Paan Singh Tomar

I watched this very disturbing movie recently. The film has won critical acclaim, and if the director’s aim was to stir the audience’s sympathy for the central character, he has succeeded more than well indeed.The details you can pick up from the links provided. First off, a salute to Irrfan (Khan): he is unquestionably the best character actor in Hindi moviedom today, and he seems to be getting better all the time. He’s done it without conventional he man/chocolate boy good looks or big family connections or money to help him, too. As with Tom Hanks and a few others, I can say I shall be glad to watch any movie if I know he is in it.

A thumbnail sketch of the plot of this biopic: Paan Singh Tomar was a real life character, a poor Kshatriya farmer who came from the hinterland of western Madhya Pradesh, joined the Indian Army (though his mama was a brigand who, he boasted, was too clever to be ever arrested), rose to the rank of subedar, shone brilliantly as a sportsman at the national level and even participated at the Tokyo Asiad. Then he got embroiled in a family quarrel over land holdings, quit the army, suffered a very rude shock when both his son and mother were brutally beaten up by hired goons and the police and district collector refused to look deeply into his complaint, and eventually turned into (yet another-) much feared dacoit of the Chambal valley. He killed and terrorized a lot of people for a while, gave a self-justifying newspaper interview which made waves, got a price on his head, managed to put his son in the army which he still revered, and was finally killed in 1981 in an encounter with police special forces after he was betrayed.

The movie deals with several important issues swiftly but expertly. How shoddily sports and sportsmen are treated in India is deeply underscored (there is a list of big achievers at the end who died in obscurity and poverty) – apparently Paan Singh’s greatest grudge was how the police treated him as an importunate nobody despite his medals, and his greatest boast (always uttered with a sad snigger-) was that everybody sat up and took notice only when he turned ‘baaghi’ (rebel) and started killing people. No wonder we do so badly at the Olympic Games: it certainly isn’t just a matter of money. And no wonder crime attracts so many in India who are in desperate straits, either. One also realizes how deeply caste and caste-based iniquity is still rooted in the social psyche of rural India. I don’t really know whether things have changed much in this regard in the thirty years since Paan Singh died; the newspapers don’t give much reason for hope. The army has been held up as the last bastion of honesty, integrity, hard work, good fellowship, patriotism and that sort of thing, and yet there are contradictions even here: Paan Singh himself tells a superior in a certain scene that there are a lot of good-for-nothings among the officers he knows (and this was as early as 1960!), and his mentors were so incredibly callous (or stupid?) that they sent him to compete in the Asiad without even telling him beforehand that he had to run not in ordinary flat-soled canvas shoes as he was used to but in spiked boots, which virtually crippled him on the track. The little romantic interludes with his very tradition-minded wife are touching. Shooting at the Roorkee cantonment and in the actual Chambal ravines has added interesting realism to the visual content.

But then I said I found it disquieting too, not least because there are different voices, and different versions of what really happened. Tomar’s (now-retired) son has said in an interview that it is the police that make dacoits in the Chambal valley (that is not really a revelation; it’s been that way for ages, since before the British came to India); he has also said that the movie is ‘85% true to life’: I wonder which 15 per cent is not. The police have been demonized in the movie, and it shows that they arrived in overwhelming force to trap and kill the dacoit (who has been portrayed as a reluctant and deeply unhappy almost-Robin Hood), so there was nothing heroic about it, just a government orchestrated massacre. On the other hand, in this interview the police officer who was in charge of the operation, DSP Mahendra Pratap Singh Chauhan (also now retired) says it was a straightforward ‘taking out’ of a notorious and unpenitent criminal who refused to surrender and for whom there is no reason to feel the slightest sympathy, regardless of his army service record and his sporting achievements. Also, that this was a ‘routine job’ for him as an anti-dacoity operative, so he has no special emotional attachments to the memory, he has not bothered to watch the movie because he is sure that a trivial criminal would be glorified to the discredit of the duly constituted arms of the law; indeed, he sounds almost proud that it was done with so little resources (six constables rather than almost five hundred as shown in the movie), and without a single casualty among the police. I wonder now, what should I think about it all? Who are the real heroes and villains in independent India? Better people than me have found themselves at a loss, this much I know…

Thinking about old boys

August is the time when some old boys and girls come to say goodbye every year, because they are going abroad – most commonly to the United States – for graduate studies. Some of the most intelligent and decent people are among them: a few years ago there were Mayuri Mukherjee and Nishant Kamath, then there was Arnab Kar, and very recently there was Sanket Roy. Not all of these are engineers, by the way – Mayuri's subject was journalism and Nishant’s is geology, Arnab’s is physics and Sanket’s is economics. Meanwhile many of my best ex-students are being picked up from the top law schools and CA institutes and places like St Stephen’s and JU where they read economics or English by top shot employers for salaries which would sound fabulous to all engineers except IIT toppers (and that too, only from a few select departments). At the same time, old boys like Abhirup Mascharak (into his second master’s at JU) and Soham Mukhopadhyay who has gone to Presidency College have been telling me not only how much they like the ambience but also laughing about how their friends who have gone into (usually third-rate private-) engineering colleges, generally against their will, and generally at great expense, are already turning green with jealousy when they compare notes. And this news article tells everybody who wants to know how bad the general engineering employment scene is. Nothing, of course, that I haven’t been telling young people for years and years – don’t imagine engineering will bring you the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, don’t go into it unless you have a genuine interest in it (rather than the desire to get into just any job somehow), don’t develop the habit of looking for shortcuts and cheating and the tendency to look down upon a lot of subjects they teach in school as useless because you will regret it soon enough, don’t pretend to be ‘interested in science’ when all you want is to get into some B- or C-grade engineering school, because it’s not the same thing at all – eventually you’ll be struggling to switch streams and try to get MBAs or a slot in the civil services anyway – don’t get lost in the herd, because ‘everybody’s doing it’ was never a good idea for making good careers, don’t imagine that what was wise advice in the 1970s still holds good today, and so on (do read in this connection what I wrote in the post titled Engineer or bust some time ago).  

It hurts me, as an old teacher, to hear old boys coming over to say ruefully ‘Sir, you were right, I should have listened to you’, because I don’t like to see people getting hurt if I can stop them from being foolish. And it also hurts to see so much talent wasted – so many potential sportsmen, musicians, artists, teachers, judges, soldiers, administrators, lawmakers, moviemakers and businessmen becoming bored, tired, uncommitted and therefore poorly-productive engineers instead: we have millions like that swarming all over this country now, desperate to get into or hang on to very pathetic jobs somehow. As I joke about a certain engineer-turned-private tutor in my town who has been minting money for years now, he found out long ago that engineering doesn’t pay, but coaching confused hordes for the various engineering-entrance examinations pays hand over fist. He and many others like him have made their piles, but is that how a country’s human resources should go on being wasted decade after decade?

