Minds like empty rooms

In his comment on my earlier post titled I am not alone in saying what I do, Nishant Kamath mentioned Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird (it makes me wince to think there are people in the world who don't know that and don't care), now 86, saying 'Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books' (People like J. K. Rowling, Shilpi, Abhirup and I hope a few million others around the world will understand what she means, Nishant, the full import of it that is...)

Harper Lee only ever wrote one book in her whole life. It has been voted as the greatest novel of the 20th century. I shall not go into superlatives - they have been so incredibly cheapened that they don't really mean anything any more anyway - but I sometimes say that the world is divided between those who have read (and loved-) To Kill a Mockingbird and those who have not. It is good to have someone like that on one's side as one fights the forces of enveloping darkness. Minds like empty rooms. Let's not forget the phrase. Some day decades or centuries hence, when some people try to figure out just why men became slaves of machines and were forced into underground dungeons to live like blind worms (see the concluding pages of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine), they might discover that the rot started when people in the mass stopped reading books, and their minds became like empty rooms.

Investment bankers!

We've been joking about investment bankers in the other blog. You might also care to read an earlier post titled 'Monkeys in Armani suits' there. And here is another collection of investment banker jokes that many people are sure to enjoy.

I am not alone in saying what I do!

The following is a translation of the top editorial in today’s issue of Anandabazar Patrika, Bengal’s premier newspaper. The translation is mine. I am sorry I lost the link to the original; if someone can locate it, please send it over.

The worship of  the small

A seventeen-year old in Britain has just invented an ‘application’ which can break up any item of news into three short paragraphs. All the ‘flab’ would be trimmed off. Nick D’Aloisio is already being hailed as a computer wizard, tycoons are coming forward to help fund the happy commercial birth of his revolutionary brainwave. This invention satisfies a very common and evident desire of contemporary  society – learn it quick, say it in short, let me know at once. The custom of drastically summarizing all kinds of reading material has already become widespread. In the west, classical literature is being sought to be presented to today’s youth in highly abridged form: the Bible is being peddled in drastically culled summary, and Shakespeare in sms-text. People these days habitually type ‘lol’ in emails when they want to laugh out loud; nobody says I just saw Dilwale Dulhaniya ley jayenge, because DDLJ does the job.

We want that a movie should last no longer than an hour and a half; cricket matches should be concluded in twenty overs, and textual essays limit themselves to a single line if possible. As an explanation, it is said that people ‘have too little time’ these days. The pace of life has accelerated greatly; nobody can afford to give too much time to any one thing. Most people take this assertion for granted. But what does it mean? Are humans working much harder than before, is the national product increasing exponentially, are people giving far less attention to recreation than to clearing files? Or is it that people these days spend most of their time checking worthless email and text messages, playing endless games on their mobiles, visiting all kinds of useless sites (entirely unconnected with the work at hand) on the internet, wandering about shopping malls, or idly surfing channels on TV? Has mankind’s workload increased, or has a vast vista of trivial engagements opened up? In fact, the means of ‘entertainment’ have multiplied so explosively and the insane urge to enjoy them all at once has become so rabid that men cannot concentrate for long on anything any more. Lack of attention has always been a problem for many; today people have found a very powerful excuse for never cultivating the kind of self-discipline and reflective ability that is absolutely essential in order to learn or do something really well. He was always eager to finish Tagore’s huge novel, but so much ‘work’ came his way in the shape of nonstop net surfing and channel surfing that he could never go beyond  the first page. Couldn’t some kind soul make a four-line synopsis of Gora for this unfortunate, and make a name for himself by providing millions with instant enlightenment?

Wily manipulators with an eye for the main chance have always been ready with enticing games to make money out of lazy dilettantes in  the mass. They do not criticize the age, they only want to make money out of the hordes of ignorant fools who define the age. It is a stupid and arrogant joke to claim to be able to reduce every item of news to three little paragraphs regardless of the importance of its substance, the sophistication of its argument and the quality of its writing style. This joke has thrilled a society which demands to understand an epic by reading the blurb on the book jacket. But this kind of shortcut insults both the serious journalist and the mindful reader. The collective which does not recognize it as an insult need only be contemptuously called h.l. – no point typing the whole word ‘hopeless’ to describe it (the original Bangla says hobha for hotobhagyo)

A word of thanks

I noticed today that 'The Warlock' has recently enlisted as the 95th member here, and I welcome him. We have known each other for only a short while, and that too only via the internet, but I have grown to like him, and - though he writes sparingly - his blog is listed in my blogroll (on the bemused blog), because he writes sensibly and well. I shall be glad to hear from you now and then here, Warlock!

