False Dusks

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Last night around midnight my son returned from his Office, piled some dinner on his plate and sat before me while I was trying hard to get the word: 'alchemy' to describe the changing facial color of KVR in my blog.

And he said:

"There is this American Lady visiting us in our Office"

I raised my eyebrows and he dismissed it saying:

"Oh, she is a very old woman"

"How old?"

"64"

I slapped him on his wrist. And he said:

"Oh, Sorry!"

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While I was passing through my post-retirement-trauma, most everyone including me, except my son, felt and declared that it was the end of my road. As they say of KGPians rather wollily:

"One can get out of Severe Depression, but it won't get out of you"

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The other day I got one of those rare mails from Professor KLC (Director, IIT KGP, 1987-97). His mails are briefer than tweets:

"GP: What keeps you busy these days? Attached is my tribute to GSS"

I then replied in detail that a handful of my students (led by that taskmaster Aniket) are taking revenge on me asking me to submit online sessionals (webnals without webpo) daily. And attached that day's blog titled: "Pilgrim's Regress". I knew he would read it between the lines. And he tweeted:

"GP: Quite a rising Ruskin Bond. Keep it up!"

KLC happened to be the Director during my best decade at KGP. IBM PC arrived just then and so did Ed Taylor's Spacetime Software. It was a terrific learning experience. I learned more of SR in 15 days than I did in 15 years past. And Somnath's batch submitted an illegal mass-petition to the HoD asking for GR to be taught. And I was working out Weinberg and enjoying it. And Amitabh Chaks brought the oven-fresh Sakurai's MQM from Purdue and asked me return it to him within a fortnight...

KLC was always curious about me and used to shoot tweets every six months:

"GP: What are you doing nowadays?"...a terrific taskmaster.

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If you get hooked to daily blogging in your so-called old age, there will be no time to think of your ailments. And if you have the great good fortune to have a li'l kid like Ishani always eager to keyboard your blogs, time evaporates like a piece of sublimating camphor.

The beauty of old age is that the two basic hungers that possessed you and made your life compelling just about vanish.

One is food. In your prime time, you have to eat well because you have to work. And digest it by walking, gymming, swimming and stuff.

But if you are as old as me, you don't need much food to blog...the calories needed for keyboarding are supplied by one meal a day, square or circular.

But you enjoy it thoroughly because you don't have to rush to the 4th Year Lab Class.

In your youth food is a necessity...in old age, it is a luxury...since all your teeth are gone or broken, you enjoy the color, the smell and the flavor of dosas, samoses, mirchi bhajas on the dining table, without having to eat them.

Much the same with the other primordial hunger...

It is the nearest state to what the Upanishads call: "Pure Existence"...like a Hyderabadi Rock.

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Keep this to yourself, and I haven't done a survey, but I suspect that all IIT KGP Directors are Great Survivors. The greatest of them all, unarguably, Professor SRS, I think was into his nineties.

And GSS was so many times in and out of ICUs that he almost winked and said like Mark Twain:

"Stories of my death are greatly exaggerated"


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