Disturbing Thoughts on a Disturbing Week goneby

 The week that had gone by has left us with thoughts too disturbing for anyone with a desire for fairness, justness and an optimistic bright future for the nation. The news and events that made headlines during the last few days cause anxiety and worry as to the shaping of India in the next few years. The worrisome news as listed under create a sense of unease and disquiet with regard to the direction we are heading that looks more Orwellian now than at any other time.

1. The current logjam in Parliament paralyzing all legislative business in much the same way that saw BJP’s repeated disruption of the Parliament during the UPA’s second innings.

2. The targeting of the social activist Teesta Setalvad (who with her single-minded devotion to the cause of justice for Gujarat’s Muslims provided legal support to the victims of Gujarat riots of 2002 and thus offended those in absolute power today) for alleged violation of FCRA

3. The new book by the Pakistani writer, Nisid Hajari, Midnight Furies: the Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition,

4. The (im)possibility of breaking the Indo-Pak jinx

5. The great oratory of Shashi Tharoor at the Oxford Union Society debate on British reparations for their colonial looting of India, and

6. A couple of  articles in different newspapers highlighting the absence of right-wing intellectuals in  the present Modi regime  that have got the  hackles up of every thinking and well meaning person.

Of the six mentioned above, the most disturbing factor is  the last one that shows India to be a post- idea nation where ideas and intellectualism are neither present nor desired by anyone-in particular the legislators who have been elected to be a part of the supreme legislative authority of  the country. The left leaning intellectuals who had  held sway for more than six decades in Independent democratic  India except for a short period when the right wing was in power have yielded to the right wingers whose intellectual efforts stop at freeing India of left winged intellectuals, without finding adequate replacements with equal if not greater intellectual vigour. It is this lack of intellectualism that is at the root of the stand-off in the parliament and in the hounding of all those who had dared to challenge the mighty and the powerful for “crimes that no decent human being should even contemplate.” – (Julio Ribiero in the Indian Express).

I do not want to apportion blame to the Congress or the BJP for the current imbroglio in parliament for both are playing the same game with roles reversed.  Unlike the Congress which was forced to make its ministers resign on charges that did not stick beyond the date of their resignation, the BJP is brazen to close its eyes to acts that attract legal sanction for corruption on the strength of its numbers in the Lok Sabha and its lung power to out-talk the opposition. The tit for tat game, the attempt to pit one scam against another of the opponent has exposed the bankruptcy of moral and intellectual fibre of our law makers. The argument is your scam is not smaller than mine and mine is not bigger than yours and therefore let us wear our scams on our sleeves. The PM who had promised a scam free government would have really gone high up in esteem had he –known for his  strong man image- got the resignations of the three ladies in one go and prevailed upon the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister to resign till such time all of them proved their innocence. The Congress could have done the same to get back into people’s favour by asking the Chief Ministers of the Congress ruled state, allegedly involved in scams to resign on high moral grounds. But Namo (he represents the BJP and the NDA)and the Congress have let go of an opportunity to rise up and redeem the sagging fortunes of their parties.  The sad truth is that we lack both intellectual and moral virtues.

What are these two kinds of virtues? According to Nicomachean Ethics, Man has two parts- the rational and the irrational. The rational part is divided into the contemplative part that deals with truths obtained from knowledge that includes a study of Science, Mathematics and Humanities and the calculative part that deals with practical matters of life. Right reasoning with respect to the contemplative intellect gives us permanent and eternal truths. With the practical intellect, right reasoning corresponds to proper deliberation that leads to making the right choice.  The wise person is one who combines knowledge that gives eternal truths with practical wisdom to pursue good life for oneself and for one’s society. This is what is expected of political leaders who should cultivate prudence that combines knowledge and practical wisdom. Socrates in Ethics 6 said “as long as knowledge existed in man, he was unable to sin and that if anyone sinned, he sinned in ignorance.”

