November Reminiscences

A prof-friend in the US reminded me that it’s Thanksgiving there. I sort of skimmed through an article on The American Scholar about ‘giving thanks’. And I got one phone call from my old friend, some minutes after I got back into the house in the eve'. So God knows I can say that I’m in the best spot I’ve ever been in my life barring maybe some months from back in 2002-2003 and for some months between 2011-2012. Many people, for different reasons, would guffaw and say that that is nothing to feel good about. Maybe or maybe not. I could have done far better and made good in one way, at least by now – I strongly think and should have – and maybe some things could have been brighter for someone else, but I don’t claim to know why certain things happen and other things don’t.  It’s also possible that I might have ended up in a lunatic asylum or have been pottering about like a vegetable at the mercy of my blood family and I wouldn’t even have known the bits that I do about one human being or or any being. This ghastly nightmare didn’t come to pass – so I do have reason to be much more than just thankful. I can actually still work. I can still think. I don’t always have brilliant ideas but I can put into practice a few or even a couple of the ideas I do or are sent my way and tend to the fledgling that sprouts from the idea which hatches. I can still talk intelligibly sometimes when I talk, considering the feedback I get. I can’t sing – which will be a regret I’ll live with – (but now I know why my melody never reaches the Lord's feet to go with Tagore's dariye acho tumi amar gaaner opaare - it's simply because I have no melody or tune in my voice to begin with. Maybe the fine and kind Lord keeps his ears shut tight or winces or grimaces or glares or simply gives me strange, tantalizing and teasing glimpses of himself instead, precisely and only because I have no melody with my insistent or continuous 'brayings' and just to shut me up from time to time) And I can’t do lots of things and I can’t be lots of things but there’s still a couple of things I can do. And my old friend and my best friend and my Fimh did and still do provide me with asylum. Not in the normal sense and not quite normally – that is what I’ll still say. But I know that this is absolutely nothing to sneeze at. And it was and is asylum akin in a sense to how Dr. Johnson defined it: a space to where she who has fled cannot be taken away from; it has been more of a mental or even a spiritual space more than a physical space across decades although sometimes it actually has been both or three or more. I can't go through all the permutations and combinations here.

Unlike some people who wish to die when they’re feeling joyous or nearly close to joyous or feeling close to bliss – I feel with this obmutacious certainty (which comes from God knows where) that I can achieve the impossible when I feel the spots, specks and flecks, glints or even the shimmering shadows of a mellow warm glow or those of laughter or joy or of the piercing light of meaning. No matter how unpredictable or how grey or how thunderous or stormy the times might be otherwise. And I worry like the dickens too. I can’t help it. I keep feeling that it’s all going to be taken away and in a sudden snap. There's Shakespeare's sonnet about 'ruin' (sonnet 64) which I can't rattle off but I remember the essence. My terror is not a misplaced terror. I’ve had that happen often enough in the past and not always for reasons that I can fathom. And I’ve watched like a dumb beast. In this sense I’ve never been able to agree with Tagore’s Bojhapora. I’ve tried that angle and I’ve failed abysmally and I can’t help but say, feel, know and even realize from the deepest part of me: so be it. There’s an advantage to placing all one’s eggs into one basket. And it has its obvious disadvantages. But advantages and disadvantages aside – at some point in life, one makes certain choices. I did. And I’ve not changed from then. I might not know and certainly do not know about a lot in life – but I know about this and extremely and exceptionally well. And over and over and over…This is the basket – one says. I don’t want many baskets or any others. So one has to and must, by that admission, take what comes with that. One cannot and must not complain and I know I’ve never even in the remotest corners of my being complained about this. There is an advantage about being schizophrenic – one has very little of any subconscious that one isn’t aware of or is completely unaware of. One is forced or is somehow made to face the murky depths and the sublime highs – whether one likes it or not; whether one wants to or not. The upshot is that the shards of joy or those of clarity and of meaning far outstrip the angst, the absolute terror, the grey and grisly, the horror, the uncomprehending sorrow…and one very quietly knows with passing moments that no matter what else – one has become a better human being for making that one choice even if one doesn’t always want to admit to the same or pay attention to the same or one feels terrible twinges of regret and sadness or anger directed towards oneself or even if one yells at God for things which might have been – and just a little different maybe – or even if one feels every now and then that one doesn’t really understand a lot of how civilizations and fate and lives get organized. But what one cannot do is to either imagine or ever want to make a different choice. Whether one chooses one's work-life or any relation or some hobby or the inner-life or whether one chooses one bit and all the other parts get organized accordingly somehow and sometimes by one's donkey-like persistence and some mysterious and invisible hand. I also can't help but remember that my old friend had written to me in November 2002 about what the French say: 'Partir c'est mourir en peu' - and I know it's true. But it's better to die a little upon parting with the lump that simply will not be dislodged in the throat and to have tears some 24 hours later than to keep dying in a grey and unbroken and desert landscape with no meetings and no partings and no re-unions. I’m not making any recommendations of how to be if one is or has been dubbed schizophrenic though. What might seem to work for one person might not work at all for another.

I’ve also been virulently grumpy sometimes even through the last year and I’ve had grey despair cloaking me and choking me too for long months sometimes and I’ve yelled angrily at God quite often through the last three years if I wasn’t yelling at myself and have even howled in silence. And yet I’ve also looked at myself quietly and said there’s nothing more I can do or be. A die was rolled and I’ve made some clear and very articulate choices. I remember them – even if I simply made them in my own head. I sometimes look at the way lives have shaped up and remember images that swept through my mind in mad bursts from 18 years ago. I’m not sure what to think of then. I can’t be a soothsayer – I think I’d have been wealthier if I’d been a real one but it can’t be possible that I’m merely a jinx or a curse and nothing but, surely? I don’t know. What I do know is that if I can’t do what I’m meant to then I am not good enough and never will be. And that has made me paradoxically feel like a bit of a matter-of-fact warrior if not a peaceful warrior.

Back in April when the ground trembled in this part of the world I had the grim feeling of ‘this is it’. My mind was finally completely bifurcating. I could physically feel it. I’d been writing something in my diary and making notes about work at the same time at that point and I could feel this eerie sensation of my mind splitting and that a part of it was floating upwards. I’ve strangely enough felt something similar back in the past but nothing so completely physical. A part of me was a little taken aback. It decided to walk around to see whether I still felt the same way. And another part said ‘it’s an earthquake, silly. You’re not becoming completely unhinged.’ I didn’t know what to think but I called out to Fimh. I knew he was there for he responded and I knew he was there if not physically right there beside me. I looked out of my little balcony and saw people on the road and I noted that I didn’t feel particularly peculiar in my mind. And just when I felt that the whole thing was just an aberration of my own abnormal mind – there was that weird feeling of bifurcation again. I trembled in my mind alongwith the ground beneath my feet. And then I was sure it was an earthquake. Fimh said so and quite calmly and quite sunnily although I didn’t see anything sunny about it. I didn’t take more than seconds to scan exactly what I’d done in life, which I considered to be of any remote value and what I was doing. I was perfectly aware of whom I valued – and I didn’t see the point in being terrified of even dying right then. If it happened, I’d know that I wasn’t meant to do anything more and that was that. An hour later on that Saturday I looked up on the internet and there it was – the earthquake in Nepal. I'd much rather not return to the month of May, not even in memory even though I wasn't in any accident physically.

In my young years, as a 6 or even 7 year old, I had not felt very far away from death and some other place and with some other being who wasn’t there in my everyday life. I missed some other being very badly and some other life but I didn’t really know the how or why about it. In my teens, I was sure that I would die young and wise and after having left my footprints on the sand. Ha? Ha? Yes, I guess. And yet to say that I was supremely fearless about dying and death as a 6 year-old would be lying. I had believed for decades that I’d never been scared about death and dying and yet it was only some two years and eight months ago when I started thinking about it again after I read and had been contemplating upon Suvro da's posts on Meditations I and Meditations II that I remembered very old memories. The memory was there and quite clearly and unabashedly. One day, after school hours, the older kids of St. Augustine's were chatting with me and one of the kids looked at my bag and told me that lightning would strike the metal clasp on the bag and that I would die. I knew that the physical pain of death would be horrible and that’s what I feared most terribly. I don’t know why or how I knew this or why it was that the physical pain terrified me so. I replied and solemnly that I would cover the metal clasp with my coat. One of them, with a cool superiority, let me know that the lightning would find that strip through my coat. One of the boys, as he left, tugged at the metal clasp on the bag, and very seriously, told me to be careful about it. All I remember in a movie scene-like way is what I did after I was off the school bus which dropped me off about two or three blocks from where I stayed back then. I ran. I ran faster than I ever had. I ran as fast as my legs could carry me while clutching onto that blasted metal strip hidden under my coat. I was terrified. The lightning forks were there in the sky and the thunder rolled. I don’t remember all of whatever happened as it happened but I remember it from what is stored in my memory bank. I remember the cold rain. I remember running and my heart pounding and the rain spraying on my face. I got back to the door and I rang the bell. I kept ringing the bell over and over and looking at the sky while covering that metal clasp with my fist and my heart was still pounding. I was looking for the lightning forks in the sky. The door was opened and I was scolded soundly and roundly and loudly  – with reason, I’d say. I had absolutely and completely and clean forgotten that the door was always kept unlocked during the time that I came back from school. I didn’t say a word and I slipped in-doors. My memory disappears completely after that but I know I never did say a word about why I had rung that bell so insistently.

