YouTube channel indefinitely paused

I have said in the last video posted on my channel that I am not putting up new videos there any more, at least until further notice.

Whoever said that people would be far more eager to watch me and listen to me on YouTube than in reading my blog obviously did not know his public. The blog has made me much happier; let me stick to it.

A few have suggested that if I keep slogging at it for several years, the channel is going to pick up a large following. But I have no motivation to do that. The response in the last six months has been very, very tepid, whether I count subscriptions, or comments, 'likes' or just plain views - considering the number of people who know me and might have been expected to visit. Evidently, people are not interested. 

It was an experiment only, and like many others I have made, it did not succeed. Lesson learnt. 

If and when that channel becomes popular again, in terms of views, comments, subscriptions, or requests via email or Facebook or Whatsapp or phone that I resume posting, I shall see. Otherwise, consider that channel defunct.

Guttersnipes

Ruchir Joshi, a social observer, writer and newspaper columnist of my own generation (he is 59) is worried about how ‘boorish and thuggish’ we Indians are becoming, as this article in the March 12 edition of The Telegraph says, with a dire warning at the end.

What he has to say about it you can read for yourself: I won’t waste words summarizing him here. The point is this is an issue that has deeply troubled me for ages, and yes, I too have felt that things have been growing worse lately.

Yes, Indians (at least a very large percentage of them) are brash and uncouth and socially callous; yes, they have been growing worse, and yes, if things keep sliding the way they are, there might sooner or later be an ‘explosion’, meaning that far too many random acts of crudeness and cruelty might make our society totally dysfunctional. So even if they can be understood and sympathized with, they cannot be condoned or forgiven. Especially that large section of them who are well-off and claim to be ‘educated’ too, yet count among the most guilty. Refer to the woman at the airport check-in counter described in Mr. Joshi’s article. Look into the mirror inside your mind and ask whether you have not often behaved as badly yourself, unprovoked.

This is not a recent phenomenon. If Indians are growing more insufferable, that has been happening for quite some time now. I remember my grandfather, the nicest, most self-effacing and mild-mannered gentleman I have ever known, grumbling to himself as we walked the streets of posh south Calcutta when he was in his late sixties and I in my late teens, ‘nikiri-te bhorey gelo deshta’… the country is filling up with guttersnipes. And he was not talking about only the poor and ignorant, or only the political class.

I believe, first, that the root of the problem lies not in overpopulation and congestion and poverty and the mad, incessant scramble over scarce essential resources that that terrible combination entails – though they are very important factors indeed, and the situation might be somewhat ameliorated if they no longer dominated our lives (which, I think, would forever remain wishful thinking!) – but in the fact that we have only recently emerged from thousand-year old slavery into self-governance, and it has been said that there is no worse a tyrant than a recently-freed slave. Imagine a billion-plus recently freed slaves, from those who have become prime ministers to those who have managed to do no better than remain chaiwallahs and autorickshaw drivers and clerks and salespersons of varied descriptions. Imagine, then, that they have suddenly begun to enjoy a heady concoction of vastly increased personal liberty (or impunity from harsh punishment for wrongdoing, which for most people is quite the same thing) and rapidly increasing material prosperity, their own or at least all around them, while aspirations rise even faster, much faster than can be fulfilled for most of them, which fills them all with intolerable frustration, jealousy and spite. Combine this with the fact that, the more we are exposed to what is happening all over the world, the more we suffer from a deeply-hurting inferiority complex as a vast nation of underachievers (whether you think in terms of Nobel Prizes or Olympic golds, recent scientific progress or military prowess), and who chafes more, who wants to throw his weight around over trifles than a man with a huge inferiority complex, or a whole nation with the same?

So whether we are shoving ahead in queues or flaunting luxury limousines, whether we are mouthing obscenities or boasting about how brilliant at everything our ancestors were or about giving our neighbouring country – much weaker than us, of course, for otherwise we wouldn’t dare – a bloody nose now and then, whether we are shouting from the rooftops that the IITs are better than MIT or cricket is better than football simply because we cannot produce footballers, whether we are telling everybody who cares to listen and everybody who doesn’t who our dad is or crying down like a pack of wolves baying for blood any fellow countryman who dares to suggest we have faults we need to correct fast – it all comes down to the same causal factor, I think. Too much liberty and wealth too soon, too little political attention to the need for stern rule of law, too widespread and nagging a sense of inferiority and far too little education about why it is important to be civilized and what that means at all.

