Subir Roy: What is progress?

OFF BEAT

Technology and high incomes or good parenting?

With the papers full of the MMS scandal, I have been trying to recall what we did when we were youngsters with enough freedom and space to risk going astray.

That risk was zero during the years spent in a strict, boys' boarding school with strong Christian missionary antecedents. The closest we came to getting a whiff of wickedness was to wonder why the principal had asked the parents of a good-looking new boy to take him out of the boarding for his own good.

There were dark rumours of some senior day scholars smoking but then they were day scholars, you know.

Real freedom came when I joined Presidency College and straightaway plunged into an atmosphere and tradition of discarding tradition with a vengeance and breaking as many taboos as one could find so as to claim to be liberated.

The first act of defiance was to almost ceremoniously eat beef "" made a very pleasant experience through ordering beef rolls at Nizam's. If you had plenty of pocket money you ordered beef-anda rolls, but that was rarely.

Some really obsessive rule breakers cut classes and went to see matinee movie shows, after collecting from friends (mostly the girls) the equivalent of 10 annas, 62 paise. (Though decimal coinage had been introduced a good 10 years ago, prices were still conceived in annas and converted to decimal coinage.)

The other popular form of rule-breaking was to smoke, which was so routine that there was not much of defiance or protest left in it.

Smoking became almost respectable when you smoked Charminar during college hours, usually bought from the foot of the stairs that took you up to Coffee House.

The next step was to "drink". This was quite widespread and not considered a big deal. As you needed plenty of money to be able to afford it, only the rich boys could drink regularly and they were not the role models.

Those who wanted to seriously declass themselves took country liquor from the joints in the slums not far off Kolkata's main streets but a friend of mine told me after his first experience not to bother to experiment "" "it tastes awful". A few went one step further and visited the red light areas, again not very far from College Street.

The same friend who had sampled country liquor confided that the experience was "terrible" and he lost his youngster's interest in sex for a couple of months. The friend was, of course, a star student and remained so.

Few lost themselves on the anti-morality road. Far more common were the likes of me who had sampled most of the taboos but eventually ruined their results because politics and pseudo-intellectual discussions were far more interesting than textbooks.

It is not as if there were no scandals. Two of us were sighted smooching a bit late one evening by the darban and the poor girl's reputation was mud for a time.

She eventually married a batch mate, not the one with whom she was caught kissing, and to the best of my knowledge they have been happily married ever after.

There was one case of a girl from an earlier batch committing suicide after a string of failed affairs but that was one case maybe in a decade or more.

Telecommunication was not entirely unknown those days (late 1960s), though Calcutta Telephones were famously atrocious. For my family, the downside of sending their son to a co-ed college was having to endure my phone calls to some of the girls in my class for an hour or more. As the phone didn't often work, that meant my monopolising the service quite a bit.

Most of us were from middle-class families that clearly belonged to the higher income bracket of those days but still we made do with very little pocket money. From second year, I began to earn a good bit of pocket money (Rs 100 a month) through offering private tuition to schoolboys but a bit of it I gave to my mother to supplement her pocket money.

Today's scandal involves high technology, high income and some of the best institutions in the country. Clearly, the country has made progress. The children of the rich sport not just cellphones, but top end ones with cameras.

And rich they are as one youngster and family have gone abroad to escape the scandal and another youngster with an exporter father initially went off to Nepal to escape the police.

Both the youngsters read in an A class Delhi school and a youngster who stands in between the kids and the portal through which the explicit clip was being hawked reads in an Indian Institute of Technology, no less. If technology and rapidly rising incomes could deliver India from its past then the scandal would not have happened.

I get bugged when my daughter keeps chatting on the Internet for what seems like hours and have to pinch and remind myself how I hogged the phone for hours when I was young. My wife says we should snoop on our children to make sure they don't access porn on the Net but somehow I can't get myself to snoop. I quarrel with my wife why our children will not use public transport far more often.

After all, I hung out of a Kolkata bus for most of my journeys to college. But my wife says, be practical, your study load was far less than theirs. Let them not waste time waiting for buses.

When we have a royal row with one of our children and the person closes the door to his or her room with a bang, I feel the problem comes from being able to afford a house where children have their own rooms.

After some of these rows we worry about how to really discipline them and then stop short, thinking of the horrible tradition of teenage suicides in Bangalore (you never know what will get to what). I agree with my wife who says, thank your stars our children are not wayward, and let things lie.

Clearly, good parenting lies at the core of nation-building. I began life proudly claiming to be an agnostic, freeing myself from the clutches of organised religion and made it a point to go through only a civil marriage.

In four decades, I have come round to hoping that whoever the gods may be, they will help our children come to something.