In today’s political system, there is hardly a thought bestowed on education, learning and prudence. A majority of our political leaders do not feel the need for books and knowledge. They are well versed in the art of promises and persuasion to garner votes during election. How the promises can be fulfilled is of no concern as that question involves a good knowledge of society, economics, state of the nation, principles of right and wrong, understanding  of what is equitable and just and arriving at all  these through a process of good deliberations. The intellectual virtues help us to know what is just and admirable, and the moral virtues help us to do just and admirable deeds. It is the lack of wisdom that is the cause of the drift that we see in governance. It is also the cause of vendetta politics that is practiced by all parties when they come to power. It is also the cause of irrational anger that is spewed on those who are perceived threats to those in power. The political arena is not a bull ring where the fight is between the matador and the bull-each trying to kill the other. It is not a battlefield to settle personal scores but it calls for intellectual debate on national and international issues shorn off false claims, prickly innuendoes and vengeful ire. The debates that we see on the TV involving the spokespersons of different parties are not intellectual discussions but descend to the level of cacophony ending with high decibel shouting and counter shouting. Parliament and TV studios where such debates take place resemble the Tower of Babel with argumentative Indians verbally slicing one another.

Hence there is hardly any scope for engaging in any meaningful dialogue with anyone with a different view point. Though there is a lot written about the lack of intellectuals among the Hindutva or the Indian right groups, the sad truth is the decline of the left intellectuals in the country.  There was Nehru-Rajaji-Sardar Patel trio during the first few years of post -independent India. The one was a humanist, the second was an intellectual and the third was strong in practical wisdom.  They steered the nation during those turbulent times that witnessed the gory bloodbath of partition soon after independence.

Today questions are raised as to why there is no one of such exalted stature to put away the Midnight furies that continue to simmer even after seven decades. Nisid Hajari’s book explores this unresolved question as to why Indo-Pak relations are jinxed. There may be many readers in India who will frown at the US based Pakistani writer’s  psychological portrayal of Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah whose personal frailties and foibles, according to him,  were responsible for the partition that ended with blood curdling genocide of the worst kind of both Hindus and Muslims. This paranoia continues as the fanaticism of Pakistan is equally inflamed by the fanaticism of the Hindutva brigade.  One does not have to be judgemental about Hajari’s criticism of Jinnah, “the hot-tempered Muslim bania”, Nehru, the equally “hot tempered  Brahmin aristocrat” and  Gandhi who appealed to the Hindus in their idiom of Ram Rajya, causing disaffection to Muslims. That is a new perspective he has brought in from his reading of the partition history.  But to the uninitiated minds that have either willingly or unfortunately been denied learning and scholarship, this new perspective is likely to make matters worse.  I will not be surprised if a fanatic group   ironically moulding itself as Gandhi brigade will resort to boycotting Hajari’s books and compelling the Indian government to proscribe its sale in India. The point to be noted is the question Hajari raises at the very beginning of the book as to whether we shall remain “handcuffed to history”. Again the root of the problem on either side of the shadow line dividing the people of India and Pakistan is the absence of the contemplative and the calculative part that gives the strength to free themselves of the handcuffs that history and Britain have left behind as our legacy. 

In this bleak scenario where ignorance, fanaticism, ego and rigid stances prevail, we had the good fortune to listen to the oratory of Shashi Tharoor, who is known for his sophisticated  thought and expression.  His analysis about the rise of Britain as an industrialized nation on the wealth and industry of the colonized Indians was not aimed at pleasing the Hindutva brigade which is opposed to all that is West or inciting the erstwhile colonized and the present independent India to strike back, but to present the facts of history in a new light. To the simple minds, unschooled in the history of nations and history of human thought and psychology, his words do sound heavenly as though they highlight the greatness of India that was impoverished by the loot of the British. But Shashi’s oratory was not to extract compensation from Britain for its acts of marauding, but to make the humanist point that Britain should genuinely feel a sense of remorse and guilt at what it had done to India. The legacy that the British left behind include the all India railway transport system, the steel frame,-the Indian Administrative Service ,modelled on the Indian Civil Service of the British Raj, the exposure to western thought and culture through the greatest gift of English language. Even if all of them had been  planned to serve the cause of the British, the legacy stays with us today and has contributed enormously for the growth and development of the nation.  The understanding of the core truth of Shashi’s speech  and the missing of it shows the vacuity of  intellectual power. One has to avoid being a jingoist with a cry “all hail, Shashi,” for attacking the British and seek the kernel of his message. This is possible only if we are educated and well trained to be liberal and catholic to accommodate differing points of view.

I had started with disturbing thoughts on a disturbing week gone by,  but I do see some silver lining- in the book of Nisid Hajari and in the oratory of Shashi Tharoor both of which demand nuanced minds to cultivate prudence that could free us from the handcuffs of history.

