Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain!

A recent sero-survey (testing for antibodies) conducted by ICMR has indicated that up to 4.5 million residents of Delhi may have been infected by the novel coronavirus already (35 times more than the roughly 125,000 who have been found coronavirus positive through swab tests), shown no symptoms, suffered not even mildly, and recovered on their own without seeing a doctor. This is corroborated by the findings of a private patho lab, Thyrocare, which indicates that 180 million Indians may have already acquired natural immunity through infection and recovery. Which seems to confirm what I guessed in an earlier post: that Indians have a high degree of natural immunity to the virus. (by the way, if 180 million have been infected and the total death toll is about 28,000, work out the vanishingly small mortality rate yourself. Heart attacks, cancer and traffic accidents kill vastly more people, but the whole country, politicians and doctors included, have simply forgotten!)

In the same vein, the chief secretary to the West Bengal government said only a few days ago that we should remember there are currently only about 660 critical cases in a population close to 100 million in this state: hardly a justification for mass panic.

In my own town, the newspapers, local word of mouth news as well as my Aarogya Setu app says that the number of people currently diagnosed as infected within the last month keeps oscillating between 30 and 37 – two or three are being freshly infected every day, two or three are recovering daily, there has not been a single mortality in four months. And yet, what people are saying is ki bhoyonkor byapar hochchhe (what a disaster is unfolding)!

If such vast numbers have been infected already and recovered with nothing more than mild symptoms or none at all, that should be cause for good cheer and a rising tidal wave of renewed confidence, right? If not one person has died of this disease in my town in four months, while a so-called pandemic has been raging countrywide, it should be more so, right? And if the infection is spreading yet causing so little harm while widening the net of immune people, that should boost our morale, shouldn’t it? So why is the reverse happening? Just what is causing the rising tide of panic?

Very much to the point, my mother, who has been teaching science for fifty years and is one of the sanest and calmest people I have ever met, has been laughing to see that a lot of ‘educated adults’ who are desperately waiting either for ‘herd immunity’ or for a miracle vaccine to emerge have no idea at all that ‘herd immunity’ requires the infection to spread as fast as possible, nor that vaccination actually means infecting you deliberately with a (mild) dose of the virus so that your immune system can develop a resistance to it. Make of that what you will. Meanwhile, we have resigned ourselves to long-persisting mass madness. As a student wisely said, we who survive and return to a normal life should remember for the rest of our lives that this was the greatest panic-demic we have seen, not a pandemic!

P.S., July 23: You really must look up this latest post on my other blog.

New story on Instagram

My daughter has put up another story I narrated on her Instagram account. Click here.

I made one little mistake while I was narrating (remember, it was said impromptu, with no text to refer to). Let me see if you can notice it!

Days of yore

A prayer for my grandchildren has climbed quickly up the list of the most-read posts. Very gratifying. So also the fact that two old posts have made their way back into that list after a long time: What sort of person am I? and 3 Idiots. The first one pleases me because it was very hard to write – just try it yourself to find out how hard – and writing it down gave me a profound satisfaction; the second one because a) it was written a whole decade ago and is still finding readers, perhaps even among those who were far too young to read and understand it then, b) so many things I said then are still so starkly relevant now. The one thing that I deeply regret is that though at that time my readers were so much fewer, the comments were so much greater in number! Are today’s readers far lazier, or clueless, or simply couldn’t be bothered, because Pubg entertains them better?

My daughter has made it possible for me to read several recent and very well written history books in succession – Dara Shukoh, the emperor that never was, by Supriya Gandhi, The First Firangis by Jonathan Gil Harris, one of Urbi’s professors at Ashoka University, and a new biography of Akbar the Great Mughal by Ira Mukhoty.  This comes hard on the heels of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy that brilliantly recreates Henry VIII’s England. How pathetic are people who don’t enjoy and profit from reading history indeed (if only to learn how humankind has fought, conquered and survived epidemics with great elan so many times before!). How sad that at least two generations have grown up in this country not knowing this, believing that reading stuff like history is ‘useless’, in the sense that it doesn’t lead to ‘paying’ careers (meaning, typically, becoming cybercoolies, or at best government doctors at vast expense through the private college route), and may even be a serious ‘obstacle’ on that road! I cannot deal in detail with all those books here, but just a few words, in the hope that I can get a few of my readers interested…

The First Firangis should ideally be read as a companion volume to William Dalrymple’s White Mughals. While the latter book is about Englishmen who started living like Indian grandees (focusing on the career of one particular man, James Kirkpatrick), the former is about foreigners – not even necessarily white skinned – who arrived in India when the Mughal empire was at the zenith of wealth, power and glory, meaning the times of Akbar to Shah Jahan (and even the Bahmani kingdoms and Vijaynagar in the south were thriving) and spent extraordinarily colourful lives here, all sorts of people from just travellers to beggars and sadhus, medicine men and courtiers, artists to military commanders, who often even intermarried with the natives and left behind hordes of multi-lingual progeny, vastly increasing the rich complexity of the cultural maelstrom that is India. It not only gives the lie to any claim about the importance of preserving some sort of ethnic purity but makes the very idea of ‘purity’ in this country laughable and dangerous: the ‘purer’ a population is, the poorer it is, culturally speaking: that is a historical truism for all time, added to recent discoveries in genetics. But of course, it makes India uniquely difficult to govern. Which is why a ruler like Akbar will remain a guide and beacon light for would-be rulers forever.