We supposedly value the family very highly in this country. It follows, then, that it is the immediate family which gives most of the primary value education to children, followed by the early years in school. ‘Higher’ education, for the relatively few who receive it, has always been mostly about learning less or more sophisticated skills for making a living. So the kind of people we grow up into, the kind of doctors, engineers, teachers, policemen, traders, politicians and parents we become, essentially depends on the kind of value education we have received within the first ten years of life. With me so far? Then, if we don’t in the mass become nice and gentle people, isn’t that where we should pin the blame?

I am asking any reader who is a thoughtful person, regardless of whether in the teens or the seventies, to reflect – if the majority of people in some countries we hear about are friendly and polite, unassuming, considerate and helpful, surely that is not a result of blind chance? Surely they have been schooled into it through generations of patient and mindful labour of parents and schoolteachers? (the descendants of the bloodthirsty Vikings are said to be among the gentlest people on earth today!)

Most children are not born either definitely saints or monsters. They are highly malleable creatures, and they imbibe early on the values they see being practised – not just professed, mind you – by their family elders and teachers and being respected by society at large. Now ask yourself, do we in India really, honestly teach our children to grow up to be good people – good in the sense of being kind and gentle, quiet, thoughtful and helpful, modest and honest – because we are convinced that will make a good society in which the same children will flourish best? Or do we instead drive deep into their skulls from a very early age that it’s a dog eat dog world, so callousness, rudeness and aggression are fine and even desirable, and one only needs to ‘succeed’ in material terms, having things to show off is everything, marks and prizes, money and overflowing shopping bags and fancy nameplates and cars with beacons and hooters if possible… oh, I know not many parents put their values in so many words, but isn’t that precisely what the children learn from their acts? Do children ever learn to value and respect good people?

I did early on, you see. I told you about my grandfather. I also picked up the same values from Voltaire and Russell and Maugham’s Salvatore, and Bibhuti Bandyopadhyay’s Dhaotal Sahu, and Tagore’s remark that if there were fewer clever men and more good ones around, the world would have been a much nicer place. I tried being good in that sense for a very long time, and got kicked in the face for it, and not once, by apparent bhadralok of both genders too (see my earlier blogposts titled The banality of evil and chhotolok)*, until I became an unsocial ogre of sorts. So I have advised my daughter that in this world (or at least this country) it is not enough to be good – one needs to be clever and cautious as well in order to avoid being needlessly, undeservingly hurt. And that realization about the kind of country I live in only makes me a sadder man. I shall rejoice if India is someday voted as one of the nicest countries to live in, but I do not expect to see it happening, at least in my lifetime.

Do my readers think I take an unjustifiably dark view of life?

*How unspeakably vulgar some of these bhadralok have become my Bengali readers can see from this news item on the actress Swastika Mukherjee’s lament about them in today’s newspaper. My most abject apologies to her on behalf of all such animals. Nikiri-te bhore gelo deshta…

Good news for a change

China and India are leading the world in greening the planet. So says a multi-country research project conducted by NASA and published by as venerable a science journal as Nature in a recent issue. That is good news indeed - however little, however late.

Do read the article carefully, though, before you start uncorking the champagne. It is riddled with ifs and buts and howevers. We Indians shouldn't be too happy, because in this sphere as almost everything else the Chinese are far ahead of us. Not only that, but while our extra greens have come from extension of croplands, theirs has come from extension of forests, which is a much-better thing, environmentally speaking. Also, the pace might not be sustained for long, if our groundwater reserves begin to dry up more quickly than anticipated. Also, 'the gain in greenness around the world does not necessarily offset the loss of natural vegetation in tropical regions'. Also, 'there are consequences for sustainability and biodiversity in those ecosystems beyond the simple greenness of the landscape'.

But, as I said, good news, however little, however late. Especially in a world where even the majority of 'educated' people below forty will already say 'Duh? Whatever - let's order a pizza on Zomato while we watch the latest romcom on Netflix, then simper on twitter about how cool/hot/amazing the heroine was looking...'

Is Durgapur a smart city?

On the website of our municipal corporation, they ran  an opinion poll in 2017 asking you to vote on the above question. How do you think I would have voted? (the poll is now closed)

I have criticized people's choice of words for as long as I remember, and I won't let go of this opportunity. It is people who can be smart or dumb, not phones nor cities. If you think the word goes with such things, I have reason to question both your intelligence and grasp of language. And don't tell me that merely a lot of people using words inappropriately (or just plain foolishly) makes their usage valid, and that I have to fall in line.

