New poll

Look to your right: I have put up a new poll after ages to gauge reader opinion. You may select multiple options. Polling closes midnight, 31st October. Many thanks for voting.

P.S., Sept. 25: 35 votes in just three days, and 19 of them have voted 'educational'! This is absolutely wonderful, a very big thank you to all who have voted already. I shall be waiting eagerly to see how the voting pattern changes over the next few weeks...

America, the beautiful!

There was this front page article in my newspaper (The Telegraph) on September 12 titled ‘Osama gone, hunger gnaws’, discussing how poverty is now rampant in the world’s greatest country. The United States of America, with a population of about 311 million, has 46 million people living on food stamps – government handouts, being the only thing that keeps them from crime and/or beggary. My economist’s instinct assures me that there must be at least another 50 million who are only just somehow managing to hang on above the poverty line; the sort who sweep floors at Wal Mart and man the counters at Macdonald’s, who live in poky rented flats in crumbling inner cities and can never afford holidays, or to go to good hospitals when ill or send their children to college. This, in a country which boasts of the largest number of billionaires and celebrities, and which over the last decade has spent an estimated $2 trillion on the ‘war on terror’, besides at least another three quarters of a trillion in bailing out totally corrupt giant corporations which brought about the recession by recklessly piling up bad investments in a nationwide orgy of greed, and whose directors, proven failures if not also crooks, still continue to draw tens of millions in salaries and perks…

Meanwhile middle class America, used to ease and security for too long, refuses to work hard at downmarket jobs (which is one reason so many of them have been ‘Shanghai-ed’ or ‘Bangalore-ed’), while the rich (about a quarter million earn more than $1 million a year) are paying much less in taxes than they – or their fathers – did twenty years ago, even while the nation’s fiscal debt, now astronomical, is threatening economic catastrophe (or maybe a Chinese takeover). Want to check out these figures? Look up this article written by Warren Buffett, not only one of the richest men in the world, but one of the very few brave and honest billionaires I have ever known.

This nation was the brightest beacon of hope for much of mankind since the end of the 18^th century (read the inscription on the Statue of Liberty here),  and great even two generations ago. I personally think the rot began in the late 1960s, though it only started becoming apparent when Dubya Bush took over the reins. Yet she is still big and influential enough to bring about a global disaster if and when she sinks, not merely because much of the rest of the world survives and dreams of progressing by exporting their stuff to her and learning all kinds of technical tricks from her, but because millions of ‘educated’ young people in the rest of the world – India in particular – cannot begin to imagine a world that is not led by the nose by the US of A, in everything from dress codes and ‘music’ to eateries to slang and divorce agreements. God save America – if only because it will still take the rest of the world a long time to grow up!

Hachiko

Just watched this 2009 movie starring (not really) Richard Gere. It’s about the oldest bonding in human history, something that long pre-dates civilization. I hope it endures if civilization vanishes for a while.

I must confess at the outset that I am an inveterate animal lover – well, all large intelligent animals anyway – and given another chance in life I might well have made a career of living with them, the way Jim Corbett, James Herriot, Gerald Durrell and Konrad Lorenz did. Dolphins, elephants, chimps, horses would have all been fine, but dogs especially so: I am slightly crazy about dogs, I think. That might go some way to explain why I found this movie so heart-warming.

I had known about a lot of real and legendary faithful dogs, but somehow not about Hachiko (look up this wikipedia article: that will save me a lot of labour). Although the story has been transplanted to the US – and I found no good explanation for how the puppy turned up there from halfway across the world – it has been educational for me, too, therefore. Many thanks to young River Ghosh for bringing it to me. You can look up this link to find out a little more about the movie, and the comments at this webpage, I think, can only tell you how widely different human beings are.

As I said, the dog is both the real star and show-stealer. I wonder what directors have to do to make children and animals act like that…

I found it good to see that the audience reaction was on the whole very positive, and to learn that in Japan the memory of the (real) dog is still revered, three generations after it died. And it made me ashamed once more to be an Indian, thinking about how animals are treated in this country as a rule.

If you watch the movie, tell me how you liked it.

Crusaders, stand up and be counted!

The last post I wrote about the ongoing anti-corruption ‘crusade’ (A most frightening prospect) has been visited and commented upon a great deal. Now that Hazare-ji is taking a breather and feeling, I’m sure, very pleased with himself while the Parliamentary Standing Committee takes into cognizance some of his demands, I should like to bring up a connected issue that has been bothering me a great deal lately. Who are these ‘crusaders’ behind him – leaving alone the Kejriwal-Bedi-Bhushan types, who are all well-off big shots with their private axes to grind, and who are obviously playing for very high stakes?

One thing that has caught my eye repeatedly on TV and in newspapers is the claim that a huge fraction of Anna Hazare’s supporters belong to the middle class, which is supposedly sick and tired of corruption. Now I have been born in this very class, and have lived cheek by jowl with it all my life in an urban setting – they even supply me with my livelihood. If I have known them even a little, I cannot help wondering whether this claim that they are ‘anti-corruption’ is not the biggest joke of the century, at least in this country. Let’s see whether my readers can deny that the great majority of the middle class

• Think nothing of cheating in examinations,
• Get fake birth certificates so that their children can get a few years extra in their jobs,
•  Think as little about bribing traffic policemen as about bribing gods in return for undeserved favours (if the cop or god does not oblige, he’s bad; and the cop, especially, is bad because he takes a bribe in return for letting them get away with breaking the law…),
• Demand dowries despite knowing full well it is a punishable crime,  and the more ‘educated’ they are, the bigger the dowry expected, ‘naturally’, 
• Spread vile gossip about colleagues and neighbours who seem to be happier and more successful,
• Absolutely refuse to think that job-shirking is serious corruption,
• ‘Respect’ their elders (both parents and teachers) only to spout the vilest abuse behind their backs,
• Litter the streets despite knowing it is wrong,
• Derive great pleasure from making the maximum noise while celebrating anything, from weddings to pujas, much of the pleasure deriving from the knowledge that a lot of harmless people are being disturbed,
• Steal everything they can from the workplace, from company time (chatting on Facebook) to stationery, to padding travel bills to using the company car for sundry family purposes, and indulge in petty shoplifting everywhere they go (I have written about this before),
• Cheat the medical insurance companies with false bills (to such an extent that those companies are getting increasingly stringent with innocent and honest customers – this is public knowledge),
• Grown children don’t want to know how much of daddy’s money is honestly earned as long as daddy can shower them with largesse, whether daddy is a clerk or a factory manager or a doctor or a contractor…

I can extend this list indefinitely, but I don’t think I need to.

These people are supporting the fight against corruption? These people want to live in a clean India – an India where so many of them or their parents could suffer a drastic fall in their standard of living, if not go to jail? Is this black comedy, or pure farce, or am I dreaming, or is there something very deep and subtle about India that I still don’t understand? Educate me!

P.S., Sept. 08: Hmm. My readers all belong to the urban educated middle class, and few of them have been forthcoming with comments!