I take pride in saying I knew a lot about the first and greatest Great Mughal already, yet Mukhoty’s book kept me absorbed from the first page to the last. I found out so many things about the man still, such as how maniacally he cultivated the strong man image (riding and taming bull elephants in musth, for God’s sake), how great a patron of art he was, how, despite his lifelong and very violent military campaigns, compassion remained a very strong inner driving force with him, how hard he tried to ameliorate women’s condition and raise their social status against tremendous resistance, how deeply he loved his friends, what a prodigious memory he had as a student of so many different subjects despite remaining functionally illiterate all his life (I wish I had found one such ‘illiterate’ pupil in all my life as a teacher), how deeply he had absorbed what he considered the best tenets from so many religions in the light of his own reason and conscience, how deeply he wished to be the paternal ruler of all Hindustan… the writer manages to paint a glorious picture of the man despite quoting at great length from harsh contemporary critics like the scholar Badauni (it is a measure of Akbar’s greatness that even such men enjoyed not only his tolerance but his munificent patronage!) I can pay no greater tribute to Mukhoty’s writing than to say that I mourned over the chapter that describes the great badshah’s death as though I had suffered a tremendous personal loss. ‘Here was a Caesar. When comes such another?’

There could have just perhaps been another, or at least a pale shadow. That is what Dara Shukoh confirms. He was unusually gentle for a Mughal prince, a truly learned and eclectic scholar of many languages, histories and cultures, he strove lifelong to create, through his own efforts, a genuine Indo-Islamic culture (getting the Upanishads translated into Persian, as Akbar had done with the Ramayana and the Mahabharata), and continued the large-hearted, welcoming tolerance of men of all faiths and racial backgrounds into his court. But he did not have his great grandfather’s boundless energy, steely resolve, ability to judge men and earth-girdling vision nor foresight, he was arraigned against Aurangzeb, for whom he was no match as a strategist or a warrior, and, above all, he was unlucky, so he was put to the sword, and, though the writer asserts that he was ‘neither secular nor liberal’ in the current sense, India’s history, and maybe the whole world’s history (if the Mughal empire had not crumbled so early, and the British did not take over so completely so soon) would have been very different if he had managed to become emperor and carried on the inclusive legacy of the greatest of the Mughals: this biography definitely confirms that long-held and very popular belief among scholars and laymen alike.

What a magnificent epoch the late 16th-17th century was in India, and what horrors followed in the next! We are still to recover from the latter economically and politically, but the even sadder fact is that culturally, we don’t even seem to realize the need to restore the best, most invigorating, most creative features of that glorious age so that bharat abaar jogot shobhay sreshtho ashon lobey. How far can mere blind and parochial chauvinism take us?

A prayer for my grandchildren

There was an Isaac Asimov science fiction story which spoke about a time in the future when technology had ‘advanced’ so much that people had stopped going out of doors into the open entirely. Every house, every building in the city was equipped with a very sophisticated contraption colloquially called a ‘door’, on which you pressed some buttons and you were instantly transported, ‘Beam us up, Scotty’ fashion, from one hermetically sealed, completely sanitized, closed environment – such as your own house – to another, whether it be your school, office, a shopping mall, a friend’s house or a hospital. It goes without saying that there were no parks any more, and nobody dreamt of going to an open-air theatre or stadium. This had been going on for several generations, until people had quite forgotten what the outside was like: all that remained in their minds was an intense horror based upon vague myths about how poisonous, how polluted, how mortally dangerous the great outdoors were.

Now there was this little boy who was sick and tired of living indoors all the time, until his mummy thought he was seriously unhinged, and got a number of doctors to try and cure him, but all in vain. Then one day a tutor came to teach him at home. This man was a poet, a dreamer, someone who knew a lot of history (as distinct from myths) – naturally, someone most people thought was more than a little crazy. By and by he persuaded the little boy that not only was it possible and none too dangerous to venture outdoors physically, without using the ‘door’, but it could actually be a wonderful adventure. So one day when mummy was not around, the two of them actually did the unthinkable. To his unspeakable delight, the little boy found out the wonder and thrill of sunshine and wind and rain and butterflies and birdsong and running  about barefoot in the grass, and realized what he had been missing for so long, thanks to the ‘wisdom’ of his ancestors, and all the ‘progress’ that mankind had made.

In another story written in the same vein, the same Asimov wrote presciently about children learning everything alone at home from robot teachers, to wit, computers, and communicating with other children, even close neighbours, mostly by telephone. Until, while doing a history lesson, one little boy found out and told his dearest friend about places called ‘schools’ that existed in very ancient times, where teachers were human beings with all their quirks, comical faults, pathetic follies and a few loveable qualities, where hundreds of children went together and made friends, played pranks and games, laughed and shared meals and did so many other things together. The two little boys sigh over the knowledge, and over the fun their ancestors used to have in the process of getting educated. That is the name of the story, The fun they had.

If my blessings count for anything, my grandchildren will not miss out on all that fun. Ever. 

P.S., June 29: Imagine, the young smart-alecks among my readers, especially those who think the world has 'advanced' greatly in the last twenty years, that these stories were written more than half a century ago!

Anticipating Unlock 2.0

Several times now in my town wild terror spread with the news (spread mostly by word of mouth or social media) that one or two local people had died of CoViD 19; every time they turned out to be fake. Noting the panic in people’s voices and eyes, it was evident that even that was no reassurance for them at all: mere mention that a handful of people had been infected was received with the same kind of consternation and dismay as though hundreds had actually died overnight. Again and again I asked people – adults, mind you, supposedly educated adults, too: ‘How many among your family members, neighbours, friends, relatives and colleagues have died of this disease?’ and every time they were forced to admit that the number was zero; when I asked them next whether they knew some among family, neighbours, friends, relatives and colleagues who had died of cancer or in traffic accidents, they all admitted they knew lots of such. When I next asked them ‘So why this kind of terror?’ they all sheepishly dropped their eyes and mumbled incoherently. They had no idea why.

There is some reason to hope now that at long last people at the highest levels of government have begun to realize what terrible damage this mindless panic has caused. I watched the PM’s June 17 message to CMs countrywide on YouTube (see here), and he himself, no less, has stressed certain things that I have been saying right from the beginning: 1) the infection and death toll, given India’s population and population density, have been small and very small respectively, 2) a majority of infected people are recovering, 3) for most infected people, the disease is mild or completely asymptomatic, 4) the stigma and unreasoning fear associated with infection has to be removed, 5) the vast majority of infections have occurred in just a few large cities. I hope that this new campaign, this effort to remove the mindless, blind, completely pointless terror will be given momentum in the days to come. That ought to be the main thrust of Unlock 2.0, as and when it happens. By the time it is successfully done, people should have learnt to live with CoViD as just another not too serious disease, and therefore without unreasoning, all-pervasive panic.

