Live Habit

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…………………“Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit”………………………………

So wrote the Poet. He knows. Dead habits kill. There is no doubt about it.

William James wrote a 1500-page close-printed tome: ‘Principles of Psychology’. It was available in our fantastic Central Library of IIT KGP during the 1960s. Students at Harvard needed an abridged version for their classes. His condensed version appropriately called ‘Jimmy’ is eminently readable, reputed for its lucidity and lack of jargon. There is a whole Chapter in it on ‘Habit’. He analyses this strange thing to which all of us are slaves from childhood till death. Essentially Jimmy shows it to be a labor-saving device.

When does a ‘habit’ become ‘dead’? Is there a ‘live’ habit?

These are relevant questions. When the labor-saving device takes us over so completely that we cannot change it come what may, I suppose it becomes a dead habit.

I am not talking of physical habits like tying the shoe strings or wearing trousers in our own idiosyncratic ways. There is no harm even if they become dead habits. One is sure that one’s zip is never down if one obeys his habit, unless the wife suddenly detracts by their usual last minute shout that the gas cylinder needs to be urgently changed. That brings me to My Fair Lady’s Dead Habit: When we are half-way down to Gole Bazaar on our scooter, she would cry, “Did I turn off the gas?” That meant going back home and checking on our every trip. It never happened that the gas was NOT turned off. But the routine continued for decades. I decided every time that I make sure to turn it off before we start; but I could never slip into that new habit. Open the garage, take the scooter out, lock the garage, kick the starter, load the pillion and take off till the Puri gate and turn back…..

I am talking about habits of the mind. Like for instance in our professional lives. When we were students in 1960 we had only Vacuum Tubes in our Electronics labs. Working with 500 Volts DC: quite a deadly shocking affair. When I became the lab teacher in our Electronic lab at IIT KGP in 1970, the tubes were getting replaced by transistors working at a very safe 12 Volts. My dream come true. No more shocks. But transistors worked very differently than tubes: they were ‘current-controlled’ unlike the ‘voltage-controlled’ tubes. The theory and practice were very different. Only those teachers who didn’t fall into the dead habit of their student lives could survive in the Fourth Year Electronics lab. Others went down to the harmless viscometer in the First Year lab.

There was another horrible thing called the soldering iron. I never could escape burns and shocks from these curses. But one fine day I was given the punishment-posting of Lab-in-charge of the Electronics lab. One lateral entry student from Calcutta (he joined GMRT later) who had this hobby of Electronics brought his own new thing to the lab the very first day and was doing his experiment using it. He was not using the soldering iron. I at once ran to him and he coached me how to use what he called the ‘Bread Board’. At once I ordered 50 Bread Boards and banished soldering irons, much to the annoyance of Tarapada Babu, who insisted that a student who can't solder and doesn’t burn his fingers in his Electronics lab ‘learns nothing’. I was reminded of Thurber’s Father Moth rebuking his son who refused to fall into their family calling of swirling around street lamps and singeing their wings: “You will come to no good”.

One of my relatives is a fitness freak. Every year I meet him he says he has ‘fallen’ into a new habit: It is Gym this year, Yoga next year, Jogging the next, Dieting next and so on. The last I heard was when he was singing the inimitable virtues of joining their ‘Laughing Club’ where apparently 50 odd old goons stand in a line and laugh their heads off.

He is the supreme example of a man with ‘Live Habits’.
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