Nothing in this post is meant to offend those few of my old boys who are doing well in the engineering profession: if they are making good money, enjoying what they do and contributing to the country’s economic development, they have my best wishes. Indeed, there are quite a few like that who keep in friendly touch with me, and know perfectly well I have nothing against their type. But I have only pity for the much bigger tribe who know now that I was right all along, and who hate me for being right, and who can only stew in their own juice of frustration and failure and imagine they can somehow get their own back by telling me anonymously how much they hate me. Poor sods, they can’t even read, or else they’d have found out long ago (it’s written on this blog itself) that anonymous comments are filtered out automatically, so I don’t even read them, and even if I did, I’d only laugh, not out of true amusement but out of sadness and contempt. But even for them I have my best wishes: maybe it is still not too late to find out how to live a good life and change courses… it is a very sad thing indeed that they feel this obsessive compulsion to keep on visiting my blog (and thereby making me proud to see how fast the counter keeps rising!) and can never think of saying anything other than hurling irrelevant abuse! I, for myself, don’t feel any hatred and jealousy for these people at all; rather, I remind myself again and again of the saying that hell is when a man is burning up with hatred and jealousy inside, about which he can do nothing, because it stems from his own unbearably painful awareness that he has wasted his life.

Free India is 65 today

Tanmoy has written about how bad he felt watching the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games on TV, and how some of his (foreigner-) friends spoke slightingly about India in connection with our medals tally: ‘What are Indians good for?’

I felt the same sadness as Tanmoy, and even worse that I cannot list for him ten things about India that I can be proud about – especially ten things achieved since independence came. The only two things that come to mind (remembering the enormous problems and handicaps we started with) are what Amartya Sen has pointed out repeatedly: that we have avoided famines of the ghastly sort that routinely took millions of lives all through the 19^th and early 20^th century, and that we have somehow managed to preserve democracy (so far at least), no matter how defective it is. Everything else pales into insignificance in comparison, or is a sad joke, given that we are a nation of 1.3 billion with a rich historical heritage many thousands of years old which drew admiration from around the world once upon a time. Forget our sports performance or military prowess or vast and awful poverty and all-pervasive corruption in public life; we can’t even design and produce on our own the ’planes we fly or the surgical equipment we use or the engines we put in our cars after half a century of ‘engineering’ education; our movie industry, huge in scale, either produces Hollywood C-grade level ‘blockbusters’ or accidental good movies which even most Indians don’t want to watch, so how can they get foreigners interested? And as for our much vaunted IT industry, the likes of Narayan Murthy and Azim Premji have said enough home truths about what really happens there for me to add anything. No matter how hurtful it sounds, everything that westerners (and the Japanese and increasingly even the Chinese) say about our lack of civic sense and punctuality and cleanliness and concern for greenery and disdain for education and superstitiousness and sectarian hatred and violence is only too sadly true…

Bharat abaar jogot shobhay sreshtho ashon lobey (India will once again rule the global roost someday) sang the poet hopefully, long ago. I have been one Indian, at least, who has tried very hard to be proud of things Indian – without, of course, deliberately blinding myself to all her myriad faults or getting furious when others draw our attention to them, for that is not patriotism at all but chauvinism or jingoism, dangerous diseases of the mind, if only too common, especially among people who know they are inferior and hate to know it. What I intensely regret is that far from achieving great new things, we are increasingly forgetting things we had once achieved that we can really take pride in, whether it is Nagarjuna’s chemistry or Kautilya’s political economy or Kalidas’ poetry or even the wonderful skill of the Kashmiri shawl weavers and the enormous repertoire of folk music we had built up over millennia. I have written about this longing time and again on this blog: see, for instance, My India, and the post I wrote five years ago, My mother is sixty. I grow older, and nothing seems to change for the better. Can my readers cheer me (and Tanmoy-) up a little by drawing our attention to at least eight other big things India has achieved since 1947 that we can be justly proud of? (please don’t mention cricket and atom bombs and Chandrayaan, for obvious reasons) And honestly, is there any sane hope that India will truly lead the world in most things within my lifetime, or even my daughter’s? That was Vivekananda’s hope – would he be cheered by what he saw if he came back to see India 2012?

Family foibles

The older one grows, the more one gets the feeling that there are lots of things in this world that one will never understand.

I have a grown up daughter at home now. She and her mother quarrel most of the time – well, twenty times a day, at least. The issues are utterly trivial; often they don’t need issues at all. I sometimes get exasperated, and sometimes despair of things ever getting better.

But then, what is ‘better’? They tell me they hugely enjoy bickering (forget the snarls and yells and mutual accusations and long faces); besides, I can see that they simply cannot live without each other. The quarrels start and end with utter unexpected abruptness, too, and then and I see that all is sunshine and honey once more, and they are all over each other. I myself, when I look inwards, know for a certainty that I won’t have things otherwise – I have long stopped pretending that I even have any idea how things could have been ‘better’.

Twenty years ago, when I didn’t have either wife or daughter, I could have given very wise sermons about what a happy family should be like.

Twenty years ago, I was a fool.

Harishchandra's Factory

I recently watched a 2009 movie called Harishchandrachi factory. It’s in Marathi, with subtitles in English. Directed by Paresh Mokashi, and with theatre personality Nandu Madhav in the lead role, it has won some awards – you can check that up for yourself on the net. I am no movie critic, so I shall write only about my gut reaction, as nothing more than an ordinary cinema buff. This is the story, in highly dramatized form and with a strong leavening of humour and slapstick, of how the (controversial-) first ever movie in India – Raja Harishchandra – got made, way back in 1913, thanks to the nearly crazy passion of one man, Dhundiraj Govind (aka Dadasaheb) Phalke, along with the almost unstinted support of friends and family, and launched what became arguably the biggest film industry in the world. It has received mixed reviews (see this article, along with the comments), but I enjoyed it immensely, and would like to thank whoever left the movie with me (I forget sometimes, there are so many of them).

Well yes, if you like, it’s a feel-good movie. It reminded me of Life is Beautiful, though it leans far less on fantasy. It told me that one needs passion if one really wants to achieve something; that one needs to shrug off a lot of criticism and ridicule and opposition, and that one’s real friends are those who stick to one through thick and thin. Nothing new here, but it’s good to be reminded as one wages one’s own struggle through life. Looking at the way the family – wife and young sons – not only braved through all sorts of hardships but actually managed to enjoy themselves, I felt reassured that I have always been right; people need money and fame far less than warmth, cooperation, goodwill and satisfying work to be happy. Blessed is the family which rows together like this – even if the reality was not half as rosy as portrayed in the movie. The movie also shows, once again, that much can be achieved on a small budget and with a cast full of amateurs if the director knows his job.

I not only have a personal penchant for movies which remind us of times of yore, but I wish that more and more such movies would be made, because people in this country are becoming increasingly ahistorical with the passage of time. It is important to know one’s history, and few people would ever bother to read history textbooks of their own volition, so film-makers are doing yeoman service when they make movies like this. More power to their elbow.