I was told once, upon my asking, that I was born a few minutes past midnight on the night of the 20^th of November – close enough to the witching hour. And apparently, in those days, cats had a free rein in hospitals and there was a black cat that insisted on keeping me company, and it had to be shooed away every so often. I can’t however fly on a magic carpet or broom or make blissful magic, sadly enough. The latter especially will always be a sore point for me. Otherwise I would have made a few of the best dreams of my best friend come true by now. But I turned 40 over the weekend and it was the best birthday I’ve had. I certainly was quietly and wondrously disbelieving even if I didn’t actually go about grinning or yelling about it. So, thank you. There were conversations and moments of being and I know I’ve felt grace through mixed times across almost a couple of decades. The 11 year-old me from one particular day onwards would look with wide eyes and say gruffly and very solemnly, ‘I don’t believe you’ if anyone were to tell her. I can't help feeling bashful about it. I can’t think of anything remotely good that I did in my youth or childhood. From one perspective, it has been, a life of sudden and utterly unexpected surprises and supreme and strange and the best of surprises, in spite of the incomprehension over more things than I can count, in how I’d like to remember it, so far. I'll raise a toast to the future. I did that twice a little over a month ago. Maybe three times might work a charm.

Moments and Diwali

I can now quite appreciate Einstein’s example of relativity. I’ve had the experience a few rare times in the past, and I’ve had enough such times speed by or unfurl to know that it really is true. Time does fly by faster and even warps in strange ways when one is where one wants to be. From quite some years ago, I also remember how long one minute can be in the final minute of a twenty minute run on a treadmill, and I wasn’t even aiming for the four minute mile record. I have other far less humorous examples too, but I’ll let those lie buried. I sometimes wonder these days whether one can feel bliss from one’s own point of view. I did think I was experiencing bliss as a confirmed lunatic quite some years ago, and on multiple occasions, but that was all in my head and there was very little connection to what Somebody else was feeling.

I had the best Kali Pujo of my life and a rather tantalizing dream-like five days preceding that. I don’t want to call November a grim and brooding and glaring month full of cold ice and sleet after the first leg of November, this year. I even strung up fairy lights for the first time in my life, courtesy Suvro da, and I flicked on the switch as soon as dusk approached. Even Suvro da said a real and loud ‘Nice!’ when he saw the lights. Pupu was there on Kali Pujo. She found the ghuronto/strobe light and some more twines of fairy lights stored so high in a cupboard that I hadn’t even been able to reach the door handle of the cupboard while perched on a chair and standing on the tips of my toes. We strung those up together and Suvro da fixed the strobe light which shimmered and cast magical light - rather psychedelic, I'd say while dusk melted with twilight. For quite a few years I had wondered about the Rangoli and how Pupu made delicate and beautiful colourful patterns with the dust-like abir. Well, I got to see it for myself and on Suvro da’s insistence and Pupu’s encouragement I even made about ten round dots, of different sizes in bright blue, magenta and red, that Pupu had etched out dexterously with a chalk. A bunch of Suvro da’s cheery and lively boys came around in the evening armed with their fire crackers. Pupu and Suvro da had already gotten a little store of fire crackers earlier on in the day. So for the entire evening the braver boys burst the colorful and noisy firecrackers in the street. I blew up a few Kali potkas with great glee and a great grin on my face. It must have been after more than a quarter of a century! One of Suvro da’s students, Swapnayu, was kind enough to hand me a handful. The firecrackers were over a little too soon and Suvro da handed out some more dough for the boys to get some more. I was almost going off on one of the bicycles myself to get a bit of abir that I thought we needed for the Rangoli but chickened out in the last moment. The bicycle seat was too high! One of Suvro da’s students when he saw me wobbling with the bike cautioned me and simply asked me a straight forward question of whether I would stay on the seat or fall off. I wasn’t worried about falling off but the shame and horror of it if I fell off on the road right in front or somehow damaged one of Suvro da’s students’ bicycle made me go back sheepishly and park the bike and slip out quietly on foot. Back in Purdue in the Fall of 2003, I had borrowed a bicycle from a senior and with grim merriment cycled around the campus for a bit until I remembered that I couldn’t get off a very high cycle….so I had started yelling at random passers-by as to whether they would please get a hold of the cycle while I leapt off. I remember there were at least two nice young undergraduates who tried running after me while I sailed by on the cycle. When it didn’t work after a couple of rounds, I told them not to worry while one of them smiled back at me. I went back to the spot where my friends were rather impatiently waiting for me. I yelled at them to grab a hold of the bike – which they did and I leapt off. I don’t think I could have tried such tactics here. But I felt like an idiot later. Modesty Blaise would have tut-tutted me. At the market I spied all the boys who had gone to get the next batch of firecrackers – or else they spotted me and yelled cheerily and I yelled back equally cheerily. The gulal – the particular colour that Pupu and I wanted was not to be found and so I walked back sadly but Pupu didn’t seem the least bit disheartened. A substitute had been found which worked well enough. Pupu lit the candles around the decoration – and the Rangoli looked beautiful. The candles, which Suvro da had gotten resembled chocolate cups. I don’t know whether, in some other lifetime, I belonged to a tribe which believes that photographs trap the happy souls or memories of people…but post 2003 – I have always been a little circumspect about taking photos…but how I still wish I’d taken some photos. There were still lots of firecrackers that the boys were bursting and burning and the light filled colours and the noises were met with ahhhs and a few ouches. A few of the boys had gone inside to click photographs of themselves and I couldn’t help but poke a bit of fun at them as one of them was beautifying himself for the photo-round. In between, we ate some delicious warm chicken patties, courtesy Suvro da, who else? I was telling Pupu an incident of when we’d been in high-school: I’d lit a chocolate bomb on that very road just before carefully putting half a coconut shell on top of it and I’d been scolded a bit by her grandfather and her aunt had complained for at least half the evening that she couldn’t hear properly with one of her ears (I forget which one). Suvro da was telling Pupu that his boys were angels compared to what he had been at their age – he described himself as a ‘goonda’ (thug)! at their age...At some point, I forget when, Suvro da’s boys went back and complained to the shop-keeper from where they’d gotten their second supply of fireworks that a few of their main ‘canons’ had not gone off properly and so they returned with their second supply of ‘free' canons very proudly and they set those off as an encore for the evening’s proceedings of pure fun and delight. While watching the lights, one bright floating lantern that skimmed the skies and the showers of lights from the near-by PCBL display I was thinking with a sense of sudden surprise that it’s very rarely that I’ve ever wanted to be nowhere else but right where I am and this was one of those rare moments. Even Fimh, who was right there so to speak, seemed to be quietly content. I’ll skip over jealously-guarded parts in between but at some point, while curled up under warm blankets I raced through the last few chapters of Christie’s ‘Crooked House’ – a book I last read in school. I think of all the murder mysteries that Agatha Christie came up with – this one is the creepiest. I’d been reading it in a serialized format every afternoon for exactly a week and I finished it late on Kali Pujo.

Fimh insists that I write a bit about human motivations. Human motivations and why people do what they do. The question of ‘why’ is an interesting question, and quite often it’s far more interesting and intriguing than the question of ‘how’. If one persists with asking the ‘why’ then one does, I think..., move to a better place in the hierarchy of being human than before – if one wants to, that is. I’ll write about this soon enough, I guess, because Fimh has been prodding me to for over half a year. But this is the post for tonight.

Happy Children’s Day….if you’re not a kid, biologically speaking – it’s for the kid that's there inside you. May it live for as long as you do!

A post from yesterday

17th October 2015

The ear-splitting music started playing from today. I just about got the fluttering of the Fall experience yesterday – of the stirrings of the unmistakable strains of the promise of joy and unfettered lazy laughter coming from maybe parallel universes with the blue sky and the sun creating ripples through the tree leaves and throwing bands through my window. A part of me dressed in the common woman's Victorian garb and with a tight, prim and ugly bonnet on her head carefully pointed out to all the times that I’ve been wrong about that strange surreal fluttering of hope and even showed me one of my terribly and horribly embarrassing e-mails as proof of my madness and wanted me to see yet other ones and carefully pointed out to the many times that I’ve been wrong and all the things I’ve done because I’m delusional. I protested and tried saying that I wasn’t going about sending e-mails or imagining anything now but that bonneted grim part of me pointed out that that was not the point. It was the feeling I felt that should not be given attention to or be allowed to bathe one. I had grumffed and asked how it was better being a grim old woman who dared not grin in fear of displeasing the gods. Another part tried telling me gingerly that it was okay while other parts were arguing amongst themselves. The grim bonneted part of me won out and I shooed away the fluttering feelings and typed along on the screen about scientists and wrote in my notebook about teachers and teaching with old happy dreams and a few memories running here and there, playing around and scampering and scuffling about and laughing like little gleeful ghosts. Fimh seemed to be rather quiet on the whole while smiling a bit in an absent- minded and sometimes a serene way. In spite of all the different opinions inside, I was later musing in a rather meditative way on the whole, I think – about the past and the present and the future. The work-week in this part of the world has come to a halt from early on in the week, which is nothing to cheer about – not from my end. Maybe next year I can cheer about it – who knows. I knew that the music – and I don’t care what music it is – would be playing at a horrible volume and insistently but I’d half-hoped that it wouldn’t start before Monday. I knew I was pushing my luck. I put up with the noise for about three hours though. An old man from the neighbourhood and I had gone at exactly the same time to lodge our formal complaints today. He was very pleasant in how he put forth his concern – I was not. Apparently there are people in the neighbourhood who want to hear the music and through the day and they have been complaining that the music is not loud enough. But I think the complaints made a difference. They started playing the songs in the evening as well but it wasn’t at that horribly head-piercing high volume.

