Filling in my diary

Back in Durgapur, daughter with me, because after two months alone in Delhi, she decided that if she has to work endlessly from home, it’s best to stay for long stretches with the parents. I am not complaining! Delighted that Andal airport has reopened: it makes travelling so much faster and cheaper. The Air India flights have been replaced by Spice Jet, and they fly at decent hours, so no more getting up at ungodly hours on bitterly cold winter mornings.

Would like to start classes, at least with the senior year, in November. I hope it works out, but I am not being too optimistic: best strategy against avoidable disappointment. (The crowds on the roads these pujo days have given me some reason for cheer, though).

Delhi was already cool, so I found Durgapur hot on the first day. There was also a very dense cloud cover: I could see the ground from the air only when the aircraft had descended to a few hundred feet. We had to use the air conditioner the first night, while we had been shivering in the morning! But the change in the weather, though very slow, is still perceptible. The sky is azure, the breeze is gentle, and though the sun is still hot, the evenings come sooner, and there is a nip in the air if you go out in the late evening on a two wheeler in shirtsleeves. The IMD has predicted a long winter with several cold waves, I have noticed.

This was the first time since it was built, back in 1988, that the house had been under lock and key continuously for a month. We are still busily cleaning up. I was glad that some current pupils visited me on the very first morning after my return.

Vegetable prices have gone through the roof here. I wonder why. The newspaper says people are eating much more fish and meat instead: exactly the opposite of what the doctors would recommend amidst the ongoing pandemic!

One very good recent development that I noticed in Delhi is that a lot of people have taken to riding bicycles again, and not only poor folk either. I think the government should strongly encourage the trend – one way would be to subsidize bikes for poor people, another to mark bicycle lanes along the sides of roads. I badly miss good, smooth footpaths in Delhi as much as in Durgapur, though otherwise both are so good for walkers. Delhi, at least, has huge parks galore, but here we don’t even have that much, something I keep grouching over endlessly…

Our prime minister has been growing his now-snow white beard ever since the lockdown days began, as I am sure lots of people have noticed. It has given him a distinctly wise-old-sadhubaba look. Is it simply because he has been avoiding the physical closeness that a barber’s work entails?

I read somewhere recently that China’s economy has been growing, albeit slowly, all through this year – the only one among the ten biggest economies to do so in the coronavirus year, while all others have gone into a tailspin, India included. And China is where the pandemic began! What do the Chinese know and do that we don’t? It is high time the whole world started studying them seriously without bias and preconceived notions (such as that capitalism works best without state involvement, or that the price in terms of oppression of the masses in such a regime is not worth paying) – much more seriously than we have done since the People’s Republic was established. If we cannot learn and follow quickly in their footsteps, then, regardless of what any non-Chinese thinks, wants or likes, no one will be left in any doubt by 2050 that this is definitely going to be the Chinese century…

Book review: Korma, Kheer and Kismet

For those of my old readers who might be flabbergasted to see me reviewing a cookery book, I shall only say, imitating Sherlock Holmes (who was himself paraphrasing Shakespeare), ‘I trust that age cannot wither nor custom stale my infinite variety’. Only, a very great deal of the credit must go to my daughter.

The wheel has come round full circle. I tried with every fibre of my being to make her an avid reader with an eclectic palate; now, over the last few years, she has been increasingly guiding my reading, introducing me to some writers to whom I have grown addicted, like Madhulika Liddle and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Julian Rathbone. Not that she actually told me to read a book on cooking, but I had been rummaging through her ever growing collection when this book, Korma, Kheer and Kismet by Pamela Timms caught my attention after I had casually flipped through the first few pages, and I literally devoured it at little more than one sitting, then liked it enough to write about it here.