In this article, Prabhat Patnaik, retired professor of economics at JNU, has clarified several important things. One doesn’t have to be a card-carrying leftist to see that he is largely right. See, for instance, this line in the first paragraph: ‘what was Hazare’s own movement all about? It was certainly not about “corruption” in any definable sense’… and he goes on to elaborate lucidly and incisively what should be deeply disturbing about this and similar movements, most notably the possibility that in the course of denigrating and weakening the elected constitutional government, these movements are likely to push India into the arms of laissez faire capitalists and religious zealots of the worst kind. The great tragedy is that those who are doing it, being ignorant of history (our ‘educated’ middle class today consists by and large of techies and traders, doesn’t it?), don’t have the foggiest notion of what they are doing, swept along as they are by their incoherent, self-righteous rage…

Superheroes

An elderly gentleman came to seek counsel yesterday about his grown-up son (who had been my pupil once) who is pushing thirty, with a pregnant wife, still sitting at home virtually doing nothing and feeding off his father, having given up four jobs in a row within five years because they were ‘ill-paid, boring and humiliating’. By an odd coincidence, I was reading the cartoon strip titled Luann in my newspaper yesterday, and there I read about an elderly American couple worrying about exactly the same thing: a son who in an earlier age would have been fending for himself for at least a decade already sitting at home, living off his parents still, and playing idiotic video games online where he regularly ‘saves the world’ as some sort of ‘superhero’.

I was musing along with some of my readers in earlier posts on both my blogs about the tendency towards homogenization all over the world, and too many features of this process are alarmingly similar, such as this one. First, parents bring up pampered brats, waiting upon them hand and foot, not teaching them basic responsibilities and manners, indulging their every whim to the limit of (and sometimes beyond) the parents’ ability, telling them that all they need to do is to get ‘good marks’ in school and college and then a ‘bright future’ is waiting for them… and then the same parents discover to their chagrin that either their children have become ‘successful’ in nothing more than the pettiest middle-class sense (doing nondescript jobs for modest salaries just like millions of other nonentities, all dreams of becoming rich and famous quietly buried, slowly burning up with disillusionment and frustration), or worse, they are useless parasites with bloated egos, who won’t go out to work unless they can start off as CEOs or superstars of this or that variety, much preferring to let their parents keep on maintaining them and their families in turn, as long as they can. And many of these parents are actually too scared to take them by the scruff of the neck and throw them out on the streets, either because they ‘love’ their children too much still ('Suppose he commits suicide?'), or they are worried sick about what people might say, or afraid that their children may actually turn upon them …news reports are becoming increasingly common about desperate old parents going to the police and courts to seek ‘protection’ or ‘support’ from their adult offspring. What monsters we have created in vast numbers by trying to be cleverer than our parents were!

I don’t care what my daughter does after she’s 24-25, so long as it’s not something shameful or criminal, but she has known since she was 10 that laziness and greed will never be indulged, and she must be able to stand on her own two feet. If she cares to look after her parents in our old age, that will be a huge bonus, of course. But she must get off our backs at least. And try to do something that is personally satisfying if not also socially useful, whether or not that makes her rich. Having her back at home with us now and then must be an unadulterated pleasure, never an obligation or burden. If things work out that way, I shall consider myself both very successful and very fortunate indeed…

Oh Albion, beware India...

I shall carry on with the thread of what I was musing over in the last blogpost, especially with reference to the two articles whose links have been provided in the comments, one by Swapan Dasgupta and the other by Ian Jack. Those who dislike any kind of serious discourse, please stay away.

Arnold J. Toynbee is generally associated with the theory that nations (he would have preferred civilisations) experience epochs of rise and fall, and that the interplay of challenge and (corresponding-) response decides what sort of historical track a nation will follow, and for how long. Also, the greatness of a nation is certainly pivoted, in the first instance, on how rich and militarily powerful it manages to become, but mere wealth and power have never completely defined greatness: that depended upon how strongly one nation could influence, even impress others, fill them with admiration, respect, and a strong desire to emulate. I don’t think historically conscious people will doubt that England’s rise to greatness started with the Tudors coming to power in the mid-16^th century (everything started then or soon after, from global explorations of discovery to defeating the Spanish Armada, the founding of the East India Company to the kind of social ambience that could produce and lionize geniuses on the scale of Shakespeare, Milton and Newton, the huge political upheavals that firmly secured the foundations of the most enduring of democratic societies…), and reached its apogee in the last days of Queen Victoria, in the final decades of the 19^th century, not merely because Britain had by then become the first as well as biggest industrial economy in the world or that it ruled the largest empire ever, but because she had self-consciously and proudly achieved an incredible number of things which she taught or dared other countries to follow: from creating the infrastructure for universal education and social security and the most organized and efficient police service in the world to kindness to animals to missionary activity on an unprecedented scale, from mapping the planet to creating the greatest body of literature the world has ever known, from setting up the first ever society geared to science and technology to delineating a culture of suavity, understated decency and humour and good manners that spared none, from the monarch down to the ragpicker, and creating a more widely diffused will to greatness than has ever been seen before or after…

Then  came the two world wars, with the Great Depression thrown in in between. Britain emerged nominally vindicated and victorious, but something precious and essential had been lost – although they didn’t know it then, back in the 1940s. There followed Keynesianism and the welfare state and the post war construction boom, James Bond and the Beatles and drugs, ‘progressive’ ideas about education and the Commonwealth and the British Council, prime ministers assuring the nation that they had ‘never had it so good’, the invasion by mass-consumerist American culture and hordes of immigrants, and the country rode an artificial high for a long, long time: in fact, even in the 1980s, there were intellectuals pointing out how Britain should rejoice that she was much ‘richer’ in the post-colonial era. There were grumbling voices growing ever louder that they had made a country of lazy, irresponsible, uncivic buffoons by the million (witness the obesity epidemic, the degree of functional illiteracy and the culture of the football beer gangs), and it couldn’t afford it much longer. What followed was the long night of Thatcherism, during which much of the best of the welfare state was demolished, and over the ruins was raised once more the ramparts of capitalism of the most rapacious, shameless, ostentatious variety … success means the rich getting richer quick (Ronald Reagan might have actually learnt this from the Brits) and nothing else. Thirty years have passed since then, too, and now, as the very recent urban riots show, the chickens are coming home to roost. Note two things: the vandals stole no food and no books, only laptop computers, iPods, flatscreen TVs and Nike trainers, besides the odd water bottle, lifted just for the ‘fun’ of it. And now the incumbent PM is lamenting over a broken society: a culture of  ‘irresponsibility, selfishness, behaving as if your choices have no consequences, children without fathers, schools without discipline, reward without effort, crime without punishment, rights without responsibilities…’ This is obviously a very far cry from the England people like us knew, adored, even worshipped. But the question is, has it happened by sheer accident, or, as the Americans say, they had it coming? And the far more important question for us Indians – citizens of the greatest wannabe country in the world – is, can we see the writing on the wall, meant for us?