God in heaven!

Talking about coarse and mindless, go to google images, type in the key words "82-year old fashion models" and look at the results. 

Just watching the scene

'Things in West Bengal and other parts of India are coming to such a pass that there is no guarantee that even an "educated" person will honour the unwritten codes of conduct in public life.' Not my words, but those of today's editorial in my newspaper. Good to see, at least, that other people have noticed what I have been carping about for a long time, and even considered it necessary to comment unhappily on the situation.

Without actually changing context, here is what I read on the T-shirt of a pupil today: 'If you see your ex with someone else, don't bother, because our parents have taught us to give away our used toys to those who are less privileged.' That is of course meant to be a joke, I understand. But don't jokes say a great deal about whether or not we are living in civilized times?

Then again, what can you expect in an age when the world can go gaga even over something as coarse and mindless as Gangnam style (have you read the lyrics in English)?

Fifty shades of nightsoil

Abhirup has been urging me to comment on the ongoing global phenomenon of 50 Shades of Grey for a long time. I won't: I consider it infra dig. But he has supplied me with a cartoon that says virtually all I wanted to say, so I have pasted it here (you might want to zoom out in order to read the text clearly...)

If you still can't read the text, try this link. And you can also go to google images and find out more stuff of the same sort by typing in the key words '50 shades of grey cartoons'.  I am frankly delighted that women all over the world, by buying the books by the tens of millions, have openly admitted just what they are like, as the man in the above cartoon says to his wife.

Places best avoided

Look up this blogpost.

I sometimes feel this world is not a happy place to live in at all, and maybe ignorance is indeed bliss.

Going around New York City

The only time I was in the United States - that was in the summer of 1991 - I made a three day stopover in New York on my way back home. I put up with an Indian friend who was then a medical intern in a city hospital. The apartment was on West 42nd Street, I think, or maybe 62nd (these are the kind of details I am beginning to forget now), very close to Central Park. My friend's idea of showing me round the Big Apple was to take me by subway to Jackson Heights: the unique aroma of incense mixed with stale urine and paan hanging heavily in the air told you from far away that it was the Indian enclave. He was eager to show me the shops and the temples, where lots of well-heeled Indians had made large endowments: golden idols, heavy jewellery, marble filigree work, that sort of thing. It was on my persuasion that he agreed to visit places like the Guggenheim Museum and Broadway and Times Square, and climb to the top of the Empire State Building (if I had known what was going to happen to the World Trade Center in a decade's time, I might have chosen to visit one of the Twin Towers instead).

It was later on, over mugs of beer on the last evening, that my friend sheepishly admitted that though he had lived in New York for four years, he'd probably never have seen the sights had it not been for my visit...

On hacks, once more

One thing I found out long ago about journalists (one of my reasons for quitting, besides poor pay, irregular hours and too much time wasted on the kind of people we call faltu in Bangla) is that though they make a living out of pointing out everybody's faults and weaknesses, they are by and large - even the pettiest cub reporter, not just high-and-mighty editors of international newspapers and TV channels - very houmourless and self-important people, precisely the sort who throw stones at others' glass houses all the time but get furious if a few pebbles are occasionally hurled at their own (so here's a link to the kind of jokes about them that everybody except they themselves should enjoy). You hear far more doctors and lawyers making fun of their own kind than you'd hear journalists (and, as I never tire of pointing out, anyone with the remotest connection with a media house flaunts the tag these days, even those who are no more than ad copywriters, subeditors or basically stringers who are allowed to cover nothing more substantial than models doing the catwalk). Just watch how self-righteously they scream when anyone says something sane about putting some reasonable restrictions on their sacred 'right' to pry, provoke, prevaricate, concoct, exaggerate and vilify: power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot through the ages, as a British statesman once famously said! Suggest that every Tom, Dick and Harry does not constantly need to be told disgusting and trivial home truths about high government officials and celebrities (where they buy their underwear, whether they religiously kiss their wives and kids good night every night), or that journalists themselves might have lots of skeletons in their cupboards, and they loudly predict the return of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.