Needless to say, the book is much more than a mere catalogue of recipes, else I would not have bothered: I am quite a gastronome, but one of the odd few who have never bothered to learn how to cook the simplest meal themselves, so no reading material could be less interesting to me than a cookery book as such. I have always shown my profound respect – not to say awe – of the culinary arts by both being content with whatever regular meals I have been fed by the women in my life and also paying back their special efforts with the most fulsome praise I could muster, or at least bearing up with stoic silence when they occasionally turned out to be disasters (some people in my family still laugh with guilty wonder over how I ploughed through a cup of supposed tea where the herb had been mistakenly replaced by kalo jeere – black cumin – or a largeish plate of visually appealing pudding that had been untouched by sugar). This has always been one of my conceits: that if no woman feeds me with love, there will always be some eatery not too far away which would fill my belly as long as I have money in my pocket, and if even such things – lately bolstered by services like Swiggy and Zomato – someday fall beyond my reach, I shall decide that my Maker has rung the final bell, and be calmly reconciled to my fate. I have come a long way with that outlook unchanged. But as I was saying...

Pamela Timms and her husband Dean are natives of Scotland, both journalists. They came to Delhi experimentally for a year in 2005, fell in love with this magical city (as I have been over the last two years) and stayed on till 2015. The book is subtitled Five Seasons in Old Delhi, and the whole book is unapologetically dedicated to her adventures in the dingy, damp, cluttered, maddeningly crowded, thoroughly unhygienic, noisy and occasionally dangerous serpentine lanes and bylanes on and off Chandni Chowk, savouring the vast variety of mouth watering street food that the city rustles up daily for pockets deep and shallow, hunting down the creators even at ungodly hours to watch them work and perchance to wangle some of their secret recipes out of them, then trying them out at home with her own innovations and improvisations and jotting down the recipes of those dishes which turned out to be somewhat better than just successful. All this she has described in the most luminous and evocative prose that went into, first, her blog Eat and Dust, and finally took the shape of this 2014 book, which someone like myself – unlikely candidate as I am – can certify as good literature. Below are a few samples of her writing that persuaded me to make a blogpost out of it.

Here is a description of what happens when the much awaited food arrives before a hungry and impatient crowd of diners in one of those famous hole in the wall eateries that have been carrying on for generations: ‘...a nervy silence gripped the diners; then at last the rotis were ready and plates of korma were unceremoniously slapped down in front of us. Juicy pieces of mutton shimmered in a lake of deep mahogany sauce – so far removed from the anaemic, gloopy, bland concoctions that go by the same name in British curry houses as to be an entirely different species. Armed with pieces of hot, crisp, coriander-laced rotis, we all dived in. Some immediately started chewing on the bones but most of us made straight for the gravy. The first taste was an eye-watering blast of chilli heat that had me spluttering and reaching for the water bottle. This was quickly followed by layers of more nuanced, elusive ingredients – ‘up to thirty different spices’, one of my dining companions assured me between mouthfuls – in a devilish pact with ghee. The meat itself had been cooked long and slow, and fell away easily from the bone at a nudge from the bread. For the few minutes it took us to devour our korma, no one uttered a word, and we paused only to signal to the waiters when more rotis were required. Too soon, we were again staring at empty plates, this time with no hope of a refill. The day’s korma was already sold out.’

For those with a sweet tooth, on the other hand, here is a rhapsody on that ethereal delight called daulat ki chaat, snack of wealth: ‘one of the great highlights of the winter is a heavenly milky dessert that makes a brief but unforgettable earthly appearance in the gullies of Old Delhi almost as soon as the last Diwali firecracker has fizzled. From then until Holi, the chaat vendors wander through the bazaars, their snowy platters dazzling in the pale sunshine, as if a dozen small, perfectly formed clouds have dropped from the sky... the taste is shocking in its subtlety, more molecular gastronomy than raunchy street food, a light foam that disappears instantly on the tongue, leaving behind the merest hint of sweetness, cream, saffron, sugar and nuts; tantalizing, almost not there... the means by which a pail of milk is transformed into the food of the gods, though, is the stuff of Old Delhi legend rather than of the food lab.’ And she goes on to narrate the kind of tale that would fit in seamlessly into The Thousand and One Nights.

