpur. By the time we parted company after heartily patting one another on the back, it was past three. I didn’t like the prospect of spending yet another fruitless day in Jorhat. Mukul and his wife had put up in the hotel adjacent to mine: after a very hurried lunch there we piled into a minibus upon a sudden decision to visit the Kaziranga wildlife sanctuary. The road was good; the trip took us a mere two hours.

            A straight tree-lined path off the main road leads to the neat tourist lodge with several wings, spread over a huge campus. The place is lush and very tranquil, and we took up rooms for the night. My friend’s wife Usha had evidently fallen in love at first sight with the place – I heard her saying at least five times within an hour of arrival that she would have loved to spend a few days here if our flight tickets had not been booked in advance. After dark, the starlit sky seen from the verdant garden was a treat for the senses. I have a snug little room to myself in the outer wing; after a heavy dinner I soon fell fast asleep.

Tuesday: I was afraid that the siren nearby would scream us all into sudden terrified wakefulness at an ungodly hour – but nothing so unpleasant happened; I woke up very normally at around six. We took a jeep into the jungle on the other side of the main road, then wandered about the baada (tall grass on soft ground) on elephant back for about an hour, feasting our eyes on one-horned rhino, wild buffalo, wild boar, lots of deer and antelope, baby elephants frolicking around their mothers, pelicans and mist-shrouded, heavily wooded hills in the far distance. Of course the men who had hired out the elephant fleeced us well and proper, but it couldn’t be helped. We strolled on and off-campus till lunchtime, saw tea and coffee plantations side by side, lugged our luggage down to the bus stop, had a hearty lunch, got scared by the rumour that traffic on the highway had been held up by a murder somewhere nearby, then somehow got back to Jorhat well in time. On the way a young lady virtually sat on my lap in the overcrowded bus, and an old gentleman complained that the music system had been turned off: ‘Aren’t we paying full fares or what, son?’

            I have had dinner a while ago. It was cloudy all day, and there was a gentle shower in the evening. Now I am sitting back to reflect wonderingly upon everything that has happened over these last five days. At the age of twenty seven, an opportunity like this has fallen into my lap out of the blue in the course of a little adventure. Whether I want to go, whether I can get leave, whether I will have time to make all preparations, I don’t know – but this much is certain, I can set off on a trip halfway across the world in April if I like, almost everything paid for. Imagine! – I am feeling both restless and very apprehensive. Anyway, I had better stop brooding for the present; let me get back to familiar surroundings and then I can take up the threads again. Meanwhile I hope I can get back safely and without hassles. Will the same stewardess accompany me on the flight back?

Oh, India!

As this editorial in The Telegraph takes note, the National Advisory Council headed by Mrs. Sonia Gandhi has pointed out with concern that the proposed new law against sexual harassment of women in the workplace has left out of its purview a very large number of girls and women workers, indeed the worst paid, most abused (not just sexually) and most insecure among women workers – to wit, the several tens of millions who work as domestic helps for all of us, middle and upper class India (which has been ‘shining’ for some time now). In this context, the paper sarcastically observes that ‘any sign that this country is actually growing civilized must be celebrated’ – a vindication, if I may so claim, of something I have been insisting upon for a very long time, namely that far more than seven star hotels and fancy cars and IT jobs and number of 3G mobiles and ‘successful’ NRIs, it is how we behave with the least privileged among us that is a true sign of civilization, and by this index, as by many others, India is still far short of the mark.

            Indeed, the editorial goes on to remark upon ‘the fathomless hypocrisy of middle class India’, which allows us to feel no shame about pretending that this entire class does not exist except to supply us with drudges – they are not to be counted among the human beings for whom all the glorious rights are guraranteed in our Constitution, so what does their happiness and dignity and freedom and standard of living matter? Their condition has nothing to do with all our ideas about progress! The editorial writer also expresses doubt about how soon such protective legislation is likely to be passed (and even more to the point, implemented), because, it wisely observes, the officials involved are hardly likely to be very interested, since ‘officials… employ domestic workers too’, and they are very likely to obstruct, or drag their feet over, any measure designed to make it harder for them to live easy-going lives on the cheap (two thousand for the part-time bai every month, and PF contributions, and medical insurance and one paid holiday every week? Can there be a more terrible vision of hell?). How true. Only, I should like to spread the net wider. Don’t our netas employ domestic workers, and won’t they (or their wives) have strong objections too? Indeed, doesn’t this apply to our whole burgeoning middle class, comprising doctors, engineers, teachers, and journalists? To the best of my knowledge, few of their counterparts in the really ‘advanced’ countries can afford the luxury of domestic help on a daily basis – simply because those countries, though they too are democratic and not all of them style themselves socialist, have actually managed to give the poorest of workers the kind of dignity and wages and security that our miserables can only dream of… and that, rather than the number of IT-workers and Facebook users and millionaires, is what justifies their claim to be advanced!

