I first saw the Kilmainham jail in the U2 video song, A Celebration, and in Jim Sheridan’s famous film about an Irish rebel, In the Name of the Father. Now I was seeing the jail in person.
 
Last year I visited Dublin and, after visiting museums of George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats, I went to see the Kilmainham jail. The British rulers built it at the start of the eighteenth century, to replace the filthy dungeon that acted as a prison earlier. It was an inhuman hellhole too, with five prisoners stuffed into a small room, irrespective of age or gender. Men slept on iron beds, women and children, often as young as seven, jailed for nothing more than stealing bread, on the floor, in straw. Inmates were hanged in public for general amusement; later a site was built for the purpose inside the jail. But Kilmainham is mainly known for the freedom fighters who were incarcerated and executed there.

​Standing there, on the threshold of the jail, my hair stood on end. I had grown up in British India and known well the humiliation of being the denizen of a subject nation. You could give a speech and be in jail. You could write a book or sing a song and be in jail. You could be hauled up for anything trivial the British rulers deemed a treason and be in jail. They had enacted laws that, if you did anything that encouraged “disaffection” of Her Majesty’s government, you could be charged and put in prison. They had shamelessly hanged a 18 year old boy who had tried to harm a British official. I had visited an Indian jail where the British had herded freedom fighters and now I was seeing another place where they had done the same thing.
 
Exactly like the Indians, the Irish had long appealed to the good sense of the British to let them have autonomy and finally realized the colonial masters had no intention to change. There were rebellions in 1798, 1803, 1848 and 1867 and then came the Easter Rising of 1916. On 24 April, 1200 armed volunteers took over key sites in capital city of Dublin, including the city hall, telegraph and telephone offices, and started setting up barricades. Unprepared, the British authorities responded with a show of strength, sending in huge reinforcements along with gunboats and artillery. In the ensuing skirmishes, 500 people died, half of them civilians. By Easter Sunday, five days later, the rebels surrendered.
 
The aftermath was pitiless. The British rounded up 3500 people including 80 women. In an illicit court-martial, that was secret, based on scant evidence and permitted no defense pleas, 90 people were sentenced to death. This was followed by other brutalities, such as the mass killing of 15 people and the shooting of a boy and a journalist on the mere suspicion of being rebels. If the Irish people had not fully warmed initially to the idea of an armed revolt, the British atrocities aroused them to a fiery demand for freedom.
 
I slowly walked through the east and west wings of the jail and finally stood in the open courtyard of the prison. It was a bright but cool autumn day and there was a gentle breeze. On one side stood a small, dark wooden cross. This is where the British army had dragged the condemned freedom fighters one by one and had them shot by a firing squad. Nineteen of them, including all the seven leaders of the rebellion.
 
The guide pointed to a corner, “Here fell Joseph Plunkett.” Born in a cultivated family, Joseph was a brilliant poet and journalist, who had become an Arabic scholar during his time in Algiers. In the few hours left to him, he married in the prison chapel, Grace Evelyn Gifford, who was also a poet and activist. The squad then shot him.
 
The guide was now pointing to the other side. “James Connelly,” he whispered. James was from a poor worker family and fought all his life for laborers’ rights. He became a rebel leader and was wounded during the Easter Rising. He could not stand for his execution. The squad tied him mercilessly to a chair and then shot him a volley.
 
I thanked the guide and walked out of the prison. Opposite to the Kilmainham jail, is a small café. I sat down and asked for a cup of coffee.
 
I needed a moment to ponder. I came from a country where too the same aliens came in ships and brutally exploited the land and its people for two centuries. Whoever protested they shot, hanged or put behind bars. The young, now free and fearless, barely remember those who suffered and rebelled, fought and died – brought them their freedom.
 
Kilmainham is no longer a jail. Ireland became a free republic in 1937 and the jail was turned into a museum. So that the Irish occasionally remember the people who paid the price of their freedom.
 
U2’s song keeps ringing in my ears:
 
I believe in a celebration, I believe you set me free
I believe you can lose these chains, I believe you can dance with me.
 

After years of study in college and university, I came out with a master’s degree in economics, including intensive courses in banking. I joined a large corporation that paid my salary in a bank account. That is when I discovered I did not know how to “cross” a check or write an “account-payee” check. A postgraduate study of banks without knowing how to write a check!
 
Why do we remember almost nothing of what we spend hours and years to learn in school and college? Could you give me the proof of Pythagoras’s theorem? How many of the chemical elements can you recall? You handle money every day, but could you tell me any of the monetary theories you may have studied in college?
 
The reason we don’t remember what we were taught is that it had no relevance in our life. That does not mean that geometry, chemistry or monetary theory is not relevant. It means the way these are taught robs them of real-world significance. We learn abstract concepts and complex theories, but we don’t learn and never realize what earthly use are they in our life.