But if you want to get them really angry, tell them they slaver for the kind of wealth, power and fame they are always criticizing, but they neither have the stomach nor the talent to make it on their own as tycoons and even doctors, lawyers, corporate managers and some teachers do, so they feed on scraps in the same fashion as lampreys cling to sharks. And this also I have noticed: those who frequently invoke the names of Daniel Pearl or P. Sainath to tell the world what a noble profession they are in rarely, if ever, choose to follow in the footsteps of those stalwarts. (P.S.: For those who don't know, Pearl wasn't even a hero by choice, he just happened to be abducted and murdered, and that, cruel as it sounds, did infinitely more for his reputation than any journalistic work he had ever done! It's quite like Stephen Hawking, who'd have been about as much of a pop-celebrity as Murray Gell Mann but for his debilitating handicap)

Abhirup sent two very interesting links in his comment on the post titled 'Journalistic ethics'. You might also try this and this before making up your own mind about whether this is the right career for you. 

odd tags

Why indeed? And why do police officers sometimes have surnames like Lawless and Coward, while diplomats are named Crooks, and surgeons Slaughter or Savage?

Trolls banished!

I didn’t know (or maybe I did, but I was pushing forbearance to the limit!) it was so easy to cut out the crude and the ignorant, the cowardly and the feckless on the internet. All I did recently, after years of tolerating trolls and assorted monsters masquerading as commentators on my blogs, was to block anonymous posts and put up a warning to say that all strangers must submit their email i.d.s for verification before their comments are published – and the most vulgar, irrelevant and stupid comments (from the sort of barely humans that can’t or won’t read what I have written, couldn’t conduct a reasoned argument to save their lives, and wouldn’t know the difference between good manners and barbarism if they were hit on their heads with it, yet have all the time in the world to tell me again and again how much they hate – read envy – me) stopped coming at once!

I am a happy man now, in the sense that a man can be happy if he loves his pretty little garden and has at last learnt to shut the gate against intruders who would come in only to pee or trample on his flower beds, because that’s all they can do to ‘express themselves’…in this context, the literate and cultured few among my readers might want to look up this little essay. Apes, I’m sorry, but I’ve got no lollies for you…

Our kind of patriotism

Aren't most Indians exactly like that? Sometimes a picture is still worth a thousand words!

Thanks to Saikat Chakraborty for sending it to me.

Biking around at 77!

My dear old boy Arnab Chakraborty sent me this link, surmising - quite rightly - that I'd be interested.

I take my hat off to this sprightly old/young man, going strong at 77 still. Brought back to mind the Canadian surgeon I heard about once, just about the same age, who earned millions over eleven months a year, and went off holidaying in January without fail to work/enjoy himself as a ski-instructor (and skiing is one of the most physically challenging sports, too...)

Do the white (and maybe also black-) men just have something in them that we don't? I already feel so old sometimes, though I still exercise, and many people assure me I don't look my age. Suppose I survive up to 77, would I have the strength, pluck and enthusiasm to carry on like Simon Gandolfi? I sincerely hope so. No point living too long otherwise.

Service with a smile

I had an interesting experience last night. Ever since I quit journalism, I have steered clear of politicians, but of course every now and then you have to rub shoulders with them... and so I turned up at my (newly-elected) local councillor's office with a request for a certain piece of paper that only some elected public official can issue. Nothing very important, and certainly not a 'special favour' of the sort that requires bending rules and things like that, but as everyone knows, in this country ordinary people without 'connections' are apt to be harassed and fleeced by the netas and babus for no fault of their own. So it was a very pleasant surprise to have my work done in a jiffy, and that too in a very courteous manner - for once, it didn't sound like a hollow joke when the man behind the desk said 'We're here to serve you'. If this is the way they are ensuring that I will vote for them next time round, why, I wish them godspeed. They didn't even charge a penny (it would have been perfectly okay to ask for fifty rupees, or at least ten, if only to cover establishment, stationery and such other costs). I came home reflecting on how little our vast, creaky, unwieldy and free public services are appreciated, while we rave starry-eyed about private hospitals and schools and hotels and malls which charge us the earth for every little thing right and left.  There is much that is wrong with our country, not least in areas that most of us never care to think about...

Fun in the dark

We went through what the media is touting as the 'world's worst power outage' ever over the last two days (mercifully in the locality where I live, there was one power cut that lasted six hours in the daytime and another hour and a half in the evening; bearable enough by Indian standards, since the taps didn't run dry). The event has already spawned a number of good jokes; the one I liked best being that it happened because Rajnikanth was charging his mobile phone...

'Journalistic ethics'!