The increasing crassness and arrogance and boorishness of an increasingly rich class of upstarts, the epidemic of social dysfunction all around us, the persistence of great poverty amidst great opulence, the skyrocketing graphs of environmental pollution and natural-resource depletion, the rapid loss of not only the physical treasure of cultural heritage but awareness thereof (‘Who was this RaOne dude? Was he, like, cool…?’ and ‘Why go to Aurangabad, yaar? No malls there, just some dirty old caves with stupid pictures on the walls…’), the stench of corruption everywhere, the increasingly moron-friendly quality of examinations (an expression that a very wise British boy has just taught me) which allows millions to get the tag of ‘educated’ with no effort at all, the policy paralysis that has engulfed the highest levels of government, the total dishonesty that pervades every kind of relationship, from the one with your bank advisor to the one with your so-called love interest… how much more evidence do we need that mere anarchy is loos’d upon us, and the ‘blood-dimm’d tide’ might not be too far off?

Oh, Albion...

I have been avidly reading the news coverage of the orgy of rioting, looting and vandalism that has suddenly engulfed so many towns in England, including London, over the last week.

Why has it happened? The pundits, as is their wont, have come up with a mixed bag of explanations. Growing income inequalities resulting from recent government policies, exacerbated by increasingly onerous poverty among large numbers and consequent anger especially among the most ‘deprived’ and despairing youth which has now exploded: that was one favourite explanation – until today, when reports are saying that the arrested perpetrators, almost a thousand of them already, not only vary in age from 11(!) to the mid-forties, but include comfortable to well-off people (see this), prompting an ordinary Londoner to lament ‘We really have brought up a horrible generation of kids!’ Police ‘atrocities’ against members of a certain community in the recent past have been another favourite whipping boy. Things have been growing darker: it seems that in some places phalanxes of Asians are now gearing up for a long-drawn-out race war against Blacks. Paradoxically, one more explanation is overly lax policing: apparently it took the prime minister three whole days to decide to authorize the lawkeepers to use force (and that too, only guns with plastic-tipped bullets, while they still debate the appropriateness of water cannon to scatter armed mobs). One does not need to wonder what the government’s reaction would be if this had been happening either in New York/LA or New Delhi/Kolkata…

What has gone wrong with this highly cultured, rich, consciously multicultural society?

Is Britain confused, or unprepared, or just too civilized to handle big social turbulences of this sort?

And turning back to India, I believe the picture is both more confusing and more frightening. There are far more people crushed together here, far more poverty and inequality, a far more volatile multicultural mix, far less social responsibility and discipline, government that is far more inept and by turns excessively indulgent and excessively brutal. A very potent brew, and little fires keep erupting every now and then with monotonous regularity, of course: but can we handle a sudden conflagration? Or rather, from prime minister down to the man in the street, do we want even to think about it? (in this context, you might read this blogpost – along with the comments – that I think has acquired a new immediacy).

P.S., August 13: wikipedia's relevant article, updated today, says a certain poll claims a huge 71% of affected people feel that criminal behaviour, gang culture and poor policing have together been responsible for the riots. If this is not a big enough go-ahead for the government to crack down with conviction on the perpetrators, what else could be? Talk about pussyfooting... 

A choice of icons

I read this very weird editorial in my newspaper yesterday. It says – quite justifiably – it is a pity that while we are going gaga publicly celebrating the 150^th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore, we have chosen virtually to forget another great titan of yesteryear, Acharya Prafulla Chandra Roy, outstanding chemist, teacher extraordinary and pioneering Bengali entrepreneur. From which the editorial writer goes on to infer that it is clear Bengalis have chosen to put literature far above science, which itself ranks higher than entrepreneurship on their priority list, and that bodes great ill for Bengal. The editorial grimly ends on the warning note that Bengalis, having made their choice, ‘can continue to spout poetry amidst overwhelming squalor and demeaning poverty’.  

Correct me if I am wrong, but I found this an absolutely remarkable example of muddled thinking. Whenever did literatteurs as a tribe (leave alone Tagore) glorify squalor and poverty? Since when did being interested (or creative) in literature automatically indicate a contempt or apathy for science? Who says all Bengalis have forgotten P.C. Roy? He was never exactly a pop idol anyway, and the right sort of people certainly do remember him – on Tuesday, August 2nd, there was a lecture cum photo exhibition about him in one of the leading universities of the state. What should we have instead: yet one more meaningless public holiday or a jamboree IPL style? Which Bengali who knowledgeably adores Tagore has deliberately forgotten Roy? And where did the editorial writer meet Bengalis ‘spouting poetry’? I should have thought Bengali businessmen (I wouldn’t honour the majority of them with the tag of entrepreneur) were a far more common species these days! How does forgetting P.C. Roy prove that we are ‘devoted’ to Tagore? I have written about another truly brilliant Bengali, Rajshekhar Basu aka Parashuram on this blog earlier. He was equally at home with both science and literature: how many ‘cultured’ Bengalis remember him? Which country, now universally recognized as ‘advanced’, had to eschew literature and the arts in order to pursue science and entrepreneurship? 

As a teacher, I can testify from a  lifetime’s experience that Bengalis care as little for science as for literature or the arts, leave alone entrepreneurship. I can safely aver that in 98 out of every 100 Bengali families today, except perhaps the very rich and the very poor, parents are drilling it into the minds of their children that their only aim in life should be finding a reasonably safe, reasonably light, reasonably well-paid job which gives one some ‘social status’, meaning that they absolutely must cram a few dozen textbooks to become either salaried doctors or engineers (definitely not scientists, unless they fail the entrance tests at least once!), both Tagore and Roy be damned. The even sadder truth is that most of the children, even if bored to tears with their academic rat race, are quite convinced that their parents are right, have only their ‘welfare’ at heart. As I frequently tell my own pupils, in another twenty years’ time we shall not have competent teachers or judges or plumbers or carpenters at all, leave alone scientists and artists and writers: we must make do as well as we can with a whole country full of just doctors and engineers (besides plain crooks and salesmen of countless hues, including journalists and ad-copywriters). This is the ground reality: how does it pay to fool ourselves otherwise? With even the media spouting this kind of nonsense, hasn’t it become truly a case of the blind leading the blind?

Sir and Madam, if you please

My wife was laughing the other day when our long-time insurance agent suddenly started addressing her as ‘Madam’. Both are Bengalis, mind you, and he had been calling us dada and boudi for years. Why the sudden shift to an alien style? Well, he shamefacedly admitted, a lot of women these days take offence if he uses ‘obsolete’ forms of address such as boudi…

We have heard the same from others, too, greengrocers and sweetmeat sellers among them. One fishmonger was hugely relieved and pleased when my wife told him she much prefers to be called boudi, as of old. He even had an explanation for the new fashion: ‘They’ve picked it up at the shopping malls!’ And the wives of the yuppies are much more prickly, it seems, than their men-folk are.

I remember that when I sat in the St. Xavier’s library in the halcyon days, and parents of boys in class 9 and 10 with any kind of query relating to their wards were routinely sent up to me by the headmaster, many of them felt this compulsion to speak to me in English, under the impression that to talk to an English teacher in an English-medium school in anything other than English was simply not done. Invariably they would take in a deep breath, puff up their chests, throw their shoulders back, go goggle-eyed and let loose a torrent of pidgin, whether they were engineers or clerks. Only perhaps one in a hundred could really talk in English, but what passion they threw into their voices! I could hardly listen for a minute before I was struggling to smother a smile, and I had to tell them that I was as much a  Bengali as they, and I would much prefer to converse in the native language. They looked nonplussed for a moment, then switched over to Bengali with obvious relief. Not that they could speak good Bengali, either, but that is another story.