Right now, I cannot say what makes me laugh louder with contempt and despair: people walking around with masks hanging from their ears, as though the very presence of the mask will be enough to save them, wearing not needed, or people driving alone inside air conditioned cars, masks tightly in place. ‘Educated’ people, too. Will I ever be able to treat such educated people as adults again, leave alone respect them?

Maybe we can start really unlocking?

So which is your favoured expression, Lockdown 5.0 or Unlock 1.0?

I consider myself among the most fortunate of men in India today. I live in my own house, my loved ones are around me, I have enough to eat, nobody in my immediate family is seriously ill at the time of writing (touch wood!), I can go out for a walk or a bicycle ride or a car drive every day.  And this lockdown has happened towards the fag end of my working life, when I don’t really have to strain every nerve and sinew to make a living and provide for the distant future any more. I guess that puts me among the luckiest 0.01 per cent of the population (that’s one-ten thousandth for the numerically challenged. I have discovered that far more people are like that than would care to admit, but more of that below).

Therefore I have time to look around me, and wonder, and commiserate, and feel terribly, helplessly guilty. I wish this country had been so organized and governed that in any serious crisis, the poorest and least secure did not always have to bear the heaviest part of the burden, always… some people have been walking home for hundreds of kilometers, starving, giving birth and dying on the way, or being treated like dogs by fellow humans (!); others have been transporting pet dogs in chartered aircraft across the country. At my age, after having seen it all, I now know that there are only two great miseries: to be poor while one is alive, and to die a slow, painful, lonely death at last. Like so many times before in history, this pandemic has shown us that for the rich and comfortably off, it is at worst just a nuisance (they have to postpone parties); for all others, it is a true tragedy. Only, in this country they bear it quietly. It is a great privilege if we just let them survive.

The lockdown need not have been imposed with four hours’ notice: of that I am now sure. Given ten days to go home, not only would millions have suffered much less and needlessly; it is very difficult to argue that ten extra days would have spread the disease like wildfire in those early days. They are coming home by the millions anyway, simply because they cannot be held back any longer, and it is now, when the government is becoming increasingly sure that further continuation of the lockdown would spell irreversible disaster for the economy, that the scourge is spreading in really significant numbers. What painful irony!

I have been talking to old boys across the globe: in New Zealand and Germany, the UK and the USA, and nowhere have they taken such draconian clampdown measures as here, though the numbers of infected and killed are proportionately much higher in several of those countries. I shall not quarrel with our great experts and statesmen: perhaps it was absolutely necessary, in a densely packed and gregarious country like ours, to spread a wild panic in order to lock people up in their homes for a prolonged period of time? But one thing I quietly predicted in my own circle was that it would be very hard to put the genie back into the bottle, and that has been vindicated. The mass media – even worse, the ‘social’ media – have been doing us a very great disservice by fanning the flames of fear night and day: so many are being infected, so many are dying, sab khatam ho jayega, koi nahi bachega!...

Very muted voices in high government and business circles are beginning to mumble, at long last, that ‘we shall have to live with this virus for a long time’ (meaning that it would be wise to start shrugging off the panic), and even urging whoever is listening to consider that the numbers should give us reason for cheer rather than gloom. We should not be comparing our numbers with those of tiny nations like Sweden and Italy (honestly, how many ‘educated’ Indians know that the city of Mumbai houses twice as many people as the whole country called Sweden, and that Italy is home to only about two-thirds as many people as the state of West Bengal?); and if we consider the USA, remembering that our population is four and a half times theirs in a land only one-third their size, simple proportionality should have meant that the number of infected in India should have been 5 to 6 million at least by now, and the number of dead, 5-6,00,000. What have we got instead, over the same three month period? Going by today’s numbers on Google, slightly more than one quarter million infected, and slightly more than 7,000 dead. Just stop trembling and think… aren’t we among the luckiest countries in the world? (and I only now mention that if the disease had struck as hard here as in the US, then, given our health care facilities and administrative efficiency, the figures should have actually been far higher than merely proportional – why not 20 million infected and a million dead already? Such things have happened again and again before: it is simply that we have forgotten all our history!) Sure, things are going to get worse before they get better: it is entirely probable that by the time the crisis begins to fade (say by Diwali time, early October), we might have two or three million infected and 40-50,000 dead – including me, as I calmly wrote in an earlier blogpost – my point is, those numbers would still be little more than a drop in the ocean that is India: there are about 27 million births and 10 million deaths per year under normal circumstances! (Google will assure you about all these figures). So isn’t it time we started thinking of other things?

I have been reading of Tudor England, when people lost dearly loved ones every now and then to the plague, and still went about their business as though nothing much was wrong, and I have been re-reading Kenneth Anderson’s hunting stories from the 1950s, and recalling stories told by my grandfather from the days of his childhood, meaning the 1920s, when the vast majority of Indians lived in vastly harsher and more dangerous circumstances, when sudden hurt, loss and death were far closer permanent fellow travellers for most people than today, and I marvel at the fortitude of our forebearers. Were they lesser human beings, or greater? And if we are truly becoming weaker as a species at an accelerating pace, are we going to survive for very much longer? Would the Great Wall of China or the Pyramids of Egypt or the Taj Mahal have been built, vast business organizations created, continents conquered, the most magnificent of music and literature written and the greatest scientific breakthroughs made if we had always lived locked away in little sanitised closets wearing masks and gloves waiting, trembling, for Death to come and take us away?