And though this last passage is not strictly about Delhi and therefore does not really belong to the book, being about the ecstasy that tasting roadside kulcha and chhole in Amritsar (which some Indian friends had described to her as the ‘street food capital of India’, though as a proud Bengali I should have liked her to reserve judgment until she had toured our own great metropolis) at the crack of dawn brought her, I cannot resist the temptation of quoting a part of the lyrical description here: ‘I was wary, but also cold and famished... I broke off a small piece of the bread and scooped up some of the chickpeas. It took a couple of mouthfuls before I noticed the extraordinary texture of the kulcha – buttery, flaky shards, as if the finest Parisian feuilleté had been combined with a perfectly spiced nugget of soft potato. Then the chhole – melting, nutty, vibrant pulses – spicy yet soothing. A third element on the plate brought it all together – a sour tamarind sauce cutting brilliantly through the buttery bread and creamy chickpeas, making the whole dish sing its heart out... I felt, as M. F. K. Fisher once did, “a kind of harmony, with every sensation and emotion melted into one chord of well-being” ’.

Well, if you liked those little snippets, there’s 166 pages of it. And then,  like the perfect topping on a great cake, there are the few concluding pages spelling out the already obvious fact that the writer's labour of love was not really about food but about people who made Delhi 'home' for her. That is what endeared her to me. Go and read the book, and may it give you the same delight as it gave me. Many thanks, Ms. Timms. I hope you read this review, and come back and write some more about the India that you have come to love.

As for me, I am off on another flight of culinary wonderment with Chitrita Banerjee’s Bengali Cooking, seasons and festivals. Pupu has got me hooked.

In Delhi

 My family has been through a very nasty crisis - certainly much worse than in 2015 when I broke my leg and was partially incapacitated for nearly six months, and even than 2017, when my father died a slow and painful death - and it is still far from over. Nevertheless, because every cloud has a silver lining, I have, after prolonged reflection, decided that it has taught me a few valuable lessons which I shall live by till I pass on. Most significantly, that nobody except blood (my daughter) really cares (if some do, they live too far away to be of any practical use) - those who picked me up and took me to the hospital when I had that accident were mostly strangers, and those who helped during my father's troubled last days were mostly paid service-providers.

For whatever duration I live hereafter, I shall have to go it alone (even more than Harry Potter, I have realized this rather late in the day), barring maybe only my daughter, and that too if she is around to help  before it is too late. The flip side of the coin is, I can forever stop worrying about the welfare of other people. The world is welcome to take care of itself. Meanwhile, in my desperate loneliness, it has been wonderful to stay with my daughter and help with the housework. Living out my old age before I had anticipated it, and I can't say that I don't like it, even doing the dishes and taking out the trash!

Katha Daan Utsav

This is about helping people again: children who can benefit from your assistance to get along with their education in these unusually troubled times.

My daughter is closely involved with the project. I thought it won't hurt to give it whatever little publicity I can.

Click on this link to find out more about the 'wish tree' that she and her friends have put up on their organizational website. The link will be operational till October 08, so if you want to act, please don't delay.

I should have posted this yesterday, Gandhi Jayanti, but I was too upset about certain things in the family to remember in time.

Wikipedia abegging

 Last month, Wikipedia was begging for donations in order to keep going.

I gave Rs. 3000. If things had not been rather dire under the Covid situation, and if I had not already given to very many charities within the last six months, I’d of course have given much more, and I am still ashamed. They also let me know that the average donation was Rs. 150. Imagine. Wikipedia has hundreds of millions of users; there are many multi-millionaires among them, someone as humble as me gave 3000, yet the average donation is Rs. 150. So how much do most donors give – five rupees, or ten?

This brought back to mind a post that I wrote here twelve years ago: Charity and other things. Do look it up before you read further. This post will be about charity, and whether it is good or wise to depend upon alms (bhikhsha) if you want to make an impact on the world, however small.