Indian Dream

I have been a keen reader of Kanti Bajpai’s Saturday columns in the Times of India. Simple and elegantly worded, they pack deep and complex thoughts with an amazing facileness that appeal even to the politically uninitiated minds. The latest Saturday Times has his article on Indian Mind. He defines Indian Dream as aspiring for modernity, moderation, a middle class income and well managed society.

For the first time, I felt a vague sense of the writer being and yet not being fully with the Indian dreamer. To capture the whole of Indian dream is like trying to catch a leviathan in a fly swatter. India is made of many Indias –not just in geographical terms, but in terms of class, caste, religion, faith, language, culture, customs etc, all further divided by groups with access and non-access to education and employment. It is not possible that each group has a dream of its own which could be collectively harnessed to make for a single Indian dream as Kanti Bajpai has described it.

Everyone has a dream irrespective of which group s/he belongs to. Aristotle said “Hope is a waking dream”.  If we give up dreaming, we give up hope, the only thing that keeps us going. The Biblical Proverb says: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a dream fulfilled is a tree of life. In our own times, we have the famous lines of Abba’s lyric ,

                                                            I have a dream

                                                       a song to sing,

                                                       a fantasy to help me through reality

                                                       When I know the time is right for me
                                                        I'll cross the stream, I have a dream.

This is true of all of us and today our dreams are drawn between modernity and tradition and neo-modernity. The first two (tradition and modernity) represent a generational clash. Thanks to modern medicine and living standards, longevity has moved slowly up on the life-scale and the dreams of the older generation are at variance with those of the younger generation. The former dreams of the older values that have lost their sanctity in many ways, while the latter dreams of a Brave New World where material values matter most. The pervasive electronic media and the ubiquitous Bollywood have also brought to the fore the difference in the dreams of the rural youth and the urban youth, though at the core both aspire for wealth and a great style of living. The difference is only in the means to achieve their respective dreams. Then comes the middleclass aspiration that just does not stop with what Kanti Bajpai describes as increase in middle class income. The middle class, more than at any other time today dreams big of keeping with the Joneses and for that any small rise in its income is inadequate. This is the influence of the Bollywood which portrays the success story of one of their class rising up the social ladder to become a billionaire. The new hero is no longer the angry young man of the ‘70s of the previous century, but the new successful brash man from the erstwhile salaried middle class who gives up all the middle class values to realize his dream of one among the moneyed class. If he does not have the money to wear branded shirts and trousers, he will go for the fake ones, hoping to shrug off the class distinction though he could never cultivate the e’lan and verve of the manor born class. He dreams like his celluloid heroes to escape and cope with harsh reality. It is no exaggeration to say that the famous middle class morality that Alfred Doolittle was wary of in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion is cultivated by our aspiring middle class to pretend to be highbrows and discard the middlebrows tag.  But the truth is the dream of today’s middle class to be highbrow is far from realizable. The middle class can be best described in the words of Russell Lynes, the American art historian, who wrote:  “The highbrows would like, to eliminate the middlebrows and devise a society that would approximate an intellectual feudal system, in which the lowbrows do the work and create folk arts, and the highbrows do the thinking and create fine arts. By contrast, the pesky “middlebrows” don’t care about “pure, complimentary pursuits”; they swap vocational significance for “money, fame, power or prestige.” It is no wonder why we have become notorious as a corrupt nation of bribe givers and bribe takers.

Those belonging to the lower middle class and the poorer class also dream big. The Television reality shows make it possible for them to dream of big money by their standards. This may not be of millions and billions but a few lakhs and sometimes they dream of becoming crorepathis. They do not ever think how many of them can really realize their dream, but then reality shows like India Got Talent  and Kaun Banega Crorepathi  and other Music and Dance competitions fill them with hope that they may be the lucky dreamers.  Again the dream is all about :

Money, money, money
 Must be funny
In the rich man's world
Money, money, money
Always sunny
In the rich man's world
Aha-ahaaa
All the things I could do
If I had a little money
It's a rich man's world (Abba)

To become insta-rich is the dream of millions of Indians today without a clue to the means to realize their dream. There is nothing wrong per se to dream about wealth and high living but if one does not have the talent or the skill or the intelligence to make money, then the dream effervesces leaving behind a residue of anger, frustration, depression and criminalism.