Moreover, for all its pretensions, Durgapur is far from being a city - yet. For one thing, the population is too small by Indian city standards, and secondly, even by the poor Indian standards, it lacks far too many amenities/facilities which go into making a city. It's a large town, that's all.

But if for the sake of argument I were to accept that it is a city and it could become 'smart', what would I look for to give it that certificate? 

• All its roads must be well built, -maintained and -lit.
• Traffic control must be stern enough to make driving and walking a safe pleasure for all decent and sober folk (footpaths along all major roads is a must).
• Air pollution - which is just plain horrible at present - should be brought down drastically.
• Clean water supply, modern sanitation, sewerage  and conservancy services must be available to all.
• Public transport should be comfortable, safe, affordable and available round the clock.
• Government hospitals must be vastly better endowed and more efficiently run.
• Above average students must find decent jobs and business opportunities within a 50 km radius, so that they don't have to leave in droves for greener pastures as they have been doing for the last three decades.
• Noise pollution, especially during the myriad festivals, must be strictly curbed.
• There should be excellent local facilities available to encourage young talent in diverse spheres, including sports, music and the other fine arts.
• The elderly and infirm should not feel lonely, insecure and uncared-for.
• Airlines should connect us to most major cities.
• There is only one real park in the city at present, the Kumarmangalam Park. There should be at least five or six more in different zones.

Well, yes, that is only my opinion, and I could jot down at least ten other desiderata offhand. But won't most of my readers agree that if only the above twelve things are taken care of, Durgapur could really take a shot at ranking among the 'smart' cities of this country? And until that is done,who but a fool would think that merely making as inessential a thing as free wi-fi available at railway stations and shopping malls could persuade anyone at all to start calling us smart?

I know our mayor is a decent and educated man, an experienced retired civil servant, and full of good intentions. But is he listening?

Delhi and Lansdowne

On Thursday February 21 the Air India flight from Andal was delayed by four hours (mercifully they have become smart and considerate enough to notify us the evening before by sms) – my first experience here – so I arrived in Delhi only in the afternoon. I bought a smart card and negotiated the Airport Express and then the Yellow Line to arrive home all by myself: I had determined not to use a hired car. If Pupu stays in Delhi for some more time, I must learn to move around the city normally, meaning by auto and metro. The Delhi Metro is a delight anyway.

Pupu arrived from her campus in the evening, and the next two days were spent the way we like best, sleeping, eating savouries, watching all kinds of silly movies and videos, walking around and chatting away to glory about every subject under the sun…

At daybreak on Sunday we took the Dehradun Shatabdi Express (a pathetic misnomer, seeing that it takes more than six hours to travel 310 km) to Hardwar. My old friend Munna was waiting with his car. We paid a quick visit to Hrishikesh and Lakshmanjhula – Pupu had been there last in December 2008, and her memories had become hazy. We saw some white tourists picking up litter at the riverside: shame on us. Then after lunch we went off in the opposite direction. The road upto Najibabad was in rather poor condition, and there were jams on the way, so it was evening and pitch dark before we arrived at Lansdowne, at about 5500 feet above sea level. Pupu found the last part of the journey rather eerie, it being the first-ever drive in the dark through forested hills for her.

The hotel was plush, and they gave us a suite for three for what I felt was a very reasonable price – it being off season helped enormously. Dinner was delicious, and then off to sleep, with extra blankets piled on just in case: one silly weather channel had warned that the temperature might drop below zero (don’t trust advice from the Net too much. Google Maps has a tendency to find the shortest route to everywhere, and manages to push you into narrow bumpy alleys, sometimes blocked by ongoing construction work, even, just to shave off a couple of km of driving).

Late rising next morning, a steaming bath and breakfast, then we went sightseeing. Lansdowne, like Chakrata and Kasauli we’d seen earlier, is basically a little military cantonment town, and so very cleanly maintained, with lavish greenery all around, and multiple rows of rolling hills to feast your eyes upon. Lansdowne was originally called Kaludanda, which in the local dialect means Black Hill, before the sahibs found it, settled it and renamed it after the then viceroy. We did a lot of walking, sucking in great lungfuls of the crisp, clean air, which is the only way to enjoy the mountains, of which we can never have enough. We took in the army’s Durwan Singh Museum, named after the first Indian recipient of the Victoria Cross (during World War I) which taught us a lot of history about Garhwal (did you know that Kotdwar nearby is the place where King Bharata, after whom the country is named, supposedly spent his childhood at the ashram of the sage Kanva?) and the glorious Garhwal Rifles. Then there was Bhulla Tal, a tiny but pretty park, beside which there is a café which served us hot aloo paratha with achaar and dahi, and Tiffin Top – or Tip n Top – which offered panoramic views, and where they have built the new Tourist Lodge. Back via St. John’s Church early in the afternoon, after which we went for another walk, then bathed in the slowly fading sunshine on the hotel balcony, working up a good appetite for dinner. I could have been in heaven.