Recall that many of the greatest religions have enjoined beggary upon those who tread the Way – the Buddhist sramana is called a bhikhshu; the Hindu sadhu has always been expected to survive on charity. The idea is that you live as simply/inexpensively as you can, and put no burden on your fellow man for your physical sustenance: you survive on whatever they give you out of the goodness of their hearts, demanding nothing (over the millennia, it has not remained so simple and humble: people were first taught they would acquire great merit by giving alms to holy men, and later threatened with future hellfire and untold torments on earth if they did not give, even unto their own near-destitution: that is how the old churches and temples grew fabulously rich!). Look at the reverse of the coin; numberless humble householders have been convinced, partly or wholly, that it is one of the most important religious duties to give in charity.

And it has worked wonders over the ages, too. Anathapindada the sreshthi, who might be called the Bill Gates of sixth century BCE India became a monk and gave away everything he had to the Buddha: that is how the Sangha got going! Much more than a thousand years later, the great Sufis like garib nawaz Hazrat Khwaja Muinuddin Chisti, quite like the even later Sikh gurus, enjoined upon their followers that they must keep giving so that no man who came to their door went away hungry – and the great kadhais at the Ajmer dargah remain as busy today as the kitchens of the Jagannath temple at Puri or the langar at any gurudwara. When Akbar visited Har ki Pauri in Hardwar he saw that thousands of mendicants were fed daily out of the charity of the countless punya seekers who came to the ghats daily to wash away their sins, and the donation collectors, to whom I have talked at length tell me they take every offering from a rupee upwards, and never raise an eyebrow when someone signs over a cheque for a million – they have seen it a thousand times before, and Akbar was told already in the late 16^th century that it was an immemorial custom. Vidyasagar came to be called doyar sagar, the ocean of charity, with very good reason, though no one who knows Bengalis up close will dare claim that he was a typical Bengali. Also, in this day and age, Gates and Buffett and other super-tycoons have pledged to give away 95% of their astronomical fortunes to worthy causes before their deaths. And yes, after more than a decade, Wikipedia is still going strong despite not carrying ads and not pricing their services, aren’t they?

Yet, surviving on pure charity, depending wholly on the goodness of your fellow man’s heart, is very hard, very wearying, very likely to grind you down to disillusionment, disgust and despair. Vivekananda during his wanderings across India often went unfed, despite Kipling’s assertion that no sadhu in India ever goes hungry; Tagore had to beg likewise to put Viswabharati on its feet, my daughter has had pretty depressing experiences, and the pathetic way in which those who run something as precious as Wikipedia have to beg brought tears to my eyes at least. I, for one, though God knows how many pupils’ fees I have waived when their parents complained of being in dire financial straits, hate it when I am cheated by people whom I know to be well off, and have made my anger so searingly clear to so many that I am much feared (and perhaps secretly reviled-) for it. I won’t be greedy, I swore to myself a very long time ago, but I won’t depend on people’s honesty and charity either – it is too untrustworthy, too dangerous.

So I wish Wikipedia (are you listening, folks?) would stop begging and make theirs a paid service. A very nominal fee: perhaps a rupee for every time I click on any of their articles? If I click 3,000 times a year, and have to pay 3000 rupees for it, why not? They would rake in billions, I would be every kind of a crook and liar if I said I cannot afford that, and that is equally true for millions of users, including I am sure tens of thousands who earn ten, a hundred, a thousand times more than I do! This too one must remember: few people want to pay anything at all if they think that they can go on enjoying something for free. Jimmy Wales, I don’t want you to wind up for lack of funds, so think about it.

Teachers' Day gift

 Well, apparently not quite ALL!

Tanmoy Chakrabarti, with whom I go back nearly thirty years, has thought it fit to recollect our classes together on his video blog. Take a look.