The same happens in the bank I go to. Those manning the counters insist on talking in English, even if I begin the conversation in Bengali, but the moment I am driven by exasperation to start talking in English, they register alarm and promptly switch back to Bengali or Hindi…

What a country we have made, indeed: the most cultured among us are ashamed of our native tongues and so proud of speaking in an alien language most of them have only the most tenuous grasp of!

Pausing for a while...

Something that sometimes saddens and sometimes irks me is to see comments coming in saying things which make it obvious that the writer has either not read things I had written earlier, or not understood, or quite forgotten about them!

There is a search bar along the right-hand column of this blog, you know, just so that before dashing off a comment you can check out whether and what I had written on the subject already – just type in key words like education or religion or prices or Harry Potter or freedom or China or poems and see what is available. You might be pleasantly surprised to see that I have said a lot of things on all these subjects already: and you might find your queries answered, your doubts resolved. If you don’t like using the search bar, you may instead click on the various labels (‘personal’, ‘worldview’, ‘tributes’, ‘earliest posts’ etc). It will be a nice gesture to me, too, saving me the trouble of repeating things I have said (sometimes more than once-) before!

I have myself been going over some old posts lately, and there are now quite a lot of them, on a great variety of subjects. And since I don’t normally write about nine-day wonders, most of them are quite as relevant today as they were on the date of writing.

So I shall not write on anything ‘new’ for a while (what’s the big deal about newness anyway? An obsession with novelty is a sign of a weak mind that merely lives from sensation to sensation, retaining no memories and having no use for reflection … that’s not the kind of reader I wish to attract and keep). Instead, I shall wait expectantly for comments to come in on some really old posts. Like this one, for instance.

Adieu handwriting?

Some schools in the state of Indiana, USA, are bidding goodbye to handwriting as an essential and fundamental skill to be acquired by all children during their formative years in favour of texting and typing, says a report in The Times of London, quoted in The Telegraph, Kolkata, 13^th July (middle of p.3. I couldn’t find the link on their website). Apparently in 41 of the US states already, it is not compulsory for children to learn to write by hand any more. This may be the beginning of a great new trend, resulting in a world, maybe fifty years or a hundred years from now, where nobody (except a few antiquarians and cranks here and there) will know how to write with a pen any more…

All is flux, said Heraclitus and the Buddha long ago, all things must pass. There were countless skills that took great patience and labour to acquire, but were nevertheless acquired and admired by millions down the ages, and now they are gone. Like how to churn butter or hitch a horse to a wagon, says the report itself. Or swordsmanship and handling sails on a ship or remembering the contents of thousands of books, I may suggest. Even things like painting pictures by hand are on their way to becoming lost arts, and so may be the ability to do arithmetic in one’s own head, if my reading of the situation around me is right. So why not handwriting, indeed? Truth is, I should be happy – being a teacher of language, compelled to read and mark large amounts of text daily, I have nearly worn my eyes out reading the ghastliest of scrawls for nearly thirty years, and computer printouts should be a great deliverance. My old boys tell me that professors in many colleges even in this country are already insisting that assignments be done on computer and sent over by email for correction and marking: it’s so much less of a bother that way. It mightn’t be long before schoolteachers follow suit, and bye bye to carrying huge piles of homework books home and back every day. What a blessed relief that will be. And who writes letters longhand these days anyway? Personally, it won’t be any trouble at all: I have been typing fast since teenage, and already in the mid-1990s I was warning pupils that typewriting would become an essential skill soon. So why should I be upset now?

Yet I must confess I can’t help sighing wistfully. One reason is that I am the type who believe that anything that has been cherished for countless ages is likely to have some intrinsic value, so it should not be lightly forgotten, especially when the replacement is no great shakes (think: contact lenses have not been able to replace the spectacles which have been around for centuries, and despite the electronic music board, millions are still learning how to play real musical instruments – why?). Another is that, as some scholars, researchers and thinkers have already pointed out (and this has been mentioned in the report itself), any skill like good handwriting (or doing sums quickly and accurately in the head) which takes years of patient labour to acquire has strong beneficial effects on the human brain, which may be lamented only when they are lost – as a lot of people are already lamenting the demise of systematic drilling in grammar during the school years! A third reason is (and I say this though I am not as sentimental as some much younger people are) there is something personal and sincere about handwritten communication that can simply not be duplicated if the same is done via computer and internet. But the most important reason of all is that I fear that – leaving aside communications of a strictly business nature, such as office files and legal documents – all communication via computer and mobile phone is likely to be of a far more trivial, superficial and ephemeral nature, of no lasting value, unlike things written by hand. It is not just an irrelevant coincidence that a lot of successful professional writers prefer to write longhand even in this day and age, and one cannot imagine people of today writing letters like Chesterfield or Keats or Tagore (Chhinnopotro) or Churchill via keyboard or keypad. If that is not a loss to civilization, tell me what is (provided you have any idea what I am talking about)? I may not be so bitter and melodramatic as the commentator in the Wall Street Journal who writes ‘…it presages a further hollowing out of the human personality, a further colonization of the human mind by the virtual at the expense of the real’, but I am both sad and worried nevertheless. I belong to a generation which is equally at home with handwriting and typewriting, but think of entire generations of children being educated without ever wielding a pencil!

Whether you think that the supersession of handwriting will or will not be a great leap forward, do let me hear your views.

Quirky lists

It’s July 8^th today: Shilpi has just reminded me that my blog is now five years old (see the post titled ‘Four years old’ written a year ago). How fast time passes, really. I can hardly believe that I have been doing this without a break for five whole years! Many thanks to all the readers who have kept me going all this time by visiting regularly and commenting frequently. I hope they too want this blog to continue for many more years, as I do.

As some people might have noticed already, I have recently added a blog titled ‘Listverse’ on my blog-roll. The fellow’s strongly idiosyncratic, of course, but he is harmless, and clever, and wicked, and though I don’t always agree with him (as I commented on his recent post about why he thinks newspapers are on the way out), I generally enjoy the slightly weird lists that he keeps putting up. He’s been teaching me a thing or two, too (as my daughter has written in her own recent blogpost). His latest post is ‘10 Industries that thrive on holidays’, and I relished the hard-hitting cynical tone so much that I must draw my readers’ attention to it (do read some of the comments, too: so many people have nothing to say to him except ‘I hate you’!).

Among other things, it should make you think: the very fact that these ten industries are thriving as never before should give the lie to the oft-repeated claim that people these days are terribly busy all the time. With so many holidays, and with so many people having both the leisure and the money to throw at all those holidays, one can only sigh to think that there used to be a time when most people had to work most of the time just to make a bare living (I have been reading Dickens lately, and his world seems light years away). That’s progress for you.

While the party lasts.