We left for the trip back a little after 11 next morning, and after a brief stopover at the Siddhabali temple at Kotdwar and Khera Punjabi dhaba for lunch, we arrived at Hardwar at around 3:45 p.m. With Munna waiting placidly, we went strolling along the riverside I know so well. Could hardly believe a whole year had flashed by since I was last there. It had been getting overcast, and Lord Shiva played a joke on us by whistling up a storm along with freezing rain, though it didn’t last long: we sheltered and snacked at the Chotiwala restaurant near Har ki Pauri, and we were at the railway station by 5. On the way back the train ran faster, and they fed us better. We were at New Delhi station by 10:50, and home by 11:30.

Half the next day was spent in bed, and the afternoon, walking around a couple of parks, including one at Mehrauli. Prithiviraj Chauhan was there once, followed by Muhammad Ghori. And so well kept, so well kept. More chatting, an early dinner, and we turned in at ten, because I had to get up at three. IGI T3 was swarming, but thanks to the recently installed self check-in kiosks (Air India has been tardy in doing this, but better late than never) and eight or ten gates functioning at the security check-in counter, the process was quick and hassle-free. The flight took off perfectly on schedule this time round, and arrived – through thick cloud cover and not a little turbulence – before time! I was home by 7:50, and it’s been raining off and on all day, so it is almost chilly. I decided to finish writing this post before the day is out. Tomorrow is the first of March, and it will be time to get ready for another admission rush.

This was not really a travel post. I keep pining for my daughter – five or six weeks and I have had enough – and every time we meet, we try to pack in a little trip. Delhi offers so many lovely places not too far away to pop off to. This time again, for both of us, the hills were calling,  and the trip was just right, short and sweet. Much of the time we had was spent on laughter and stories, and planning excitedly for the future. If Pupu stays on in Delhi, I might be travelling there so often that staff at the airports will begin to recognize me! And things could have been much worse: I can travel in comfort, and swiftly. Today I went from home to home in a little more than four hours – it takes me longer to go to my house in Kolkata. If in a couple of years’ time Pupu is actually working in Delhi, and we have daily, perhaps twice daily flights from Durgapur by then, I might work part time both there and here: that will really be fun! So the Lord be praised; I am looking forward to certain things again.

[for a few photos, click here]

Ranchi-Rajrappa-Hazaribag

For several years now the second half of February has been holiday time for me, seeing that all the schools have their year-ending and board examinations during this time. And I usually don’t fail to grab the opportunity to go travelling. This time round I made a four-day, 900 km trip to Ranchi and back, taking in Rajrappa and Hazaribag on the way. Ma went along, and we picked up Swarnava, who is reading physics at BIT Mesra, and who had been asking me to come over ever since he went there. The new car got its first long trip, and went like a dream. I drove it for more than five hours on the whole myself, and would have done much more, if only my leg and back hadn’t hurt, and people on the road hadn't made driving a nightmare with their recklessness.

We went via Purulia, and I am proud to say that most of the road was in excellent condition. Mamata Banerjee has certainly done more in this regard in seven years than the CPI(M) did in 35. The village folk also look far more well-fed and clothed than I saw in the 80s. It was cloudy and drizzling in Durgapur when we set out, then the day cleared up, but it drizzled again in Ranchi after sunset, so we had pleasant weather all through the day. On the way we stopped to see the Hundroo falls; no one had warned me of the thousand steps one had to climb up and down, and then the falls were a disappointment: I have seen many that were much more spectacular. Maybe it will be a tad more awe-inspiring at the height of the monsoons. Ranchi itself is rather an overgrown village, I was disappointed to see, with roads – some very bad ones, despite it being a state capital – clogged with swarming, lawless traffic, frequent power cuts, and all the disadvantages of a city without many of its advantages. The hotel was good though modest, and thankfully quiet, with a very helpful staff. The town does have several well-maintained parks, though, as I found out next day – I shall especially recommend the Rock Garden overlooking Kanke Lake. Swarnava showed us around the BIT campus: the huge sal forest there is a treasure. Then off we went to Rajrappa, origin of the Damodar, beside which stands the Chhinnamasta Temple, made famous by Satyajit Ray’s Feluda. The drive was lovely, going partly through low hills; the temple was ugly and crowded, as most Hindu holy places are; the riverfront was spoiled with carelessly dumped trash, but otherwise it could have been the Marble Rocks near Jabbalpur on a small scale. 