My heart is full, Tanmoy. My most loving blessings upon you and your family.

ar ami pari na

 যতদূর পুরোনো দিনের কথা মনে পড়ে আমি খুব একাএকাই ছিলাম। সময় কেটেছে মূলতঃ বইয়ের সঙ্গে আর নিজের মনেমনে অনন্তর কথা বলে। মা-বাবাকে তেমন করে কাছে পাইনি, বরং তাঁরা ভয় আর ভুলবোঝাবুঝির কারণই হয়েছিলেন অনেক বেশি। কাউকে দোষ দিতে চাইনা, অনেক দোষ আমারই। দাদু-দিদার অনেক আদর, অকুন্ঠ স্নেহ পেয়েছি, সেকথা পঞ্চমুখে স্বীকারও করে এসেছি সারাটা জীবন, আর সেই স্বর্গসুখ হারানোর দুঃখও কোনদিন ভুলতে পারলাম না। বড় হতে হতে অনেক কথা বলার তাগিদ অনুভব করতে লাগলাম, শিক্ষকতা করার কাজটাও শুরু হয়ে গেলো অত্যন্ত কম বয়স থেকে, করতে গিয়ে দেখতে পেলাম পড়ার বাইরেও অনেকে আসে আমার সঙ্গসুখ পেতে, আর সে তৃপ্তি অন্যকে দিতে দিতে মনে হতে লাগলো আমিও পরম তৃপ্তি পাচ্ছি। তাই থেকে গেলাম এ'কাজ নিয়েই। আজ প্রৌঢ়ত্বের শেষ সীমায় এসে পৌঁছেছি। অনেক কিছু পেয়েছি, হারিয়েছিও অনেক কিছু। অন্য মানুষকে চির-মূল্যবান কিছু দিতে পারবো বলে যে বিশ্বাস একদা জন্মেছিলো তা ভেঙে খানখান হয়ে গেছে। ডানাভাঙা পাখি ডানা জুড়ে যাওয়া পর্যন্তই কাছে থাকে, সেবা-স্নেহ নেয়, তারপর অবধারিতভাবে বাসা ফেলে উড়ে যায়, পিছন ফিরে আর দেখে না। সবাই 'বড়' হয়ে যায়, সবার কর্মময় ব্যস্ত জীবন হয়ে যায়, সবার কাছে ক্রমশ অপ্রয়োজনীয়, অপ্রাসঙ্গিক, বোঝা হয়ে যাই। সবাই, সবাই। কারো মোহ কাটতে ছ'মাস লাগে, কারো বিশ বছর, এইটুকুই যা তফাৎ। তবে আসলে তো পাখি নয়, মানুষ, তাই অনেকে শুধু ভুলে গিয়েই ক্ষান্ত দেয় না, নিজে ভুলে গিয়ে আশা রাখে যে সে কিন্তু চিরটাকাল আমার স্মৃতির মণিকোঠায় জ্বলজ্বল করবে! অনেকে আবার গালিও দেয়। মানুষ তো! শুধু করুণ  হাসি পায় ভাবতে যে কতজনই না বলে গেলো 'আমি তোমায় কোনদিন ভুলবো না, চিরকাল যোগাযোগ রাখবো'!