            Coincidentally or otherwise, in the op-ed article titled Dangerous Mission on the same page, the noted economist Prabhat Patnaik has mused on the very disturbing mindset currently in vogue among our ruling classes, as recently voiced by none less than the prime minister himself, to the effect that a high growth rate of gross national income should be the paramount – if not the only – national goal for any decent and sensible Indian: indeed, anyone who thinks otherwise may soon find himself socially outcast, if not liable to be thrown in jail! As any economist of a far lesser stature than Dr. Manmohan Singh should know, the mere crude growth rate indicates very little about what is happening to the country, in terms of real progress, as measured by improvements in the overall standard of living as well as the safety, security, longevity, health, education and happiness of the total population. More drugs, more lethal weapons, more lunatic asylums, more fancy junk food outlets, more fairness creams, more movies of the trashiest kind – the increase of the output of just about anything figures as growth in the national accounts (and I am reminded of the joke that if a man marries his cook the national income goes down, since he is no longer paying her for her services). Besides, the growth figure by itself says nothing at all about who gets what, and how much: which is the question of overwhelming importance to all but the richest (and/or most ignorant - there is a surprising degree of overlap!) five per cent of the population.

Indeed, it is an oft-repeated and very thoroughly documented fact of economic history that unless wisely controlled and guided (by society as a whole and most directly by government working in the larger interest), a high overall growth rate, while ensuring the flooding of urban areas with luxury goods and a few thousand suddenly-very-rich customers for those goods (most of them quite unnecessary for a good life, like Louis Vuitton bags, and often very harmful to the environment and a drag upon natural resources, like golf courses and SUVs), either does little to ameliorate the lot of the really poor and most needy (in whose name all 'development' projects are still justified!), or even actually worsens it. And indeed, though the jury is still out, there are already enough hard data from many impeccable sources (as Patnaik has pointed out here, and has elsewhere been variously done by stalwarts like P. Sainath and Amartya Sen) to indicate that not only have things not improved for a very large number of Indians after two decades of near-dazzling economic growth (India still has the largest number of absolute poor in the world, defined as those who survive on less than US $1 a day, and greater incidence of poverty than even sub-Saharan Africa!) but that things have actually grown worse for many of them (our per capita foodgrain consumption, which rose from less than 150 kg per year at the time of independence to nearly 180 kg in the late 1980s, fell again to around 156 kg in 2008, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN – and this in a country where obesity among the idle rich has already acquired clinically menacing proportions; so if the latter are eating like pigs, what are the very poor eating at all – given that the cheapest rice is going at Rs. 17-20 a kilo, onions at Rs. 60-70, the cheapest unbranded cooking oil Rs 60-plus, sugar Rs. 35 and lentils Rs. 80-100?).

 Dr. Patnaik quotes not only his personal god, Karl Marx, but also that greatest of the 19^th-century English liberals, John Stuart Mill, to argue that this is not a happy state of affairs; I have not only abetted him by referring to Sainath and Amartya Sen, but could go on to reel out the names of all the greatest and best human beings through history in support, from Buddha and Hazrat Muinuddin Chisti to Vivekananda and Tagore and Gandhi and Satyajit Ray… but what more could you expect in a country where the likes of the low-end-software peddler-cum-body shopper Nandan Nilekani now presume to show us visions of national greatness?  There is a saying in Bengali, haati ghora gyalo tol/ mosha bole koto jol (the mosquito scoffs at the depths in which elephants and horses have sunk). Even a great tycoon like JRD Tata had once said 'I'd not so much want India to become a superpower as a country where everyone was happy'! My hero John Kenneth Galbraith, lifelong professor of economics at Harvard, used to laugh that in the 1950s and 60s, the American obsession with a high growth rate was such as if they all expected to be asked by St. Peter at the gateway of heaven only how much they had contributed to that growth. Fifty years down the line, we have caught up (just as we are planning to send a man to the moon, too). Aren’t we progressing, doing everything stupid now, at last, that the Americans were doing half a century ago?

Change resistant, am I?

Quite a few people have told me that they have been reading this blog all through last year. I should like them to let me know which posts they found most interesting/touching/informative or thought-provoking.

Some people are born conservative-minded, and most people grow more resistant to change as they grow old. Someone reminded me of this recently, probably hinting that I had better watch out if I didn’t want my public image to get cemented as a stick-in-the-mud, who hates all kinds of change and wants desperately to hang on to old-fashioned ways.