A Telephone Conversation

(with a doff of the hat to Wole Soyinka)

An old girl rang me up from distant Bangalore last night, essentially because she wanted to hear my voice, and because she wanted a shoulder to weep over about a lot of unsettling things that have been happening lately – accidental death of loved ones, loneliness, inability to focus on essential work at hand, loss of self confidence and lack of direction, etc. etc. I said what I usually say on such occasions (which are not infrequent), and, to cut a long story short, she sounded much more cheerful towards the end of the nearly half-hour conversation, and acknowledged as much, adding, ‘Sir, you have no idea how much you have done for so many of us, and how much you still mean to us. Thank you!’ Goes without saying, it made my day.

And in turn it made me think of so many who gushed that way in class and then have dropped out of my life completely. Other boys and girls even tell me that some of them regret not having kept in touch, and wish they could renew the connection, but are ‘too scared’ to try, remembering that I had made scathing remarks in class about how many will gush and forget, and they fear they will be in for some tongue-lashing if they do call, or email, or turn up at my door now, after a long hiatus.

I shall never stop wondering about what really draws people to a person, and what repels, and what makes us forget some people completely after their immediate ‘utility’ is exhausted.

And, of course, I grow more cynical every year, more convinced than ever that it’s not just about me and my ex-pupils: human beings in general care little about one another, even so-called loved ones, much beyond their immediate utility. I have heard so many things, you see. I have heard a father pointing to his wife and daughter and saying ‘I am just their ATM!’ and I have seen grown children referring to their aged fathers as burdens and old fools, and I have heard about the man impatiently asking the insurance agent ‘Who cares what my family will get when I am dead? Just tell me how much I will get if I am still alive when this policy matures.’ I have seen 'friends' falling out merely because one scored a few more marks than the other in some silly examination. And I have seen so many young married couples breaking up before my eyes, apparently because they simply couldn't bear each other any more.

I was recently going through some essays on the subject of love written as homework by some high-school girls, and I couldn’t help smiling sadly as I read through the absurd teenage romantic fluff. If only they knew a little more about hormones, and making a living, and going through the daily grind day after day, year after year…how I wish our children could grow up, not cynical, certainly, but a little more clear-eyed! I believe, you see, that even three generations ago their ancestors at this age were not quite so dumb, and therefore not quite so vulnerable to reality when it bites.

Summarizing Harry Potter

In recent years I have been re-reading and rewatching some great books and movies. So I read through the Mahabharata, Asimov’s Foundation series, all of the Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown books, the Don Camillo series, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Tolstoy’s Resurrection, and some more (quite a lot more, actually, and there were always new books to read besides). This, even as I realize ever more deeply how right Khushwant Singh was when he wrote (then approaching his nineties) that as one grows older, one realizes how many people one need never have met, how many meetings one need  never have attended, how many books one need never have read. One must not only be lucky enough to be free to choose, but have the power of discrimination that allows one to choose wisely – a power that, sadly, is given to too few of us, or is lost too early in life.

And even with all the freedom that one wants and all the discrimination one needs, one must concede that life is too short to savour all its pleasures over and over. There are simply too many good books, for instance, that I will never have the time to read from cover to cover again. Shortly after the seventh Harry Potter book (The Deathly Hallows) came out, therefore, I read through the whole saga at one go, and determined to write down my own summaries of all seven books, so that I could at least have the pleasure of re-visiting them from time to time. My daughter, avid Potter fan that she is, helped me most ably from the start. Sometime last year, when I had reached the last book, the continuity of the project was broken for some now-obscure reason (we became ‘busy’ with other, more pressing things, I suppose, as most people do when they do not want to admit that they simply grew impatient and distracted…). I am happy to say that today we have picked up the threads again, owing to my daughter’s stern reminder, and the job will soon be complete – before the last movie (DH 2) comes out in July. And it will give us both, father and daughter, a great deal of satisfaction.

A civilized person needs to carry around a lot of books inside her head. It helps to refer back now and then to summaries that one has made for oneself. It is also a most delightful feeling that I no longer have to think that I did it for my daughter, because I did it with her.

College admissions: curiouser and curiouser...

There is a certain elite college in Delhi which specializes in teaching commerce (much abused among the engineering fraternity – please refer to 3 Idiots), and this year they have announced that their required ‘cut-off’ score for admission is (hold your breath, all those who are both still sane and haven’t been reading the papers) 100%!

Even the Union Minister in charge of education, Kapil Sibal, who is not exactly feted for being a highly rational person, has publicly said that the decision is ‘completely irrational’ (The Telegraph, June 16, first page). An old boy of mine who saw the principal of the said college on a TV show said the man tried to defend the decision by claiming that it applied only to non-commerce stream applicants (it so happens that one science student has scored an aggregate of 100% marks in this year’s CBSE plus-two level examinations); for commerce students, the cut-off is ‘only’ 97%. This decision has been taken, according to the said principal, because they have a policy of taking in only the ‘very best’.

Here are a few things I would like to say as a lifelong teacher who also happened to be a better than average student in his time:

1.   Do the ‘very best’ habitually go for higher academics (recall gentlemen called Tagore and Sachin Tendulkar and Vishwanathan Anand and Dhirubhai Ambani) at all?

2. Of those who do, since when did the ‘very best’ start going for commerce studies?

3.  As for colleges indulging in this farce of setting 94% or 97% as their cut-off requirement, when will it cease? Isn’t it an open secret that most of those who score such marks these days are only slightly better than duds (most secondary- and higher secondary level toppers, briefly but ecstatically celebrated in the media, are never thereafter heard of again, as I have personally checked for nearly three decades: at most they become faceless managers in banks or power plants, working 12-hour days for a pittance)? I can also personally vouch that of all the scores of my own pupils who have got 90%-plus marks in ICSE English this year, hardly a handful ever scored more than 70% in the tests I gave them in class, even objective-type tests when I called out the answers and they marked themselves! Since the boards grossly inflate their abilities (and egos), why not prick the balloon by telling the colleges to select them strictly on the basis of their scores in standardized entrance tests, the way the engineering and medical colleges (and some top-of-the-line liberal arts colleges, like St. Stephen’s in Delhi and Presidency in Kolkata) do?

4.   And what about the school and plus-two boards deciding to give marks more sensibly, so that one has to be really, really good (as it was in my day) to score an aggregate higher than 80%, and 90% meant sure-shot Nobel Prize material? Would such a decision hurt anybody but idle semi-literate middle class mothers whose whole existence pivots around boasting about their children’s examination prowess before other equally stupid females?

Science contemporary style

This link to an article written by someone who ought to know the inside story of drug-development research should send shivers down many spines. Do read it slowly and mindfully right through.

My reflections:

1.      I know a little more about this than the man on the street, yet it gave me fresh nightmares.

2.      This is one reason why I steer clear of doctors and hospitals as far as I can, and never regret that I did not become a doctor myself.

3.      This is also why I have a (I believe healthy) disrespect for so-called science: meaning that I don’t swallow every kind of rubbish which is claimed to be the product of the ‘latest scientific research’.