I had promised in my last post to give a glimpse into the world of journalism, as I have seen it. I could cite a lot of hilarious (or disgraceful) incidents from my own direct experience, but for now let two incidents suffice, things that happened within the last decade in my own town.

Several years ago, some outgoing girls had gathered in their school (very well known hereabouts) to bid farewell to one another. Girls being girls, they had to do something ‘exciting’, so many of them had brought over their old shirts and told one another to write parting messages on them with indelible ink. Naturally they were ‘expressing themselves’ by screaming their heads off, until it attracted the attention of the irate headmistress, who confiscated many of these offending shirts and sent the whole class out of the campus, telling them to go directly home. Next day some of the papers carried the news that a lot of schoolgirls had been stripped by the authorities and sent home déshabillée!

Then there was this fracas among parents and staff in the school where I had once worked, a few years ago. There was some angry talk, a lot of abuse was bandied about freely, and one or two staffers were pushed around… nothing much really. Many of these boys came to my tuition, and I heard the details from them. What is relevant here is that they had heard some journos prodding them to spill the beans about what was going on in the school, with the following words… tora kichhu bolbi, na amrai baniye baniye likhe debo (are you going to talk, or shall we make it all up ourselves)?

From long personal experience (my family has been in close touch with the media world for more than thirty years now) I know that this is the norm rather than the exception (remember the posto I mentioned in the last post?) So much for lofty ethical standards.  This is the reason that what you get if you google 'News of the World scandal' comes as no surprise, at least to the likes of me. No profession more deserves to be told ‘physician, heal thyself’…I think it was Desmond Doig, a celebrity journo himself, who famously said about Mother Teresa that she never read newspapers, so she knew better than most just what was going on in the world!

[My strategy seems to be paying off. The last post has attracted 500-odd visits within a week. However, I am waiting for more comments here, and the members count topping the 100-mark]

P.S.: If you are a complete stranger and are commenting here for the first time, start with a short self-introduction, specifically mentioning your age. I expect the same good manners on the internet as in the outside world: courtesy is a must, especially if you are someone far junior. That's orthodox Indian tradition, and I am a very orthodox person in these matters. If I am old enough to be your father or teacher, you will use language that is appropriate for your own father or most respected teacher. Otherwise, stay away...

What happened in Guwahati?

[Nothing in this post should be construed to mean that I have the slightest sympathy for people who gang up to harass, abuse, hurt and humiliate the weak – by which I mean not only young girls but children, old people of both sexes, the disabled, the ill and even the lone man against the mob… we too easily forget that young girls are not the only victims of abuse! A lot of people of the type who are now up in arms in defence of this girl find it quite right and enjoyable to beat a petty thief to death or close if he is unlucky enough to get caught: I have seen this again and again with my own eyes]

The more I read up on the net (click here and here) about what happened that night in Guwahati, the more I smell something very, very fishy.

For one thing, the so-called video looks much less like a genuine molestation scene than a grotesque pantomime in slow motion: in this age of the uncouth and the absurd, courtesy kinky cinema and mindless ad flicks, surely most sane readers will agree that much weirder things can be ‘arranged’? This suspicion grows strong when one sees how quickly politicians have got into the mutual mudslinging act, how the police still haven’t picked up the main accused, and how the National Commission for Women seems at a loss about what to do (this evening I heard it has recommended that the government ‘rehabilitate’ the girl with a job. For god’s sake!)

Secondly, molesters rarely allow themselves and their dastardly act to be filmed for the record at length – unless the whole thing is premeditated for a purpose (Amitabh Bachchan has asked in his blog how a TV crew was so promptly on the spot). I have been on the news beat (real news, not covering models doing the catwalk or launching new brands of shampoo), and I know that the far commoner reaction is to take away the camera and beat up the man behind it.

Thirdly, ‘assaulted and molested for half an hour before she was rescued by some passers-by’? How could a girl be assaulted and molested in public for half an hour? And who were these ‘passers-by’ who then rescued her? Were they a bigger mob, or armed policemen, or a few braveheart do-gooders? What took them so long, and how did they persuade the ‘molesters’ to let the girl go?