I was reading this article titled 'Do Female Lives Matter' from The American Scholar yesterday. I must say that I had never heard or read about William James’ sister. It was nice to read about the James sister but especially about Beryl Markham – I harbour a fondness and admiration for women aviators from another generation. I’ll remain sceptical about the allegation that William James did not want history to remember his sister. The article as a whole and especially the title made me instinctively want to argue with the writer. Maybe I’ve gotten even more sensitive with age and experience. God knows, I do not disagree with the premise of needing to make an exceptional individual and life visible and audible to a wider audience and bringing that life within the frame of history. But I don’t see why ‘female lives’ in the grand scheme of things should matter regardless of what sort of females we are talking about and what such females have done or achieved. And surely Jane Austen cannot be compared to Dickens in describing ‘trials and triumphs of the human existence’?! As for individuals being noticed or remembered for what they do: Emily Dickinson wasn’t really known outside her tiny circle until she was dead but then Van Gogh wasn’t particularly rich or famous when he was living. J.K Rowling, as a writer, enjoys far more public attention than Kiran Nagarkar ever will. But will someone try to say that the saga of Maharaj Kumar and Meera is less fascinating than the Harry Potter saga? Which work and which lives will be noticed and in which age and for what reasons do not remain a gender issue. But that particular article got me thinking about our present times. It certainly made me wonder about karma again and other very worldly matters and also from an objective bird’s perspective, which I cannot adopt very often or for too long. There is the matter of the common people and the average people and the billions across the world who are still poor and who still scrounge to make a living and who will never, most likely, make it into the pages of history unless it is through some quirk and quark of fate. But what about the billions or at least the millions and more than millions from the educated middle-class? Will the world, if it continues to make its annual swing around the sun, many centuries later comment on how middle-class girls and women lived for the most part during this age? Intent on extracting and getting whatever they are able to from the rare decent man and also from the roadside Romeos and various men in between while also feeling affronted and offended for not being understood? I’ve lost count of the number of females from different professions who have claimed that ‘all men are selfish’, ‘all men are pigs’, ‘men don’t understand…’, ‘my boyfriend/husband doesn’t understand me…’. I hope history honestly remembers that the greatest achievement of the great majority of women from the educated, middle-class in this particular generation was either to display their feminine wiles and charms in full glory while never needing to prove that they had earnt respect, regard and love or else it was to tell the world all that was wrong about men or else it was both even as they quoted, elsewhere, from Tagore and Shakespeare and some romantic hard-headed poet. There are the regular feminists and there are plenty of women in this category who claim that they are not feminists, which helps their cause no doubt. I have never understood why anybody should deserve respect, admiration and love for just belonging to a social category or why women from the grand middle class should expect the same. I don’t understand why women should almost always cook up the many ways as to how they are being ‘victimized’ at the hands of men or whine about not getting enough respect or why men have it ‘easier’. Otherwise women will see themselves as being close-to-perfect while it is always the men who ‘have problems’ and need to improve themselves. In the grand category of females as a species – these days, I remind myself that I have more than ‘a choice of nightmares’. One group of women will call me stupid and obsessed for the views I have. I remember telling lots of women that ‘all men are certainly not pigs’ and they have tsk-tsked me or called me some names. Another group will call me stupid as well for different reasons. Maybe I am the one who is making a terrible blunder. There have been Lucys and Mirandas and there have been the Helens and Delilahs (Cleopatra was an unusually remarkable woman not to be mixed with the aforementioned types) and anybody who has read Morton’s memorable passage in his A Search for England on how he helps a woman by the roadside and why he does so and about Jatin from Debjaan and how he returns to the world because he cannot bear to see Ashalata in pain will know what I’m talking about. Maybe it’s that many girls and women, for the most part, do not need to do much apart from looking pretty or beautiful and charm men and weep every now and then or smile mysteriously because they are so emotionally awakened as they 'come and go...talking of Michelangelo' or somebody else. Maybe I have just become a grum old woman who insists on trying and trying to do something which matters and makes a genuine difference because I cannot be any different.  I’m sure there are plenty of pretty women and lovely girls half my age who’ll tell me that I’m grumpy only because I’ve never been able to bewitch any real man. They could even ask me whether I think that writers or poets would, upon a glance, write about them or me and they’ll probably point out to Tagore’s poem Gupto Prem and titter while telling me that that is the poem, which is meant for me. They could add for good measure that the only reason I try so hard in doing something is because I can never charm a real man with my being – which they can do in an instant. Much of what such a group might say about me wouldn’t be far from the truth. Even if it is all true I don’t mind making a terrible blunder, if indeed it is a blunder. I’d rather be someone who is valuable for something other than youth, beauty and some ephemeral charms which make romantic, imaginative writers spin stories and poems. That speaks more of the imagination and creativity of the writer rather than any real attribute or quality possessed by the woman in question. And unless human beings are still living in some Neanderthal age or something similar I am sure there is something beyond the markers of youth, looks and charms that takes a human being further along the path of being a human being who loves, cares, has a mind and does things to bring about a positive difference to someone. Am I being delusional? Well, this will be yet another delusion I’ll live with. The grim bonneted part of me can mutter all she wants to about this and throw evil glances in my direction - I'll stick with my beliefs.

I have also been reminded through the din about some other things that I have been fairly stoic about across the last more than two years. I feel terribly sorry and sad that India is in the state it is – more than I normally admit. Yes, true – the US has terrible problems of its own and it’s all the more befuddling in a way because there are so many socio-economic and basic material aspects that the Americans have addressed by now – absolute cleanliness in surroundings (at least in smaller towns if not entirely in the cities), lots and lots of greenery being preserved and conserved and ‘actively promoted’ – which is probably an off-shoot of the insistent teachings, writings, exhortations and actions of Thoreau, Muir, Pinchot and Emerson from the turn of the 20^th century – an efficiency in everyday services, including administrative, banking, municipal functions and various everyday services including but not limited to gas, electricity, plumbing, fire and emergency services and so on, and making a good and earnest attempt at making unpleasant services well-paying and also entirely mechanized, as far as possible – such as, everyday trash-removal. It’s something most middle-class Indians would much rather ignore or at least not talk about because it is impolite. In the place I stay now, for example, the man (please take note – all ye feminists and females who are not feminists) who clears out the trash everyday goes about with a hand-held cart and picks up whatever offensive stuff is there near the gates of every apartment complex. And if smart Indians still want to believe that India is progressing by leaps and bounds because we have smart phones and can buy stuff on-line or that the biggest problem in the country today is the violation of homosexual or transgendered rights – well…maybe I’m a dinosaur in the wrong world. I’m reminded too of the incredible US libraries, the art galleries, the nature parks and the animal welfare organizations. Of course it makes me wonder all the more why the Americans have become so incredibly mindless through the decades in spite of such fabulous resources and earnest attempts to take care of certain aspects of their society. And there are terrible pockets of poverty – not just in the ghettoes of big cities – in spite of the overall wealth. Among the highly developed nations of the world – the US had a very high and abnormal rate of poverty even five years ago. I do not know about the current statistics. And from a social-psychological angle, I do not think that Americans have become a superior race in terms of the mind. It sometimes just makes me want to pick a quarrel with Marx again for his saying that if societies took care of the basic economic base – the super-structure, meaning culture and the social-psychological would all take care of themselves. In India, we seem to have not found any model of development or progress for ourselves and we fail even on objective indicators. And it’s not as though we don’t put some laws into practice with great gusto. We have become very proper about adhering to the no-smoking law on platforms and near airports – but about spitting and throwing trash and keeping our surroundings filthy and smelly and sporting indecent public habits and about flouting traffic rules, we do not care. As for personal hygiene – I remember while reading Suvro da’s chapter on 'Personality Development' from his To My Daughter even the very first time quite some time ago, I’d cringed at the thought of actually telling educated people that they mustn’t pick their noses in public (or in private, actually). I’ve now stopped counting the number of people I have seen picking their noses at formal workshops or conferences. When I look around in my country, I would if I hadn’t been trained well, feel utterly hopeless and dejected. I can only too clearly remember how the state of worldly affairs had made me feel back in my college days. Most of the times, and every day when I travel, I keep a blind eye and a deaf ear or at least pretend to the same to get whatever bit of my own work done. I’ll do what I can do and I have made certain circumscribed boundaries or these boundaries have been clearly made for me. I was re-visiting Einstein’s Ideas and Opinions recently and one bit especially brought the glimmer. It’s a line where Einstein quite unapologetically states that the herd is unimaginative and useless and that it is the individual who is important as a sentient and creative being.

