Writing the Monsoonami letters

It is almost over and it is starting. 

I am finishing 2024 wiser. This has been one of those pivotal years of my life, comparable only to 1993 when I started working or 2004 when I migrated to the UK and started my life again. In the sense that those two years taught me a lot and made me a different person: 2024 did that too.

I am also wiser because my optimism is tempered. I have finally gotten rid of my youthful assumption that it is possible to change people or systems (in other words, I have now, finally, become old). I am not cynical - at least not yet - but far more conservative than I was. I know things change only very slowly, and only organically, and forcing the change, however desireable, is beyond the powers of human beings. We seem to think that we are at the centre of the universe, and therefore the changes are really brought about human action. I can wake up one morning and command the Sun to rise, and when it rises, can claim my supernatural powers, but the observant would know my secret; I have started believing that most changes, including revolutions, discoveries and all the evidences of human brilliance, come as a product of time. I have started seeing through the stories.

But this is not the same as losing hope in human agency. In fact, if anything happened this year, that is me taking a lesson in entrepreneurship, with the inevitable blood, sweat and tear that come with it. It was as practical as it gets, with false starts, slow gains and the joy of seeing the benefits of one's labour in quick succession. And yet I did not hustle, and maintained my deep distrust of the popular belief that anything is permissible when starting a new business. I have maintained my boring view of the world, that in education, one needs to be extra careful, and the people are always more important and an end in itself. Therefore, while I was giving up on changing the world, I kept knocking. I maintained that the system is rotten in the core, and, though I am weak and inadequate, I should keep faith and keep trying, and be present on the day when the broken door and the storm would have their rendezvous.

Hence, I am now the non-pessimist, or the opportunist-optimist, who has given up on big dreams without regretting his former self. In other ways, too, I am less ambitious. I have now reconciled to living in London. I have tried to escape London every year for the twenty years I lived here, finding it too commercial and too busy. But I have started accepting that this is now my home and it would be hard for me to escape ever again. Indeed, I keep dreaming about setting up a new university, which often draws my attention away from the job I have at hand. London's fortune as an attractive destination for international students ebbs and flows - it is still one of those great clusters of innovation and ideas, and yet, too many financiers and too much bad money have spoilt the place and speculating has become a more attractive activity than building or making. It is somewhat ironic that the political speculators like Nigel Farage get something right, which the strange current breed of 'centre-left' (there is no such place as centre-left - one is either on the left or not) politicians keep denying: That the defining divide of our age is between the committers and speculators. 

  I thought I need to record my journey from this point onwards, and I would do this in the form of letters. Written to my former self, because I don't have anyone to write to anymore. But I am very much into studying letter writing, an art that email has killed, and intend to spend my Christmas reading Madame Sevigne, Lady Mary and Horace Walpole and thereafter others (there is a long and glorious list of letter writers I am assembling, Seneca and Cicero to start with). This is something I once prided of, but when I tried my hand at it recently, those fell flat and failed to ellicit any response from its recipient.

Here, then, to the lost art, to my many failed attempts - missives to the former me, a surge of Monsoonami!