And my mind keeps drifting back obsessively to the wizened old woman who comes to beg at my door once every few days. Her daughter stays at home with the babies, and the crone will go about in this sweltering heat under a blazing sun until she thinks she has collected enough money to buy the minimum necessities for the day, so that she can go home and her daughter can begin to cook the sparest of meals for all of them to keep body and soul together. In a daze of despair, I think of so many things. Nobody cares for the most wretched of the earth, who don’t even have Aadhar cards and ration cards which might fetch them the occasional doles of rice and lentils. And then I remember females who believe that buying shoes and learning nail art are among the most important things in life, and complain that they cannot find dalgona coffee online, and fulminate that life is so unfair that men ogle at them when they go out in mini-skirts… truly, how much some people suffer!

Oh, before I take your leave, readers: do look up Tanmoy’s blog and Shilpi’s blog. They have been writing very interesting things lately.

P.S., June 09: I am still trying to cheer you up a bit more. Consider: worldwide, including the most advanced countries, 400,000 have died so far, and in India, with nearly a fifth of world population, only 7,000. For God's sake, doesn't that mean that in this country we are almost immune? Also, a recent ICMR study says that in reality many tens of millions may have been infected already, but think sanely, that only means that a microscopic minority of us are dying of this disease; most of the infected are so unaffected that they never even know it happened to them. Take heart! If infected, at worst, most of you will suffer from nothing more than a running nose, a cough and a mild fever for a few days. Hasn't that happened to you a hundred times already? Did you die?

P.P.S., June 15: My ex student Swarnava has been feeling the same way: look up this blogpost.

Lockdown memoirs, part two

Yes, I know I haven’t written for some time, and people have been asking why. My excuse is laziness, but also a little bit of something else: I am terrified of repeating myself, especially seeing that some people have dropped not too subtle hints that I am becoming boring… my frequent readers, you can do me a great favour by giving me the same warning if you too feel that that is indeed becoming the case. Old people become garrulous, and ramble and repeat themselves unselfconsciously. They need to be (mildly-) reprimanded.

My children are complaining that they are desperately sick of staying at home (ha ha: even Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, agrees that permanent work from home would be sick!), and would love to come over for regular classes; that they are even missing the scoldings! I can only say God bless. And I know today how kind Providence has been to me, how much beyond making a living I depend on my pupils year after year to live a good life, how badly I’d miss my work if I were forced to quit even if I didn’t need the money at all. In later years, if I am still at it, I shall only have to find ways of making it less of a routine drudgery…

While it has caused too much (partly avoidable) misery worldwide, I cannot deny that the pandemic scare has also done us some good by forcing a global pause in the pursuit of the ‘ordinary business of life’, to use an expression coined by the great 19th century economist Alfred Marshall. As I noted in an earlier post, crime is down, road accidents are down, pollution is down, but that is just the beginning of the story. The Bengali writer Bani Basu has pointed out that, because of being under house arrest for a very long stretch, many of us have rediscovered how little of material things we can actually make do with: which cannot be but a salutary lesson for all of us, or at least a powerful reminder, which I hope will not be too quickly forgotten. And while we have discovered how many parties we need never attend and how many meetings we need not sit on, we have, I hope, also found how much we need one another’s physical, face to face company, though we do get on one another’s nerves from time to time too, even in very loving relationships. I wonder whether Aristotle actually said (in Greek) that man is a political animal, or was it really ‘social’ animal, as I read when I was a small boy? I hope that a lot of people have found out how much they travel unnecessarily, simply to run away from home or to feel important! It is good that so many people have been forced to discover, or rediscover, how to be fruitfully, enjoyably alone both with a few dearly loved ones, and with themselves, whether it is by meditating or reading or indulging all sorts of hobbies that can be pursued at home. I, for one, have been spending much more time than usual chatting with old boys, whether they live nearby and drop in occasionally, or whether they live half a world away, and can talk only over Whatsapp. It is a genuine pleasure to know that they relish these interactions as much as I do.

What has amazed me, personally, is not the disease and its effects, but how it spread panic worldwide – in our country far more than in many others – because it is so uncharacteristic of human nature, unless human nature itself has changed within the last few decades. We humans did not survive and thrive over hundreds of millennia, nor did we bring so much suffering and destruction upon ourselves through horrors like war, by being so afraid to die! I shall keep writing again and again on this subject, because it touches upon so many things, metaphysical, existential, ethical, etc etc. It takes my breath away. But let that wait for later. However, interested readers might meanwhile review my two old blogposts titled Meditations on death and dying.

Subhasis wrote in his comment on the last post that this once in several lifetimes incident has helped us greatly to know what people are really like. I have been pondering upon that remark for days together. Someone else, a doctor, told me last night he is truly glad to see that the sight of so much human suffering all around has aroused the kind of sympathy and desire to help our fellow man that we had been on the verge of losing. I hope he is right, and even more that it will not be quickly forgotten. Also that a few good habits that people have been forced to cultivate out of sheer terror will not be given up, especially in overcrowded countries like ours, like not crowding and jostling where that sort of thing is not absolutely necessary, not spitting on the street or using the roadside as a toilet – frankly speaking, I am not too optimistic, though I shall be very happy to be proved wrong.

The recent cyclone that blew over Bengal (Amphan, May 20), and wreaked havoc especially over the southern districts and the metropolis of Kolkata has briefly taken people’s minds off the obsession with the spreading virus. I do hope, heartless as it sounds, that more such traumatic things happen and soon, so that millions of foolish folk eventually realize that we have to live with a lot of unpleasant things all the time, because that has always been the human condition, and so start behaving a little more normally again. ‘New normal’ is a historically valid idea, but it takes ages to happen, like manuscripts being replaced by printed books, home tutors for children of the rich by sausage-factory schools for the masses, and horse-drawn carriages by railway trains. They don’t happen virtually overnight, as many people seem to be expecting. Thirty years after the internet began to spread worldwide, there are still millions of people around who are like babes in the wood when it comes to something like online banking.

Among other things, during the lockdown I have discovered Russian child piano prodigy Elisey Mysin. He brought back memories of the wonderful movie August Rush. I can almost agree with one of the comment writers on YouTube that Mysin is Mozart reincarnated. May he have a long life and wonderful career ahead.  Also, I am breathlessly into the just-released Thomas Cromwell trilogy by Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light. My daughter introduced me to the first book, Wolf Hall, a couple of years ago, and now she has bought me the third. I haven’t read fictionalized biographies of this calibre since Irving Stone stopped writing.