I had planned to visit Netarhat the next day, but the only decent hotel there was overbooked as I learnt via phone and net, and I didn’t want to make a twelve-hour round trip, so I dropped it for the sake of Hazaribag, which is less than three hours away. Nice, clean town, though there isn’t much in the way of sightseeing, except for a little private museum of tribal art which strongly stirred my interest because of the eccentric people who run it: I think I shall write separately about them later, and, God willing, visit them again for a longer stay. On the way back to Ranchi, we stopped at Tagore Hill, once home to Rabindranath’s elder brother Jyotirindranath, and now preserved as a museum. Made me wonder why we know so little about these other brothers of the great man after he became a super-celebrity…

A quiet drive home the next day, and on Thursday the 21st I flew over to Delhi. Now looking forward to the next part of my holiday, this time with Pupu and Shilpi for company.

[for photos click here]

Harking back to UBI

This is February, my lazy season, and today is Sunday and Shoroshshoti pujo to boot, so I have had the whole day off: not a very common thing.  I shall have to saunter off presently to show my face at the cultural soirée they have arranged in my neighbourhood park – they don’t love me, but they love my money, and since I contribute handsomely, they then feel very bad if I don’t show up at their feasts and do’s – but meanwhile, time to write in my diary.

I am glad that my recent post on the prospects of a universal basic income has drawn the thoughtful attention of a few of my readers. Rajdeep’s link to what the historian Rutger Bregman said at the World Economic Forum in Davos recently is so important that I am re-linking it here. Bregman points out, tellingly, that people should stop talking ‘stupidly’ (and, I’d add, with false piousness) of things like philanthropy and talk about ‘taxes, taxes, taxes…’ instead. Indeed, no less successful and dyed-in-the-wool a capitalist than Warren Buffett has gone on record saying that people like him, the über rich, are taxed too little, and too unfairly: men who actually work for wages (his driver and secretary and bodyguard, for instance) pay much higher tax rates than those who earn vast sums idly through interest, rent and profit! A far more equitable tax regime, one that really bites the stinking rich (who do not really ‘earn’ their fortunes, at least beyond the first few years of setting up new businesses), would go a long way to giving governments much more money for social  welfare services, including UBI, thereby making society far less cruel and unfair to the vast majority who are poor or badly off. What could be more urgent in a world where in almost every significant country a few hundred people control the bulk of the nation’s wealth, and only a few hundred thousand could be called even well off?

[As an aside, if I were planning to recast the income tax regime in our country, I would exempt all single income family folks with monthly earnings of up to Rs. 50,000 – 80,000 if they invested in important savings like life, medical and unemployment insurance – entirely, charge only 5% for incomes between 50K and 150K a month, 10% upto 300K, 20% upto 500K, 40% upto 1 crore; then the rates would really begin to bite, until, for those who made more than 10 crore a month, the marginal rate should be something like 80 or 90%, unless they gave it away to charity. And – the really crucial thing – income in all forms must be clubbed together, including perks that come with jobs, from five-star accommodation in hotels, luxury villas, fancy cars, first-class travel, astronomically-priced gifts,  company-paid dinners, as well as domestic, secretarial and security details. Hiding incomes, and accounting sleights of hand that put large parts of it in low-tax brackets must be made impossible. As no less a personage than the head of the Central Board of Direct Taxes has put it publicly, it is a national shame that in a country of 1.2 billion plus, with a growth rate of 7%+ a year, where luxury consumption is shooting through the roof, the number of people who have declared incomes above a crore a year is only about 150,000, and most of them are in the salaried category. Obviously the real fat cats, whether they are in business, politics, sports, movies or crime, where they make the really big money, get away under the present dispensation almost without paying any taxes at all… what a ‘socialistic democracy’ we have made indeed!]

In that same video linked above, I would like to draw everybody’s attention to what the director of Oxfam has said: don’t just talk about jobs, talk about jobs that give people some dignity as human beings. Such jobs are few anyway and vanishing at an alarming rate, and what provisions are we making for the hundreds of millions who are falling by the wayside?

