Let the past bury its dead

It is downright cussed, if not plain ridiculous, that those of us who live in the Garden City of Bangalore, a gross misnomer if ever I came across one, should keep whining and going on about the unpleasant weather during the months of April and May. Yes, the heat and humidity, once unknown in the city during this time of the year can be physically and mentally stultifying. ‘We never had fans in Bangalore.’ Thus far, the rain god Indra has also been disobliging. Perhaps El Niño has got the drop on Indra. Then the rains, huffing and puffing, do arrive and the air-conditioners are turned off forever. We can then move on to complaining about other things like the traffic jams, load shedding, lack of infrastructure and public transport, new constructions sprouting like a rash, trees being felled willy-nilly, threats to the ozone layer, parking woes and several other sins of commission and omission. Incidentally, if you do not like my saying Bangalore instead of the localised Bengaluru, tough. Feather and tar me, if you wish. Old habits die hard. The masthead of the daily newspaper The Telegraph in Kolkata still says Calcutta. Bully for them. Always hoping and praying that the new dispensation in that capital city of West Bengal does not decide to rename it Ma Kali Durga Nagar or some such divinely dictated moniker. Stranger things have happened elsewhere in the country.

Incidentally, as an off-the-cuff comment, a bit of a non-sequitur really, it is the mango season, short though it will be, and it is the one bright spot on the horizon. That is some compensation for all the other travails we endure during these summer months.

The human species has developed and fine-tuned the habit of cribbing about anything and everything. We are never satisfied with the status quo, never mind which generation we belong to. Which is why we are forever moaning, teary-eyed, about the ‘good old days.’ What is more, we always find the grass infinitely greener on the other side of the fence. I now live in Bangalore and formerly spent many a turbulent year in Calcutta. As a city that attracts immigrants like moths to a flame, I know of many friends and acquaintances who have moved to Bangalore from Calcutta, either to seek greener pastures on the job front or to buy property and lead a quiet, retired life. Hope springs eternal. If you happen to be sitting in a waiting lounge in any one of Bangalore’s leading hospitals, chances are there will be a Bengali family within stone-throwing distance. Ditto at an airport departure area. Oftentimes, this has resulted in striking up momentary friendships, even if they are just akin to ships that pass in the night. Though not a Bengali by birth, my identity with Calcutta and the Bengalis is deep. I speak the language colloquially, after a fashion, and can spot a fellow Bengali from a mile off.

Then comes the inevitable fraternising and the joy of being able to exchange pleasantries in that beautiful language. In passing I can confidently state that though born a Tamilian, my friends from Tamil Nadu will invariably respond in English if I open the conversation in my mother tongue, a strange affectation. If I address a Tamilian with that familiar greeting ‘Sowkhyama?’ his reply is bound to be something on the lines of ‘Very fine Sir, which is your native place in Tamil Nadu?’ See what I mean? With a Bengali, never mind which strata of society he or she belongs to, the lingo will just flow like treacle. And they love it when a non-Bengali speaks their language, even if imperfectly. ‘Urre baba, khoob sundar Bangla bolchen.’ Once you have got past that initial exchange, the conversation will quickly move to politics, cricket (don’t forget to mention Sourav Ganguli) and, if you are in luck, Satyajit Ray and Ingmar Bergman. Mamata Banerjee and Suvendu Adhikari are best avoided. Recent tumultuous happenings post the West Bengal state elections may witness some fundamental changes in peoples’ mindset, for better or for worse. We will just have to wait and watch. Meanwhile it is best to give the subject a wide berth.

As more than 25 years have passed since I left Calcutta to settle in what was then a reasonably salubrious Bangalore, I have had enough time to start beefing about the terrible conditions in India’s IT capital and how rosy and wonderful things were ‘back in the day’ in Calcutta. That is what inevitably happens when you are unhappy with your present state and long in the tooth, to boot. Cynicism comes easily. If you were truly objective, you will recall how you suffered interminable power cuts under the Communist regime in Calcutta while you were swotting for exams under the ministrations of a rapidly dying inverter at home. Then, just to be an awful tease, the power would flicker briefly raising hopes, and quickly die on you for hours together. As to the local transport, we would clamber precariously on to the 2B red bus or the No.24 tram to and from college, barely getting a toe hold, cheek by jowl with a gaggle of sweaty, grimy, ill-tempered humanity, inhaling a lungful of carbon monoxide belching from the bus. I recall an occasion when an elderly gentleman kept philosophically digging his nose during the entire journey. When at last his stop arrived for him to disembark, one of the other passengers tapped him on the shoulder and asked him in chaste Bengali, ‘Dada, kichhu pelen?’ (‘Dada, did you unearth anything?’) Dry humour can surface in unexpected places.

Cut to the present. When a group of friends in Bangalore who can all be described as ex-Calcuttans, to coin a term, gather at the Bangalore Club, a pleasant enough location, the conversation would invariably shift to reminiscing about what a marvellous time we all enjoyed in the culturally vibrant atmosphere and broad-minded populace that characterised that city of dubious joy. While all that is not entirely untrue, my limited point being that the mind naturally discards the negative aspects of the past and concentrates on what we truly cherished. Which is probably a very good thing. That is the very nature of nostalgia, all of us looking through rose-tinted glasses. Spotify may have democratised and made immensely convenient our access to music, but we will keep harping on our dust-laden, scratchy LPs or spool cassettes and tapes. ‘The sound was truly genuine. Spotify is all artificial and digitised.’ The poet Longfellow exhorted us to ‘let the past bury its dead.’ That’s all very well, but the past keeps rearing its head, particularly when you are at an age when there is not much of a future to look forward to. On the whole, I prefer the gurus who lecture us to ‘stay in the present.’

I shall end this lugubrious rumination on the past, present and future by referencing the world of sport to buttress the point I am struggling to get across. The aged cricket lover, on being told of a 15-year-old tyke called Sooryavanshi who slams sixes for fun is bound to respond with a sigh, ‘When will we ever again see that classical forward defensive push, bat and pad locked together? Sunil Gavaskar! When comes such another?’ A conversation on tennis will yield a similar response. ‘This Djokovic, Alcaraz and Sinner. They are good but they just keep running from side to side and blasting the ball to kingdom come till one of them drops with sheer exhaustion. Even the spectator gets dizzy. Give me a Laver, McEnroe or a Federer. A beautiful service motion, a couple of balletic steps to the net and the volley crisply put away for a winner.’ My short answer to all this rhetorical ‘When will we ever see’ nonsense is to direct them to YouTube and invite them to search for whichever antediluvian hero he would like to wallow in the past with. Who knows, even the luxuriously bearded W.G. Grace might put in an appearance, provided he has not been a creation of the dreaded AI.

It’s the same with music. Ask me and I am bound to say, ‘There’s nothing like The Beatles or Bob Dylan, M.S. Subbulakshmi or Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, Bach or Beethoven.’ That being the case I might as well close with these lines from the legendary 82-year-old Irish soul balladeer, Sir Van Morrison, ‘The beauty of the days gone by / It brings a longing to my soul / To contemplate my own true self / And keep me young as I grow old.’