Abou ben Adhem কবিতায় লেখা আছে, যে মানুষ মানুষকে ভালোবাসে, ঈশ্বর তাকেই সবচেয়ে বেশি স্নেহ করেন। কেন করেন? সবাই মানুষকে ভালোবাসে না কেন? কারণ বলা অতি সোজা, কাজটা প্রায় অসম্ভব।এটুকু খুব দুঃখময় গর্ব করেই বলবো, আমার মতো এতকাল ধরে খুব বেশি লোক প্রাণপণে চেষ্টা করে  দেখে না।  এক তো আমার নিজের অনেক দোষ, ঈর্ষা ক্রোধ ভয় কুসংস্কার দ্বেষ সংকীর্ণতা-ভরা মন, সে মন খুলে মানুষকে ভালোবাসা যে বিষম কাজ! যদি বা প্রাণের তাগিদে সেসবের হাত থেকে কিছুটা মুক্তি পেলাম, উর্দ্ধে উঠলাম, কিন্তু মানুষ ভালোবাসা নিতে পারে কৈ? সব তো দু'দিনের। তারা শুধুই ভালোবাসা চায়, দিতে নাচার, যা দেয় তাও  ক্ষনিকের, তারপর ভুলে যায়, ছেড়ে যায়, মন বদলে ফেলে, অন্যত্র সে জিনিস খোঁজে। কেউ কেউ মুখে লাথি মেরেও যায়, মজা পায়। তারপর এও  সত্যি, যে 'বড়' হতে হতে সবাই আস্তে আস্তে আমার বহু দোষত্রুটি আবিষ্কার করে, সেগুলোই মনের ভিতর অন্ধকার ছেয়ে  দেয়, তখন যা কিছু একসময়ে ভালো লেগেছিলো তা আর মনে পড়ে না। অনেকের কাছেই আবার তর্কে জয়-পরাজয়টা  বড় হয়ে দাঁড়ায়, 'আমি ঠিক' এটাই যেমন করে হোক প্রমাণ করতে হবে, ওসব ভালোবাসা-টালোবাসায় গুলি মারো। আর সেরকমভাবে যখন আমার বিচার হয়, তখন নিজের অজান্তেই এভাবে চিন্তা করে... 'উনি কেন সর্বগুণসম্পন্ন নন?' যেন আমাকে বাদ দিয়ে তারা অনেক perfect মানুষ দেখে এসেছে, আর তাই যদি না হলাম তো ভালোবাসবে কী করে? - কে পারবে এইরকম মাপকাঠিতে উৎরে যেতে?

তো আমি আজকাল প্রায়শঃই বলে থাকি যে আর মানুষকে ভালোবাসতে পারি না, হাল ছেড়ে দিয়েছি। স্বভাব যায়না ম'লে, তাই বোকার মতো নিজের ইচ্ছার বিরুদ্ধে এখনো চেষ্টা করে যাই, তবে জানি, ব্যর্থ হওয়াই আছে কপালে। আসলে না, ন্যাড়া বেলতলায় যেতেই থাকে, শিক্ষা হয় না! তবে হ্যাঁ, এটা বুঝি, ভগবান বুদ্ধ কেন বলে গেছেন  জীবন দুঃখময়, খৃষ্টধর্মেও কেন বলে this world is a vale of tears. জৈন মহামুনিদের তো বলাই হয় 'তীর্থঙ্কর', অর্থাৎ কিনা যাঁরা বৈতরণী পার হতে সাহায্য করেন।

তাই এই মানসিক অবস্থায় বর্তমান পরিস্থিতিতে আমার অন্তত অপার বিস্ময় লাগে এই দেখে যে আমার থেকেও যাঁরা অনেক বেশিদিন বেঁচেছেন, জীবনযুদ্ধের জ্বালায় জেরবার হয়েছেন, তাঁদেরও কেন মরতে এত ভয়, এই জীবনকে আঁকড়ে থাকার এত আকুতি! ঢের তো দেখলি বাবা, এখনো  আশ মিটলো না?