But all this, while good in itself, does not address the main issue that I raised in my blogpost. Far too few have noticed, understood and thought about it. So please read the last two paragraphs of that post very closely again, and reflect. Even if we could create a society where most people are mostly unemployed yet comfortably off in material terms, can such a society avoid dissolving into anarchy for long? I think not, I am very fearful about the likely scenario, and find it most disquieting that far too few people have even begun to think about it.

Meanwhile, my daughter has written a post on her own blog about how she has begun to despise the moneyed class, especially as they exist in and pollute our own country, and I am as proud as I am glad that she has grown up to be not only possessed of a strong and clear mind of her own, not only far more articulate in expressing what goes on in that mind than 99% of people in the 18 to 50 age group, but very closely resonating with my own – very settled – outlook on life. My only prayer for her is that she never has to know harsh and humiliating want, and, that much assured, that she never becomes another member of the affluent trash. In this context, look up once again Chesterton’s wonderful essay titled The worship of the wealthy.

And – I cannot help bragging about this, though I have held myself back for months now – she has become the fourth member in our immediate family to have won a gold medal for a university first. If there are ten people in this world who truly love and respect me, I hope they would pray she has a good, happy, fruitful life hereafter. Do that if you really care for your own loved ones.

I have been reading voraciously and watching movies equally avidly of late … but about that, in the next post.

I 'teach' disrespect. Huh?

I hear from my boys in class that some so-called teachers in that school where I, for my sins,  taught for fourteen years are still abusing me behind my back, seventeen years after I quit – futilely, it goes without saying, because they are too dense to notice that what they think and say about me hasn’t mattered one whit to my professional reputation. The real reason is of course only impotent envy, one of the basest, and alas, most common of human emotions, especially if those humans are middle class Bengalis. They have said many ugly things about me in the past; now, apparently, all they can think of to revile me is that I ‘teach’ my pupils to ‘disrespect’ their parents. It could be brushed away with a derisive laugh of the Bertie Wooster vintage, but let me do them the honour of taking cognizance and analysing why I should do such a thing if I do it at all…

One reason I might behave like that (and have been apparently doing so for donkey’s years) is that I am simply mad. An interesting conjecture, really, and one that not a few have toyed with. If I am, there’s no help for it at this late date. But I wonder if it is possible for a madman to be professionally successful – and that too in a sober job like teaching – and if it is, shouldn’t madness be prescribed for young people who are aspiring to be as successful or more so?

But just suppose I am not mad. Why, then, should I ‘teach’ youngsters to disrespect their parents? Won’t the word spread far and wide soon enough, and seeing that it is the parents who pay me, won’t they get miffed enough in bulk to see to it that their wards stop attending my tuition: my only source of bread and butter for all these years? Why, instead, have the numbers kept swelling over the last two decades to the extent that my real problem is having to handle too many people, and making many of them unhappy by having to turn them away? If I did teach my pupils to be disrespectful, how have I managed to keep that a secret from the parents for all these years – a secret which, curiously enough, lots of schoolteachers in my town are privy to?

Then again, most of these wiseacres forget that I have been (quite a successful-) parent myself. My daughter attended my classes like any other pupil for several years. Naturally I dealt with them the same way and said exactly the same things to all of them: and look, my daughter has not grown up to ‘disrespect’ me! Which means that I either don’t ‘teach’ them anything like that,  or that I am a very poor teacher, doesn’t it?