Of what use is mathematics to me if I can’t look at an apartment and estimate its area or lift a salmon and correctly guess its weight? Why should I study chemistry if I haven’t the foggiest notion of what my favorite pie or ice-cream does to my body? What is the point of mastering economics if I have no idea whether to buy shares when there is a depression or how stupid demonetization is to stop black money?
 
To go up a step more, why have education at all if you don’t even know the basic things of life: how your body works, what your food does to you, why you remember some things and forget others, the way your refrigerator and lamps work, what aging does to your father and mother and what conflicts you can expect with your brother, how stress affects your life, how communities go berserk and act foolishly, the manner in which love and hate are likely to radically change your life. If education is to prepare you for life, these are the things it must deal with. It seldom does.
 
You learn mathematics, plenty of formulas and equations, but when you are buying an apartment you cannot even estimate its area by looking at it. You study chemistry, but you are completely beyond your depth when you have had a drink too many and your wife brings you some aspirin. You have a degree in economics, but you are foggy about how a company operates or why you shouldn’t buy a share some friend recommended.
 
My friend Donna, a professor of history, bemoans the way we are taught history. Who cares which year a war was fought or a king was decapitated? The only history we should read is world history and the only reason we should read it is to know how society has changed over the years, so that we understand ourselves and our society. History, she says, is not old annals, but the living story of our many mistakes and some successes – from which one could learn how to live now.
 
At present, the deity at whose altar we all seem to worship is technology – which means computers. We have a huge and growing class of people who manipulate data, often skillfully, but seem impervious to the real meaning of the data and its meaning in our life. Health, finance, medicine, sports, all are getting usefully data-based, but we are falling behind in understanding what the analyzed data signify.
 
Donna says, “The techies seem content to look at the data in different ways. But if all their time goes in manipulating data, when will they learn to relate those to the bigger issues of life? Or, if they can, how will they tell us, in simple, clear language what they find out? We are developing an army of people smart in juggling figures but inept in thinking and expressing where those figures lead us.”
 
The response you hear is specialization, the accomplishment of burrowing deeper and deeper like a mole in a small terrain. Are we quite sold on the benefit of knowing more and more about less and less? Aristotle would have laughed at an electronic engineer who could not distinguish a presidential from a cabinet form of government, for he wrote treatises on politics as well as biology, linguistics, logic and music. Albert Schweitzer would have cried if a cardiac surgeon could not say why religion is a lousy basis for citizenship, for he, the finest organist of his time, besides being a philosopher and writer, became also a doctor and ran a hospital in the obscure African town of Lambaréné.
 
A school or a college is a learning location, not a penal institution. We learn so that we can live happily and well. That demands we look at the broader interlinked horizon of knowledge and life. Instead, most of the time, we spend miserable years in murky institutions to acquire meaningless certificates to work in dull organizations to inch our way to a lonely, listless, pointless end. What a waste!

My apprenticeship in the industry began with some unexpected help.
 
Within a week of emerging from the university, I went to work for a large European company and the Eurasian secretaries there played a large role in my life. They belonged to a community that was incorrectly called the Anglo-Indians, because their forebears were not just English, Scottish and Irish, but also French, Portuguese and Dutch. They spoke English, affected western dress and had a unique culture that melded Indian with occidental ways.
 
Mine was an affluent British firm and it hired only Eurasians as secretaries, probably a legacy of its colonial heritage. The Indian executives tended to look down on the secretaries because of their biracial antecedents; the secretaries in turn usually despised their Indian bosses, usually regarding them as uncouth. Fortunately, I was assigned Pamela, a pleasant elderly secretary who somehow looked on me as a wayward youth and treated me with maternal protective care. This proved a lifesaver, for I was young and totally unversed in the ways of a narcissistic bureaucracy. She saved me from a thousand pitfalls and a million gaffes.
 
I defied company tradition by inviting Pamela to an elaborate lunch the very first week. It was my idea of starting work with a person I considered an ally. She graciously reciprocated by inviting me to her home the following week and introducing me to her husband. Thanks to her I gained a sterling reputation among secretaries. In those pre-computer days, we dictated letters to our secretaries who then typed them out. I was aghast that most executives dictated a draft, sometimes a second draft, before signing the finally typed letter, forcing the secretary to print it several times. I disciplined myself to think ahead and dictate fast and only once, telling the secretary the paragraphs and punctuation. Result: I dictated only once, saving my time, and she typed letters only once, saving her time.
 
My reputation as a dictation wizard spread fast. Whenever the director wanted me to prepare a draft, Sharon, his secretary, would say, “Perhaps Mr. Nandy can dictate it to me, and I can get it to you in the next fifteen minutes.” I liked that because Sharon was the prettiest secretary in the whole office, and she had a great sense of humor. At our first encounter, she named me ‘Menace’ and claimed that my rapid-fire style reminded her of a hoodlum in a Hollywood movie. She mocked what she called my show-off erudition because I used words she declared nobody else knew and I also used punctuation marks such as a colon or semicolon that no other executive used. She was amazed but complied with my request for the Director’s last 500 letters, which I analyzed to work out the kind of letters he preferred, and, from that point, he never took issue with anything I wrote. Rather, he started sending me others’ drafts to change and improve.
 