Well, indeed, I have never been excited by change for the sake of change (so I’ve always laughed at fashion trends, and I’d go on wearing the same old jacket as long as it doesn’t look shabby). I also ignore a lot of change around me as essentially trivial (as I have done with Facebook and twitter after giving them a year’s trial) no matter how big a noise they make, and I do believe that a lot of things about old-fashioned ways are worth conserving (like good manners and museums, and teachers taking pains to drill their pupils in math or grammar, and giving marriage a very long trial before breaking up…). But I think those who imagine me to be an inveterate change-resister simply don’t know me, and if I make out a very short list of changes that I wish to see in my lifetime, many of them, supposedly eager votaries of change, may quickly and quietly decide that they cannot stomach so much drastic change after all. So here’s a tentative wish-list at the start of a new year. I’d like to see

1.      that war is officially banned everywhere, and only the UN is allowed to keep a standing army;

2.      that in no country (especially where there are large numbers of poor people still) are multi-million dollar incomes allowed by law, nor giant inheritances;

3.      that no one, not even the most competent technician (by which I mean everyone from doctors, accountants, engineers and managers to plumbers and carpenters) is allowed to call himself educated unless duly authorized colleges certify that s/he has also had a thorough grounding in the humanities (which would include compulsory reading and assignments on a very considerable amount of literature in at least two languages);

4.      that in no society are parents any longer allowed to drill it into the minds of children that monogamous one-time marriage between two members of the opposite sexes is the only ‘nice and normal’ thing to go for once one grows up;

5.      that mandatory speed governors be installed on all motor vehicles which ply on municipal roads and busy highways;

6.      that worship of money (rather than achievement or accomplishment of any significant kind) would automatically brand every man and woman as uncivilized;

7.      that conversely, everyone who puts ideals like beauty and justice and freedom far above money and machines be automatically accorded the tag of civilized – as indeed every ‘great’ society from Periclean Athens to Gupta-era India to the Tang era in China to 18^th century France has actually done;

8.      that the pursuit of science and art and teaching are again accorded the status they deserve, which is that they are the pursuits of the best of men for the highest social good, and not merely ways of making a living;

9.      that Singapore- and Switzerland-style laws against littering and noise and vandalism be enacted and enforced in every city in the world;

10.  that every able-bodied man and woman give mandatory national social service for at least two years of his or her life within the first thirty years (the kind of thing they do in Israel, and the kind of thing the NCC and NSS were started in India for).

… and that is only a small part of all the changes I should like to see. Now then, change, anybody?

Goodbye, 2010

As I write, the sun has set on the last evening of the year: 2010 is coming to a close.

In one sense, it has been an eventful decade for me, and busy enough. Big family turmoil, successive surgeries on my wife and one on myself, minor accidents on the road, dad-in-law having and surviving a stroke, resigning my job and learning to be self-employed after I was past 38, getting used to the world of mobile phones and the internet, having some of my writing published, writing a whole book for my daughter, travelling again and again to different parts of the country, teaching thousands, bringing up my daughter, warding off and surviving all kinds of mischief-makers bent on giving me depression at best and a bad name at worst, buying a new car and a house, coping with at least two great bereavements and people who have taken me through emotional roller-coasters deliberately or otherwise, getting burnt and food-poisoning, saving obsessively month after month, year after year, being betrayed very badly by some I had loved and trusted… yes, I guess I have had my hands full.

And yet, strange to say (I was reading my journal entries nearly a decade old), time seems to have stood still. Were it not for the fact that my daughter’s grown so big, and that I have thinning grey hair and the beginnings of a paunch and twinges in both knee joints now when climbing stairs of winter mornings, this could still be December 2000. Very few really big changes have come about in my life and lifestyle in all these ten years, despite so many things happening: or at least I wonder why it seems that way. That is why it feels so weird to see and hear from so many people who were children then and are quite grown-up now, married, divorced, making a living, researching and teaching in their turn, raising children of their own, scattered all over the world, some having turned into snobs, some fancying themselves to be intellectuals, many ‘too busy’ to look back, some gone astray, some already thoroughly sick of life. When did they grow up? Have they really grown up at all? Have I grown old, or has Time somehow passed me by, so that I feel I am hardly much older than these people? Do all ageing teachers feel this way, or is this something peculiar to me?

They have put up colourful festoons and bright lights in the little industrial township next door: in a few hours’ time, the merry-making will begin there, as in millions of households and hotels and resorts all over the country, dancing, feasting, jesting, carousing until many of them have drunk themselves silly, and so another New Year will be rung in with head-splitting hangovers and surly mutterings. I have in mind the sort of people who write comments saying ‘Get a life!’, because I prefer to stay at home and think, and reflect, and write the year away. More sand trickling down the hourglass, but I don’t feel too bad about it. I guess I have stepped into what the poet called the ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’, and though I crib sometimes, it’s certainly a vast improvement upon the hectic, confused and dreary adolescence and youth that I have had to live through. In the year ahead, I wish some of my readers will find serenity.