By the way, here's the link to a little something I read out from Jim Corbett on Instagram at my daughter's behest.

Well, so much for now. I am writing these memoirs rather like a diary, to make interesting reading for myself and perchance some others many years later, when it will all sound like a fairy tale. Imagining my grandchildren going through it, to think of one example!

Lockdown memoirs

I belong neither to the category of the very poor who are having to cope with extreme privations, nor to that small fortunate section of well-heeled businessmen, politicians and assorted types who have found in the lockdown an unexpected opportunity to further their careers vigorously, so I happen to be one of those whose biggest problem is to cope day in day and day out with boredom, frustration and incipient depression. This is what has been happening to me and immediately around me.

Of the few people who come out on the streets, the vast majority are males again. Without comment.

Beggars are knocking daily at my door after a gap of more than two decades.

Some people – old boys, as well as parents of current pupils, are beginning to say that the lockdown is slowly driving them mad. On the other hand, a lot of people are so scared of being infected and killed that they have virtually stopped even coming out on their balconies. Mostly retired people on pensions and those with assured salaries being deposited in their bank accounts, I am sure. They remind me of Dwijendralal Ray’s poem Nandalal: amazing indeed to think it was written more than a century ago! Who says the world has changed?

This has been a very wet and mild summer: it has rained heavily again and again ever since the middle of April. There are sudden chills; this evening itself there was a thundershower, and I had to wrap myself briefly in a shawl. So my surroundings are lush green, ablaze with flowers of many hues, and actually rather too noisy with bird calls at all hours of the day. I have seen snakes slithering on the roads and large scorpions – not very common sights at all.

The dogs prowling around in packs for scarce food are becoming feral, and a menace to pedestrians after evenfall: I am usually fond of them and they respond with wagging tails, but lately I have taken to carrying a big stick.

‘Learning online’, from my experience, is rather like what we Bengalis call kanthaaler aaamshottwo, or, as one dad put it, learning how to drive by reading a book. But a lot of us are having to make do, pupils and teachers alike. I have not gone for video conferencing, because they are not worth the bother: besides the networks being weak and people’s equipment often not up to the mark, there is more noise, distraction, idle chatter and pointless repetition than real learning of any sort whenever large numbers of youngsters get together. I have restricted myself to posting written lessons and exercises as well as audio lectures in class-wise Whatsapp groups, with an occasional pre-recorded video thrown in (which, to my surprise, have been much appreciated), answering questions via Whatsapp and phone, and correcting homework via email. That is a lot, actually.

And while this is deeply unsatisfactory as a solution over any significant length of time, one very heartening spin-off is that I know now that I don’t have to stay put in my house here for months at a time in future (as I have had to do for more than thirty years) to keep my career going any more. Given that logistics will keep improving – better phones and connections for most people, more robust apps, large screen TV and high quality webcam for me when I feel the investment to be justified, most of my study material stored in the Cloud and accessible from anywhere, I can buzz off for short, suddenly-planned holidays far more frequently, telling my pupils (maybe notifying them minutes before catching a flight!) ‘The next week’s classes will be held over the Net!’ That’s a happy thought.

On the flip side, I have sadly gotten very used to long post-lunch siestas. While I can cheerfully forgive myself given my age and the very long years of toil behind me, it will be quite a wrench – at least for the first few weeks – when daily afternoon and evening classes begin again, as they will sooner or later. Also, I have not been able to get a haircut in more than two months, and it's getting to be a nuisance.

The local markets are quite adequately stocked with essentials like rice, dal, salt, sugar, cooking oil, meat, fish and vegetables (especially vegetables: a great many people, from rickshawpullers to autodrivers, have been forced to turn into roadside vegetable vendors), but there are incipient shortages of processed foods, like Maggi and coffee and Nutella.

It puzzles me why only one hospital in the town has been designated as a CoViD diagnostic cum treatment centre, and that too a private hospital many miles away from the town proper.

A lot of people have told me stories about crowds being beaten up here and there by the police. Yet I have gone around the town several times in the last six weeks, and though I have seen crowds in some places, not once have I seen a police posse roughing them up. I have never been personally accosted either, though the local police patrol sees me taking a walk along deserted streets every evening.

Some people who think they are very wise and prescient are saying that this pandemic scare will change the world forever; others that, given how soon the whole world forgot the Great Pandemic of 1918-1919, everything will be business as usual by this time in 2021. Which side would you lay bets on?

The Decameron was written during the Black Death in Europe. I wonder who is working on some such epoch-making art or science right now, and where, if at all?

So much for now. I’ll be glad to hear from readers who are stuck at home like me.

P.S., May 17: For the record, this was one of the serious irritants I anticipated as reasons for not going in for live classes online by video. I can smirk and tell all those miffed teachers 'I told you so!' 

Urbi's stories

Different people are coping with the lockdown in different ways. My daughter is reading out stories on Instagram. Look her up there: her handle is urbichatterjee.

This is the link to today's story.

P.S., April 30: Want something to smile over? Look up the last two posts on my other blog.  

Endless lockdown: a bewildered lament

I don’t know whether mankind has taken leave of its senses. Read this essay, and this one. At least some people are still thinking like me, here and abroad.

I don’t know whether everyone has forgotten the warning that ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’, whether you picked it up from Gandhiji, or Franklin Roosevelt, or Harry Potter.

I don’t know why panic has been spread like this. Didn’t people die in vast numbers routinely before this, of accidents, pollution, bad genes, other epidemics and just extreme poverty? Has everybody forgotten that panic itself can be a deadly and indiscriminate killer? Recall what they did to anybody suspected of having leprosy in Europe of the middle ages…

I don’t know whether the only people who are all for an indefinite lockdown (at least those who chatter on social media) are those who are both a) bone lazy and basically hate to work, b) assured that even if they don’t work for months at a stretch, their pockets won’t hurt, and c) don’t give a damn about all who are not so lucky, and so do not feel horribly guilty like me. Have we asked the many hundred million who don’t write their opinions on social media?

