'time-pass' and true love

Just watched a 2014 Walt Disney animation movie called Maleficent. Bad title. In any case, though it's not what I'd call a great movie, I liked it, not only because it is an interesting re-telling of the Sleeping Beauty legend, but because it underscores pretty strongly something I have believed and said for a long time: that 'romantic' love is for kids. They say in the movie that nothing like true love exists, and then show that it does, but it is far more likely to come from parents - or, even more likely, parent figures, biological parents often being no more than brutes and bores - than the boy or girl in class you had a crush on. Good to think that it was my daughter who told me to watch the movie.

There are, of course, lots of people who cannot recognize or value true love when it is served to them on a platter - but why waste time on them? They cannot do anything more worthwhile than 'time-pass'...

Facebook 'discovery'

A 'scientific study' recently conducted in the US has 'discovered' that people who are insecure in their relationships are more actively engaged on Facebook - frequently posting on walls, commenting, updating their status or 'liking' something - in hopes of getting attention. (The Hindu, Kolkata edition, Feb. 16, p.5)

They could have simply asked me.

Dawn of the golden age in Delhi!

Ha ha ha... a certain fruit-people party has swept the polls in our capital city. So, within six months, for sure, there will be free water round the clock from every tap, no government babu will think twice about clearing files in a twinkling without asking for a palm-greaser, no student will cheat in an examination, the streets and garbage vats will always be spanking clean, traffic accidents will dwindle to zero, young drunken studs will prostrate themselves at midnight before near-naked girls having fun and call them 'mother', every daddy will report for work at 8:50 a.m., every mummy will be lecturing her friends about the importance of honesty and integrity...

Our squeaky-clean, Gandhi-worshipping middle class, long oppressed by dirty politicians and sleazy clerks and wicked wheeler-dealers (who are not people like us, don't be silly), has at last found its true spokesman and saviour.

Let the fun begin.

P.S., Feb. 11: This morning, Anna Hazare has set the ball rolling by announcing 'Arvind knows how to run a government. He is a graduate of IIT Kharagpur' (The Hindu, Kolkata edition, Feb. 11, p. 9). 

Full circle

Two years ago, at admission time, when I am literally swamped with frantic parents and work like a machine, hardly looking up from my papers as I go through the formalities, one woman, who had sat down in front of me with her daughter beside her said, ‘Suvroda, whom are you calling apni (vous in French)? Look up – it’s me, X, from the 1992 batch!’ The wheel had turned, and an old girl had brought her daughter in her turn to me. Isn’t this what is called the fullness of time?

Indeed, so many old boys and girls, now raising families but living far away, tell me their one big regret is that their children are missing the Suvroda experience that they still savour nostalgically, over and over in their minds. And I often say it is my great sorrow that Durgapur has never provided jobs to reasonably educated and ambitious young people, so 95 per cent of them go away – else my classes would have been full of the children of older pupils by now.

This morning an old boy from the 1990 batch came over with wife in tow. She told me that she has heard so much about me and so often that she sometimes feels she has attended my classes in person, and both husband and wife were absolutely determined their son just had to have a taste of the same. I am not often at a loss for words, but the kind of pleasure that this sort of thing fills me with – especially when juxtaposed with all the inhumanity and injustice that I have also suffered at the hands of so many old boys and girls who once averred that I mattered to them – that it is beyond my power to express. Thank you, whoever up there decides that this man sometimes deserves a bit of happiness too, and a reaffirmation that he has not worked in vain all his life after all.