Strange contemporaries in history

When I turn the pages of history, I sometimes notice something truly remarkable. If I think about it for a while I become confused and distracted, all well-reasoned schemata regarding how to think about the world fall apart, and it seems to me that the relentless efforts of scholars to make some theoretical sense of the great flood tide of human affairs is forever doomed to futility, no more than a child’s prattle or the rantings of a madman. – Precisely when Sri Chaitanya Dev was stirring up a revolutionary fervour of love for the Divine Krishna in Bengal, Leonardo da Vinci was making the first detailed and accurate drawings of a foetus in the womb, and the first engineering drafts of what would become the helicopter several centuries later, while the successors to Vasco da Gama and Columbus were raising their victorious pennants in newly discovered lands to the east and west of Europe. Just when Sri Ramakrishna was sitting at the Kali temple in Dakshineshwar and soothing the hearts and minds of his compatriots with the elixir of his message of a universal, all-embracing religion of tolerance and acceptance bathed in the mystic aura of the Mother, the godless intellectual whiplashes of Darwin and Marx were arousing Europe to a frenzy of both anxiety and activity. And it seems that precisely at the same time the gun-toting hard-riding cowboys, equally innocent of both great currents in the life of the mind, were having a great time creating the legend of the Wild West on the vast plains of North America!

Lenin, Henry Ford and Tagore shared the world’s stage; in the same terrible century men hurled the atomic thunderbolt on the heads of their fellow men, while Gandhi did his life’s work. it takes one’s breath away to think of what might have transpired if they had met and talked at length. In the same age and continent, some were hailing the writer of Principia Mathematica as God’s gift to man, while others were burning wretched helpless women alive by the thousands on suspicion of being witches, while yet others were destroying highly evolved civilizations like those of the Incas out of the lust for gold. We are told that Chenghiz Khan, Roger Bacon and Saint Thomas Aquinas were near-contemporaries. The emperor Cyrus and the Tathagata Buddha, great conquerors both, were separated by hardly a blip on the vast time scale of history; so were Aristotle and Alexander (who knows but eastern philosophy got its first foothold on European soil through the teachings of the ‘naked bearded sages from the banks of the Ganges’ that Aristotle had requested his pupil to bring him?); as were Pablo Picasso, Charlie Chaplin and Mao ze Dong. So were Benjamin Franklin, Jagat Seth and and the great shogun Yoshimune in Japan! – just as, in our own time, some people are sending off exploratory spacecraft towards the boundaries of the solar system, while others living in the same age are stoning people to death on the charge of being heretics and blasphemers, or trying to ascend to heaven up the coils of smoke given off marijuana-filled reefers.

And yet we are supposed to believe that all the myriad threads of this vast swirling mystery without beginning or end are tied together, playing the same harmonious melody, and one great sage or the other holds the failsafe key to the riddle.

[I wrote this essay originally in Bengali 31 years ago, in May 1989, six years before my daughter was born. I was recently reminded of it when she was musing over the phone – as we often do – that she had been struck by the same sort of remarkable coincidences during her own studies in history. I was almost 26 then, she is almost 24 now: that too!

For something else I wrote back then, see this post]

P.S., August 22: I am delighted that the post titled What really mattered has come back to hold a high position on the most-read list just because I provided a link to it. In the absence of meaningful comments, I wonder how many actually read, understood, thought about it and were affected by it, though! And I do wish that my readers - especially the new ones among them - would browse through some of the old posts by themselves, even when I don't provide links. Many of them might be pleasantly surprised. As I have said and not once before, I treat this blog as an extension of my classroom: if you want the full benefit of my work, keep reading this blog, and tell your friends to do the same. For their benefit, not mine.

Watching in the rain

শ্রাবণ মাস, যদিও পচা গরমটা ভাদ্রর মতো।  তবে বৃষ্টি হচ্ছে যখন তখন, মাঝেসাঝে বেশ তেড়েও হচ্ছে।  আজ সকালে বাইরের বারান্দায় বাগানমুখ করে বসে খাতা দেখছিলাম, তো আস্তে আস্তে আকাশ কালো হয়ে এলো, তারপর বৃষ্টি নামলো, প্রথমে টিপটিপ করে, ফের মুষলধারে।  চেয়ারটাকে জলের ঝাপটা এড়াতে একটু পিছিয়ে নিয়ে বসে খাতা বন্ধ করে দিলাম। ঢের খাতা দেখেছি সারা জীবন ধরে, আরো হয়তো ঢের দেখতে হবে, এখন বৃষ্টি দেখি।