One thing that I liked about the movie was the way Chaplinesque gestures and movements have been blended with very Indian background music. Another was the fact that the man’s long-suffering yet always cheerful and supportive wife reminded me of the Bible saying ‘He who has found a good woman has found a good thing’. The older I grow, the more I appreciate what that means, and how few of us are so lucky. The third thing was that it set me musing anew on education. I have always taken the story of Eklavya very seriously, you see, and I can vouch, on the other hand, from a whole lifetime of teaching experience that you can’t teach anybody who is unwilling to learn. As in October Sky, as Will Smith said in his interview to the Reader’s Digest, if someone really wants to learn something, be it making a movie or flying a space shuttle, s/he will find out ways to master it; otherwise, no amount of schooling and tutoring ultimately amounts to anything. I wish the world would begin to realize this eternal truth and start paying less attention to formal education, which produces molehills out of mountains by the tens of millions! Finally, the movie made me marvel at how easily people only a few decades ago could feel enchantment. Is it only me, or do many others also feel that all our super hi-tech wizardry cannot affect us similarly any more, whether we are watching The Matrix or Avatar or Inception?

The movie also motivated me to read up on Dadasaheb Phalke. It seems that he made several successful movies after Harishchandra in the silent era, but faded out once the ‘talkies’ became all the rage. Strange that a man of his versatile talent couldn’t cope – or was it that he was not interested in the new format at all?

Anyway, watch this movie. And let me know how you liked it. 

Troubled communication

A female ex-student, now in her late-20s, had this exchange with me via email very recently. She, as you will read (still, though maybe not much longer-) claims to have some respect for me. After having read very closely, do tell me what marks you will give me if I were being judged as her teacher: how much of my values (leave alone my knowledge) have I been able to transfer to her? I have no objection to being given poor marks, mind you: if the teacher has failed, it’s largely his fault, after all… the only thing is that comments should come solely from those who have known me well, and for a long time, and like to think things out in depth before shooting their mouths.

Dear Sir,

This mail is in response to your blogpost ‘What happened in Guwahati?’ dated 18^th July 2012. With all due respect Sir, and to say the least, I was surprised to read a post of the sort on your blog of all places. The comments on the post are even more startling. I am not a bra-burning feminist trying to rip apart every male in sight, but I also find it difficult to come to terms with a school to thought that blames the wallet owner than the pickpocket, on grounds that the victim should be more careful of his belongings!

A certain Sunandini Mukherjee writes, ‘Most girls love to draw people’s attention towards them, put on clothes and attitude which are not really decent for that purpose but then feel ‘insulted’ on being greeted by lewd comments by loafers on the road.’ Really? I wonder; is that really why I dress the way I do? And do I lose the right to be offended by people, who have no semblance of etiquette, thanks of the length of my skirt? Is dignity defined by the droop of my décolletage or the rise of my hemline? I have not judged women who step out of their homes in salwar kameez and oiled hair, then what has given them the right to judge me? Sir, I have taken your classes very seriously, and a lot of things you told us have stayed with me till date. I shall also take the liberty to say it has shaped me in many ways. You spoke about the real meaning of independence one day – ‘Do as your heart pleases, as long as your actions do not bother, adversely affect or hurt another.’ So then, what is wrong if a 20-year old girl or for that matter a young man, decides to go out drinking with his/her friends late in the night? Should an ideal society not flourish on the tenet of Live and Let Live?

While the media angle is a different topic altogether (I completely agree with you Sir that TRP reporting has become today’s norm, and it is shameful. Personally I have written a letter to Mrs. Ambika Soni in a hope to be one more voice against sensational journalism.) I also wonder if it is such an eyesore to see youngsters behave like, well, youngsters. Which teen does not falter, have lapse in judgment, and make friends only to realize later in life that they were probably not worth their while? Why is there such an expectation from scholars, intellectuals and litterateurs that 20 somethings should behave, think and operate like them? I know most great men started young, and that is inspirational. But let’s face it, not everyone is meant for great things. The world is made up of all kinds of people and the world better make place for the average man. It’s no sin, according to me.

P.S.: This is just my point of view and I felt a strong need to share it with you. Hope you make space for it, Sir. I didn’t send it in as a comment, because I was not sure if you would like it.

Regards,

X

Thank you, X. We might talk about this again, if I am around, in say twenty years’ time, preferably when you have a teenage daughter growing up at home … I shall take the liberty of observing for now, however, that you do NOT read my posts with a tenth of the attention that I demand from my readers. And that is hurtful at best, and offensive at worst.

Sir

Sir,

I am sorry if I have offended you in any way. That was not the intent.

X

Good to see that, at least, X.

In response to your angry question, here’s  a poser. I too, like you, say nothing about women who step out of their houses in salwar kameez and a lot of oil in their hair. So they shouldn’t say anything about how I dress either, right, especially in my own house? So would it have been perfectly all right if I took my classes all these years in my underwear? Or do different standards apply to men and women here (and one standard for teachers and another for all other men?): women have a ‘right’ to be free in how they dress, whereas men don’t? And am I a very foolish conservative if I say that I can quite understand why 99% of parents wouldn’t have wanted to send their kids to my classes?

I notice also that you very carefully stepped aside the challenge that I threw at you: that I would like to talk to you again about this when you are raising a teenage daughter… and don’t give me nonsense now about how mothers have to be careful about their daughters in this society full of bad men, please. If you insist on your rights you must carry the responsibilities that come with it (like it or not), and you mustn’t suddenly change tunes when you have your own daughter to bring up…

All evil springs from people insisting upon rights while denying the concomitant responsibilities. I have an unchallengeable right to stay naked only in my own house, and only when I am completely alone. At all other times, my right must be restricted by how others feel.  Even if I am in no danger of getting raped. Otherwise I am telling all others, including my maidservant and my wife and my daughter ‘You are not human; your opinions don’t count’.

Having typed that much, I already have this sinking feeling that I have wasted my time: you will not do me the courtesy of taking time out to think, really think  about what I said. Anyway, I won’t try again.

Sir

No Sir, you did not waste your time. I understand that not everyone will share or agree with my point of view. I respect your opinion, but that said, I am not sure your respect mine Sir. You have already made up your mind that any counter-discussion from my side will be ‘nonsense’. What I intended to do with my mail was to merely have a healthy exchange of views (I believe such a thing can happen even if opinions clash) But I fear Sir that this attempt of mine has only offended you. I apologize for putting my disagreement forth.

X

Just one question for the reader: was this girl ever actually interested in a ‘healthy exchange of views’? (for those who might be curious, I was merely using what is called the ‘Socratic method.’ Took the first step  would be more accurate, because I couldn’t go any further.)

Two awesome women

'Captain' (actually Colonel) Dr. Lakshmi Sehgal, head of the Rani Jhansi regiment of the Azad Hind Fauz, passed away yesterday. She was 97.

Today is also the birthday of Amelia Earhart. She would have been 115 if she had been alive.

Two more women whose memories I regard with profound respect and awe. Pity I haven't met the likes of them among women born within the last fifty years... not in flesh and blood, anyway.

P.S., July 25: There's a new post on the whimsy blog today. 

Repeat request, and a new blog

Is there a problem with visiting my other blog, people? Just click here. 

I would like many more people to visit it, read, become members, and comment more frequently. With the aim of forcing the pace, I am going to post more often there instead of here for some time.

My old boy Sayan and his wife Rashmi, two very nice and thoughtful people, teachers and readers by choice (which automatically puts them in the top 0.1% of the population, culturally speaking) have recently started their own blog. I should like all my genuine readers to visit them, become members, and write sensible and encouraging comments every now and then (by which I mean a little more often than once in fourteen months...).