4.      If this is the case in the USA, one can only imagine what the situation in India is like, where loyalties can be bought, and facts can be twisted to suit opinions convenient to the rich and powerful, so much more easily…

I shall be glad if, after reading the article through, some people want to engage in serious discussion on this issue – something that affects not just a few big business interests but all of us, in a very immediate and indispensable way.


P.S.: I have found that 'real' scientists are either quite ignorant of or disdainful of the subject called sociology of science.

Brief holiday

It was my half-yearly one week holiday, and I try to stay off the Net as much as I can during such times, hence the delay in posting.

It wasn’t much of a holiday actually: there was very mundane but essential work to attend to in the Big City, and it was sweltering hot all the time (though right now Durgapur is just as bad). Still, Kolkata did look a teeny-weeny bit cleaner and greener than usual – or was it my Didi-infatuated eyes playing tricks on me? And we got a bit of rain, though it did precious little to affect the weather for the better. Anything without air conditioning was a perfect nightmare, and whenever I feel like griping that God didn’t do enough for me, all I have to do to feel mightily better is remind myself I could have been a daily office-goer in Kolkata lifelong…

We took a two-day breather by scooting off to Diamond Harbour. It was a very nice hour-long drive from my in-laws’ place. Sagarika, the government tourist lodge, is located on a prime spot right on the waterfront. We took a liking to it immediately, although, expectedly, not everything was as spick and span as one would like, because the room was large and airy and slightly olde-worlde: I mean, very much on the generously expansive 1950s scale. One does not see such big bathrooms and enormous balconies in hotels these days, except in the five-star category. There wasn’t much activity on offer, but we were only looking for uninterrupted leisure, and we got it. The weather was just as muggy as in the city, but the waterfront was always breezy, and you could sit out on the river’s edge till nearly midnight if you wanted to, listening to the lapping of water on the shore and watching the lights of Haldia on the far bank, and following with your ears more than your eyes some small steamer or trawler throbbing away downriver in the dark. I dreamt how the first British ships had come up the same river more than 300 years ago to lay the foundations of empire, and also of how when I had last made a day-trip to the place, my entire expenses had not been more than a hundred rupees. To my daughter, they both sounded equally like fairy tales. Here is a link to some photographs that we took.

Back on the net, I am delighted to see that there have been so many comments on my last post (though, it goes without saying, I am always hungry for more), and that, without my noticing, the number of ‘followers’ has reached the 200 mark. Who was it, I wonder, the 200^th one? I’d have loved to thank her or him personally.  (The few who left recently were no loss; they had enlisted themselves for a lark, I’m sure, and never really read what I wrote). I am looking forward to suggestions from serious readers again. And I do wish that more people would look up my other blog more frequently…

Sal forests and driftwood collectors

My wife and I often simply run away together on the scooter to take a deep breath of fresh air whenever the life of the city begins to stifle us. We have been doing this unremittingly for the last 16 years. Once every two or three months, that is. There is a long tree-lined drive through the country that leads to the Ajoy river, and that is the route we invariably take. In all these years we haven’t tired of it. As the first picture shows, the Forest Department’s desultory efforts at conservation have managed to preserve only a thin line of sal trees bordering the road, but even that is enough for our thirsty eyes: the silence, disturbed only by the loud chirp of crickets even under the mid-day sun, the gentle breeze, the lush green of new and freshly-rain washed profusion of leaves, the absence of traffic (though it’s much worse now than 16 years ago) – the magic never fails to work. I took a few photos on my mobile phone (I keep forgetting to take my real camera along), and here are two of them, with apologies for the poor quality.

Where we stopped – I for a smoke and my wife for a drink of water – today, there was this villager struggling to tie up a huge bundle of dry twigs and driftwood that he had collected (fuel for the hearth) on to the carrier of his bicycle. He was huffing and puffing and making a bad job of it, and he let out a plaintive cry for help when he saw me. We fought with the bundle together until we had securely roped it up, then we paused to regain our breaths, and that is when I took the second photograph (he addressed me as ‘kakababu’: just imagine!)

I reflected that if the new government which has just assumed power can do something for this man, it will have achieved something praiseworthy indeed. And by something I don’t mean turning him into a drudge at a sponge-iron plant: he’s much better off as he is…

Salaam Mamata!

Shabaash, Mamata!

Be careful. Remember your promises. And God be with you.

An archive of infinite value

Google has done all mankind a signal service by helping to put online the historical resources of Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem based centre for remembering the Holocaust.

The work of this kind of research centre grows increasingly more important and valuable every day, as the last survivors die, and as hundreds of millions of children worldwide grow up history-illiterate (or, what is just as bad, unconcerned), and so they can be fed any nonsense, any vile and motivated garbage about what some of our ancestors did to their contemporaries.

Holocaust denial has become a kind of industry in many parts of the world. They say everything from ‘It never happened’, to ‘it was vastly exaggerated’. As if saying that ‘only’ fifty thousand or a hundred thousand Jews were slaughtered like sheep somehow makes the crime less ghastly, less mind-numbing than saying the number was close to six million; or as if saying a few million Jews were ‘only’ thrown out of their jobs and houses and countries, or robbed and beaten and raped and jailed as a national mission-cum-pastime for years together for no crime they had committed except the fact that they were Jews makes the horror less damning, more tolerable. I dare anyone who knows what it means to be human, to be a father/mother, a son/daughter or a husband/wife, and who knows about the Holocaust, to stand up and assert that a) it wouldn’t matter to him/her if it happened to ‘only’ his dearest one, and that b) knowing physics is ‘more important’ than knowing that kind of history, so s/he just doesn’t ‘have time’ for that kind of knowledge.

It didn’t happen to Jews only in Germany or German-occupied territories such as Poland during World War II, by the way. To cite just one instance, the Nazis did the Russians a service of incalculable value by deflecting the world’s attention from the record of the endless pogroms in which heaven knows how many million Jews suffered and died. And there are many countries, if truth be known, which have no right to hold their heads high over their record of treating the Jews, though they might never have descended to downright, cold-blooded mass slaughter.

And it hasn’t happened only to Jews, either. Even if we restrict our attention to the 20^th century alone, humans of every description who were unfortunate enough to be hated and weak minorities in the countries where they lived have been humiliated and slaughtered savagely in vast numbers, in all places from south America to the Balkans to Africa, the Indian subcontinent and East Asia. No one who has had both the energy and the stomach to go through that history of endless night should dare to say that the 20^th century was an era of spectacular and unsullied ‘progress’. No one except the technology-drunk (and also personally unaffected) can make a claim like that.

I carry no brief for what the state of Israel stands for today, nor have any wish to defend it if in their historical turn the Jews have turned oppressors in some places (about which, though, there can be more than one opinion). But using Holocaust denial to bash the Israel of today is not just ignorant and silly, it is diabolical. And the same goes for all those elsewhere on earth who want to forget or deny what their forefathers did because it makes them ashamed to call themselves human beings.

Keep up the good work, Yad Vashem. Your kind of work is of ever-increasing necessity. I can vouch for the ignorance and unconcern of only a very tiny section of the human population – to wit, teenagers who are studying in my town for the secondary board examination and have to read about the Holocaust as part of a short chapter on the Second World War in history – and I know just how clueless they are, all of them. If I can get even a handful of them to click on the links provided here (and I am not very hopeful) I shall consider that I have been doing my job well.

