Intellectuals

The unalloyed joy I get from reading Shibram’s writing is something I do not get from reading anything else. The gentleman never wanted to be a writer. “Pulling a pen is harder than pulling a rickshaw,” he wrote. He never called himself an intellectual; he called himself a laborer. These days, of course, everyone is an intellectual. Those who have no intellect are, rather, the biggest intellectuals.

This was about fifteen years ago. I was still unmarried then, more or less a free bird. I was traveling by train from Mumbai to Howrah, to our house in Konnagar. Mumbai had not yet become my home. My fellow passenger was a writer of school textbooks, physics, as far as I remember. In those days, there used to be an annual conference of the Publishers’ Guild in Kolkata, held at one of the city’s five-star hotels. I heard about the conference for the first time from this person. I have not kept track of whether these still happen. All kinds of writers were invited to that conference, from fiction writers to those who wrote physics. Without any pretension, my traveling companion said, “On my own merits, I will never be able to go to a five-star hotel. So I cannot ignore this invitation.”

At one such annual party, a well-known Tollywood celebrity was among the guests. As expected, the celebrity took the stage and, after speaking nonsense for a while, concluded with the words, “We intellectuals…” As the conference was being described, my companion looked at me, widened the eyes, and said, “Just imagine, brother, even that celebrity claims to be an intellectual! Where is the intellect? Do you see where we have landed?”

That day, I laughed a lot. It was because of the way the line was delivered. Whether a celebrity is an intellectual or not, I had no opinion then, and even today I do not have one in that sense. Or perhaps I do now, which is why I am writing this.

If you think about it, if Shibram can call himself a laborer, then who is an intellectual? And to what extent can celebrities, in a state of self-forgetfulness, call themselves intellectuals, or arrange that when a football star comes to Kolkata, they swarm around the star and deprive others in the stadium of even a glimpse. So much for intellect.

That is all I wanted to say.