Please.

P.S., July 18: I have just written something about the news of a girl being molested on a Guwahati road. On the other blog .

Status update

Now that the previous post has been visited more than a thousand times, I hope a lot of girls and women will know the right way to deal with me in future (the best thing might be not dealing with me at all!)

Since I have nearly 300 posts on this blog now, I do wish a lot of visitors, both new and old, would frequently look up older posts and comment on them: little on my blog gets dated, as I have said before.

I am feeling rather sorry for my other blog, which for some strange reason seems far less well attended than this one, in terms of number of members, visits and comments. In an effort to remedy that, I shall for some time concentrate on writing more there than here. Look it up more often, folks.

I also long for more dialogue of the right sort. So, one more time: no one who is not uncouth by nature need be overawed or hesitant about commenting. Comments are welcome at a very basic level, because they tell me that people are not casual visitors but read seriously what I write. And to write a comment you need not be a know-all; even a word of appreciation or a little relevant nugget of information or a query or suggestion for a future post can qualify as a comment…  

Two requests to my long-time readers: a) get me some more readers – surely you meet some people of the sort who’d like to read this kind of stuff? and b) lead me, if you can, to blogs written by ageing teachers. I’d love to read them, and compare notes.

I am reading several books simultaneously, as I often do. One of them, Kiran Nagarkar’s Cuckold, is powerful and profoundly moving – it tells of Mewar at the time of Rana Sanga and Meerabai, when Babar is about to attack India, but it is narrated from the point of view of Meera’s husband. It was written in 1997: a wonder that I missed it for all these years. I shall probably write in detail about it once I have finished. The other notable is a collection of scientific articles by Isaac Asimov called Life and Time. It is refreshing indeed to be in touch with a master spirit once again. As an old boy who has just finished a science master’s and has been reading the likes of Whitehead, Russell and Asimov avers, later writers like Hawking and Dawkins are not only pale shadows of these titans as writers but have been making much ado about nothing: very little of serious substance has been added to the corpus of science (as distinct from applied science, aka technology) in the last thirty odd years, though far more people make far more noise about it…

That’s about it for now. This was just to let readers know what I have been up to.

No women, please, I am an MCP

I have finally decided to listen to the tiny handful of women who really care about me, and live the rest of my life by the axiom ‘If you stop bothering about girls/women, they stop bothering you’!

So from now on, this blog will be written strictly from the pov of a male chauvinist (if you are one of those who want to append the suffix –‘pig’ to that, you are welcome. I won’t miss you): a male chauvinist who cares only about the women who care about him. The rest can go and read Fifty Shades of Grey.

I am now satisfied that I have wasted too much of my time and attention on females who never intended to be either grateful or loving, or keep in touch, or give back in any way (that means everything from bringing little gifts when they visit to writing about me to waiting for me at stations or visiting me in hospitals) – either because, being female, they were incapable of such things, or simply because they disliked me from the start, and were simply buttering me up to use me for all I was worth (even in the pettiest of terms, such as getting counsel and ‘notes’ for free). It’s been more than thirty years, and more than 2000 females (my ex-students range from 16 to 50 years of age), and I am sure that it’s time to draw some final conclusions.

There will still be some girls/women who would continue to keep in touch, and they are the only ones I need to care  about. The rest should remember that I am not interested even in seeing them or hearing from them unless they are paying me by the hour, my rates.

I feel strangely relieved after having typed out the above paragraphs. It’s as if the albatross has finally dropped from my neck. But woe betide the next parent who comes to gush about how much his/her daughter ‘loves’ my classes…let them be just good pupils by my lights, pay their fees on time and forget me as soon as they leave; I shall be glad, and well rid.

I shall still, of course, feel the deepest sympathy for women who suffer seriously from all kinds of social evils, have profound respect for all women who refuse to be merely wives, mothers, dressed up dolls, gossips and shoppers and rabid feminists (does that leave out a lot of women?), and have all the time in the world for the few among them who feel both interest and respect for who I am and what I do. I am sure that if some such comment on my posts hereafter, they will neither whine, nor rationalize all their faults and shortcomings, nor call me names for being what I am – a human being, only incidentally male, looking all his life for people of both sexes whom he can be glad to call his friends.

And I shall continue to laugh publicly about girls getting angry when I tell them I no longer think of them as anything but monthly envelopes and/or irritants; when countless ‘didi-s’, some 25 years older and some only three, have taught me what a fool I have always been to imagine otherwise!

The likes of Lavona and Pupu…I hope you have figured that nothing I have said in this post applies to any of you (as yet!), so carry on as before. But I hope reading this post gives you a better understanding of what a rare sort you are, and how grateful I am to Providence that your sort still exists; women with brains and consciences and some idea of what civilization means.

And, in case some of you are wondering, no, this is not a sudden outburst in reaction to some recent provocation. I have been recalling my experiences with a very large number of individual ex-students (and parents), and meaning to write this post for a long time. Now we all know exactly where we stand, and can interact more sensibly hereafter if at all. There is a very large number of females whom I should never have missed, beginning with the ex-girlfriend who turned fifty yesterday.

P.S., July 07: ... and meanwhile, I have discovered this absolutely delightful blog. Also, you might be interested in looking up some of the things you find if you search via google with the keywords 'woman against feminism'. Try this blog, for instance.

PM for Prez

Do I wish to see Pranab Mukherjee in Rashtrapati Bhavan? Most definitely I do.

First of all, it will be the crowning glory of a long and distinguished career – chequered, yes, but most of it at the very highest echelons of government. He is truly one man who’s been there and done it all. Born in a politically involved but humble family in a remote village in one of the most backward districts of Bengal and beginning his career as a government clerk, he was already being called the second most powerful person in India at the start of the 1980s, before I went to college, when he was Indira Gandhi’s finance minister and winning accolades from all over the world; now I am pushing fifty, and he is still right there (actually was till June 26, 2012), commanding (at least grudging-) respect across the political spectrum as both an astute, suave fixer and a very able strategist cum administrator. As one trained in economics and one who has followed him on TV and the papers without a break for nearly thirty years, I can vouch that his grasp of economic affairs national and global is little short of legendary; the word encyclopedic can be used to describe his tip-of-the-fingers knowledge with total aptness. He has been the UPA government’s man for all seasons for nearly a decade now; there have been few serious problems under the scanner of either the Union Cabinet or the Congress Working Committee which he has not been asked to look into personally when all else had failed. The man’s sheer appetite for work takes my breath away – he travels more in a month, and not for fun, than I have travelled in the last ten years. And while looking after the highest affairs of state 24/7, he still somehow finds time to look after his extended family and its gods, and to read good books (among a thousand feathers in his cap, he is the current President of the Nikkhil Bharat Banga Sahitya Sammelan). And – knowing how much muck one must wade through if one merely becomes the head of a neighbourhood puja committee or party unit in this country – I find it well nigh unbelievable how he has kept his nose more or less clean all through these decades, to the extent that accusations of corruption have never risen beyond rare and stray murmurs, and not one serious case has ever been brought to court against him, leave alone won, though he must have made a thousand enemies among the highest and mightiest in the land and beyond, apart from making millions just plain jealous: any person who wields such enormous power has to. By now we know and he knows that the ultimate prize will forever elude him – the Gandhi family will never let him be prime minister – and he’s getting a bit long in the tooth anyway; 77 is pretty old even for a politician! So why not fade out in a blaze of glory, occupying what is the highest, even if almost purely ornamental office in the land? If you call that being ‘kicked upstairs’, how much sweeter can it get? (charming thought: there was a time when Manmohan Singh, as governor of the Reserve Bank, rose before him and called him ‘Sir’, he being finance minister and close confidant of the PM; it couldn’t have been easy to swallow his pride and tolerate the role reversal with him in the FM’s seat and Singh in the PM’s, and so it would be nice again to have Singh-ji rise for him in the dusk of his career…).