There are some individual dreams that get realized like the American dream of the IIT and IIM graduates, the dream of  the poorest of poor like the road layers winning a talent show against all odds, the dream of a rural youth becoming a crorepathi, but these are few and far between and they are dreams that are brought to fruition by hard work and focused learning. There are many other collective dreams like a Corruption-free India, Swachch Bharat, Clean Ganga, Freedom for our women and children from the rapists and exploiters of innocence, Discipline in all our personal and professional lives, a nation free of crippling poverty, illness and illiteracy, a nation committed to religious tolerance and accommodation, a nation of World class institutions and committed to Welfare society- these are just  dreams to keep us alive and awake. 

Sholom Aleichem , the leading Jewish writer speaks of life as “a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.” We must dream but should bear in mind that dreams without vision, vision without intelligence and practicability, and intelligence without commitment and service to fellow humanity will remain as dreams, making us blissfully snuggled under the covers. After all ignorance is bliss and bliss is ignorance.  If dream is the opium of life, let us dream on.

Who am I

Who am I

It is an instinct of human nature to label others who are different from oneself. A socialist brands all those who do not subscribe to socialism as capitalists, a theist finds it repugnant to be in the company of those whom he describes as atheists or agnostics. The neo-critics sarcastically refer to the older school of critics as canonists and ridicule them as fossilized scholars holding to a body of established and axiomatic rules and principles.  The earliest endorsement of this trait among men and women started with the Bible. The Book of Matthew (12.30) reads: “Whoever is not with me is against me” and later  the Book of Luke  (9.50) quotes  Jesus saying : “Do not stop him, for whoever is not against you is for you”.

Ever since I started putting down my thoughts on society, politics, art and literature and spiritual matters, I have been ist- labelled as a socialist, communist, elitist, atheist, canonist etc, though honestly speaking, I do not subscribe to anyone of the- ists without some degree of reservation. I have also been pigeonholed in other contrary labels as conservative and post-modern, radical and progressive depending on my views that appear chameleonic to an uninitiated and prejudiced mind. Married for more than half a century I have been an advocate of lasting heterosexual marriages in the interest of family and society. At the same time, I do not find anything odd or objectionable in gay or lesbian marriages. This is not to be seen as pro-actively modern by casting off conservatism that becomes a senior citizen of my age,  but because I subscribe to and endorse individual make-up, what is sometimes referred to as the genotype, that has a sexual orientation to persons of the same sex. This group may not be as large as the heterosexuals and therefore in no way will it conflict with progeny that is central to the perpetuation of humanity. For me homo- or hetero-, the mutual attraction between two human beings is an exalting experience and to frown upon same sex fascination as an aberration because it is a departure from what has been traditionally prescribed and followed is an infringement on the right to love. If we recall Milan Kundera’s line “love…entered the room like a miracle”, we will understand that proscribing love between two human beings irrespective of their genders is going against instinctual human nature.

The immediate provocation for writing this piece is an article on female sex tourism by a dear friend of mine from Spain. She is a European by descent, liberal and left of Centre whose political beliefs lean towards socialist ideas though not of the extreme. She has a soft spot for people in the third World and in the colonized but now liberated countries and her empathy with them is not to be mixed with ‘pity’ that carries overtones of condescension and patronage. Her article on Female Sex Tourism highlights the colonial mentality of the white women towards the blacks as portrayed in two plays, Tanika Gupta’s Sugar Mummiesand Debbie Tucker Green’s Trade. As a reviewer of the two plays, she has examined “the interactions between white female tourists and local black men from the context of post-colonialism, asking whether these encounters can be considered a “fair trade” or whether it is the neo-colonizing of people in this ex-slave society.(Hilda Klein)

The plays present Northern European women, independent and professional, travelling to Africa or the West Indies in search of sexual satisfaction. In other words, these plays deal with male prostitution and the new trend among economically independent women to go on sex tourism. The statistics are staggering- some 600,000 European women, among them 80,000 single British women are engaged in sex tourism. These affluent women seek the virile physique of a small number of black men for trifling sums. The earlier dominance of the white colonizer over the dark-skinned colonized continue today through sexual relationship between the black male prostitutes and white female clients. Tanik Gupta says: “You can […] see it as white people colonising and objectifying black sexuality. It’s almost like a return to the slave days, with white women checking out the men’s teeth, limbs and dicks before they buy”.   Prostitution is the new trade except that the client is a white woman and the prostitute is a black man. The new trade balance is one of eco-sexual transaction and white women with their economic independence and hunger for sex that is not satisfied by their white spouses in their native lands, are presented as degraded and perverted females.