[You can go to their photo archive and take a look for yourself.]

Poll update

I feel more enthusiastic to cast my vote as I grow older: when I was young, I was too cynical to take the trouble.

Today was polling day in Durgapur – the fifth phase of the West Bengal Assembly elections, 2011. My wife and I checked out with neighbours that there was a big crowd at our designated polling centre in the early morning, so we turned up there at about 11:30, hoping that the blazing and sultry heat would discourage a lot of people from turning up. We were not disappointed, and we were lucky too, for there were two long queues at the other booth, whereas ours was deserted, so we were in and out within five minutes flat.

I was deeply satisfied and not a little proud to see how quietly and efficiently the whole show was being conducted. Three cheers for the Election Commission! I sighed to think, for the umpteenth time, that things can be done very well indeed in this country whenever the administration makes up its mind to do so. Shall we ever see the day when everything runs smoothly and speedily like that, every kind of public service that goes into making a great country?

Now I am watching talking heads pontificating on TV, and catching up on the unraveling news. Barring stray untoward incidents, things seem to be going equally quietly and smoothly everywhere. One noteworthy thing is that the voter turnout is likely to be very high. It is heartening to know that the real common man (and woman – women are highly visible at all the booths) still pins so much hope on the electoral process. I hope, for the long-term welfare of this country, that our ‘leaders’, regardless of their party affiliations, learn to take the faith reposed in them more seriously: our people have been betrayed too often for too long…

One thing that I have been missing on TV is that young voters (those in their 20s) are not being interviewed at length anywhere. Is it because the news channels have a blind spot, or because the young generation doesn’t count, not having any coherent and articulate political views of their own at all? If the latter is true, what a shame!

Self-assured, or merely pig-headed?

A very interesting idea raised by a recent comment-writer is that I sound very ‘self-assured’ in this blog.

I could choose to be facetious (or unkind) and imagine that she meant dogmatic or pig-headed, and was just being polite.

However, I prefer to give her the benefit of the doubt, and believe that she meant it as a compliment, as a recognition of a good and rare trait. And then I turn around to take a good hard look at myself, and ask – am I really as self-assured as I sound?

Well, here are a few things that occurred to me off the cuff:

Firstly, I grew up rather quickly and started fending for myself (not just financially but morally, aesthetically and intellectually) from a very unusually early age (I meet so many 30-plus children these days!). And I have been buffeted by not only the slings and arrows of fortune but by contrary ideologies and ways of life rather more than most men, even if I say so myself. So God knows if I hadn’t had that kernel of self-assurance (and consequent self-reliance) to see me through the bad patches, I’d probably not have survived and functioned sanely till this late date. I congratulate myself for it, and consider myself deucedly lucky too. There have been times galore when I have felt lost and drained out, and just somehow managed to keep dragging myself onwards. (If in the process I have grown a bit of a thick skin and a habit of raising eyebrows at people who want to re-educate me, I guess that cannot be helped).

Then again, I am not really as self-assured as I give the impression of being. I am not really very sure that I have done the right thing by not wearing jeans and not bothering about cricket all my life, and by laughing at and steering clear of every brand of organized fanaticism – from traditional religion to the gospel of the market to Marxism to arcane “Theories of Everything” in Physics. I am not at all sure that I have a lot of ‘valuable’ advice to give to my daughter about how she should grow up (as so many parents and teachers do – I marvel at their self-assurance!). And I have no clue if there’s one person alive and kicking in this world today whose life I have strongly influenced. How’s that for modesty?

But there are indeed a few things about life that I have learnt well, and on them I won’t budge an inch. If someone has been a regular, long-time, attentive reader of this blog, s/he’ll know exactly what I am talking about. If the above-mentioned comment writer had that sort of thing in mind, I thank her for noticing. And I hope she will wish that I may continue that sort of pig-headed, hard-nosed, unrepentant self-assertion for some more time before I hand in my dinner pail. Reed I may be, and a very unimportant reed to boot, but I shall not be deterred from having my say – if and when I have something to say.

What news is news?

Very big recent news headlines:

Satya Sai Baba has passed away.

Prince William is getting married.

Winds of change are blowing strongly in West Bengal, as will soon be apparent to one and all when the Assembly election results come out.

Alas, all three leave me unmoved.

Is it because I have grown old and cynical, or is it that there is something lacking in my mental makeup that I simply cannot get excited when millions of others do?

If pressed, I would say that to me, the first item was of the greatest significance. Not because I liked the Sai Baba’s looks, his love of wealth and pomp, his taste in clothes or interior décor, his (or rather, his followers’) claims that he was God incarnate, or his penchant for magic shows.

I had a certain degree of respect for him because of the immense amount of good works that he had done in one lifetime: from bringing water to some of the most drought-prone areas of the south to setting up schools and colleges where a lot of young people got fairly good-quality education to his several A-grade hospitals where hundreds of thousands have got medical treatment for almost free. I have also seen the educational booklets that they use at his Bal Vikaas Kendras (a type of playschool, of which there are hundreds around the country), and found them eminently sane and relevant to a good upbringing of children: they teach very practical things about resource conservation and environmental protection, about good manners and social responsibility, and about relying on one’s own spiritual strength to tackle all the hurdles and challenges of life. Whether or not such ideas are spread with a religious backing, heaven knows that this country desperately needs to spread that kind of education among its young.

To all those who turn up their noses because he was regarded as a godman, I can only say ‘do more than he did for social welfare, then start criticizing him’. I know, too, about many kinds of unsavoury rumours and canards that go around about him – and all I can say is, with a millionth of his fame, I have suffered lifelong from the same insane rumour-mongering industry, so I know how much they are worth. Finally, for all those who consider themselves too ‘smart and scientific’ to revere godmen, all I’ll say is that they are calling all sorts of people from Mukesh Ambani to APJ Abdul Kalam, from Sachin Tendulkar to Manmohan Singh and literally millions of ordinary devotees (who include all sorts of highly educated professionals) superstitious fools. I prefer to be humble, and adopt an agnostic position, choosing to judge a man by his words and deeds. I have no idea whether Vivekananda saw God (I don’t even know what that means, after reading both science and religion all my life), but I respect him profoundly for the life he lived.

And I certainly believe that Vivekananda living or Sai baba dying matters considerably more than Prince William getting married, or what the election results in West Bengal may say (about this last, see my comment on Tanmoy's blogpost).

Kids at a loose end

There’s a girl I met on the street yesterday, a 16-year old who’s recently become an ex-pupil. She finished writing her secondary board examinations three weeks ago, and she was complaining that she was bored, having just about nothing to do at home. It threw my mind back to more than three decades ago, when I was exactly in her position.

