A sense of unease

Yesterday was not much different from any other.

Yet, it was depressing.

It has not been easy for me to pinpoint a singular reason for the depression, mild as it was. The day itself started normal, meaning getting up when the alarm rang, and spending time at the sink, trying to clean my gums, which were having more than normal infection at the roots of my teeth. This was making more than one a bit loose. Perhaps in the next few months, a few would need to be pulled.

The girl at the Dentist that told me to care for his gums, was a pretty immigrant from Ukraine. She had married a French Canadian, and settled in Western Canada. She had a good memory for faces. She remembered that she had treated cleaned my teeth at the Dentist a year ago. I could not remember her name or her face, though that was partially because they cover their face in a medical mask when they work. Still, I had felt sort of sorry that I did not remember her. She had sparkling blue eyes, and spoke about the transformation taking place in Eastern Europe, when I asked about it.

I had washed my mouth and checked for traces of blood, especially after cleaning the gums at the root of teeth. Irene, the dental assistant, had asked me to shoot for gradual improvement of the gum infection situation, so that less of the roots would bleed when I poked at them. I was sort of happy to note that only two of them bled a little, unlike four a few days ago. A good sign.

The day itself was clear and sunny, unlike the previous day. It rains more than it snows in winter, if you are in the lower mainlands south of Vancouver. This is one reason the climate in British Columbia is milder than in the rest of Canada. It has something to do with the Rocky mountains and the warm ocean air that comes off the Pacific ocean but is trapped by the Rockies. This moisture laden warm air ends up increasing precipitation in British Columbia and preventing it getting too cold. So, it rains more than it snows, out here . I could draw a vague similarity with the Indian monsoon, which was also a product of warm and moist air off the Indian ocean being trapped by the Himalayas. Different continent, different season and different direction of the air current, but there were similarities in heavy rainfall.

But, rainy days in winter is not the most comfortable to drive through. I would prefer it to heavy snowfall to drive through. Nonetheless, the traffic slows down. The fog effect keeps clouding the windscreen, the side and rear windows and mirrors. Visibility reduces, and traffic slows down. Those who are in a hurry, this is a cause for frustration, and perhaps a few accidents - which further slows the traffic.

But for those that have learned be philosophical about it - this is an opportunity for introspection, or catching up. Catching up with what ? For me, this is the time to catch up with the world. In particular, catching up with world news. Over the years, our method of gathering news has evolved. In my school days in Santiniketan, we had a radio. There was just one of two state controlled radio channels, called Akashvani. And we could hear news a few times a day. The word Akashvani literally meant - message from the sky. Was the news any good? I do not remember, but suspect it must not have been very exciting, since I do not seem to remember every being too eager to listen to it.

I remember my now departed father talking about listening to news during the second world war. He was in his early twenties at the time. In Santiniketan, someone had a Radio. About once a month or so, folks were invited to congregate in some place, where this Radio was rigged up for everyone to listen to the news - mainly war news and what Hitler was up to and what the Allied powers were doing.

Anyhow, we did not get daily newspapers those days. My uncles, who lived about mile away, got one daily newspaper in Bengali - Ananda Bazar Patrika. It arrived by train from Calcutta and was delivered in the afternoon. I remember glancing at it time to time, especially if there was news of a cricket match. The person that usually read the entire paper from end to end, was my grand mother.

By the time I was in college in Bombay, transistor radios were common. TV was still boring and black and white. English newspapers were more common in the college hostel. But, I did not have any habit of reading news with any seriously. I did by then have a few pen friends - all girls and all living outside India. The letters were interesting - but did not really count as channels for exchange of news. One of them was a French girl that lived in Paris - but, I never got around to learning much about France, in the few years when I exchanged a few letters with her. But, I do remember Rober Kennedy being shot and eventually dying from that in a hospital. I was shocked.

During my working life, I had a rather fancy Sony Digital Radio that had programmable channels that could be set to BBC news or Voice of America or Soviet News of All India Radio etc. I used to work on a ship as an engineer, and usually used that small radio to listen to world news through short wave. As far as I can see, my gathering of world news really took off during that phase.

Later on, when I lived in Hong Kong or USA, the TV replaced the radio - but somehow, the quality of news delivered and received, deteriorated. I remember being frustrated at the hours and hours of news coverage on TV on a single subject - OJ Simpson and if he did or did not murder his ex wife. That literally turned me off TV for good, and I have never recovered from it. But by then, internet was looming large, and proved to be among the best sources for news man could imagine.

As news channels got consolidated and concentrated in a few hands, so did independent sources proliferate. It was cheap to put up things on the internet, and citizen reporting got off the ground. I was hooked.

Then Apple went and invented the iPod, and the internet invented the Podcast. The world was no more the same. The sources of information through audio podcasts, and iPods ability to automatically synchronize and download new information and its ability to hold vast amount of such information, to be played and listened to later - literally changed my way of gathering information. I hooked the iPod to the car music system, and would listen to news, while stuck in traffic in pouring rain on the way to work.

It was all those things that eventually prompted me to learn to make my own podcasts, but thats another story.

Meanwhile, yesterday, I was listening to BBC, and also to KCRW’s left, right and centre podcast. I also listened to Amy Goodman speaking about Palestine looking for statehood at the UN general assembly.

Through all this I was vaguely disappointed at the lack of options on the podcast channels to get some high quality news and analysis about India and China, either in Bengali or English. These two countries where, along with Brazil, South Africa and Russia, the new emerging nations and getting increasingly important for all sorts of reasons. But news and analysis about them was still doled out from western sources. I had learned enough by them to identify these sources as biased and incomplete, and should be augmented by more local sources from these regions. Unfortunately there did not seem to be many that rose above r e the trivial level.

Anyhow, that was not reason enough for a mild depression at the end of the day. Over the years, I had gotten increasingly occupied in my idle times about my state of affairs - rather, it was about the state of the country, the economy, the civilization and indeed, of the planet. I have a mild suspicion that the depression, mild and in the background, is somehow rooted into a sense that all is not well with what man has done with himself and the atmosphere around him. Its a mild foreboding that the future is worse than the past.

Since there is nothing much I could do about it, and since this was essentially a global issue, and since I was not the savior of the world, I should have been above it all. But somehow, I suspect, I was not above it.

Anyhow, a single lunch break is likely not enough to cover the state of the Universe, or why one might develop nagging doubts about things.

So I shall end this one by a simple - cheers and take care.