All non-essential services will remain closed. So everyone from us teachers to actors and sportspersons, everyone in the transport and hospitality and beverage trades, to name just a few, we are all ‘non-essential’, eh? We should remember that forever: this is what society really thinks about us!

Since when did governments start caring about saving every human life, ignoring all other priorities? Why do riots and wars keep happening then, killing truly vast numbers, if governments really care? (I know everybody has forgotten, but there was the Delhi riot as recently as February!)

Is saving lives that important? Since when did it become absolutely essential to stay alive at all costs, regardless of whether such a life is meaningful or not, liveable or not? I for one wouldn’t want to live the life of a helpless cripple in pain, or a starving, freezing, regularly beaten prisoner in a concentration camp, or someone who has been permanently cut off from all work and all loved ones – aren’t there many people who would agree with me, who are privately beginning to lament that living life in an interminable lockdown is not much better than a quick death? In any case, how have we convinced ourselves that if this virus doesn’t kill us, we shall all live happily ever after?

At least our own Chief Minister has said that it is a suffocating situation (dom bondho kora poristhiti), and therein lies some little hope for the likes of me. I fervently pray that next time such a weird thing happens, I will not be around to see it.

Ah yes, many good things have happened too. Crime is down, pollution is down, death by accidents on the roads is down. A lot of people, especially in countries like ours, are re-learning the worth and importance of manual labour, since domestic helps have gone on an undeclared strike. Pity that we could never find more sensible, less drastic ways to solve the same problems.

One last, very sobering thought. I hope all those idiots who used to imagine and boast that science and technology have made us masters of the world will fall silent for a long, long time. Earthquakes, tsunamis and viral epidemics are all Nature’s diverse ways of reminding us, not too gently, that when She wants to strike, mankind must behave just in the same helpless and panic-stricken mode as we used to do hundreds, even thousands of years ago! We need to live with that humbling knowledge instead of hubris…  

Why is CoViD-19 killing at such different rates?

Since the whole world is indulging in every kind of speculation, from very sane to completely lunatic, why shouldn't I join in?

Still, I shall start with hard facts which nobody has denied. China claims to have controlled the epidemic very quickly, even if the death toll might have been several times what they have reported. Most of the rest of Asia has followed suit. Meanwhile, the same toll has been merely creeping up in India: in the month or so since the alarm went out, it has gone up to only about 77 (even the best newspapers cannot wholly agree on the exact figure, leave alone the social media), whereas it is literally galloping in the USA - New York City alone has seen 3,500-odd deaths already, and the numbers show no signs of flattening out yet. One great myth, I hope, has been busted for ever and ever: the Americans are NOT far more advanced than us in all respects. Indeed, though it sounds cruel, it is good to hear that the US president is begging India to send a drug not easily available there (hydroxychloroquine, commonly prescribed for malaria, which, in combination with Azithromycin, seems to be working well on many patients) and accepting a large donation of ventilators from - surprise, surprise - China! (see this news item).

What explains the tremendous difference in numbers? It can't be because we are more God-fearing: there's more than enough of religious loonies in America too. It certainly can't be because we have a far better medicare system (Germany has one that is better than America's, yet there have been a lot of deaths there, too). Surely not very many Indians will claim that it is because our prime minister has superhuman powers to protect us. To my mind, it has to boil down to one of two possibilities, or maybe both: perhaps a hot dry climate does prevent the virus from doing too much harm (look at most of Africa), or maybe simply because we live in far tougher conditions, we have much higher natural immunity. In happier times, I used to joke in class that we have the best bio-weapons in the world: welcome an invading American army with open arms and feed them all on roadside paani-puri: 90% of them will be dead or dying of diarrhoea within three days...

Care to join issue with me, readers? 

Model essay for pupils

[The following essay is supposed to serve only as a guide: do not copy out bits and pieces from it blindly while writing your own]

How I spent the days under lockdown

March 22, the day of the ‘janata curfew’, was incredible: never in my life, not even during the Bangladesh war or the Emergency had the whole town been emptied out as it happened that day. Two days later the countrywide lockdown began.

The night before there had been a scramble as panic-stricken people went out to shop for essentials. But from Wednesday the 24^th, there descended an eerie silence. All day the streets were deserted, save for the occasional bike or car cruising by, and the odd pedestrian or bicyclist. People were seized by a strange, quiet panic. You had to look hard to find someone not wearing a mask of some kind. Whole families were stuck from morning to night within four walls, and TV- and internet usage zoomed. People were binge-watching movies, or obsessively following the latest updates on the spreading infection.

A lot of us found out how hard it is to stay locked up for days on end, and to do all household chores, from cooking to washing to sweeping the floors and doing the dishes all by ourselves. Tempers flared, and unnecessary quarrels erupted. Many of us sought refuge in sleeping for far longer hours than usual, until insomnia took hold, and we tossed and turned in bed for hours. Boredom quickly became so acute that many of us started yearning to get back to work, and swore over and over that we were never going to ask for holidays again. People stayed glued to their phones for hours together, that being the only way to keep in touch with friends and relatives.

I tried all sorts of hobbies that I had forgotten to while away the time, from drawing to playing the harmonica to trying to write stories. I read books in a frenzy. I got used to people looking askance at me every time I went out for a walk, and wished I had been living in one of those countries where doctors were actually asking people to do it, in order to stay fit. I welcomed with open arms any visitor who dropped in, hoping for a hearty chat that could while away an hour or two. But still time hung heavy on my hands, and I kept praying for April 15 to come quickly. May God grant that we may never have to go through another such experience in this lifetime.

(400 words)

Lockdown: faint light at the end of the tunnel?

Kolkata's first three coronavirus patients are apparently on the road to recovery.

South Korea has reported that it already has more people cured and sent home than still under treatment. Meanwhile, the USA, with by far the largest number of infections, has still not decided on a countrywide lockdown. Are they all very stupid compared to us? Or otherwise?