Janine, an earnest Catholic secretary, wrongly inferred that I was a devout Catholic because a Jesuit priest used to visit me regularly and I occasionally took him out for a meal. He was my friend, not my cleric, and our common interest was literature more than religion. But Janine took our closeness as a sign of my piety and would invite me to all kinds of church events. I went to a couple of social events and even danced the whole night with her at a gala. She impressed me genuinely by her generosity, for I retained her high esteem – she even spoke well of me to other secretaries – despite failing to turn up at St. Thomas’s ever for a mass. When our company made a significant donation to Mother Teresa’s charities, she came breathlessly to hug me, not incorrectly guessing that I had something to do with it.

​Perhaps the most remarkable was naughty Crystal, an attractive short-haired minx, the cynosure of all the bachelors in the office. She had shrewdly determined that I was the most accessible – and probably gullible – young man in our department and would discreetly play all kinds of flirtatious games with me. On the stairs or in the elevator, she would deliberately brush past me, or, coming to deliver some urgent message, would softly whisper, “When will you invite me for a drink?” When I felt emboldened enough at last to invite her for tea, our conversation was a modest session of covert signaling. I am not sure what prevailed at the end, wisdom or cowardice, but we parted as good but unimpeachably chaste friends.
 
It is my perverse belief that I learned from these encounters as much as I ever did from any of my bosses or colleagues, let alone the myriad conferences and training sessions I suffered through. They taught me that little gestures and signals often mean more than your words, spoken words deftly spoken could convey more than looks, and a little care about how you present yourself might count more than the appearance you were born with. I learned to deal with different types of persons, respond to their preferences and aversions, and enjoy the whole darn learning process.
 
A decade later, when Pamela, who never stopped causing an irrepressible throb in my heart, left the company and immigrated to Australia, I knew the time had come for me too to look for another job. My days with Eurasian secretaries were over.

​Carlos Lopez loved to tell stories, mostly about himself. Those stories unveiled his gift of imagination more than his loyalty to prosaic facts. He told us he was a New York kid who had grown up in a notorious Bronx suburb, acting first as a Latino gang’s courier and later its sicario. He had reportedly crossed swords with other gangs and extorted money from vendors and shopkeepers that, he claimed, later paid for his school. His flair and Hispanic name made his stories believable, and every time he spoke of his gang life his stories turned more bloodcurdling. I later found he was a New Yorker all right, but his father was a Manhattan surgeon and he attended an elite boarding school in Chicago.

​He was my colleague in Washington and we got on well together. He was clever and hard-working and, when there was a problem, we worked together to solve it fast. He had served briefly in the US Army and claimed he had seen action in the Middle East. As usual, he had horrific, gory stories of the war front, which he loved to narrate to a willing listener. But it was I who listened most to his memoirs, for we traveled together for work often and spent hours in cars and planes. Much later, I met one of his army colleagues and found that he was a senior officer in supplies with a desk job and had never seen any action at the front.
 
I got to see another side of him when I told him of a childhood experience. I mentioned that, whenever my brother and I saw a plane in the sky, we would do a sketch in our exercise books. We both dreamed of being a pilot, which seemed to us to be the most romantic job. I told him that I even thought of taking flying lessons much later, but it fizzled out when smaller airports were closed in our area after 9/11.
 
Carlos listened intently and narrated a chapter from his own life. When young, he was keenly interested in flying; he took flying lessons for a long time and passed all the tests with distinction. He applied to the air force, intending to complete his college later on military scholarship. His father just wouldn’t hear of it. He said he was quite capable of paying for his son’s college and would not need public funds. He added that he expected his son to complete college before he started on a career.
 
He tried again when he finished college, but his father was adamant that he should go to a university and complete graduate studies. Carlos met that bar too and he was still under the maximum age for enlistment, 27.  But when he went to the enlistment center, he found he was two pounds over the maximum weight for his height. The air force required him to five pounds below the maximum. Seven pounds was not a large margin, the recruitment officer advised him, and he could come back in a few months having reduced his weight by a combination of diet and exercises. But, once again, his father, when he got to know about it, pronounced a verdict against it. He wanted his son his son to look for other jobs.
 
I guessed that his father’s persistent opposition had to do with the fact that the Korean war was going on and the US Government was actively recruiting for war missions. But Carlos could only remember resentfully his father’s rock-like opposition to his long-held dream. He could never be a pilot and he blamed his father for it. I realized all his stories of bravado and glory came from an unfulfilled dream of what he imagined to be a life of unremitting adventure and heroism. There was something touching in his endless longing for a dashing life he felt he had been unfairly denied.
 