It is also strange, I was thinking, of how one remembers certain dates even if it might seem silly or childish to others. I remember this date from 13 years ago and how I got a letter and I remember long bits from the letter and yet I remember of nothing from the same date for years in between until four years ago again. No, actually one year, seven years ago, on this date – I’d gone and had a martini at a French restaurant in the small town I stayed. Not a James Bond martini but it was a nice lemon martini. One year I had gone to the river in the evening and with some coffee and a doughnut and was perched on a tree branch that curved over the river edge; the river had been in retreat and I had sat there on the branch dangling my legs. One year I had a semi-mystical, adventurous, incredibly perfect, very proper and utterly blissful sleep dream in shots, even though it was rather too short. That dream however, unlike a couple or a few of my sleep dreams and waking dreams didn’t materialize in reality. Now I can’t help but almost smile softly. I sometimes wonder whether such perfect dreams come from parallel universes. I don’t know. But I like to think that they maybe unfold somewhere, sometime.

Mahalaya

October, in my mind, always feels like the first gentle, snug or haunting shroud of a winter. It has nothing to do with the physical reality but I actually get the sudden and delicious cold shiver, every now and then. October spells the leaves changing colour – into golden yellows, maroon, burgundies and flaming oranges. It spells also of a sudden quiver of almost expecting an unexpected perfect moment of communion. It spells of meetings and reunions and companionship through the forests of life. If that doesn't quite come about in physical reality – October spells of being reminded of some that happened out-there in the physical world and not just in one’s own head. Moments of close-to-bliss, so Fimh whispers. November is different. November is grey, icy, still and brooding and with a lot of sleet, cold rain, snow and dark winds, which sometimes blow in just the mind, and it’s almost as if there is ‘first the chill…’ and then the hibernation if not the stupor. But I mustn’t get started on the months and seasons. That would be a different post. Although Sunday morning has passed by – this song, rather restive, below, has been playing on my computer, off and on, from the time I got up and started working on a side-project....

This is already going to be my third pujo after coming back. I remember one evening, very clearly, from the first Durga Pujo after returning. Last year, I don’t remember anything from the Pujo days. I spent a few days down south on a work-trip and workshops and spent a few days looking after two cats in Mohanpur, near Kachrapara where Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay had spent a fair bit of his time. But I don’t remember what I did or didn’t do. Right until the 12^th year of my school-years (I feel embarrassed to think about this now), I would wait in tremulous anticipation for the Pujos when I could dress up and go and spend whole days and evenings at the pujo pandal. Yugh – is all I can say now. I did go out for a couple of days during a couple of my college years too and after that I became a crotchety recluse and nobody – but nobody could drag me out of the house during those days. No amount of shaming or name-calling about how ‘unsocial’ and how ‘abnormal’ I was could make me budge. I merely chortled or maintained a shroud of silence. I don’t think this is entirely a function of age – this growing feeling of distaste and disgust and revulsion. It’s almost as if I quietly and slowly understood that I expected something else during celebrations – and that the reality of what I experienced never gelled with some images in my mind. I don’t mind people enjoying themselves and having fun – but I do start wondering over why and how people – and masses and masses of people can enjoy themselves and have fun by creating a lot of unholy ruckus, mess, irritation, and by gorging and spending and going about woo-hooing. People can of course tell me that I have the freedom to be away from it (I am already cringing thinking about the decibel levels during those days) but why should I be such a ‘Scrooge’ when it comes to Durga Pujo and complain about other people and how they use their freedom to be? Freedom to be – ah yes.

‘Freedom to be’, brings to mind long parts of the book chapter ‘Freedom and responsibility’ and thoughts and questions about the same. Yet another chapter/essay/mixed strain of thought I sometimes wish I had come across in my early college years. I am also reminded of many a class argument and discussion from 20 years ago as a college student with my professor and then from less than a decade ago when my students discussed, debated and argued with me. And then just this Friday, in the middle of a formal and semi-fruitful conversation with a woman scientist and administrator who – when I mentioned Suvro da and Fromm in the same breath and said that a particular problem these days is that people are concerned only about the ‘freedom from’ and yet they have no real idea about the ‘freedom to be or do’ unless it is (and I know I am not the only person to think this way) to engage in utterly directionless, mindless, heartless, soulless activities or ephemeral fancies – smiled and said that I had in turn reminded her of a woman poet whom she had read in college and who had said at the beginning of her feminist activism and writings that women needed freedom to express themselves as human beings; many years later the same poet had wondered aloud sadly that women had gotten the freedom but what indeed had women done with the same. That reminded me of Virginia Woolf and her ‘A Room of one's own’...

I have been talking with scientists over the last long months for a side work-project about scientists and values, transcribing and looking at the interview excerpts and when I’m not obsessing over my hobby horse project about the self-development workshops. Who knows – maybe one day soon when our Institute is truly flourishing – we might indeed be able to do meaningful research studies on freedom, parenting and children and their strangely stunted development in some crucial ways these days. I'd be happy when we can host the grand lecture series. Anyhow. During the course of this last year, some of the matters that I’ve been relentlessly thinking about or which, to tell you the truth, keep invading my mind, even when I try to push them away saying ‘I don’t have time to think’ – have chased me down and now demand to be written about. Maybe it’s in connection to my current work, finding more work or my own self-development or some mix of this and something else. God knows, I’ll always see it as a blessing that I have been given a chance to build up something good while engaging in paid work that is built on all that one has really learnt through one’s own education and search for meaning and where one must ruthlessly look at oneself, better oneself, be mindful and keep the faith. I know I am abnormal in plenty of ways but this part and the following have nothing to do with my being abnormal – I am sure about this.

Some stuff goes back to my college years. I remember picking out Scott Peck’s book ‘The Road Less Travelled’ on one sudden impulse when I was flipping through it at the book-store – Chuckerverty and Chatterjee – where I spent an inordinate amount of time in my college days. I bought it, read a few parts of the book but then stuffed it away.  I remember reading about ‘delaying gratification’. I remember the example as clearly as though I read the book some minutes ago – not two decades ago. He raised the question of whether I, the reader, liked eating the frosted icing or the cake for iced cakes. I had chuckled and said ‘the icing’, and I answered before he had gotten to raise the next question, ‘I save the icing for the end’. Peck’s question was whether one first eats the icing or the cake, depending upon what s/he liked best. I was so chuffed to have fallen in the category of folks who can delay gratification in order to attend to the less appealing parts of a task – any task – I had chortled in glee and put the book away to read for later. I did read it later. The ‘why’ has a story of its own (and I got to read about serendipity and more).  Back then I had been too hasty in being pleased with myself. I am old enough to admit to this. I did practise delaying gratification in eating iced cakes and I did wait for 11 years before opening my mouth to talk with my old friend, but these instances apart, I do not think that I have ever had the tenacity to keep doing boring, mindless stuff or even useful stuff or stuff that I do not like as much if it does not interest me enough or lacks immediate meaning or if I do not have some idea as to why I am doing what I am doing. I know this for I have tried and very hard but every time I have tried I have failed in such an enterprise. I failed to keep at my undergraduate studies and sat out of examinations for two years in a row when I couldn’t see the purpose and there was interesting, other-worldly stuff that I'd started experimenting with. The only reason I actually sat for my examinations is another story but I know it goes back to an utterly unexpected encounter. I failed when I tried to work on a Ph.D. project on scientists when it didn’t interest me enough. I did try but I couldn’t do it. And these are just two examples. I have been able to tackle some stuff at certain points in my life by saying that it is the means to a greater end – and there I have managed to get certain things done because there was something interesting that I knew I could do in the future… When I am interested, I know I am deeply interested and work like the dickens or do my best (even if my best isn’t always good enough). This is not a figment of my fanciful imagination. Even people who hardly knew me told me the same when I was a Graduate student.

The above is not a meaningless delving into what I am or am not as a human being. If I fall at one end of a scale about delaying gratification and happen to fail in plenty of ways as a normal human being – it seems to me that much of the so-called educated world today is geared towards ‘instant gratification’. I want something now – so why shouldn’t I get it? I am reminded of a song which goes back to my college days, which sang about instant nirvana and enlightenment. I have lost from my memory the title of the song and the exact lyrics. I certainly shall not pretend that the matter of long-term and short-term gratification is so basic and easy that all human beings should innately know how to deal with it. There are obviously different kinds of desires and needs – that goes back to Abraham Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ even though there are and have been people who can transcend a few of the basic needs and search out for the higher needs – but I have not been able to figure out exactly all the factors that make for such differences. This was something we had dabbled with in one of our first introductory sociology classes, when I was a college student: that human beings alone, among all the animal species, are capable of a super-organic level of existence. And then there is the line from Suvro da’s chapter ‘On Time’ -  ‘…act as though today will be your last, and sometimes as though you are going to live forever’, which makes perfect sense now and then but I don’t always know for sure whether it makes sense at the precise time it is supposed to or whether I just imagine it to be so. But still – in spite of my doubts about what I don’t always know for sure – it does seem unsettling to me that most human beings these days seem to seek instant results, thrills, pleasures, respect, romance and meaning in life. It doesn’t seem to matter whether I have done enough or worked hard enough or whether I deserve what I want or whether someone else is being badly inconvenienced or whether I even know what I really want or am seeking for. At least there is some humility in U2’s angst-ridden liner, ‘I still haven’t found what I’m looking for’ but it seems to me that most people don’t even have that basic humility because it takes too long to think about what they are really looking for. It doesn’t even seem to make sense to most people that things will not always work out the way they expect them to or want them to. This goes for youngsters working on scientific experiments where they want instant results to females – young and a little older – who will arrive late at airports and then expect to be whisked away through security like they are very important somebodies (while donkeys like me will get there at the stipulated two-hours-before-time and plod patiently, and now and then not-so-patiently through the long queue), to people who want a formal service but somehow think that they don’t have to pay for it to folks who do not think twice before breaking a rule or being rude but are all flustered when someone else does so to especially girls and women who desire and even get romance and love right at the time when they want it but are only interested in getting a lot of stuff from lots of quarters – tangible and intangible, even if they never admit to it even in their own heads – without ever even needing to ask themselves whether they know the basic difference between the mindless and the meaningful and whether they can and want to stick with the meaningful. And when things do not work out the way they want – then they are victims or martyrs, for it is always somebody else’s or something else’s fault. 