I find the plays a pointer to the debasement of humanity. It is one thing to justify female sex tourism on grounds of failed marriages and failed sexual satisfaction. When one does not succeed in man-woman relationships, can't women raise themselves up to seek satisfaction in things other than sex? Somehow degrading oneself in this way shows women lowering their femininity whose distinguishing characteristics are delicacy, gentleness, demureness, grace, love and compassion.(classical views) Can’t the women adopt children, do social service or indulge in forms of creativity to heal their hurt physical deprivation? Isn’t seeking sexual satisfaction an easy form  (though debased) of escapism? I do not know if I am right in expressing my feelings that border on disgust and revulsion that sound antithetical to present day feminists’ no holds barred orchestration towards  freedom and gender equality.

As stated at the beginning, though labeled a conservative because of my family upbringing, I appreciate romantic love which is based on two identities becoming one. If A is in love with B, A identifies himself with B and so does B with A. Shakespeare’s Desdemona, a white woman is deeply in love with Othello, a black Moor. She tells him “I see my visage in thee”- it is a total identification of the two lovers.  The romanticist in me is of the view  that sexual union between two beings, irrespective of gender, authenticates the exalted love felt deeply in the heart. Unfortunately in today’s fast moving world, there is no time for men and women to read and enjoy great works that distil the essence of human bonding in exalted terms. They seek coarse sexual pleasures without the experience of exalted joy. For example, here is a lovely poem by John Donne who speaks about the lover and the beloved bitten by a flea:

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,

How little that which thou deniest me is;

Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;

Thou know'st that this cannot be said

A sin, nor shame nor loss of maidenhead,

Yet this enjoys before it woo,

And pampered swells with one blood made of two,

And this, alas, is more than we would do.

…    …     …    …     …

This flea is you and I, and this

Our marriage bed and marriage temple is;

Here are a few lines from another poem of Donne: The Ecstasy

Where like a pillow on a bed

A pregnant bank swell'd up to rest

The violet's reclining head

Sat we two one another's best.

Our hands were firmly cemented

By a fast balm which thence did spring;

Our eye-beams twisted and did thread

Our eyes upon one double string.

So to engraft our hands as yet

Was all the means to make us one;

And pictures in our eyes to get

Was all our propagation.

This ecstasy doth unperplex,

We said, and tell us what we love;

We see by this it was not sex,

We see we saw not what did move;

These poems reveal the working of the senses in transmitting love between two souls- it does not matter whether it is between a man and a woman or a man and a man or a woman and a woman. The eyes and the hands complete the fullness of love, the bliss of togetherness. Void of such ecstatic bonding, sexual union is animalistic in character. Reading such a poem of pure and unalloyed love is one way of transferring the experience of the poet to oneself. The modern men and women have no time to absorb such exciting experience.

Thus I grew to be I a romantic at heart ( which endorses unrestrained freedom), but I continued to be a classicist in spirit in my unrelenting search for  elegance, grace, beauty. I am a liberalist favouring tolerance and open-mindedness and yet a conservatist who believes in law and order. I am a theist  and that too a polytheist, but I am also an agnostic who does not worship God  as a benign Power ever willing to bestow His benevolent boon giving hands  on us, but only as an unknown, unknowable and inscrutable Power endowed with authority and capability to create as well as to destroy. I am a feminist inherently proud of the capability potential of women and its realization for which they need total freedom, but at the same time, I am an anti -feminist who refuses to labour under a fallacious delusion of persecution and victimization.

Am I the only one to be a bundle of contraries in my make-up? No, I am one among many thousands who does not seek an –ist label unless the –ist is prefixed with ‘human’. A very large majority of people all over the world are humanists who believe in humanistic values and devotion to human welfare. There is no point in being rigid and dogmatic and be labeled an –ist. The cause of all clashes today begins with this act of labeling.  Since till today Man has found no answer to the question “Who am I” nor will he ever arrive at a comprehensive answer,  let us drop that question and instead explore what we can do with the given’I’ without attempting to coerce all other ‘I’s to be like our ‘I’.