An interesting parallel to his stories of derring-do was his claim that he was a great cook. He knew of my utter ineptitude in the kitchen and would ridicule me, justifiably I thought, for my unquestioning dependence on my cook. He would tell me, especially after a weekend, about the delicacies he had prepared and served himself and his guests. The tales of his culinary triumphs took on more color when we had female visitors. I had noticed that Carlos always mentioned Chicken Tetrazzini as a special entrée he prepared for female guests and said he used a special recipe he had acquired from a famous chef. I was mildly perplexed because whenever we dined together he suggested a restaurant and the one or two occasions I had shared a meal at his home the fare seemed pedestrian.
 
When Kathleen, an extremely attractive colleague from our Milwaukee office, visited us, I took her out for dinner one evening, and over coffee in the office the next day she referred to it as a great treat. Carlos promptly invited Kathleen for dinner the following night and graciously included me among the invited. He promised Kathleen that she would have the greatest Chicken Tetrazzini she had ever had in her life.
 
Early the next night I had a call from Carlos.
 
“How is the Chicken Tetrazzini coming along?” I asked.
 
Carlos sounded unusually subdued and said there was a problem. He asked me if I could keep a secret. I promised to be discreet.
 
Carlos said that he never cooked Chicken Tetrazzini; he did not know how. He always got it from a boutique restaurant near his home when he had special guests. He had just found out the restaurant was closed because its workers, led by Carlos’s favored chef, was on a strike. What should he do? I offered that there were at least three other Italian restaurants in our area that had Chicken Tetrazzini on their menu and there was still time for him to order some for his guests. I advised that he should remove the restaurant packaging well before the guests arrived.
 
That evening, as Kathleen, looking glitzy in a red sequined dress, turned to Carlos and thanked him for a delicious dinner, I completed my collegial duty and commented loudly that nobody, absolutely nobody, made a Chicken Tetrazzini as well as Carlos did.

Something curious happened on the way back home.
 
I lived then in the Park Circus area in Kolkata and often walked back from my office near Park Street, less than two miles away. As I passed the park near my home, I noticed the unusual crowd and heard the music. Inquisitive, I sauntered in.

I was amazed. A fortyish man was on a makeshift stage, evidently a foreigner, playing a five-string banjo and singing. He was tall and lanky, with receding hair and a widow’s cape, in casual dress, a gray tee-shirt and blue jeans. He was singing American folk songs, but such was the magic of his singing that many in the audience, ordinary people, some hardly conversant in English, were keeping beat with him and trying to sing along. I found in the crowd several local people I recognized – three street urchins, two shopkeepers, a guard, a kid from the tea stall, a driver I had used – all rapt in the music and responding eagerly.
 
I had never seen anything like it. I turned to an older person next to me and asked who the man was. Irate for the interruption, he whispered, “Pete Seeger.” First time I heard the name.
 
But then the man started on a song I had heard, “Where have all the flowers gone,” a protest song that had already gone around the globe. He followed with another familiar song, “If I had a hammer,” which too was used at a protest rally. I did not know then that Pete was the lyricist and composer as well as the singer. I heard him, mesmerized, until he concluded with the visionary “We shall overcome” – a song that could be heard in India in two local languages. It was only later that I learned that Pete had replaced the ‘will’ in the original spiritual with a ‘shall’ and given the song its current tone and tempo.
 
When I narrated my remarkable experience the next day to my photographer friend, Debesh, he surprised me with a song album of the Weavers. Pete was the lead singer of the group, which had its name from the weavers Pete and others had tried to help during their strike against exploitative employers. Pete sang with them for several years and helped build its following but quit the moment he found the group had agreed to do a jingle for a tobacco company.
 
I loved the songs of the album, like “Turn! Turn! Turn!” and “Little Boxes,” all of which espoused a humane cause, and heard them over and over again. I was stunned to hear a less known ditty called “Who killed Norma Jean?” that exposed the ruthless Hollywood exploitation of Marilyn Monroe (Norma Jean was her real name). I had just read her husband Arthur Miller’s play ‘After the Fall’ about her end and felt the song encapsulated her tragedy. What a charming song and what a searing message! Like thousands in many countries, I became a Pete Seeger fan.
 
Pete’s parents were both musicologists, his father teaching at Berkeley and Yale and his mother at the famous Juilliard. Pete went to Harvard on a scholarship but dropped out to play music. He learned ukulele and then banjo on his own and even invented the long-neck banjo. He started playing in the countryside, learning about both country music and exploited country folk. From then to the end of his life he used his musical talent to fight for causes like civil and labor rights, racial equality, anti-militarism, international coordination, and environmental protection. He believed songs could make ordinary people conscious of their rights and encourage them to fight for those. Rabid right-wing groups had him blacklisted, stripped him of his job and tried to put him in jail. He also did pioneer work for abolition of the death penalty, which worked mostly against the poor and the disadvantaged.
 
It was an amazing coincidence that our paths crossed again two decades later in a very different part of the world.