Given our country's gigantic population, and the considerably increased rate of testing of late, people at the highest decision making level should keep in mind how very, very slowly the infection- and death rate is going up: people are dying of coronavirus at the rate of two or three a day (remember, once more, that the normal death rate is 26,000 a day!), not in hundreds, leave alone tens of thousands, as so many doomsayers have been predicting with ghoulish glee over the last fortnight.

The media and opposition parties have rightly begun to point out that the man-made human tragedy caused by the countrywide lockdown could very quickly grow out of all proportion to the cost of the disease itself: see this article, for instance.

The highest civil servant in the central government has denied rumours today that there are any plans to extend the lockdown beyond April 14. We should be glad for small mercies, I suppose. I am also seeing reports that the government has already begun to ease up a bit on the countrywide transport of both essential and non-essential commodities. I wish they would act faster.

A thought: why not focus on the few specific areas where there have been infection flareups, and spare the rest of the country? As someone wrote somewhere very recently, why shut down Puducherry if there are a lot of infections somewhere in Uttar Pradesh?

Meanwhile, daytime temperatures in my town have risen to 36-37 degrees C. I never thought I'd welcome summer, but there is some hope that it might do away with the new virus as it deals with the ordinary flu...

Lockdown, and my daughter's blog

Well, I am far too insignificant a person for my likes and dislikes to affect how the world goes, or even this country, so now we are in a 'lockdown' mode more or less all over India. I have had to cancel classes for a prolonged period entirely against my will, and there is no way I can 'work from home' at a time when social distancing has acquired paramount importance. Today was my first day of enforced indolence, and I didn't like it much. Thank God my daughter is with me. She has the privilege of working from home, though, so maybe she's slightly better off...

In any case, she has written something on being gainfully occupied in the time of Covid-19 which I think all my readers should visit - for their benefit, not hers. If a few of them like it and write in to tell her so, I shall be glad.

P.S., March 25: I have been reading up on the opinions of the best experts, as well as listening to the warnings and counsel of top government leaders from around the world.  I shall cite some of them here. First off, please note that much of the panic is concocted and entirely avoidable: this is the first epidemic, if it is that, in the era of social media, overflowing with fake news of the stupidest, most uninformed and fear-mongering sort, and that is our biggest problem. Note, next, that the disease broke out in China at the end of 2019, and peaked in end-February; they have already brought it under control with a little more than 80,000 infections and 3,000 deaths. Also, though the disease is supposed to have spread worldwide, more than 80% of the deaths outside China have happened so far in only three countries: Italy, Spain and Iran. In India, just before the lockdown began - in a country so densely populated, so poor, so ill informed, so careless about health and hygiene, the number of infected had been a little short of 500, and the number of dead, 10. Remember to stay clean, avoid crowds and catching a cold if you can, and unless you are very young or very old, there is hardly ANY need to worry. Infection does not mean you have to fall ill, 80% of those who fall ill show only mild symptoms, and, I repeat, the fatality rate is very low, unless you are old and already ill with other diseases (read this article, especially the last lines). Lockdown is good to slow the spread and succour the desperately stretched healthcare services, but I shall stick my neck out and lay a wager on two things: the government will not be able to maintain the lockdown for very long without resorting to draconian measures which is bound to turn public opinion quickly and sharply against it (see the last lines of the linked article), and millions are NOT going to die. Please read this interview of one of the world's top 'virus hunters'.

I must also note, in passing, that one over-zealous chief minister (I won't even deign to speculate either on his IQ or his sense of humanity and decency) has threatened a 'shoot at sight order' in case people are found outdoors. The message, unless I have got it all wrong, is this: you are free to die of an accident or heart attack or snake bite, but we'd kill you if you risk dying of the coronavirus. With rulers like these, what hope for the ruled?

Meanwhile, I worry terribly about a) the fate of the vast majority of our poor working class who are in the unorganized sector, and have no social security or insurance or savings to fall back upon: how are they going to survive almost a month with no earnings? (read this article: one of them has told the reporter he is far more likely to die of hunger than of the virus); b) how are essential supplies going to be maintained for weeks with so many restrictions on mass movement of goods and people? and c) won't a vast number of people go mad with sitting at home doing nothing, even if they have enough to eat?

March 26: The worries are mounting rapidly. Do look up this article and this one in today's newspaper. Another concern is that given the cramped and unhealthy conditions in which a very large number of people live (think of metro slums), locking them all at home may not help too much to contain the infection.

I am truly glad that the central government has at least begun to move on the other great concern - how to prevent the vast number of poor from suffering too much - by announcing a large relief package. Knowing how leaky, clumsy and slow government delivery systems are, however, I strongly believe that the well-off public at large should come forward to help. I have started doing my bit; I hope a lot of my readers will do the same locally by contributing to relief funds and programmes being set in motion by NGOs and individual social activists. Every little helps: a thousand rupees donated by ten million individuals each (let's say everyone who owns a car and a decent house) would make a fund of Rs. 1,000 crore. That can feed a lot of people for a month or two.

March 28: It seems that the epicentre of the infection has now moved to the USA, while it is slowing down in Europe. And for some humour, look this up on my other blog.

March 29: It's barely a week into the countrywide lockdown, but I think anger is beginning to spread among a lot of people who do not enjoy the luxury of sitting at home for weeks and months on end without significant hurt to their stomachs or their pockets...

Coronavirus: are we hyperreacting?

I am writing this because several people have prodded me to. This is my take.

I have no idea why a very influential and supposedly responsible organization like the WHO has started bandying around words like epidemic and pandemic, despite the Director-General himself saying they should not be used carelessly. Well, let's look at a few very recent figures.

Since the scare began at the start of the year, a little more than 5,000 people have died, 3,200 of them in just one country, China. Out of 80,000+ who were infected there, nearly 67,000 have recovered already.

In the US, a little more than 3,000 infected people have been identified, and 60 have died (that's two per cent, by the way, and a little more digging will probably reveal most of them were old and weak and even ill already).