Secondly, if the Prez’s job is all about symbolism and tokenism too, why not a Bengali? We have had Muslim and Sikh and Dalit and woman and men from down south more than once; nothing wrong in saying it’s our turn now. Nothing wrong in claiming something for Bengali pride, is there? We have precious little to crow about anyway. Not since Subhas Bose left the stage have we had a fighting chance of being at the helm of this country; not since Jyoti Basu (and he was a very old man by then) has any Bengali in independent India come close to the hot seat in South Block. So at least let’s settle for the President’s post, for now? And if it’s going to be a Bengali, how many candidates more eligible than Pranab Mukherjee can we think of putting up, all things considered?

Finally, our Constitution, as some people have demonstrated (T.N. Seshan as Chief Election Commissioner, to name just one), has strange things hidden away in its voluminous bulk, obscure laws and bye-laws and grey areas which a wily, determined and vastly experienced man can take advantage of to make a substantial something out of what has hitherto been regarded as a powerless and/or ornamental post. Who better than Mr. Mukherjee to do that with the office of the President, so that the next PM and cabinet may find out, either with alarm or delight, that they have an assertive and activist head of state to reckon with?

No, Mr. Mukherjee is not even a distant relative, I have never met him personally, and I didn’t take part in the yagna they arranged in his native village to facilitate his accession. But I shall be glad to see him raising the flag next Republic Day. India could do worse.

Casual musing...

Some stray thoughts again for this weekend:

The monsoon has arrived in full force, and I am rejoicing, to the accompaniment of swaying greenery all around me and Tagore’s incomparable music.

I am both surprised and hurt that not one reader sent in a comment on my last post. I know all about what sort of society I live in, but sometimes I still cannot help feeling utterly sick…

I have been researching the ongoing global economic crisis – focusing on the US and the ‘Eurozone’. Apropos of that, did you know that everywhere, but in the US most of all, the rich pay much less in taxes than the middle class? Warren Buffett and a few lesser tycoons have gone on record saying they can not only afford to pay more, but that in their opinion the world economy actually needs that they pay more.

I was also musing that over a period of more than thirty years of teaching, I have dealt with hundreds of pupils who were very good at math, but hardly ten who could write a tolerable story, and not one who could write a real poem (following all the rules of prosody, that is to say). So which is really the rarer and therefore the more valuable skill, assuming that you are not one of those idiots who think that the ‘market’ is the best and last arbiter of all values?

I have been watching the old Byomkesh and Miss Marple movies lately and in tandem. It’s really good, unadulterated fun.

I also heard Satyajit Ray speaking in the background of his documentary on Tagore. Why haven’t I met ten Bengalis in all my life who could speak in English like that, and also not ten Bengalis who could speak fluent, chaste Bangla?

Next year my daughter is going to finish secondary school and I am going to complete half a century on this earth. That also calls for some reflection, I think.

And finally – for now – I wish my readers would visit the blogs I read (listed on my blogroll) and bring some of those issues up for discussion a little more often.

A nice book to read

My literary minded old boy Aakash had not been very pleased with the blogpost I had written on the Shiva trilogy, and had promised to send me a book in broadly the same genre that would provide much better reading. So now I have just finished reading Madhulika Liddle’s debut crime novel titled The Englishman’s Cameo, and yes, Aakash has kept his promise.

It is a murder mystery with a difference – for it is set against the backdrop of Delhi at the time of the emperor Shah Jehan in his last days on the throne, 1656 to be precise. Naturally one expects careful period detailing, and Ms. Liddle has done it very well indeed, ably helped by her sister Swapna, a historian who has specialized on late medieval India. The English is just appropriate, fluent and idiomatic at the same time, marred with neither irritating pedantry nor the colloquial pidgin that so many Indlish educated contemporary Indians find oh-so-cool. The plot centres around a fictional character, a young minor aristocrat ‘with friends in low places’ called Mujaffar Jang, who acts out of noblesse oblige to get a friend out of trouble, and in the process gets entangled in deep intrigue. One meets all kinds of interesting characters, beautiful courtesans and pot-bellied banias, supercilious omrahs and dedicated bureaucrats, ardent  lover, English fortune hunter, lusty but good natured boatman, spies and mercenaries and all in a pretty heady brew. The plot is not earth-shaking, but plausible enough, and the chief merit of the book, I found, is its readability: it definitely is a page-turner in the best tradition, and not too many writers can claim as much in contemporary India (it goes without saying that I do not consider readability a minus point, because where books are concerned I am anything but a snob; besides, writing racy but persuasive fiction is far harder an art than most people suppose). And – I say this as a compliment, not patronizingly – Ms. Liddle has accomplished the rare feat of not letting the reader guess that the writer is a woman if he has not noticed the name, just as you wouldn’t with J.K. Rowling or Agatha Christie or Ashapurna Devi for that matter. The book is refreshingly free of  à la mode feminist touches.

A quick search through Wikipedia tells me that Madhulika Liddle has come out with another collection of Mujaffar Jang stories (she apparently regards short stories to be her forte). I shall look forward to reading it, and I wish the writer very good luck with her writing. I should also be glad if a) she places her forthcoming books in other historical eras, equally painstakingly reconstructed, and b) other writers are inspired to do the same, because it is a very interesting genre, and also because very few good books of this sort have been written in recent times in India, whether in English or the vernaculars, so far as I know.

[The Englishman’s Cameo, by Madhulika Liddle, Hachette India 2009, pp. 281, Rs. 295, ISBN 978-81-906173-3-8. Available via flipkart.com]

Make up your own mind!

I have believed since I was very young that the most important sign of maturity is both wanting to and being able to make up one’s own mind on more or less everything under the sun that concerns one’s own life. As an elderly friend I respect said, ‘I will not of course always make wise decisions, but the point is I will make them myself and then enjoy or suffer the consequences; what else marks me out as a man rather than just another member of a faceless herd?’ Yet all my life I have watched people either completely unable to make up their own minds, or terrified to. So they go around consulting all and sundry, usually working upon the premise that if most people I know agree upon a certain course of action it must be the right (or at least safe) thing to do. Here is a random sample of questions people of all ages agonize over, though the ‘importance’or urgency of the questions varies with age:

Should I/my son study science or arts or commerce? Should I attend this or that coaching class? Should I bother much about examination scores? Should I go to this or that party? Should I keep long hair/wear short skirts? Should I have a girl friend/boyfriend? Should I tell my parents about it? Should I have an extra-marital affair? Should I tell my wife/husband about it? Should I shop at this or that mall/become a member of this or that club? Should I gossip with my friends about the latest scandal I heard? Should I watch an ‘adult’ movie? Should I take up this or that job? Should I smoke or drink, and should it be done on the sly? Should I tell my doctor about my problem?… I could stretch that list ad infinitum.