​I was coordinating a campaign against the death penalty for Amnesty International in the Washington area and I met him in a school auditorium where he was to perform. I told him how I had heard him sing twenty years earlier in a Kolkata park and marveled at his ability to thrill hawkers and traders who knew scant English. Pete laughed when I described how an Indian youth had been transfixed by his magical talent and had gone on to become an admirer.
 
He picked up his banjo and hummed a few lines of Raghupati Raghava Rajaram. He said he intended to visit India again. I wondered how earnest he was, but I know he fulfilled that promise twelve years later.
 
I saw him again at Barack Obama’s inauguration, singing “This land is your land” with Bruce Springsteen. He was 89, but his voice was strong and melodic, quite memorable. It was a joyous culmination of the career of a splendid man who, all his life, used his songs – not to gain wealth or fame – to defend the undefended at great personal cost.

If you have to have a conference, you should have it in Japan. I will tell you why.
 
Invited to coordinate the conference of an international organization, I flew to Tokyo and drove to Chiba City. The capital city of the Chiba prefecture is a port town on the Tokyo Bay with an attractive artificial beach. The Japanese government was a conference sponsor and the waterfront business district doubtless had an interest, because conference participants were coming from sixty countries.
 
The international center where the conference would take place looked attractive and I felt buoyant. The feeling evaporated quickly when I was led to my room. Since I was the coordinator, I had been given the best room in the place, but its dimensions left me aghast. How would I spend ten days in this minuscule room, which seemed a quarter of the average room of a middle-range western hotel? The second thing that deflated me was the supposed machine on every floor. It dispensed only green tea. Ugh.

I was introduced to my conference assistant, arranged by the center. I expected a clerk or stenographer who would take notes and carry files. Instead, I met an elegant and attractive woman, a senior executive from a major airline who spoke four languages fluently. When I explained hesitantly that our work might occasionally extend beyond office hours, she forthwith told me that she had taken a room in the center to make herself available the entire time, day or night.
 
Languages and availability were the least of her skills. She was untiring and unflappable, everything at her fingertips. From the schedule of the conference to the menu at the dinner table, she carried the precise, punctilious details in her tiny electronic tablet. The schedule changed every day as planes carrying lecturers tarried and the menu was modified as some precious tuna remained undelivered, but my indefatigable assistant was always uptodate.

​Because of my work I attended conferences in many countries, and I hosted them myself in World Bank venues, but I could not honestly claim that there never was a misplaced pencil or unwiped board – or even a speck of dust – in any seminar venue. Our Japanese hosts could. Every desk was spotless, every file was in the dead center, every microphone functioned flawlessly, every meal was precisely on time. I suspect that if, like Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg, I checked the temperature of the coffee with a thermometer, it would have been exactly the same at every breakfast.
 
How was this possible? I got my answer the fourth day when I returned briefly to my room during a break to pick up a forgotten file. The evening before, sipping some burgundy, I had inadvertently spilled two drops on the carpet and had guiltily removed the stain with a moistened paper towel. Now I saw a maid working assiduously on the faint vestige of that stain. She worked on it as if her life depended on it, long and hard, until even a detective could not find the slightest trace of a stain. Clearly to the Japanese employee, keeping the place impeccable was not just a job but a veritable mission.
 
Since the conference participants came from different countries and, after the closing session, some were leaving early in the morning, we announced that the kitchen would serve boxed breakfasts that the participants could pick up on their way to the airport. The chef came and remonstrated to me that Japan’s foremost international center could not let its guests part in the morning, however early it was, without a proper warm breakfast. He said the kitchen staff had decided on their own to sleep that night on the dining room floor in sleeping bags, so that they could get up at three in the morning, prepare a decent, varied breakfast meal and serve it to all the guests, even the earliest-leaving ones. I was astounded, but I had little option but to agree. It was a truly delicious breakfast.
 
Let me end with two postscripts. Missing my usual black coffee, from the third day I started using the green tea dispensers at every corner. I found it surprisingly agreeable, kept drinking gallons of it during the conference. By the end of my Japan days, I was nearly an addict. Even now I drink green tea periodically. I think it is wonderful.
 
Also, in the first couple of days, as I got over my western assumption that a hotel room should be bigger or my role merited larger space, I found the small room amazingly well organized and comfortable. Everything I needed was there, near at hand, and that was refreshingly convenient after an exhausting conference day.
 
Yes, if I have to attend a conference I would rather attend it in Japan.

Sigmund Freud sat down to write, as was his practice, the case history of a patient he had treated that morning. For privacy he needed a pseudonym for the patient and the name Dora came into his mind. It was the name of his sister; he preferred a different name. Still, the name Dora kept popping in his mind. Freud, being Freud, then set about exploring why that was happening.
 