As I step into my 40th year, I sometimes wonder about the kind of childhood and growing up years that such creatures have had. Did they really get whatever they wanted whenever they wanted? Is that why they are so expectant of things always working instantly and the way they want them to and for people to fulfill their every want and need? Did they ever wonder what it might be like to be in somebody else’s shoes? Did they ever wonder what ‘meaning’ in life means? Or is it that they have been 'hurt', 'inconvenienced' and faced 'problems and troubles' of their own and have gotten comfortable in the notion that 'everybody does the same thing' and so we all need to be just as callous and unmindful of one another and just get along? I know I saw enough of such different types in my blood family and even among erstwhile friends and fleeting acquaintances. I don’t, quite honestly, give a damn, about the mindless herds. For the most part – the herds have in the past made me scream out in absolute despair and madness. From an objective bird’s perspective, I think it explains much of what is wrong with our world currently. It would have made some ounce of sense if the herds knew cannily and for sure what they really wanted and why. I doubt that this is the case (even though plenty of them seem to have got for themselves bits of 'worldly success'). But that goes back to a discussion on values and valuing and what an individual sees as being valuable. 

Now it hurts to see the rare human being who stands out-of-the-crowd getting burnt or scalded because people think that instant gratification is something of a divine birthright. I remember reading a book review and I shan’t say too much about the book review before reading the book but the book is by Barbara Fredrickson and it’s about how love is not entirely about commitment or about long-term feelings but about ‘micro-moments’ one can feel and everyday and multiple times a day, and for strangers and for just about anybody. The book uses ‘science’ to talk about love and how our bodies are geared to feeling the euphoric spasms of love in those micro-moments and how we can best use them to our advantage and for our ‘development’. Now I’m not being presumptuous here but yes, there is the feeling of ‘agape’ every now and then – not every single day of a lifetime – which has been talked of by individuals from different walks of life – but one gets over that and finds out what is really important and who really matters unless one simply remains flighty or uselessly mad or unless one is an avatar of an extraordinary being, like a Jesus or Krishna or other such human being. I often think wryly, these days, that too many of us, imagine that we are such avatars. I have come across only one such human being but that itself is a rarity on the planet. One might wonder what the connection of all this is to instant gratification and delaying gratification. My question is: how can ‘micro-moments’ of love be anything but instant gratification, no matter if the author apparently gives a doff of the hat to the 'non-lusting', 'spiritual' and the long-lasting? Whatever else one can dub those no-doubt intense instances – surely, surely, but surely – we are degrading and abusing and misusing the meaning of ‘love’ when we describe those instant but terribly temporary and flighty instances by the same name? 

This brings me to the matter of human motivations. The motivations for behavior – social and private behavior. Max Weber had something to say about that. This is something that has been bothering me consciously for months and maybe sub-consciously for years – people act and behave sometimes in similar ways or even in identical ways and sometimes say similar or even identical things – the reasons and the motivations might be, can be, and are, very different. That gets me to Ratnakar, who became Valmiki and through a very conscious and careful choice, so I would say...

In Hinduism, we often get to read that all human beings carry the essence of godliness in them. The essence of godliness in all living things is what is captured in 'tat tvam asi'. I have felt that keenly and vividly in wild and euphoric moments in the long dead past which I do not wish to revisit. But these days, I wonder along the lines of Tagore regarding more than lots of human beings and I hold myself to the same scale of judgment and across contexts: 'tumi ki tader khshoma koriyacho? Tumi ki beshecho bhalo?’ Surely there is a difference between the true human being who has loved and cared and brought meaning, laughter and joy, and the human being who has loved, and the human being who is yet to even really know, understand, feel and internalize pain, empathy, knowing and remembering? How can all human beings be the same or be seen or viewed as being equal or even similar? That is travesty. I can’t help but be reminded of letters from long past and of another book chapter...

So much for this post. It is Mahalaya, officially. So here's a song for the evening.

A strange month

God, this month seems to have whizzed by on certain weeks and seems to have passed by in the slow lane in a week in the middle, here and there. Fimh has been prodding me for two weeks to write a post and now I’ll write a bit. It beats being obsessive over a brochure outline or a new website or a workshop powerpoint presentation or sitting and brooding over what is to be in the coming days and weeks and whether I will or will not get any calls for workshops or worrying over other stuff or puzzling over the last month. The last month makes me wonder actually – which makes me wonder all the more in a way, because a little over four months ago I was sure that my sense of wonder was broken and quite lost. Strange sleep dreams and different waking ones even came about in this month. But I don't think people will believe this. They'll call me abnormal or strange if not unhinged and loony. Anyhow.

Strange with a beat...

The last four weeks and four days really seem to have been conjured up by some strange, capricious, unpredictable, hard-headed and inscrutable God. I would even go so far as to say a ‘loving’ God but I don’t want to be presumptuous and so I’ll stay quiet about that. I had a second semi-homecoming when I least expected it. I had incomparable, exquisite moments of conversation, companionship, quiet and even crazy times with my best friend. I worked in moments of trance to type up and collate material for a workshop. I kept at getting a few toes, a booted foot or both through the doors of a few educational institutions in the city and country. I got to meet and even chatted with Pupu for a few hasty minutes at her college because I had accidentally left behind some of my belongings, which she had spotted and her dad had sent alongwith her (psst: I wouldn’t ever recommend being careless but whoever knew that  being careless could mean having a brief but delightful encounter?). I even spent a couple of lovely hours listening and chatting and arguing and listening at Suvro da’s place in Calcutta. I started off an introductory workshop on self-development 12 hours later; the best one till date, in over a year.

And then on a Sunday after a rather whozzy morning when I wandered around my place like a ghost that walks with lines from the above song playing in me 'ed, I took out the paints I had bought a few of evenings ago. Not water colours or acrylics or oil paints. I cannot paint like an artist but I can paint walls, doors and windows. So I got out house paints. I had been looking at my place through objective eyes for about a week. I’d looked around and said that the apartment I stay in is hardly The Ritz but that aside the doors needed fresh paint. So I went about painting the doors. I’d completely forgotten how nice it feels to paint with roller brushes and a big fat paint brush where the only aim is to cover the piece nice and well but not too thick and not too thinly. I was reminded of scenes from the original The Karate Kid where the Sensei teaches the kid the master strokes of the ancient martial arts through the art of painting walls. I didn’t master the strokes of the martial arts but I had a rather meditative time painting the doors in the contained anticipation that a particular Somebody might just come and visit, if even for a bit. There was a bit of a mishap when what I had seen as being a soothing saffron turned out to be a shrieking yellow but then a mix of white did the trick. But the painting, among other things, got me wondering: I’d much rather quietly paint doors rather than do the ten hundred things that people seem to love these days. That goes for socializing to pub-hopping to gobbling huge quantities of food every weekend to coyly flirting and facebooking their ten hundred pictures to show how pretty or ‘cool’ or ‘hot’ or  good looking they are or being 'busy' with 'work' that neither brings in a lot of money or any prospects of more money nor fulfills some meaning or purpose in life. I was also reminded of a news piece. I don’t read newspapers regularly. I keep meaning to and sometimes I manage to buy a paper when I’m outdoors but otherwise apart from two years in college when I read the newspaper cover to cover every day – I don’t regularly read the news. However the news piece I read was commented upon by both Suvro da and Pupu and when I’d been glancing through the papers – the piece had indeed caught my attention because it was so ludicrous but so apposite for the times: it was about a bored and depressed billionaire. If I were to go along with that bit I would digress too much. But to keep it short:  I couldn’t help thinking that the bored and depressed billionaire would have a good time if even he decided to paint his doors and walls or buy a piano and get tuitions on how to play or take music lessons or painting lessons or take some special friend out for a thumping good vacation or...well, let that be.  I was reminded of one conversation between Pat and Robby in Three Comrades where they rue over the fact that the wrong sort of people seem to have so much of money and about Modesty and Willie on how they use money to good ends – well, to be honest, Modesty has very clear ideas on that and about money; Willie, while he does have crystal clear ideas about one aspect of life, he isn’t very clear-headed about the money part till Modesty spells it out for him. So much about house painting and life and living. One more thing: I wouldn’t recommend distemper for new timers (I've tried that) but plastic paints are nice to paint with. And these days, they have pretty and different designs that one can try out on walls with pre-made stencils although I think people can make their own designs too.

Would I recommend the translation of the lyrics that appear on the screen? - nope. No. I love the whole version without the translations. That goes back to a memory.