Both youngsters and adults come to me for advice, as they have been doing since I was myself very young. There are a few things I have noticed about almost all of them: either they merely want me to confirm them in their prejudices (‘See, Sir also says you must go for engineering/not have an affair at this age, just as I told you!’) or they are terribly guilty or afraid to take a decision which they feel inwardly compelled to, and are only seeking some sort of solace or reassurance from me that nothing awful is going to happen if they go ahead with what they want to do (they sometimes want to do quite pedestrian things, like kissing a girl/boy, and sometimes utterly weird ones, like ‘I’m studying physics and want to switch afterwards to an MBA to have a safe career, but basically I want to make a name as a writer, is that okay?’). For long I have enjoyed helping them, but these days, after handling too much of the same thing over and over again (and seeing confused teenagers grow into confused adults despite everything I said and did for them), I get very tired sometimes. It is neither possible nor pleasant to keep telling people they are doing all right even when I know they are being common at best and foolish at worst; it is also wearying to have to tell craven people that sooner or later they must make up their minds and choose between options because they can’t have everything unless they want to regret missed opportunities all their lives, and if they can’t do that no outsider can do it for them anyway, so what the heck? – I actually say this aloud very often, and then they go away not only confused and hesitant as before, but resentful of me that I did not resolve their dilemma with a painless wave of some magic wand. How childish most people are all their lives! All that swells with age, it seems to me, is the paunch and the ego.

Mind you, just because I advocate independent decision making, I am neither an anarchist nor a blind rebel without a cause: indeed, I fear the one and despise the other. As my readers will know, I set great store by order and discipline and old-fashioned good manners in social life, regretting much that is wrong in this country solely because our rulers (including heads of families) do not sufficiently appreciate their value to civilized living, nor have the courage of conviction to impose them without fear or favour. In personal life and habit, as those who know me closely will vouch, I live in a very staid and conservative style: I dress simply, paying no attention to fashion fads, I cut my hair short, I do not use trendy abuse in my speech, I do not zoom around on a macho bike, I do not stay out late, I am content to be much closer to  a stick-in-the-mud family man than a wild bohemian, I happily put up with my wife’s occasional puja at home provided it is not too long, loud or expensive, and I neither walk in noisy political processions nor subscribe to the idea that throwing a few bombs can solve any problem. And yet, ever since I was a teenager, I have insisted on taking my own decisions – seeking the advice of only those I personally respected (not necessarily parents), and never considering myself bound to follow anything that conflicted with my own reason, conscience or gut feeling. That has applied to things major and minor alike: nobody ever told me to smoke a cigarette or forced me to go to a movie, I dropped engineering and medicine because I wasn’t interested, I had affairs when I chose, got married when I wanted to, quit jobs that I didn’t like, read books because I wished to read them, went travelling when and where I desired, avoided partying like the plague, and reared a child the way I thought best. And look, at this age I have very few things to regret having done!

So why on earth do people bother much more about physics and chemistry and marks and looks and pay and what mummy and daddy will say and what their wives will do and what latest gizmos are on sale instead of this most important of all questions: ‘When will I learn to make up my mind?’ Give me an IIT topper who has never had an original thought and an 18-year old who knows his own mind, and I know which one I won’t waste a second giving attention to.

The paradox is that the more the ad men extol and celebrate ‘freedom’, the more restrictive our real lives seem to become, the less independent our minds (and we seem to be growing so used to it that most of us cannot even see that anything is amiss!) ‘Children’ of 18-20 still have all sorts of decisions taken for them by parents, including when, where and with whom they should go out or chat on the Net; older people do unquestioningly what the boss/TV/wife tell them to do, modern ‘adults’ go chhee-chhee over things that would have been par for the course several generations ago: Romeo would have been arrested for pedophilia today, Shakespeare hauled up before the Race Relations Board for writing something as ‘prejudiced’ as The Merchant of Venice, and the Wright brothers punished instead of merely ridiculed by their father for ‘wasting their time’ trying to build a flying machine. Most people cannot imagine that they need not watch cricket when everybody else is doing it, or go pandal-hopping at puja time if they live in Bengal.There are millions who work in offices where they are constantly monitored by CCTV cameras in the name of security, the way only prisoners used to be not so long ago, something that Charlie Chaplin mocked so tellingly in Modern Times. And most don’t even seem to mind: rather, they are probably happy that the burden of taking decisions and being their own men has been lifted from their shoulders for ever, lifelong. But it makes me feel as though I am living in a cage, gilded though it might be, and the walls are closing in…which reader dares to tell me, after reading this post closely, that s/he still believes that the world is ‘progressing’?

One human heart

I should like the more serious-minded among my readers to go slowly and carefully through this essay. It would help them understand more clearly an important part (though, admittedly, only a part-) of the goals, ideals and principles I have tried to live by ever since I started to think (and that was a long time ago!)

No one has the full truth, of course, least of all professional philosophers. The contrary position, generally called utilitarianism, has led to much good in this world – from the abolition of slavery and legally sanctioned torture to the spread of democracy and literacy to all the wonders of technology harnessed to capitalism. I am no Luddite; I should be loth to subscribe to a naïve ‘revolutionary’ (actually very ancient-) back to Nature/ back to basics zeitgeist. As I often remind people, think of having your teeth pulled out without anesthesia whenever you are feeling too romantic, too peeved with the contemporary world and its ways. And yet, as the poet says, ‘God fulfills Himself in many ways/lest one good custom should corrupt the world’. Much that is wrong or bad about the world today might have been the consequence of utilitarianism pushed to absurd excess in every sphere of life. One begins to suspect as much when one finds that thinkers as disparate as Aristotle and Karl Marx and a Pope have had deep misgivings on the subject.

It all boils down to the question of ‘What is Man?’ or ‘What do we mean by human worth?’ Do read the essay, and get back to me. This is a question on which I should love to hear comments from young and old, male and female, highly educated and barely literate alike.

Midsummer musing

Several unconnected musings for this time.

We are going through the worst part of summer. What with temperatures soaring to 47⁰ C combined with the sort of very high humidity that is more commonly associated with Kolkata, life has been made miserable around here; everybody’s praying for rain, despite knowing that the monsoon is at least a fortnight away. Perhaps I grow more sensitive to extreme heat and cold with age, but it is a matter of fact that we are hearing of sunstroke deaths in the papers. Oh, by the way, the latest fashion among women around here – at least those who ride two-wheelers – is to clothe themselves head to toe in burqua-like apparel, face masks and elbow length gloves and all, presumably to avoid sunburn. I wonder how I survived so many years without any kind of special protection at all!