He recalled a months-old event. He visited his sister and, while waiting in the living room, saw a letter on the center table. It caught his attention, for the letter was for a Dora, but the last name was not his sister’s. current or premarital name. He asked his sister who gave a curious explanation. She and her husband had engaged a new maid six months earlier who had the same name as her, Dora.  Since the same name for the maid and mistress would cause confusion, she agreed in that household to go by a different name. Freud saw the connection readily: in writing the case history of a person whose real name could not be used for reasons of privacy, his mind was automatically coming up with the name of a person, the maid, whose real name had to be suppressed in favor of a pseudonym.
 
You don’t have to be a psychologist to notice the strange ways that our mind can work. I remember something curious that happened to me. I was preparing for a speech for the Rotary Club and wanted to use an example from Somerset Maugham’s novel Theater, in which a famous middle-aged actress is besotted with a young accountant. I could not recall the name of the actress, however hard I tried, and was flabbergasted that a weird word kept surfacing in my mind, “Beaconsfield.” It took me a little while to figure out that I had earlier been reading Andre Maurois’s fascinating biography of British premier Disraeli. The French novelist dwelled heavily on the romance of socialite Mary Ann Evans, Viscountess Beaconsfield, who was fifteen years older than Disraeli but loved and married him.
 
I suspect that psychologists will, in fact, have difficulty explaining the mysterious ways the human mind moves – as William Cowper said of God – to perform its wonders. I recall an interview in which philosopher Bertrand Russell was asked how he solved problems. Russell replied that he never tried to solve any problems. Heavens, how did he then solve the great problems of mathematics and philosophy? The old man laughed and said that, when he encountered a problem, he went and took a long shower. An answer somehow popped in his mind. His method was to cogitate on an issue and then simply leave it to his mind to come up with an answer.

​I thought I would give the method a tryout. Since I write regular columns for newspapers and magazines, and I am always in search of new ideas, I decided that I would start a column and then go and take a shower. As a kid I liked walking in a drizzle and as an adult I like no less to stand under a running showerhead. There are few things more relaxing than a long, warm shower, and, when I emerged, I found the next several paragraphs ready in my mind. It worked like magic.
 
I have since discovered another option. I find that, if I start a column at night and go to sleep, the next morning I wake with several new ideas that help my progress. I have to do no more than just let my mind dwell on the chosen theme for a few minutes, perhaps as I brush my teeth or pop vitamin pills, and I wake the next morning with unexpected, sparkling-new ideas. Sometimes the ideas are so new that I have to abandon my original idea of the essay and take a new track.
 
Why does this work? Neurologist Barry Gordon says that our mind is a reservoir of many ideas and we are not aware of most of them. They float around, subconscious, seldom recognized. When an idea gains force on its own or is churned by an event, the ‘full beam of consciousness’ centers on it and we become attentive. When I relax, either in a shower stall or on a comfortable bed, I am taking advantage of the rich bank of subterranean ideas that are already circulating in my mind. They have been built up over the years by what I have read or heard, learned or experienced, deduced or inferred.
 
Not everybody is writing a column and has to find a way to beat the deadline. But everyone can make use of new or novel ideas. Ideas are precious. The seeds of such ideas often lie dormant within us, hidden and unknown. Just waiting to be mobilized by the magic touch of a curious but relaxed mind – just like a sleeping beauty waiting to be roused from unending sleep by a princely kiss.

Friendship is hard to forget. Affection is hard to live without.
 
I wrote about my friend Sam two years back. Sam was an earnest man, dedicated to his work, always on the run, impatient to achieve what he had set his heart on.
 
The article ended with this:
 
“I was accidentally at the project office window one afternoon when I observed the strange arc of Sam’s car as he dashed typically to another downtown appointment. Sam was an excellent driver, and that reckless curve was bizarre.
 
I rushed out and found the car stalled on the sidewalk, Sam’s large frame sprawled on the steering wheel, motionless. Ominously, even the Rolex on his drooping wrist was still. My best friend, always in a hurry, had finally slowed down.”
 
I thought that was the end. It wasn’t.

Last night, after so many years, I dreamed of Sam.
 
He was his usual busy, brusque person, keen on achieving something he had in his constantly whirling mind.
 
I looked at him as he appeared on my door and I pressed his big hand. I said, with great feeling, “I have missed you, Sam.”
 
I had indeed missed his eager face, always full of optimism and spirit.
 
He just said, “I understand,” and then quickly added, “We have lots to do.”
 
I said, “Sam, those things can wait. I want to tell you how much I have longed to see you again.”
 
He just looked at me quizzically. As if he didn’t understand why I was saying this.

I said, “Don’t you understand? Maybe I never told you. You are an important part of my life. How important I didn’t know. But now I know. When you were not with me, I missed you acutely.”
 
He seemed almost embarrassed by my sentimentality. But perhaps he was also touched.
 
He said, “But now I am here. We can be together.”
 
“I am so happy to see you. So very happy.”
 
He just nodded.
 