Then it was in the middle of the week and I’d been loping about the house – doing this and that. It was one of the random days that I was in the house, and I got a surprise that didn’t even belong to the box of my often-times fantastical imagination. In the midst of hunting for a work-file, from 10.30 in the morning the day changed into one of those exceptionally rare and perfect dream sequences, which is like a unique snowflake. I ran out of doors making sure I had my phone and was wearing decent clothes. Before I knew what was happening – I had a perfect tour of the Jadavpur University campus. One of the finest moments for me was looking in on a classroom where Suvro da had taught a class as a Master’s student, which he pointed out to me. I’d been wondering about that class and scene and for more than a couple of years. Suvro da wondered about one professor and how he could be still around. The professor’s door had a lock and it did say ‘Out’ but there was his name in its real presence on the door. We stood around one balcony in the Economics department, talking, which overlooks one section of the campus which has a small gazebo. I wondered whether that structure had been there thirty years ago. Suvro da's car, in one of those strange co-incidences, was parked right across from where we stood and seemed to be winking at Suvro da. A little later, we crossed the road for some tea. And even I could see that the place couldn’t have changed much in thirty years. There was a feisty dog there which insisted on standing in the middle of the road and barked noisily at a car which had hardly touched it. I scolded the dog while Suvro da grinned and remarked that the dog liked to live dangerously. The doggy poo-poohed a biscuit which was given to him but went over to the other side of the road to gobble up some food that was laid out for him. I liked my biscuit. The very young chap manning the tea-stall, upon Suvro da's chatting with him, said with a smile that it must have been his grand-dad who had been manning the counter thirty years ago. It was back to the campus and I could almost see the place in my mind’s eye and in sudden scenes from more than thirty years ago with the students just a year younger telling their batch-mates to move aside because ‘Suvroda’ was coming in. I had been worrying like a worried hen about the hour and a half and yet before I knew it – it had zoomed by and rather too soon. We sat under a tree chatting, watched the students and their doings, the walls with posters and messy graffiti, had a Pepsi, saw the dark thunderclouds spread across the sky and took shelter under the roof of what is called ‘Worldview’ when the rains came down for a bit, and chatted and chatted in-between in bits and pieces and some more little bits which needed some more pieces to fill in more bits of the 'over-sized brain twisting jigsaw puzzle'. But maybe, so Fimh claims, I can look forward to some other times. Pupu came in soon after her exams were over with her new friends. A couple of her friends were more talkative than the rest and Suvro da rattled off all he knew about Pupu’s friends and they looked delighted and a little amazed that he knew and that Pupu had told him about them.  I grinned with a quietly blissful contentment inside my head. It was off to have lunch after that. I had one of my favourites – momos. It was one of the nicest momos but I think that was because of the company...One of Pupu’s lively friends dubbed me ‘Pishimoni’. Pupu didn’t miss out on remarking on that with a laughing spark in her eyes. That certainly was a first. We visited one part of Pupu’s department. I was looking at the posters. We walked around and I tried not to worry about Suvro da and his straining his leg, which made me somewhat like the boy from Aldous Huxley's tale of the boy with the 'magic carpet' and the purple cow. I didn't nag him too much, I hope. In some moments with the way he was moving around, I might have almost forgotten that he had a leg which was still hurting. There was an insistent man, I remember, on the ground floor of Pupu's department who was selling hand made cards and coconut sweetmeats. In a sing-song voice, he was telling folks about his ill mother and about being an ex-student of Jadavpur. He latched onto Suvro da and Suvro da bought some stuff from him. The very discomfiting man rather reminded me of the Sherlock Holmes story of the man who used to pretend to be a beggar. Some kids who were trying to raise money for some political cause had also zoned in on Suvro da much earlier, I remembered, and Suvro da had talked with one of the kids and handed out some money to one who had smiled hugely and seemingly gratefully. Pupu admitted to buying lots of joss sticks from another such sad sort of seller because she had felt terribly sorry for the person and then distributing the joss sticks amongst some of her friends later. None of Pupu’s friends wanted to have coffee after our lunch and look-around, but I always do and when Suvro da asked me whether I did – I said a huge ‘yes’. So we sat around with some coffee and I suddenly told Pupu and her friend about the great big husky that I have encountered across the last year and more on my work-trips down South. And then the snowflake of a day walked on a bit for a little while longer in a most unpredictable manner.

Then there was the superb trip to Durgapur on Friday with Suvro da in the front seat and in his car, Earl Grey. The very relaxed and competent driver, on a couple of occasions, raised even my heartbeat with his overtaking tactics. I almost got up from my seat once and the only thing that stopped me was the image of Suvro da telling me not to engage in back-seat driving! But God be blessed – Suvro da told Feroze, his driver, to take it easy. The highway which I have encountered on more than a few occasions on the bus looked completely different in Earl Grey and it was fairly free of traffic. It looked beautiful and my eyes were fixed on the highway, for the most part, almost like I were the one who was driving. The highway reminded me of those highways from the US apart from the lorries which insisted on driving left of centre. I think the only other difference might have been is that I would have been driving…and the kaashphool which I spotted in one sudden beautiful moment – the first of the season. With his eyes, Suvro da wondered aloud about the trees on the left-hand side which weren't as lush as the ones on the right - I was willing to overlook that till he pointed it out. Suvro da pointed out to the stretch that he normally drives, and I could visualize that quite clearly. I didn’t even notice when Earl Grey had turned into Smoky and was doing over 75m/hr. Suvro da cautioned the driver and I looked at the speedometer and did a calculation and cheered Smoky and patted and petted him in my head. I was reminded of a trip across the Appalachians while driving a truck, somehow. I won’t go into the reasons. Sometime in the middle, I pensively wondered aloud to Suvro da about the goats on the divider of the highway who were busily and happily chewing grass and Suvro da pointed out very seriously that the goats knew about the road-signs and could read them. I was in fits while in the back-seat and tried to stop the noisy laughs. Every now and then I could see the mountains loom in the distance. I was almost expecting them to appear but that didn’t happen this time. It was perfect nonetheless. At Shaktigarh, there was a mini-stop and I debated about lighting a cigarette. I debated about it too long. We got tea. Suvro da chatted with Pupu on the phone while I was trying to encompass my sometimes bizarre trips to and fro and this one and observing Smoky and contemplating objectively about some other stuff. Before I knew it – it was time to get back in Smoky. I tried getting a few puffs of a smoke in between – I might as well have avoided it. The last stretch passed by in a flash – even Panagarh went by in a blur. I’ve never missed the Airforce base – this was the first time that I did. It was also the first time that I didn’t doze off and wasn't in any mood to doze. And there it was – the Muchipara crossing rose into the distance and we were back before too long and after lunch and not without one round of impassioned scolding. Suvro da was clearing out cobwebs from his classroom even before he gave himself time to sit for a bit. I've been kicking myself for forgetting I had a working camera for the various trips. 

The monsoons are over but this is one song which insists on edging its way in: it was dedicated to a person who survived in spite of being hit by lightning more than once.

This is a long enough post, so Fimh seems to be saying, although there is more I can think and write about and even more I could ask about. But I shall depart for the nonce. Oh, and one more thing...'oh, okay - I'm going, I'm going!' I'm being huddled out now.

Homecoming, Part I

It’s been well said, by one grand writer that one needs 'time and patience' and more than medicines to cure a sick person. Two utterly unexpected phone calls out-of-the-blue, towards the end of the week, last week, from my old friend miraculously cured me of the lingering after-effects of the nasty flu and hopelessness in a way medicines or even extended sleep or even attention to work could not do.

It’s been two years, two months and two days since my homecoming. After being in Wonderland and with my best friend for a whole day and a whole night, within a space of 24 hours, I was in the city where I’d spent 9 years of my youth. I am reminded of how I walked from Esplanade to Nandan and found a place to sit next to the unruffled pond of water. It started drizzling soon after and I was sitting in the shade of a tree and smoking. I think people who have stayed away from their country give out some odd vibe for there were random people, I remember, who asked me whether I was a tourist and where I was from. In my head I was thinking of the line ‘This world is not my home…’ and yet I didn’t want to leave the world right then for I knew I had promises to keep and so instead of being a smart-alec I’d said that I was not a tourist. I sat at Nandan and wondered and rather pensively about what was to be. I’ll take the risk of saying that I’m in a better place than I had been while sitting there in front of the pond and smoking.

I had left my country 11 years ago. When I’d left I hadn’t foreseen any reason that I would return for good. In fact I had absolutely no intentions of returning for good. And yet I knew of one happening that might have made me never leave. That did not happen. And so I did leave the country and on one very early morning. Like thousands and thousands of youths do worldwide as they travel to the US as eager and bright-eyed Master’s or Ph.D. students. I must say that this was one of the things that I had obsessed over when young and I can still remember the sense of relief with which I boarded that flight westwards. More than a lot of my concentration was directed towards one of the things I would do once I got to Purdue and yet that did not directly have anything to do with Graduate School or being in the US – or so I had assumed. It did and would have much to do with knowing, knowledge, and being in Graduate School too and beyond Graduate School but I didn't know about that back then. Back then, I'd seen it it as being inextricably linked with a couple of my childhood years, my long and awkward adolescent years and of curious and uncanny happenings which unfurled during my early youth. 