হাওয়ার ঝাপটায় বৃষ্টিটা  বেশ একটা হালকা ঝাপসা পর্দা তৈরি করে দেখেছ? সে পর্দাটা আবার সরে সরে যায়।  কয়েক মুহূর্তে রাস্তা ধুয়েমুছে ফাঁকা করে দিল, গাছপালা লতাপাতা দিল ভিজিয়ে। কাঠবিড়ালি, প্রজাপতি আর বিচ্ছিরি চ্যাঁচ্যা করা পাখিগুলো সব  কোথায় জানি পালিয়ে গেলো, দুটো কাক বোকার মতো ডালে বসে ভিজতে লাগলো, ভুলো কুকুরটা ভয়ে ভয়ে দুবার আমায় দেখে নিয়ে  বারান্দায় আমার পাশেই গুটিশুটি মেরে বসে গেল। অল্পক্ষনের মধ্যে ছাতের নালি  থেকে অঝোরে ঝর্ণার মতো জল পড়তে লাগল। বাগানে শ্যাওলার বিরাট পাপোশ হয়েছে, সেটা ভিজে চুপসে উঠল।  পিঁপড়েরা গুঁড়ো মাটির ঢিবি করে বাসা বেঁধেছিল, প্রানপণে মুখে করে ডিম নিয়ে পালাতে লাগল। আমি দেখছি সামনের জবা গাছের সরু ডাল বেয়ে জলের ধারা নামছে, দেখাচ্ছে যেন মুক্তোর মালা। সেই সঙ্গে মেঘ গুড়গুড় করেই যাচ্ছে, আর থেকে থেকে এমন বিদ্যুতের ঝলক যে দিনের বেলাও চমকে দিচ্ছে। এই না হলে  'গগনে ঘনঘটা শিহরে তরুলতা'? শুধু ময়ূরের হরষিত নাচটাই যা দেখতে পেলুম না! তা সেও অন্যত্র অন্যসময়ে দেখেছি। ...

এ দৃশ্য আমার অন্তত কোনদিন পুরোনো হবে না।  অবিশ্যি এর থেকেও ভালো লাগে যখন রাতে শুতে যাওয়ার সময়ে বৃষ্টি নামে। মহাকবি বলেছেন 'অমৃত জিনিসটা রসের মধ্যে নেই, রসাস্বাদনের মধ্যে আছে', বড় সামান্য কথা নয়।  আমরা আস্বাদন করতে শিখলাম কই?  'বৃথা খেলা, বৃথা মেলা, বৃথা বেলা গেলো বহি'  ... আজ যে ভগবান সময় সুযোগ দুটোই দিয়েছেন, তার যদি সদ্ব্যবহার করতে না পারলুম  তাহলে দোষটা কার?

CoViD: sane voices making themselves heard

These lockdown diaries of mine will make good reading once the nightmare is far behind us. A vast number of people are going to giggle sheepishly to remember how wildly they had panicked; many will be deeply offended if they are even reminded. I hope my readers will recall that I took and maintained a consistent stance all through: the basic message was, don’t panic and over-react; that will do none of us any good.

I can see with the passage of every month that most of the things I said right from the beginning have come true. I shall not repeat them here: those who read really attentively will remember; others can simply scroll down and read the older posts, or re-read them.

For now, I shall offer two more links. One, to a video interview (dated August 01) of a very prominent doctor (epidemiologist and sometime head of CMC Vellore, one of our most iconic hospitals), offering ‘good news’. The other, to a news item in today's paper saying that various health groups and academics have been asking the central government to make public not just data relating to coronavirus infections and deaths, but to all deaths that have happened since March. It should be obvious to the meanest intelligence that if the government adopted a conscious policy of making people aware of what a vast number of people die daily of completely non-Covid related causes, and kept hammering on those data every day, the countrywide panic would subside within a month. As to why they are not doing it yet is anybody’s guess.

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!'