I was luckier than most in a way. Exams ended in end-February: I went off gallivanting with some friends on that very day to nearby Shantiniketan (travelling without adult escort was still a great thrill in those days) to enjoy Holi as only footloose and fancy-free boys can do. Then back to Durgapur, to get thoroughly bored as that girl is being bored now for two whole months – though I read enormously, and often went to the movies, and cycled all around town alone and with friends, had sleepovers with one or two them, went swimming, and mooned over a budding romance. In May I had a lucky break again, and went holidaying with a friend’s extended family all around Himachal Pradesh for close to three weeks. We travelled on a shoestring budget, yet the memories still glow in my mind: it was one of the best holiday trips I have ever made. I came back to collect the examination results, and then it was permanently off to Calcutta. There I promptly got involved in a lot of things, from typewriting class to French lessons to giving tuition and writing for magazines and helping with my dad’s little business, and then I gradually began to study for the higher secondary course and prepare for admission. By mid-August I was well into a new and very hectic academic schedule once more, with hardly time to breathe, leave alone feel bored.

The girl’s complaint brought home to me the fact that very little has changed for the better in this one-horse town in thirty-odd years. Oh, there’s a multiplex cinema now (while most of the old cinemas have shut down or gone to seed), and you can easily watch movies at home, but on the flip side, there are no libraries any more. Nor museums, art galleries, zoos or parks worth the name. Shopping malls are becoming common, but no thinking person who is not a rich shopaholic can go to malls every day. As my daughter avers, it’s hard to keep watching TV all day for weeks and months on end, unless you are born with a vegetable brain, which doesn’t need much stimulation anyway. There are few clubs where parents can send their young to enjoy themselves in safe and healthy ways, such as by learning to dance, paint, sing, act, tell stories, cook or pick up some martial art: those that there are have been too strongly affected by a rather sick competitive spirit. One of the few bodily pleasures that I still enjoy is swimming, and I have to drive halfway across the town to do it: besides, it’s rather too expensive for most people. There are few interesting places nearby that you can drive to for a day’s outing. No wonder that most kids strain at the leash to start attending tuitions once again: that’s the only thing that is available aplenty, and the only place most parents are glad to send them, and where they can breathe a little and chatter a little and while away the time…

So why did I myself come back after eight very busy years in a metro? Well, partly it was because I was fed to the gills with the noise, crush, squalor and the peculiarly poignant kind of loneliness that grips a certain kind of person in a great city (see Albert Camus, The Outsider); partly it happened by accident (too long and convoluted to interest my readers, I’m sure). But it is true that it offered a more relaxed, less expensive, clean and quiet lifestyle, and I quickly got addicted to it. It gave me a decent living, and it helped that I became heavily enough engaged not to have time for boredom and loneliness. And now I am so used to it, 24 years later, that I can hardly imagine moving to someplace else, unless it were to some cleaner, quieter, nicer place still.

But the girl’s problem remains unsolved. What does a lively teenager do in this town when she has time on her hands?

A most frightening prospect

A lot of people have been asking me to comment on what Anna Hazare and his supporters have recently and spectacularly achieved with their agitation in New Delhi.

This blog writer (and those whom he has quoted, along with those who have commented on his blogpost) has done a great deal of work for me, so I needn’t write a lot of things that I’d have otherwise had to. To all of them my thanks. My readers should look up the contents of that link thoroughly before proceeding to read the following lines.

Well, now that you have read the above (if you want a professional lawyer's take, here it is), all I want to say is:

1.      I have profound respect for Anna Hazare and all he stands for (today the media have made him a national celebrity: I have talked about him to thousands of pupils for years when their parents had never heard of him), and as a thinking man and an Indian I am deeply grateful for much that he has fought for and won for all of us. India certainly needs lots of people like him.

2.      Having said that, I agree with Dr. B. R. Ambedkar that trying to coerce governments by going on fasts unto death Gandhi-style is a very very dangerous strategy (Nirad Chaudhuri once famously said that Gandhi was a worse dictator than Hitler!), to be used rarely and with extreme caution, and I am not at all sure that Hazare-ji did the right thing this time round.

3.      While any reader who follows this blog regularly will know how serious I am about this corruption issue, and though I do not want to sound cynical just for the heck of it, this ‘movement’, such as it was, makes the corners of my lips involuntarily curl up with suspicion and disdain. Who are these members of ‘civil society’ who have so suddenly woken up to the crying need to do away with corruption in public life? Someone who watched the whole shenanigan from almost next door as long as it lasted averred that a huge number were exactly the kind for whom any tamasha will do when something like World-Cup cricket is not available – they would run at the first hint of serious trouble, or as soon as they heard that a new shopping mall was being inaugurated nearby by Katrina Kaif. Of the rest, a significant number simply wanted to be seen on TV, wannabe celebrities all, a most pathetic class indeed; no one who respects the Masterda-Bhagat Singh type of patriots can spare a kind thought for them. Another group came riding in chauffered limousines – the five-star chatterati class – to show their solidarity with the aam admi’s concerns. Now chances are 99 to 1 that their wealth has not been gotten by means that would bear scrutiny by any anti-corruption body worth its salt, so no matter whether they are big-time contractors or ex-civil servants or yogi-babas or film stars, aren’t they taking a very silly risk, living in glass houses and still throwing stones? Would they enjoy the fun if and when such a high-powered vigilante body really came into being and started looking closely into their means and affairs?

4.      I shall go on repeating ad nauseam that this kind of corruption that has supposedly angered so many people is bound to become systemic and incurable in a country where most people are lazy and therefore want shortcuts to ‘success’ ever since childhood, and most have no means of making big money by honest means (think of a typical government clerk, a private sector engineer, a petty shopkeeper, a schoolteacher or a police constable), yet everybody has started worshipping money, slavering over it all the time, and using it as the only real criterion of ‘success’. Admit it to yourself; almost all of us are like that now, and those who aren’t we call stupid or crazy! (How many Indians do you think would be ‘fans’ of SRK or Sachin if those two had not been making pots of money?) Gandhi knew this very well, which is why he insisted lifelong that there can be no honesty in public life unless public figures (cricketers as much as politicians, mind you) are committed to living simple, undemanding lives as models of self-control and probity. He himself practised what he preached, but remember he couldn’t persuade even the man who liked to call himself his closest disciple to follow in his footsteps. Anna-ji maybe has every right to call himself a Gandhian, but he should be very careful about all the people who are clambering on to his bandwagon: he has a hard-won reputation to lose!

5.      Most worrisome of all is that a small number of people – even a few tens of thousands is a minuscule number in a country of 1200+ million, remember – is aiming to set itself up as the supreme national arbiter of all things moral, a kind of absolute, unchallengeable supra-governmental authority over all the rest of us. Even if every one of those ‘revolutionaries’ were a saintly lover of mankind, I would be terrified at the prospect: if this does not strike at the very roots of representative government (which, as Churchill said, is the least bad of all forms of authority known to man), if this does not reek of fascism of the worst sort, I don’t know what does. I for one would much rather live with a lot of crime and corruption and confusion and dissent of even the violent sort than submit myself with glee to such a draconian dispensation: I see shades of the French Reign of Terror and the worst times after the Russian and Chinese revolutions in the very attempt to create such a monster in the name of cleansing public life. I do, do hope that a lot of sane Indians would see the danger before it is too late, and protest very loudly indeed. Oh that we were a race that knew and cared a little more about history!