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Time's up. Thanks to all of you for voting. Pity that the number wasn't larger, though.

Seventy five percent said they found the blog hugely entertaining: that makes me happy. The six who said they find it only mildly entertaining might write in to say what, in their opinion, would make it more enjoyable to them. Just please let me know your names, though: I don't set store by anonymous comments.

To the few who said they don't enjoy this blog at all, I am sorry that my tastes don't match yours. Please don't visit again!

Whodunnit

In the aftermath of the recent train accident at Sainthia station, West Bengal, TV channels and newspapers, as is their wont, are inundating the public with all kinds of theories, more or less bizarre, about what could have gone wrong. Here is one of them. 

Heaven knows what official inquiries will eventually reveal (if anything at all - such inquiries are much better known for covering up after a mess than otherwise), but for the present, I think, the moral of the story is that you shouldn't accept tea from strangers, especially in the middle of the night! Even more especially, if you happen to be driving a train. It's not good for you.

MLAs in helmets

My newspaper says (The Telegraph, 13th July, p. 3) that some MLAs in the Karnataka Assembly have gone to attend meetings protected by helmets, claiming they are afraid of being manhandled by some of their colleagues in the ruling party.

Parliamentary politics has always seen some degree of rough and tumble: that is supposed to be inseparable from full freedom of expression. They banned the induction of arms of any kind inside the sacred precincts long ago so that some people's representatives didn't get carried away in their enthusiasm to make their point into murdering some of their peers. Now, it seems, even bare hands and legs have started posing sufficient menace: we might soon hear about MPs and MLAs arriving to serve the people in full body armour. Who says democracy isn't flourishing in India?

Never just right

In this country, they keep telling you till long after you start sleeping alone that you are 'too young' for certain things - consorting with the opposite sex, for instance, or experimenting with drugs (even of the very mild sorts) - and then, before you know what, you are suddenly 'too old' for everything, except perhaps politics. Just when are we ever the right age?

This is the reason why, though I make fun of such people too, I feel a sneaking sympathy for both little boys who try very hard (by growing beards and jauntily perching cigarettes at the corners of their mouths) to look grown-up, and old geezers who dress up like young rakes in the desperate hope that they might look the 'right age' despite their swelling midriffs and their bald pates and their wheeziness. But honestly, is most of life supposed to be yearning to grow up and then lamenting that the 'right age' is past forever? How sad.

Odd choice!

Why is it that these days both on the streets and in the newspapers and fashion magazines one only gets a choice between looking at over-dressed women who resemble misshapen mountains of lard and those who look like well-oiled lizards (size zero, my daughter says they are called, just skin stretched tight over bags of bones sticking out at all sorts of odd places) who have little to cover themselves with?

Has anybody else noticed?

The world of Don Camillo

They make neither priests nor humorists the way they used to.

That was the thought that kept passing again and again through my mind as I was savouring a set of Don Camillo books that Shilpi had very kindly sent over all the way from the United States.

I shall not write much about either the irrepressible village priest Don Camillo (and his eternal friend-cum-bête noir Peppone) or about his creator, Giovanni Guareschi: a google search, I have checked, will yield enough to whet the curiosity of any real reader/connoisseur of humour, and then the books are waiting. All I want to say here is that I am grateful to an old boy for having reminded me of the books (which, thanks to yet another great Catholic priest – Father Pierre Yves Gilson – I have had the privilege to know, I enjoyed in full measure long ago, when I looked after the library in St. Xavier’s School, Durgapur. Another time, another place…)

Earthy, credible, wicked, whimsical, unfailingly imaginative, loveable, and yet also informed, thoughtful, large-hearted, moving and memorable. I rarely use so many adjectives at one go to describe anything, but they all fit in admirably in this case.

In one sense, the stories are period pieces now, as much as those of Dickens are. Yet – as all good books should be – their essential appeal is eternal. Nothing about these stories is more endearing than the little candid conversations that Don Camillo has with his mentor on the cross. I often reflect that certain writers – Tolstoy, Dickens, Ruskin, Chesterton, Eliot and Guareschi among them – have done far more for Christianity than any flesh and blood priest has ever done. A pity that the Vatican has not always done them justice.

Try this link if you like.