By the time I was in middle-school I’d gotten to know that people could go and study in the US for higher studies and could get full funding to study and a decent amount which covered living expenses and even savings. I’d actually secretly wanted to go to England for higher studies but back then and through my college years, I was told that people did not get funding from universities to study in England. So I’d decided that I would go to the US – and to study and to really know about all that perplexed me. If I’d told anybody in middle-school that I was going to engage in higher studies – I would have been laughed at. By the time I was in Class X, I’d managed to flunk every subject with the exception of History, Geography and Physics and maybe Biology but I can't be too sure of that last one. Maybe nobody flunked those subjects in school. Yet in spite of my bad performance in school, knowledge and knowing fascinated me. I hungered to know and know more of what really matters and to 'follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bounds of human thought...'. I was particularly fascinated by human beings, human minds and human behaviour and about what made human beings different from one another and sometimes not-so-different. I knew that sex, age, race, ethnicity, class, religion, national origin and none of those social markers separated the extraordinary human beings from the ordinary, trivial and evil ones. Yet quite what it was – I did not know. I was quite sure it was something peculiarly individual. Then there was – from the time I was in college – the haunting and persistent desire in wanting to unravel the ‘theory of everything’. One elegant theory which could explain the purpose and the reason of all life and bestow meaning upon this otherwise rather bizarre concatenation of features which marked life and existence on this planet. I was sure I could discover it and live like some messiah come to save the planet. Maybe I should be embarrassed to own up to this – but I’m not. I didn’t actually discover the theory of everything but I did discover my own meaning and purpose in life, which is not anything remotely trivial or ordinary. And I know I am walking on the path to fulfill that meaning well and truly…

But to go back to the curiosity otherwise I’ll be traveling on another path. I was sure that even reading alone would not help me in discovering or cracking the puzzle of life. Here, I was merely keeping in mind my own limitations – the fact that I couldn’t read a huge lot and digest all of it. But even so – I had heard and read and even seen documentaries on the fabulous libraries in the US and I’d heard how people could study what they wanted to in the universities and the whole deal sounded much like a good dream and I was determined that I would go to the US to know and learn and live like a human being who had chosen to be a knowledge hunter. I was interested in making money but I had had the feeling that if I could exploit my own skills which seemed to be in the area of understanding and explaining social and individual behaviour and engage in work that was interesting to me – I would neither be poor nor make a poor living. As for love and human relationships – since I had found out by my early twenties that I was unbelievably awkward in that racy, fine and sublime area and made more than most people uncomfortable by my presence after a bit of time, I had reluctantly decided that I’d have to leave that aside. I preferred keeping a stiff upper lip about matters of the spirit and God and letting them be, by then: my individual attempts, in early youth to pierce the veil and to understand the mind of God had driven me barmy. Fate of course most likely said a loud ‘ha!’ at my neat little decisions that I’d made upon the beginning of my travels towards higher knowledge like a scholar who had it ‘all figured out’ or so she thought.

My discipline was Sociology. I studied Sociology for my Bachelor’s by a process of elimination. I didn’t have Sociology for my high-school years. But just before applying to colleges in Calcutta in 1994, I was given some money to buy a few basic books. I got a feel for the discipline. What had fascinated me back then was that the discipline contained almost all the social sciences within its folds. As a social science discipline it had branches which related to psychology, politics, economics, anthropology, religion, literature and even biology. It was also, I could see, overwhelmingly concerned about the external social forces (family, schools, teachers, religion, media, class, gender and so on) that act upon an individual and how those structures ‘determine’ and shape the individual. And the topic of social determinism and human freedom kept me engaged in college. There was something in me however that strongly resisted the idea of social determinism. In this sense, I never quite became the conventional good sociologist in the twenty years that I was in formal academia but I certainly stuck to my guns. I argued vehemently that the individual was of importance and the exceptional individual was a case to be studied in and of himself and could not be seen as just another statistic. While most of my intelligent friends in college became ardent Marxists of various hues I became just as much of a militant too – about individualism – although I liked to think that I was not a militant. The matters of values, mental health, choice-making, creativity and intelligence, among other matters, interested me deeply. Now it feels a little strange to think that I managed to combine various aspects and do my Master’s and then my Ph.D. on topics which kept nudging me to think and held me completely in their thrall as a willing accomplice for a long, long time before I’d ever really known that I would engage in higher studies some 10,000 miles west.

Life in the US was more of a superb and somewhat disjointed dream for the first 9 months. I flew through the coursework without batting an eyelid and even managed to ace statistics – my bête noir. However, I had not known for a few months that we actually got grades in Graduate School. It was only when my old friend reminded me of ‘straight As’ that I went on to make enquiries and got worried that I hadn’t been paying attention to how much I was scoring on different exams and papers. I didn’t need to worry though on those grounds. I aced everything without a second thought those first two semesters. I read much. I typed a lot. I wrote not a bit in my diary. I was quite gregarious. I had made more than a few ‘friends’ and of different sorts from different parts of the world from our very mixed and rather mad dormitory housing. There was Irini, Clara, Eva, Miguel, Yanni, Domingo and Bean and others. Smoking brought together a bunch of people from the dorms – and there were plenty of conversations, debates, discussions, arguments over cigarettes and coffee and sometimes even some alcohol on the stairs of the dorm under the night sky if we didn’t meet at the coffee shop. The campus was very pretty – so I felt all along although many fellow students snorted at me. Friends said that Indiana University, Bloomington was pretty. Purdue was not pretty. I still went with my views on these matters. The lawns were a delight. The gym was huge and there was an Olympic-size swimming pool. What took my breath away was the absolute cleanliness and order and basic decency in public surroundings and the wonderful libraries. This is what makes the country, in spite of the dark and dirty and growing underbelly, still great – I think. For some reason, more than a few Indians didn’t care for the cleanliness. I had a vein in my head throbbing with anger when a couple of Indians said that the US obsession for cleanliness in public surroundings felt too sterile and antiseptic. More than a couple of Indians said the same thing and I had duly yelled my head off at them and most sarcastically. Apparently they all loved some smelly place in New York. It had felt like ‘home’. I never got a ticket for speedy driving but one day quite some years after the first 9 months, I had been staring at my 10^th floor corner dorm window with longing and with surreal memories knocking into me while crossing the road and a very smart cop crossed a road himself, approached me and scolded me for not walking carefully on the road. Right till the end I could never go to the school library without feeling that I was entering a cathedral. I remember some moments of holding books there and with different thoughts chasin my mind and of feeling like I was holding in my arms an incommensurable human life in that sacred silence. I used to go for long walks around town and especially to the river and to a hill. But it wasn’t all this and actually it was none of this that made those first 9 months a dream. That is another story that I've written about here and there and elsewhere…

The second year was a ghastly nightmare. I hope I don’t have to re-visit that time and space ever again although I’ve had the terrible fright more than once. I won’t talk about the why here but that second year was worse than horrible and there was not a thing that I could do about it even though God knows I tried. A couple of my department mates noticed the change in me and tried keeping me company for an evening or so during the week. They lived in apartments and I had had to shift rooms and was staying in a dark and gloomy dorm room that year. But somehow they came over to that dorm room and sometimes armed with alcohol and songs and we spent very long evenings in that room. I used to smoke in the dorm room. I did that in the first year too. I have the suspicion that the Resident Advisor knew about my misdemeanor but she and I used to get along well and so she overlooked my impudent breaking of the rule. I didn’t smoke at the beginning but then one day I set fire to a frozen waffle when I’d put it in the microwave for too long and by the time I got it out and doused it there was dense smoke in the room but the fire alarm didn’t go off. So I knew that a mere cigarette or two or more with the window open and with my head very near to it while sitting in an armchair couldn’t set off the fire-alarm. I got along very well with the cleaning maids who used to come around and one of them had very kindly lent me a thick blanket of her own accord and told me to put it up against the bottom of the door. She told me that it would prevent the smoke from escaping. I wasn’t so lucky in the second dorm. Every single thing was off that year. And when an anonymous complaint about ‘someone smoking’ went through I knocked on the door of the uptight Resident Advisor and told her that it was I who smoked and made sure that I moved out of the dorm as soon as my contract was over. The two friends who used to come over – Beth and Lorrell – sometimes pestered me to go out with them and on a few evenings I did. One evening, Lorrell after she got to know that I didn’t know how to drive insisted that she would teach me. We had gone bar hopping and afterwards we went to a deserted carpark and I drove for 15 minutes round and round and round the carpark while Beth had lain flat on the backseat worrying that a cop-car would spy us and that a cop would nab us. One late night Lorrell wanted to get a bottle of vodka and so the three of us went over to a pharmacy store (the pharmacy stores sell liquor too). The security guard took one look at us and felt that we were trouble. He insisted on following me around the store and I kept acting like I was going to do something amiss. Beth went red in the face and kept telling me to stop acting suspiciously. She was sure the guard was going to take out his gun and just blow my brains out or something. I told her not to be silly. I was just helping out the security guard. The poor man was following me around and if I didn’t act a little suspiciously – he would have felt miserable. It wasn’t really his fault though. The three of us – Black, White and Brown respectively – had walked in late at night in hoodies, jeans, sneakers and bloodshot eyes. We didn’t look very respectable as a group and didn’t look like law-abiding people.