I added, “Sam, we have been working together all these days and months. We talk only of schedules and deadlines. Maybe we should sometimes talk of something else too. You have been a good friend. You mean a lot to me. I feel you are hell-bent on our project. I admire that, but I also feel concerned. I believe you should take better care of yourself.”
 
Then I paused and asked, “Why are you panting, Sam?”
 
He was a big and heavy man. When he panted, it showed.
 
“Oh, the elevator in your building wasn’t working for some reason this morning.”
 
“So, you walked up all these eight floors?” I lived in a high-rise building.
 
If I knew Sam, he wouldn’t walk, he would run. He was an impatient man.
 
“Yes. But I am all right.”
 
“You are not. You are panting.”
 
“No, no. I am all right.”
 
Then he paused and said, “Let me use your bathroom.”
 
I pointed. The door closed. The next moment I heard him retching. The climb, especially his breathless run, had been too much for him, though he wouldn’t admit it.
 
Then the bathroom door opened, and I saw his ashen face. He wasn’t feeling well.
 
“Sam!” I cried out, anxious.
 
I quickly went up to hold his arm. The next moment I felt him collapsing, his legs giving way. I had a moment of panic, for I couldn’t sustain his heavy weight.
 
The next moment I woke up.
 
A thin ray of light was intruding through the curtains of my bedroom. It took me a few minutes to realize I was dreaming. My eyes were wet.
 
I had indeed missed Sam.
 
Friendship is hard to forget. Affection is hard to live without.

​In fact, it was more than a month that I spent in Kolkata. It wasn’t easy to start with. I had to be awake precisely the time I sleep in Washington and I walked around like a zombie for a few days. Friends were gracious enough to overlook my fading voice and vacant look.
 
The air took a few more days. The acrid air literally took my breath away. I gratefully accepted the offer of a mask, but using it seemed like a Sisyphean ordeal. I not only looked like Darth Vader, I felt like a dog on a leash. I decided to brave the oncoming waves of airborne pollution like a patriotic martyr.
 
The streets took even more days. An annual visitor, I wanted to walk around, see things for myself, watch the people, explore the stores. The city seemed determined to present itself as an obstacle course. The sidewalks are broken, uneven, studded with cracks and cavities; where repaired, the repairman seems to have laid traps for unwary heels. Home and shop owners clearly have the right to break the sidewalk and reshape their front-yard.
 
All this is where the sidewalk exists. Mostly it doesn’t exist at all. Largely it has become a shopping arcade, vending snacks and sweets, books and bangles, tea and trinkets. If there were a tiny gap between the shops, where a pedestrian could walk, small vendors have spread their wares and hawk pencils to panties. In this town, you don’t walk, you negotiate quick turns between stalls.
 
When I visit India, my usual stints in Delhi and Mumbai invariably include lodging with my two brothers. I can’t think of alternatives. They are kind hosts and warm company. In Kolkata, I stayed often with an old friend who combined hospitable hosting with considerate allowance of space. This time I chose a bed-and-breakfast place that too offered a remarkable combination: a large, quiet place with a lively coffee shop and a popular restaurant. I had a noiseless room – as noiseless as it ever can be in a raucous town – with a couple of animated meeting places.
 
The last brought an unexpected advantage. An Uber or Ola cab was never more than five minutes away. I had always thought of not having my car with me as a handicap; now I saw it as a great benefit. What could be better than having a vehicle accessible at any hour, without having to drive it? I could be anywhere in the city for the princely sum of a dollar or two.
 
I tipped heavily, if only for the refreshing exchanges with the chauffeurs. One or two may have been taciturn, but the rest spoke volubly, spiritedly, of their speedy urban life and the contrasting quiet of their village, usually in backwater Bihar. One spoke disgustedly and comically of the bank officer who lent him money to buy his taxi and another impressed me with the devotion to his purblind mother whom he feeds by hand every night. My favorite was the driver’s tale who defied his adamant family and married the winsome lass from another caste who had caught his eye in a village fair. Google’s self-driving cars and Tesla’s electric vehicles may one day save the world a lot of gasoline and environmental havoc, but I will miss these spirited storytellers who made a performing art out of a prosaic trip.

I attended events of many kinds, social and cultural. All seemed well-attended, people who attended seemed enthusiastic. And all served a lot of food. If they started late, they tarried long, and even memorial meetings smacked of joie de vivre. If daily living in the town is harder than in some western cities, the events possibly are occasions for people to loosen their belts and savor the fun of being together. I saw the modern version of a fifth-century Sanskrit play and was thrilled that the theater world of Kolkata – to which I owe my abiding love of drama – remains as vibrant as ever.
 
I have to confess that, for someone from a Washington suburb, Kolkata is a difficult place despite many improvements. Filth repels. Unpainted, unrepaired old houses displease the eye; ugly new buildings are a growing eyesore. Traffic is chaotic and cacophonous. Anybody like me, who grew up in Kolkata and experienced its invincible charm, finds its overpasses and shopping malls scant compensation for its old-world seductiveness.
 