Starting today, I am taking the usual mid-year week off, but this time we are not travelling anywhere. That’s because we couldn’t think of any nice place to go to. We tried hill stations at this time of year, and got blisters and heat fever and upset stomachs after coming back; we also tried places which blaze, such as Varanasi, and had to virtually stay cooped up in airconditioned hotel rooms round the clock, which is no fun: if we are going to be cooked, we’d rather do it on the cheap, at home. So it will be housework, movies, books, sleep, swimming, chatting and maybe dining out once or twice, that’s all. And helping my daughter to get through the mountain of projects assigned in school…

I was looking at the list of ‘most-read’ blogposts, and couldn’t help wondering about some of them. The top two have been fixtures for a long time now, but why is Subarnalata on that list and so high for so long? The post relating to Anna Hazare’s mission (A most frightening prospect) is still relevant, so I am glad that people are reading it. The same goes for the one on Indian English and the one titled Are you sure (because it makes me feel good to think that maybe it has set a lot of people thinking a little!). Growing up in Durgapur obviously struck a chord somewhere, so let it enjoy its place in the sun. But I wrote very little in the post on 3 Idiots, so I cannot figure out why it should be permanently on that list, and placed so high too. That the post on Steve Jobs should still hang on there while the one on The Mahabharata has dropped away I find truly dismaying: how badly people these days have got their priorities mixed up, really. An epic will be remembered – at least if civilization survives – long, long after PCs and iPads have become as trivial and uncommented upon as the washing machine and refrigerator are today, yet readers are more interested in finding out what I have said about Steve Jobs? What a pity. And there are at least half a dozen other posts which I think deserve a place on that most-read list, too. I wish my readers would go back to older posts a little more often.

Finally, a reflection on my work again. Given the number of people who keep coming to ask me to admit their kids in my classes, virtually the only thing that has been stopping me all these years from increasing the number of batches is the fact that I cannot cope with so much homework. As thousands of ex-pupils know, I correct homework with a fine-toothed comb and write detailed comments, and it gobbles up time like nobody’s business (besides hurting the eyes and trying my patience, after having been at it for so long); beyond a certain limit I simply couldn’t handle it. I have been telling ex-students that I’d gladly pay 10,000 rupees a month to anybody who could do this job for me, in keeping with my standards. Let’s put that in perspective: people with master’s degrees are teaching full time in schools around here for as little as five thousand rupees a month, whereas I am offering double that for four or five evenings’ work a week, not more than three hours a day. Imagine how hard an insurance- or vacuum cleaner salesman has to work to earn that much in commissions. Reflect that engineers at sponge iron plants hereabouts start at 12-15,000 a month for doing 12 hour days, six days a week. And yet the wonder of it is that I have never had any takers on my offer in more than a decade…

Teaching children rot

I was marking a comprehension exercise done by a pupil for homework. It told a story about how the great German painter Albrecht Durer attained fame, what a tremendous sacrifice his brother Albert made to get him the career of his dreams, working himself to the bone for years in underground mines, and how the artist paid tribute to his brother by painting his work-wasted hands folded in prayer – a painting that became famous worldwide, and still remains.

A touching story. However, having read about that painting years ago, I had a niggling feeling that something didn’t quite sound right. So I checked it out on the net, here. And just as I had suspected, that story given in some school question paper or workbook was a silly sentimental fabrication. As a medical expert cum art historian confirms, they are not Albert Durer’s hands, indeed not those of a poor emaciated workman at all, but those of perhaps a slightly elderly nobleman, perhaps suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, and whoever the model was (it could be some obscure Italian), the same hands feature in another famous painting by the same artist which shows a saint praying. So this story prescribed for schoolkids is a load of tripe. And this, when any fool of a writer, publishing editor and schoolteacher can check out the basic background facts in five minutes thanks to Google. Given the fact that children on their own read nothing these days, imagine what harm this kind of irresponsible misinformation is doing to their minds (my only consolation is that this kid, being a typical teenage moron, will have already forgotten the passage, now that it is almost five days since she did the exercise… after all, no one retains any datum for any length of time these days, neither love letters nor movie storylines nor chemistry equations for much beyond examinations). But I cannot help having recurrent nightmares about these children growing up to be parents and teachers.

By the way, I found that website so interesting – Hektoen International, a journal of ‘medical humanities’, that I have put it on my blogroll.

Thinking about words

Language keeps ever changing, like a tree shedding old branches and putting out new ones, or like a river that never stops shifting course – and, at one level, it is a fascinating thing to watch and practise with, as any teacher of language must. It’s one of those things that keep me from getting bored with what I do. But, as I have sometimes commented before, there are changes that cause disquiet, or at least stir the funny bone for their sheer frivolity or absurdity, like substituting ‘anyway’ with ‘anyways’, and calling everything under the sun ‘awesome’ (recently some of my kids got certificates for being ‘awesome’ volunteers in a school function – not ‘excellent’ or ‘outstanding’, but awesome), or signing off with ‘Best’, as though it would wear your fingers out to type ‘With best wishes’, and calling the head of an academic department a ‘Chair’, or saying ‘I hope you’re doing good’ when you obviously mean ‘doing well’…galloping laziness and mindlessness combined with a desperation to be ‘in’ with the ‘cool’ crowd is not an edifying thing to see all around you!

There are three words in particular that I want to discuss in this post. Everyone suffers from ‘tension’ these days (and everybody seems to have forgotten that once upon a time it was a technical word, by which doctors referred to blood pressure and engineers to the tautness of an electrical wire): what happened to the good old ‘worry’ and ‘anxiety’? What better function does ‘tension’ serve (especially in the mouths of paanwallah’s sons, the sort of people who cannot string together one ten-word sentence correctly in English)? Then there is ‘mistake’. Everybody seems to make only ‘mistakes’ these days, never a misdemeanour or an offence, leave alone a crime or a sin! I regularly underline the word when I read essays where a pupil writes about a bully harassing a child, or a student cheating in his examination, and afterwards – most commonly when they are punished for it – realizing their ‘mistake’! Isn’t it one way we are teaching our young (and by young today I mean everybody under thirty) never to take responsibility for serious wrongdoing – when they can always expect  to get away by claiming it was just a ‘mistake’? How much longer will it be before people in the dock accused of murder will tell the judge they shouldn’t be severely punished because it was, after all, just a ‘mistake’?

And finally (for now) there is ‘insult’. Of late I have been frequently hearing (and reading-) teenagers saying ‘The teacher insulted me’ (for not doing homework, being rude in the class, coming late to school, failing in an examination or whatever). They didn’t say it so commonly twenty years ago, I can vouch for that, and I find it deucedly odd. Has the meaning of the word changed then, or have teachers changed, or have the children’s attitudes changed drastically? In our time, we had in general much sterner teachers: they not only scolded us, often harshly, but were liberal in meting out corporal punishment with the cane and otherwise. Many of them we still revere, and have no hard feelings for; to some, we are eternally grateful for all they did, and no, we certainly never dreamt of saying they ‘insulted’ us (though, admittedly, as all my Bengali readers will understand, even the best of us were frequently addressed as goru, gaadha, bandor, chhagol, pantha, bhoot, hotochchhara, idiot and the like). On the other hand, on the very few occasions when I did find a teacher’s behaviour truly unjust and cruel, I stood up to it in a way that no present-day student can dream of doing: at best they go and complain to daddy and mummy. My father did the same as a schoolboy, I happen to know: he seized the cane from his headmaster, broke it and threw it away – and willingly took everything that came his way as a consequence. Real men don’t cringe before authority figures and abuse them behind their backs. So what do my readers think has changed in these intervening years? Has something gone wrong with our teachers, or are today’s students a cowardly lot saddled with overblown and fragile egos?