I teach English, which involves not only dealing with the prescribed textbooks of the ICSE syllabus but also handling things like grammar, comprehension and composition. In the course of such things, I discuss many things with my pupils indeed, so that they can understand their texts well and learn to express themselves intelligently, coherently and in a well-informed manner. Among hundreds of subjects, the issue of parent-child relationships certainly crops up now and then, as for instance when we discuss what to write in an essay titled ‘Teenagers should be given more freedom’, or ‘Parents always know best’. I tell them to think and write in a rational, balanced manner, taking note of what keeps happening in the real world, so most of them agree with me that though parents may as a rule have their children’s best interests at heart, that is not a universal truism – many parents can be very bad parents – and even the most well-intentioned parents may not always know what is good for their children (like mothers who never allow their children to go out to play, and ply them constantly with junk food), and some even give highly anti-social lessons to their children (‘always put your self-interest above those of others, never share your notes!’), which goes a long way to making anti-social adults of the next generation. Then there are stories in which we actually have to read about very stupid or nasty or indifferent parents, such as when we discuss David Copperfield’s guardians, or Harry Potter’s – and there was this story by Mrinal Pande called Girls in the ICSE syllabus some years ago which showed how women in the household can oppress girl children, and, in the current syllabus, how Jessica in The Merchant of Venice hates her father Shylock for being a cold-hearted, money-grubbing monster, or Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Little Match Girl, where the beggar child freezing on the street doesn’t dare to go home because her father will beat her if she doesn’t bring any money, or the woman in T. S. Arthur’s story An Angel in Disguise who died of a stroke as a result of ‘idleness, vice and intemperance’, and who took so little care of her children that the neighbours agreed the children would be better off in a poor house. Yes, while dealing with such things, I do rub it in that just giving birth to children doesn’t qualify you as a good parent; you have to achieve that status through much learning and very hard work. When I am doing that, I am trying to make a better generation of parents for the future: I am saying ‘respect’ should not be taken for granted as an automatic privilege, it must be earned. Isn’t that a big part of what a teacher is supposed to do?

Also, I have heard all my life about real-life parents who scald their children with hot irons or throw knives and cleavers at them as a way of ‘disciplining’ them – the wonder is that in this country most children grow up to forget such horrors, or forgive their parents, or come round to believing that that is indeed the right way to bring up children. Now while I do NOT believe in pampering children – my daughter has been brought up under a pretty strict regimen of do’s and don’ts – I have also always believed that such creatures are not parents but perverts, and should be locked away: most people in this country might not know this, but they indeed are, or their children are taken away to foster care, in all civilized countries. My own daughter has been taught ever since she became capable of thinking that if your father behaves like a monster, he stops deserving respect as a father; treat him like the monster he is. Aren’t we all aware that in this country lots of parents are spendthrifts or irresponsible drunks, many parents sell off their girl children or marry them off underage or force them into early labour, and other horrors too awful to mention? Whom are we fooling when we pretend not to know such things? What kind of future India are we building by telling our children that they should ‘respect’ us regardless of our faults and crimes – indeed, that it is forbidden to even think that we, being parents, can have any faults at all? Aren’t many of the millions of criminals in jail right now parents too? Should they, too, be respected?

And there is something else that I try to teach my youngsters in this connection – that ‘respect’ involves courtesy and consideration, though never unthinking deference and obedience. I see too little of courtesy and consideration from youngsters to their elders in this country, within the family and outside: evidently that is not what they are ‘taught’ at home or in school. In many countries, young people are taught much better to yield a seat in the bus or train to any elderly person, not just to their own parents, not to push ahead of them in queues or shove them aside while walking, not to use loud and vulgar language in the presence of much older folk. I wish our parents and so-called teachers tried teaching such good manners. I should, if I like to think of myself as a gentleman (or woman), treat all elders with courtesy and consideration, even while not listening to everything they say, when I know they are saying foolish or wrong things, as they sometimes do. Isn’t that something we elders should try to teach our young more strenuously?

So yes, though I do not bring up such issues unless we are doing something directly connected to the syllabus and question papers they would have to face, I do indeed talk in a rational, factual, un-hypocritical way about parents and children and what the ideal relationship between them should be like. Some children, I hope, learn good lessons from me, some don’t; some parents know and approve, some don’t: I really don’t care, because I have the backing of the best authorities, philosophical, legal and pedagogical, behind me as well as my own conscience; it has never hurt my professional interest, and you can’t teach an old dog new tricks – this is the way I have worked all my life, this is the way I shall go on working till the end, cocking a snook at all my pathetic detractors.

But I have a theory about why insistence upon blind parent-worship is so strong in this country. Shall I tell you?

Well, let me save it for  a future blogpost…

Universal basic income: prescription for disaster?

I have written over and over again about the necessity of socialism in order to achieve anything like real civilization in human life, and about the gross evil of extreme and growing economic inequality all over the world – the latter, I am pleased to see in a rather weary and cynical way, is beginning to grasp the attention and stir the anxiety of a lot of thinking people even in positions of wealth, power and responsibility lately – and I am much exercised by the spreading idea of putting some sort of ‘universal basic income’ (UBI for short) guarantee into place within the short- or medium term. A lot of people, from Mark Zuckerberg to Nobel Prize-winning economists to the long-serving chief minister of the tiny Indian state of Sikkim are rooting for the idea. 