Stubbornly, I return to Kolkata for an annual pilgrimage, bypassing the call of Venice, Paris, Rio or Dublin. Of course, I want to see my friends, many of whom, alas, have moved to another city or another world. I cherish the ones who remain. They are a memento of the past that has vanished and the affection that has survived. Whatever we shared has narrowed, but whatever we loved has broadened. I acquire, too, new friends, who bring a new dimension to my understanding of the land of my birth.
 
But, strangely, even beyond friends and relations, there is something in the city that I cannot turn away from. It stays with me, it pursues me. It is a daemon, a supernatural spirit that is now intertwined with my flesh and bones. Beyond all reason, it pervades my being and draws my body to its muddy, murky shores. The further I go, the longer stretches its grubby arms, its tentacles go deeper in my frame, its aroma lingers, its images haunt my dreams. No wonder a poet, as dear to me as the city, wrote:

Calcutta if you must exile me wound my lips before I go
only words remain and the gentle touch of your fingers on my lips.

​For a law-abiding person I have spent a fair amount of time behind bars – visiting prisoners and making sure of their humane treatment.
 
Suddenly, the world over, we are prisoners in our home. We are asked not to cross the threshold except for a critical need. Some of us who live alone have nobody to talk to and feel in solitary confinement, the worst punishment for prisoners. Others who live with their spouses or family members have suddenly too much of their company and feel a stress worse than that of solitary incarceration.
 
Victor Frankl, an Austrian psychologist, was in a worse kind of prison. As a Jew, the Nazis confined him in Theresienstadt ghetto and later in the Auschwitz death camp. He observed three kinds of reaction among prisoners. First, people had a shock, to be suddenly deprived of their normal life. Second, apathy, as people grew used to their misery and deprivation. Last, depersonalization, as they lost their identity and dignity, concerned only with their animal survival, abandoned hope and eked a bitter existence. The ones who survived were those with hope, clinging to their humanity and a lingering trust in goodness and concern for others.
 
Though imprisoned, Frankl felt himself free in important ways, free to think, free to help other prisoners every little way he could, and free, above all, to do what every person can do: choose to make his own decision even in the most horrible situation. He felt himself freer than his armed German guard, imprisoned in his Nazi allegiance, his brutal ways, his horrid hatred of Jews.
 
It is an astounding story. A moment’s thought tells us what confines and imprisons us most. Not an unfortunate situation, not our lack of resources or social contacts, not even a fearful pandemic, but our dearth of faith in anything, the lack of meaning or purpose in our life. We have nothing to look forward to, because we believe in nothing that surpasses our petty orbit. No calamity can take away our ultimate freedom to choose how we want to react to it. Bow to it in abject surrender or face it with a resolute mind.
 
The Buddhists have a telling phrase. What imprisons a tiger are not the steel bars of its cage, but the spaces between them. We are often circumscribed less by our material limitations than by our mental conditioning.

​We are so stuck in our ways that we never review our life and our views. We seldom know whether we are going northeast or southwest, until we are lost in a forest and bring out the compass to check. But it is never too late, as Thoreau used to say, to shed our prejudices.
 
We are hopelessly shaped and burnished by our social context. Thoreau’s suggestion was to leave that context, at least change it in some radical way. Without your accustomed ways, your familiar lanes and by-lanes, you will feel lost, and that will force you to bring out your compass – your basic values – and willy-nilly find a new direction. As long as you are comfortable in the cocoon of your habits, you will never surge for a new horizon. The good will continue to be the enemy of the better or the best.
 
The truth is we know amazingly little of ourselves. Because we know others know less about us, we are tempted to believe, in comparison, that we have a fair knowledge of ourselves. It is only when a key event occurs, or we encounter a special person or undergo a head-turning experience, that we realize some new aspect of our personality of which we had no inkling. We know little of our talents, our urges, our hidden abilities, even our cherished, long-lost childhood dreams. We have only the most elementary idea of what kind of a person we are.
 
Thoreau left his urban home and went into woods, to live at Walden Pond, chopping his own wood and cooking his modest meals, so that a simple life could let him see clearly what he could not see in his daily city life, surrounded by the accustomed and convenient. He came, as his classic book shows, face to face with himself, understanding his world and his place in it.
 
We don’t need to repair to the woods, for we have now a remarkable opportunity to quarantine ourselves, cut ourselves from our normal life, its many conveniences and tempting distractions, its infinite capacity to blindfold us and make us miss the thousand pitfalls of the life we lead. We are so enamored of comfort that we are ready to sell our soul for it, to replace genuine friendship with spurious Facebook intimacy, to exchange our smart phone and television serial for a meaningful look at the only life we will ever have.
 
The coronavirus has wrecked our economy, killed our friends and driven a ruthless broadsword through our society, but it may also have opened a secret door – if we would care to walk through it.