Is all 'work' work?

I watch cycle-van pullers sweating as they drag along huge loads in the blazing sun, and I watch government clerks lounging away in cool dark offices, I hear of schoolteachers chattering away in class about ‘interesting’ episodes from their personal lives and also of tycoons who spend their time drinking champagne and playing golf when they are not clinching hugely lucrative deals in five-star environs. ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ was the rousing rallying cry of the communists since the mid 19^th century: partly through their efforts and partly through historical circumstances which they could not have predicted, the lot of the average blue collar worker, at least in the organized sector, at least in reasonably developed countries such as India – leave alone Germany or the US or the UK, where they talk of a ‘labour aristocracy’ – is far better than anyone could have dreamed around 1900 C.E. But looking at people working, or pretending to work, I have wondered ever since teenage: how many of these can be called workers in any meaningful sense?

Both make-work and finding elaborate ways to shirk work are so deep rooted in the human psyche, you see. I myself allow for a very broad definition of ‘worker’, much broader than traditional communists, who could only think of peasants and ill-paid, overworked factory workers when they first defined their beloved proletariat. I can consider a top flight surgeon to satisfy my definition – as long as he does his work well – and equally a housewife who does all the household chores all by herself every day. A teacher who really has to teach instead of fooling and boring and browbeating his wards for a living is a worker, too, and so is a shopkeeper, though much of his work might consist only of fighting off boredom when there are no customers, and keeping fit despite his totally sedentary occupation. The engineer who has to rush at all hours to attend emergencies at the power plant is a worker indeed; so also the sculptor hammering away at his statue, or the scientist keeping a sharp eye on a bacterial culture in his laboratory for months on end. But when you watch a bank clerk taking half an hour to do a little thing that should take five minutes, even as he chats away with his colleagues and is rude to the client who dares complain, yet gets paid 30- or 40,000 rupees a month for it, can you call him a worker? What about the man who keeps running away from the workplace to ferry his kids to and from tuitions, and is never hauled up by his boss for it? Can most PhD scholars honestly assuage their conscience with the thought that they are doing some useful work?

Then there are sinecures – from ATM attendants to the President of India – well paid or not, they do get paid (some, even after retirement) for doing virtually nothing, or nothing of any importance. And of course, bureaucracy at all levels is a byword for inventing work: the more the papers, the fatter the files (which go unattended for years on end) the more important they look, the bigger their budgetary allocations grow, the more the perks they can claim for themselves! I still don’t know whether fashion designers and models do any work by the traditional definition of the word. The same goes for a lot of currently ‘in’ professions that I shall  not name here…

In a world where work was much more rigidly defined, and Tolstoy’s dictum of ‘He who does not work shall not eat’ was sternly enforced, how many housewives and headmasters, CEOs and celebrities and secretaries to the government might go abegging!

Wife beating? why not?

This newspaper report, based on the findings of a recent UNICEF survey, draws attention to exactly the kind of serious and very unpleasant social realities that we Indians live with, and prefer strongly to shove under the carpet rather than discuss threadbare with a view to criticizing what is bad about us and replacing them with healthier attitudes and practices. In this day and age, 57% of male teenagers and 53% of their female counterparts are okay with the idea that married men should beat their wives now and then!

I, of course, differ strongly on the question of whether India is ‘rapidly developing’ as the editorial writer claims, as anybody who reads this blog regularly should know. Sanitary toilets, decreasing superstition, greater freedom of expression and increasing public awareness of rights and responsibilities are far better indices of development than cars and cellphones and shopping malls, and my worst critic cannot deny that we have made very little progress on such counts. But let us think for a while about all the possible reasons why such a fiercely atavistic attitude regarding what is permissible in marriage should still prevail so widely among our young, especially given that so many of them believe (inspired by Bollywood if nothing else) that ‘love’ should be the cornerstone of a good marital relationship.

First, the survey could be very small and based on too biased a sample to be reliable. I doubt it, though, because the UN is not known for superficial and shoddy work.

Secondly, (if we assume that the above is not the case) it may be that the young are so indoctrinated by both oral tradition and what they see at home that they actually believe wife beating is ‘normal’ and even right. If that is so, what, as the editorial asks rhetorically, are our young people being taught at home – what kind of parents are we? Do we need the kind of public regulatory authority of the sort that they have in countries like Norway, where governments can take away very young children from home and put them in professional care if their experts think that the parents are incapable of raising decent children decently? How many Indian parents are going to lose their children if that happens?

Thirdly – and I am being politically incorrect here consciously – shouldn’t we ask why such an attitude still prevails among so many? Let us grant the feminists what they have always shrilly claimed, that men are brutes, pigs, so they can’t think of anything better, marriage for them has always meant exercising crude physical dominion over the wives. Well, why aren’t today’s mothers (many of them ‘educated’ too) teaching their sons any better? This is one question feminists answer with a loud silence. Much more alarmingly, so many girls seem to find wife-beating okay too – what can be said about that? What is it about our females of all ages that they should still hold such a belief? Could it be – dare I articulate this question? – that too many women are aware, deep inside somewhere, that there is much in them that needs disciplining lifelong in the crudest possible way? Could it be that too many women, having seen how some of their highly ‘liberated’ sisters abuse their freedoms, have decided that most women cannot handle freedom responsibly? (I hold no brief for men, by the way – to my knowledge, most men cannot do it much better either, but the very ancient tradition that acknowledges their ‘superiority’ in this matter still seems to have very strong roots in many women’s minds!)

And what about the remaining 43% of boys and 47% of girls, those who apparently do not condone wife beating? Shouldn’t they play a more vocal, more active role in bringing about change for the better?

My daughter belongs to this set of teenagers. What her attitude in this matter is should be obvious to all who know – if only from this blog and hers – what kind of parents she has. But the fact that she is growing up in the midst of so many others of such a very different and ugly mindset is something I find most disturbing to contemplate. Will most of these girls be happily married if only their husbands buy them a lot of clothes and jewellery, and let them go to parties and malls and beauty parlours every now and then, even if they are occasionally beaten just to be reminded who is the boss? Is that all they ask from women’s ‘emancipation’?

An old boy was recently lamenting that his girlfriend of many years, having suddenly ditched him for a wealthier husband without so much as a by your leave, is now trying to get back to him, moaning about how badly she repents her ‘rash’ decision! Do such women deserve to be beaten by their menfolk, then, as disgusting creatures who have no real minds and feelings of their own? Remember, in our hoary scriptures, women have often been compared to various kinds of domestic animals…

Postscript: Critical comments are welcome, but for those who base their comments merely on the last line (because they have already forgotten the rest), let me remind them that if I have referred to a certain type of woman derogatorily, I have also called some men pigs in the same blogpost! I have written glowing tributes to women I admire, too. And if I see that most female readers prefer to stay quiet, I shall assume that most of them cannot see anything wrong in what I have written, only they are too embarrassed to say so openly.