Many people are claiming, very plausibly, that UBI will not only go a long way in reducing inequality, but will prove to be much simpler and cheaper overall to implement than the plethora of complex and leaky social welfare schemes that most governments currently run, give the average citizen greater choice about the way s/he wants to live life, and could perhaps be the best protection against the sort of widespread social chaos that could arise out of very large scale unemployment stemming from increasingly universal automation – something that is inevitable within the next half century, and something that is unravelling the social fabric as nothing else has done since the first Industrial Revolution began more than 250 years ago.

Why am I not too keen on looking at UBI as a panacea, then?

Firstly, because I do not think that a genuinely meaningful UBI scheme will ever be feasible within the existing capitalist order. As the professor in this article calculates, trying to guarantee a measly $12,000 a year to every US citizen – hardly a guarantor of a decent standard of living at current prices! – will call for transferring something like $3 trillion from the rich to the poor: aiming for a higher per capita figure could raise the figure to ten trillion. Does anyone believe even for a moment that the richest 1%, who control nearly 50% (or more) of the country’s wealth (conditions are more or less the same in India) could be ‘gently persuaded’ to give up that sort of money to help the vast majority live in security and decency?

Secondly, because as an ‘elitist’ from lifelong experience who cares more for other people’s welfare than most people seem to care about their own, I am convinced that giving people free money to spend as they wish is not a very good idea: it is pretty well established that a very significant chunk of the populace would spend the money on drink, gambling and buying basically useless gizmos (like new smartphones or motorbikes every year) than on food, shelter, healthcare or education for their children. Call me names if you like, and I don’t like the situation one whit myself – but it hardly changes reality.

Thirdly, and most importantly, I think that UBI addresses only a small part, the economic part, of the crisis looming over us. And I believe (I may be wrong) that far too few people are yet worrying about what worries me. To put it very briefly: how will a society filled with vast hordes of unemployed people with money enough in their pockets survive for long? That is not wholly an imaginary dystopia, it is already a (though not-yet-all-pervasive) reality for those who have eyes to see with. I wrote in a post titled Technology in a demented age that ‘I know there are many hundred million people in the world today with too much money, too much time hanging heavy, too little responsibility, too empty brains and no real passions of any kind, who need to be kept constantly engaged and entertained…’ and you can check this out for yourself, really, though schoolchildren are still writing trash in their essays about people being ‘busy’ all the time. What on earth are they busy with? I see folks swarming in shopping malls even on weekday mornings whenever I care to go and look; enormous numbers are going to wedding- and other feasts or attending noisy picnics and festivals of one sort or the other all the time, still bigger numbers are dressing up for hours or glued to their TVs or mobile phones for many hours a day, or zooming around aimlessly on bikes; so many parents chat vacuously before my house every day dropping their kids to the tuition and waiting to pick them up again, obviously because they have nothing better to do… one has to be determinedly blind or stupid not to notice. Of course some people are really very busy, but they certainly do not make up a majority. And remember, this is already true in an age when not all – far from all – are assured of a decent, guaranteed, unearned income lifelong! Trying to imagine what is going to happen when everybody is so assured boggles the mind.

I have a great faith in proverbs – remember they represent wisdom about human nature gleaned and distilled over thousands of years, and human nature does not change significantly over a few generations – and I constantly worry over the proverb ‘An idle mind is the devil’s workshop’. Imagine a society where the vast majority of minds are always idle, and bodies too, because they never have to think of making a living. Colin Wilson wrote in his monumental Criminal History of Mankind that much of the worst kinds of crimes all through history have been committed by people who were bored stiff with a too-easy life. And that was in the days when most people had to keep their noses to the grind from early childhood to old age just to survive. Look around yourself, see how many crimes and offences are committed already by people (even supposedly educated people) whose primary problem is time hanging heavy in their hands, from drug-sodden teenagers screaming and swooning at rock concerts and football games to louts harassing women on the streets to gangs ready to be whistled up by any political party to create a riot just because it relieves the unbearable monotony of their empty lives with a few moments of violent, gory ‘fun’.  Then imagine a whole society full of such semi-humans…

Shall we acknowledge reality before we go ahead with well-intentioned but harebrained schemes which can bring about disaster? How many people, given what we are mostly like, use well-provisioned leisure to become Thomas Jeffersons, Lord Kelvins and Rabindranath Tagores? How many are much more likely to turn into pigs and wolves instead? (In case that last line sounds harsh or far-fetched, I suggest you look up Tolstoy's short story The imp and the crust).