In India, positively identified infections has just risen beyond 100, and the number of deaths so far is 2 (oh, no, some will tell me: you are way off the mark; the actual number is 3).

Put this a little in perspective. Without a pandemic/epidemic of any sort, the number of normal deaths per day is 150,000 (two-thirds of age-related causes); 26,000 in India alone. That's almost 55 million a year (by the way, 150,000 people died in road accidents in India alone in 2018, and no sign of any alarms anywhere!).

As for epidemics and pandemics. When I was a child I was told of cholera and malaria epidemics which killed off whole villages in a matter of days, hundreds of thousands before the storm abated. The greatest pandemic we know of, the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918-19, also called the Spanish Flu, killed off 20 to 50 million worldwide; some experts claim nearly 100 million, or nearly 3% of the world population at that time!

By reacting as we are, putting whole nations in lockdown mode, we shall probably be doing economic harm to ourselves on a scale from which it will take many decades to recover. Talk of mass hysteria...

Also, everybody seems to have forgotten about similar scares which arose and subsided quickly without doing significant harm in the fairly recent past:mad cow disease, chicken flu, swine flu, Ebola, Zyka, H1N1, SARS and on and on. Even  AIDS didn't create a tiny fraction of this kind of consternation worldwide!

So my take is very well expressed by this letter-to-the-newspaper writer. It is good that we are taking precautions, so that the death toll may be limited to a few thousands, but I am not sure we are doing it the best way.

And yes, as I write this, I am perfectly well aware that the new virus could kill me, but equally that, statistically speaking, there are at least ten much more likely ways that I might die. And no, I am not going to drink cow's urine as a potent preventive, even to save my life.

If some of my readers think this is the voice of informed and sound common sense, please share it with as many people as you can, in the larger public interest. 

P.S., March 18: Here is an article by an infectious-disease trained epidemiologist which can help to calm your nerves, if you can read, understand, think and remember. 

Mamata's minions making millions: how amazing?

Mamata Banerjee’s electoral advisor Prashant Kishor (already notorious statewide as ‘PK’) is apparently dismayed to find out that while Didi deliberately lives an austere lifestyle, her footsoldiers, even far down the line (including municipal councillors) are living it up and flaunting it. He fears that this could boomerang on the party at the hustings next time round, because the opposition – read everyone from the BJP to the CPI(M) – could make a noisy issue out of it.

Who in this country pretends to be surprised at this late date? Read my three-part essay on corruption. Personally, I would lay much of the blame for the persistence of the disease on the mass media: they hold the spotlight steadily and harshly on those at the very top, to wit prime ministers and chief ministers, so that they have to keep forever to the straight and narrow or go the way of Lalu Prasad and Jayalalitha (in fact, when I am in a cynical mood, I often say that I would much rather leave the top jobs to others: too much trouble, too little scope of wholesale loot!), and pay scant attention to how the minions are feathering their own nests with impunity. The saying in political circles, indeed, is that if you can become and stay a councillor for two successive terms, your children can live in gravy all their lives without doing a day’s honest work.

In fact, it has been at least three generations since most young people who have known they cannot make a good enough living in any ‘respectable’ profession and don’t have the stomach for a life of wholesale and large-scale crime, take to politics as a duck takes to water. They have no ideology and no ideals and no goals beyond enriching themselves quickly and effortlessly through the bribes, cutbacks and speed money that come with assumption of office. They always know which side of the bread is buttered, they quit fading parties like rats deserting a sinking ship,  they always salute the rising sun, and they keep changing badges over and over again. The real tragedy of our political life is that this type has become too numerous to satisfy all of them, and too impatient and fickle, so the top leaders, who have to utilize their money and muscle and loyalty to grab power and hold on to it are always living on a powder keg with a slow fuse attached; the ancient saying ‘uneasy lies the head that wears the crown’ has acquired a much more sinister immediacy in these ‘democratic’ days than in the days when real kings ruled! I remember India’s political history clearly since the early 70s, I pity the leaders of Congress, CPI(M), Trinamool, BJP and the rest equally, and I marvel at the composure and (short-lived? suicidal?-) self-confidence of top leaders who have to rely on this kind of human material to govern this land or even parts of it.

I have said and not once before that the roots of the malaise lie in four social factors:

1.      Far too many people have become convinced that a flashy and expensive lifestyle alone gets you widespread social approval, despite all our high-falutin’ talk about the nobility of 'plain living and high thinking',

2.      Far too many people, who started off poor or hard up, can see politics as they have understood it as their only passport to quick money and ‘fame’ (notoriety, to their minds, does almost quite as well: no harm in occasionally spending a few months in jail if that ensures the five-star lifestyle for the rest of the year),

3.      There is too little systemic surveillance, condemnation and punishment of that kind of living.

4.      Every opposition party goes all out to hoist the one in power on this ‘corruption’ petard, knowing full well all the time that those whom they are luring into their own camps from the ruling dispensation are being drawn only by the tacit promise of carrying on making the ill-gotten gains they have got habituated to making for a few more years. 

So those who pretend to beat their breasts over the rottenness of the system are either naïve and ignorant, or very cynical but want to look good in their own circles (just the same as claiming loudly that only others, ‘bad people’, watch porn!), or just have too many idle hours to kill every day in useless chatter. The comfortably salaried, holier than thou, middle-aged  middle class is the most culpable.

There: I have just ensured that like John Stuart Mill, I am never going to win an election myself!

[Oh, and it would be remiss of me if I didn't mention that I am very pleased that the post titled 'Addendum to the population bomb post' has stayed so long on the most-read list, and the post on Father Wavreil has come back, and the one titled 'Missing you, my heart' too: though the memory of the girl - besides my own daughter - who caused me to write it only makes me want to puke these days: how could I have been stupid enough, at fifty, to be besotted with someone so completely ordinary, common and nondescript? I often think that most women can live with a modicum of safety and decency only because the average man is so docile and tolerant and gullible.]