The nice thing about renting a place there was that the apartments came with all the basic stuff and the Purdue University tag helped. Apartments had water, electricity and cooking gas connections in place. Most had central air-conditioning and every apartment had heating. Some apartments even had basic and nice clean furniture. And almost every place had a fridge, microwave, washing machine and dryer. So one’s own expenses were limited. I moved around apartments a fair bit in the first four years but stayed in the same place for the next six. Gosh yes – it was a decade. I had been absolutely sure that I would travel in the US. I had very badly wanted to go to Yosemite and The Redwood parks and the Grand Canyon before I had left for the US but I didn’t travel. It was too painful to visit terribly beautiful places without one friend. It didn’t make sense to me somehow. People will call me stupid and mad and obsessed and I won’t argue any more – but I can only accept that I had become a different person after the first year of Graduate School. I simply felt like a disembodied being for years even in little Lafayette and West Lafayette and while wandering around that pretty town and so I stayed put in Lafayette and traveled a whole lot in the mind. I had sometimes discombobulated and very interesting mind-trips even if I say so myself. Once I learnt driving I did make lots of driving trips to the airport to drop off friends or pick up friends. I think I may be the only Indian who stayed in the country for a decade and never once visited NYC. I did however change tyres on a car twice, went to court to file a case against a man who had threatened to slit my throat, went with a calm friend Beth to a piano concert in Chicago and I drove a u-haul truck through the Appalachians when a sane friend, Guha, moved to Maryland.

For some years in the middle I had utterly lost my compass and anchor. I swung this way and that and I helplessly watched sand run out of the hourglass. My old friend had once told me that all people should count but nobody should be allowed to matter and I had tried to put that in practice. I inadvertently put into practice the line from Kipling’s ‘If’ – ‘all men should count but none too much’. I paid a horrible price for it after those magical first 9 months. I should have known better but I had had the cocky belief that I didn’t need anyone in my life to live well but I had been mistaken about that. The pain that came with the realization that I had made the most horrible blunder in my life made me realize too of who and what really matter. I never did forget after that even if I became a trifle more weird. It also made me by-and-by eliminate all that was unnecessary from my life. I finished my Master’s a couple of years behind schedule but it was a nice little eccentric study once it was done. One of my professors kept hounding me in the corridors to publish my paper and others and I kept running away. For all aspiring academics I will say this: publish papers when you are graduate students if you are interested in staying and thriving in academe.

I started teaching courses from the third year and that was enormous fun. I remember though that on the first day of classes in a huge gallery, my legs were shaking like jelly as I faced some 90 students or more but my voice was very composed. I remember my favourite student from that first class. The Sociology 100 Introductory course was my favourite teaching class although students liked me in the Sociology Theory class. One semester, not a few of the students liked me even better than the professor. I rather liked the professor though. He and I got along fine even though he came across as being socially awkward to many people. I’d been teaching for three years when there was an urgent notice that came to the Department Chair which stated that I had not taken the mandatory English Test that was required of all foreign students who were teaching. The Department Chair and our Graduate Secretary were more annoyed with the notice than I was. Both of them grumbled saying that I had superlative language skills and yet there were those silly bureaucratic procedures that would have to be fulfilled. I took the test of course and it was fun actually. When the scores came in our Graduate Secretary had grunted and said that it wasn’t a surprise that I had scored full points for the exam. She had added that I could go and teach them a few English skills if need be.

I took quite a few extra courses through my Master’s and Ph.D. and when I was finally entering my Ph.D., a few years late, the paperwork I noticed stated that not all the courses I had taken would count towards my PhD. That was a bother and so I took some more courses that I simply wanted to take and not because they were related to my Ph.D. One course was on ‘Nation and Nationalism’ but about that some other time maybe. I worked on a completely different topic for my Ph.D. for quite some years in the middle. But then the sun shone in utterly out-of-the-blue on one fine day in 2007. After a very awkward year and three more years of wandering around the other topic on environmental values and scientists, I finally zoned in on my choicest Ph.D. topic. I had a very clear sleep dream which made me change my topic. Many people in the department thought that I had finally lost it and that I was mad. But the old professors trusted me. One old prof with whom I’d never taken a class told me one day that it didn’t matter if I took awhile; what mattered was the quality of my Ph.D. My Ph.D. advisor and committee members were fine with the topic change. The last one and a half years were marvelous in a different way from the first nine months. A few times I would feel melancholic during the last lap of my Graduate Studies that I’d lost so much of time. I couldn’t help thinking that had I done the maverick study within the first few years I’d be one of those ‘cool’ academic stars and could have made good in a way that could have made a genuine difference. Still. I made good in one way, I think and when I read this I feel more than vindicated. It’s one thing not to do a Ph.D. but I can’t possibly imagine having done my Ph.D. on anybody or anything other than whom and what I ultimately did it on. I remember while there were professors who literally had shining eyes when I graduated (and not just my advisor), our then graduate secretary sent me a lovely e-mail saying that she had gone for my graduation ceremony and she was very pleased to see that I didn’t race across the stage in my usual style. She was very worried that I would run across the stage and she said that I had been very ‘graceful’. Me, graceful – can you imagine. I also know that not a few professors started wishing that some student of theirs would do a Ph.D. on them! Once I finished my Ph.D. I felt with that strange feeling inside which isn’t always right that I needed to and desperately wanted to come back home. I knew, like E.T. exactly what home meant for me: home is where the heart and soul is. I was terribly homesick. It wasn’t just a childish sentiment. I knew too and in a very hard-reasoned way that I simply didn’t want to stick around in formal academe in the U.S. any longer. I was done with the whole thing. I can very well empathize with Max Weber’s saying that he studied Sociology to see how much of the world he could take. For me it was the idea of the anti-climax. Nothing I could do or achieve within formal academe would ever compare to what I did for my Ph.D. But I wasn’t ‘allowed’ to come back right away and so I stuck on and with various odd pieces of work and a very odd existence – academic and otherwise. Call it fate or God!

And then, just as I was giving up all hope I was allowed, indeed told to come back home, back in 2013. I was beyond relieved and delighted. A different story began then. For a few weeks recently, I was wondering whether I’ll be able to truly make good. It haunts me, this. I can't see the reason though for being around unless I can so I can't imagine that I won't be able to make good. I want to and need to make good for this life and for whatever that follows. That's all for now. 

A bit of the flu and a bit of dreams

The one good thing about a week-long lousy bout of viral fever is that one can look forward to getting better and hale if not ‘hearty’. This was the worst flu/fever I’ve ever had with intense body aches. I’d been navigating the roads and public transport with great caution, I didn’t get wet in the rains but the health gods still curled their lips and said, ‘trying to be a little too careful, aren’t we?’ and so I guess I got a viral-whatever. I had visions of hundreds of angry ghosts hitting me on the head, on my eyeballs and insides with miniature hammers and tongs. I merely felt like an in-pain vegetable and I was utterly hopeless, yet again, at reaching out to God through the clamp of physical pain. I couldn’t even hear fimh. I certainly had nothing intelligent to say. I hope I burnt off a little more of bad karma, if nothing else. The only thing I was glad of for the first time in a year and a half was that nobody gave me prompt appointments over the last week.

I did have rather interesting dreams every now and then though. Not at the beginning. At the beginning it was mottled grey and splotchy. And even the very hopeful dreams coloured in soft rose and grayish tinges became black and puffed and all wrong as I dreamchased and with grim determination feeling that I was on the right route. I was sure I was right. I didn’t turn out to be right at all. I was all wrong. I made every possible blunder in the dream and I woke up with a blooming headache and horrible bodyaches. But what made me miserable was not the physical ache – it was my failure. It was my abysmal failure in the dream when I was so sure I was right that made me feel even more in pain and utterly dejected. But after three nights of nastiness – the good dreams swung in. One dream came in when I reached the first bout of ‘getting better’ in almost exactly a week. I was half-napping in the late afternoon and there was a surreal light dappling through the bed-room windows and I was dreaming of mountains and hills with a smile on my face and in the dream I was thinking that the best of British, German, French and Bengali men were luminescent-ly intelligent, furiously cantankerous, strangely humourous while being great eternal romancers. Having the thought in the dream – I imagined I had chanced upon a glorious nugget of knowing and felt bathed in a precious laughing light. I could then see a hillside with a gathering of such gentlemen. I was thinking then that it would be such a thrill to be invited to such a gathering for afternoon tea and there I was! I had actually been invited. I could see one gentleman very clearly – he looked very young and rather from an old photo. It was up on the hills. I was smiling in my sleep by then but had most surely woken up from the dream. Yet another dream harkened back to ghosts and gods from monsoons and springs past. There was Meera and Krishna and Meera writing a poem of how others could go find knowledge, intellect and look for learning; of how others could go be very wise and wizened; of how others could go count the number of ways they had done good works and deeds in life – all she would keep count of was the number of times Krishna stole glances from her on the sly, laughed his laugh with her, did tease her, joust with her and make merry with her – that’s all she’d keep count of. I surfaced from that dream and was reluctantly smiling over it. I couldn’t argue with Meera. I was reminded of fimh who had once carefully rattled off a ditty about a ‘bichchu meye’ (‘imp of a girl’) while I had listened in wide-eyed wonder but had forgotten to hastily scribble out the ditty for later times. The ditty got lost in the vast space of mahakaal – the memory however did not.

The sleep dreams that I sometimes like the best in their relation to living life that is are ones that somehow seem to tweak or influence the future or somehow give me some reason to be mystified without clearing too much of the air but somehow let me make some quantum jump into the future. It hasn’t happened all that often obviously through the course of one human life…but maybe a couple of more times wouldn’t be too much to ask for before the boat sets off for the last time around the bend. I have done things and even a few fun things too…but I and the things done have not overlapped like a perfect snowflake as yet.

I had more to write about for this one but I’ll let this one be.