Fourthly, some reports say the girl was a minor: so what was she doing in a pub? Why did they throw her out only when she couldn’t pay? It even seems she had been brawling drunkenly on the street with some of her friends, and it is some of these ‘friends’ who then turned on her (some are even saying that one of these friends was the reporter who told the cameraman to start shooting; the fellow has resigned from his job even before formal charges have been brought against him!). What kind of people did she choose as friends? Everybody is screaming about her rights and how they have been violated – what about some talk of responsibility? What kind of responsibility did this girl take for her own safety? What kind of parents let their 17-year old kid out for a night on the tiles? Why don’t people who want that kind of ‘fun’ – no matter whether they are young or old – calmly accept the fact that it goes with certain kinds of risks? Nobody accuses ‘society’ of neglect or abuse when a bungee-jumper dies because the rope broke!

And finally, all this talk about how journalists were involved, and what they should and shouldn’t have done fills me with deep disgust. Any honest reporter admits in private that ninety per cent of what they are accused of is true: they are only concerned with finding or actually creating sensation, because that alone sells, and that alone is what ultimately matters. In the newsroom we talked about posto – slang (in those days, I don’t know what it is now) for concocted or grossly embellished news, and how most of our pages were routinely filled with such stuff.  I shall narrate just two fairly recent incidents here, both in Durgapur. But let’s keep that for the next post… 

So what am I missing here? Those who have been following the unfolding story more closely, would they care to enlighten me? Catcalls, wolf-whistles, lewd remarks, surreptitious groping in buses, yes (disgusting as all that is), but girls are not as a rule suddenly molested on city streets by gangs, else all the hundreds of girls who have been coming alone to my classes for years would have stopped coming long ago. Why did this happen? And what really happened? 

Sayan and Rashmi's blog

My old boy Sayan and his wife Rashmi have started their own blog. 

I should like all my readers to visit them, become members, and write sensible and encouraging comments every now and then.

Also, though only 85 people have become members of this blog as yet, I know that far more people visit (the number of members on the other blog is now 275). So how about cheering me up by joining the members' list? It's not a crime. Go on, it takes only a minute...

Only Man is vile

The evil that men do lives after them,

The good is oft interr’d with their bones…

(Shakespeare, Julius Caesar)

There were these parents of an ex-student who had come over for a chat, and they happily and gratefully recalled the time they spent when their daughter was a pupil here. I do not like to boast, but it made me feel good to see how well they remembered all the ‘special’ favours that the girl and her friends had been treated to as a matter of course – things that were special only because they had neither expected nor got the same treatment at any other tutor’s: a large, well-lit and airy room to study in rather than a dingy garage, a clean toilet always available, filtered water to drink, medicines whenever someone felt ill, our own clothes for them to change into when they came in from the rain dripping wet, the meals upstairs when some child was hungry, the assurance that the kids were safe indoors with us when a parent couldn’t help being late in picking them up, the punctuality which made things hugely convenient for them and their parents alike, the stories they heard, the games they played, the movies they watched, the quizzes they enjoyed, the countless jokes they laughed over, the meticulous correction and commentary on homework, the habit of disciplined regular work well within deadlines, which, if picked up here, helped them to do better in all subjects, the books they borrowed to read, the new vistas opened up of so many things they had never even heard before, things which came in tremendously useful later in life, whether they were taking a vocabulary test or participating in a group discussion or an impromptu writing contest, even at university level or while entering working life…

I told them that the real wonder was not that I did all this, but that they remembered still, long after my immediate utility was exhausted, and had even bothered to come over to thank me for it. I am not ungrateful to Providence: certainly for years and years lots of ex-students and parents have spoken well of me; nothing else can explain why such big numbers come over unfailingly to enroll with me at the start of session after session, despite all my failings, all the outbursts of temper, all the scathing remarks, all the worst that the scandal-mongers have spread. What makes me wonder is that so few people thank me directly for what they have got from me (even over the phone or the internet), and also that there is a sizeable number of people who, after having enjoyed and benefitted from everything good that I did for them, have decided, once they found out that I had maybe one fault or two, that I was an entirely forgettable person, or not a nice man to know. And this is not peculiar to someone like me: titans all through history have faced the same weird treatment from the people. One fault or shortcoming discovered (you know, Gandhi had sexual urges for women other than his wife!!!), and all the great and good about them is instantly forgotten. Talk about selective memory. Which is why I tell everybody that to praise someone is infinitely harder than to abuse. Anybody can speak ill of you, however noble you might be, and however petty and despicable a character he might have himself. It is hard to live long and not become a misanthrope. I think it was in this frame of mind that the poet wrote of a beautiful natural landscape ‘where every prospect pleases/ and only Man is vile’!