The Two Cultures

                                                                   The Two Cultures

We are living in alarming times with the fawning courtiers of Prime Minister Modi  raising a toast to him on daily basis , raising a halo round him as the savior of the country and turning him to be , the  new messiah, made in God’s image. The latest paean from an acolyte of Modi in a Sunday article in a leading newspaper is about the PM’s insightful effort to shape the nation’s future with a blend of technology and cultural rootedness. For him and for many hundreds of the aficionados of Modi, the solution on offer from the PM is a simple arithmetic equation: science + tradition. They view tradition and scientific culture as two sides of the same coin- being austere, strict and related to a perceptible world, truer to fact and far removed from the world of the “loose and bohemian”( terms used by the above mentioned writer)  humanistic culture that rests on libertarianism, belief in free will, in freedom of thought and expression and creative imagination. I only hope that PM does not have the time for these flatterers and perceive the inherent flaw cloaked in such flattery.

 The term “Two Cultures” was first coined by C.P. Snow who had the distinct advantage of being both a scientist and a novelist. Snow did not pit one against the other as both the cultures make distinctive contribution to the progress and development of the society.  The humanistic culture originated from a world of words seeking to express reality through language. Till the 17^th century, it dominated all discourses that encompassed the whole of human experience. For example, painting before the advent of modern art was “an illustration of verbal concepts- a picture in the book of language.”(George Steiner). All those pre- Modern paintings could be titled and could be seen as rendering a verbal account through colours and lines.  Similarly music was always set to a text or programmed to articulate a formal occasion or situation. For example the Bhakti movement in India was known for its music in praise of God. Music was the text rendered into soulful ragas. The word dominated all discourses in philosophy, ethics, economics, sociology and literature. All these changed after the 17^th C with the slow and steady advancement in science and technology, though it did not result in the banishment of humanistic culture. Today economics, sociology and social sciences are becoming more statistics and mathematics oriented and unlike the classic works of economists like Adam Smith, Ricardo, Marshal and  Malthus,  a number of modern economists have made economics approximate to mathematics replacing words by equations. (Keynes was an exception as he straddled between the humane and mathematical branches of economics). Sociologists have replaced words by graphs and statistical tables and even when they use word, their writings use the vocabulary of sciences. In a brilliant essay The Retreat from the Word, Steiner writes: “… sociology borrows what it can from the vocabulary of the exact sciences. One could make a fascinating list of these borrowings… norms, group, scatter, integration, function, co-ordinates”. Even Philosophy that had from the time of Plato and Aristotle relied upon words to apprehend the truth beyond the pale of facts, has come closer to mathematics with Descartes’s efforts to link eternal truth with mathematical proof. Spinoza recognized  precision, certitude and logic in mathematics that he turned philosophy into verbal mathematics, organizing ethics into” axioms, definitions, demonstrations and corollaries”. Modern art with its slogan “to make everything new’” changed realistic art from being “an illustration of verbal concepts”. The Impressionists and the post-Impressionists that include Cubists, Fauvists, Expressionists, Surrealists etc painted not what they saw but what they felt. This is the new art that transcended words and tried to capture feelings beyond reality. Musical notations approximate to mathematics that one notices in the works of Mozart, Hayden and Beethoven.  Much of music and art produced in modern times are notable for their technical virtuosity rather than relate to any exterior intelligibility.  In all these we notice  that words are being supplemented by non verbal language that belongs to the domain of science and mathematics. The two cultures are not opposed to each other. But a new literacy has come into existence where words have shrunk in potency but strengthened by the language of science and culture. Mathematical formulae and equations, graphic and statistical displays, electronic and chemical equations that are precise and exact complement words bringing about a fusion of the two cultures. There is no need to mark one as superior to the other. In Snow’s words: “a man who has  read no Shakespeare is uncultured, but not more so than one who is ignorant of the Second Law of thermodynamics. Each is blind to a comparable world.”

Unfortunately with partial knowledge of the concept of two cultures, our present day intellectuals speak of them as antipathetic to each other and deride those who favour freedom of thought and speech as “loose” and “bohemian” and applaud those who misunderstand the rigidity of tradition to be the same as the rigour and precision of science. We have to liberate our minds from pseudo- intellectualism that refuses to see anything except in black and white. It is in the shades of grey that one notices the commingling of the two cultures. Disproportionate praise of the PM by his ardent admirers founded on partial understanding of the two cultures is harmful and has the danger of  evolution of  a new world of cultural illiteracy that has a blinkered view  about the two cultures so essential for the regeneration and progress of humankind.

                                                           Our Tryst with History

We buy three newspapers on weekends- the Times of India, the Hindu and the Indian Express. Browsing through newspapers is the best and the most satisfying way to spend the two days before a fresh but pedestrian week of routine begins, the commonplaceness of which is capsuled in Samuel Beckett’s unique statement: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”  The expectation is that there will always be at least one thought provoking article in one of them. But today on the 69^th Independence Day, I had the bonus of three separate articles, one in each of the newspapers to give me enough mental drill to keep my grey cells well exercised through the next seven days.

The first was by Kanti Bajpai in the Times Of India about India as a theatre state, the second by Professor Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express on Independence Ennui and the third by Ziya Us Salam in the Hindu on History as a continuum of conflict, cooperation and conciliation. The first two present a realistic , albeit pessimistic state of Indian parliamentary democracy as it is now while the third, anchored on the idea of History offers a possible solution to our current state of darkness at noon that is so sharply drawn by Kanti Bajpai and Prof. Mehta.  

The recently concluded monsoon session of Parliament has raised questions about our proud claims of being a robust democracy, claims that rest purely on the successful conduct of elections every five years. But our elected representatives do not have a clue to parliamentary etiquette which calls for reasoned debate and civilized behaviour.  What had happened in the washed-out session that concluded a couple of days back was a re-run of the drama of 2013, enacted many times during the UPA rule from 2004-2014 ,except for the change of the dramatis personnae. Kanti Bajpai is quite charitable to call India a ‘theatre state’ where theatrical performances are enacted on the Parliament stage by our hon’ble  elected members. Theatre is not an odious term  as it refers to the arena where the activity  of communicating and the activity of conveying  message through performances  take place to provide the audience both entertainment and instruction. But there is always a good theatre and a bad theatre where the quality differs due to poor script and poorer acting ability of the players onstage. Whether it is comedy or tragedy, vaudeville or slapstick, the language of the script and acting it out make all the difference.  Every play consists of a beginning,  a conflict , reaching a  climax and at the end the denouement. In our Parliamentary theatre, there is no beginning as the play straightaway plunges into conflict and action, the climax is quickly reached with the members trooping into the well and the denouement is in their walking out with the session adjourned for the day. This drama has been played out ad nauseam during many sessions in the past and to that extent the washout of the present monsoon session is not a new phenomenon. In our Parliament, the script is ready made with the opposition in direct conflict with the ruling party on every trivial as well as serious issue. The speeches and action are left to the spontaneity of the players who act out on the spur of the moment, by rendering the script in high decibels and following it with rushing to the well of the House shouting hoarse. There are no rules of dramaturgy to be followed as the actors on a cue from their leaders have only to ensure that there is no reasoned debate, no comprehension of their script, and no discussion except to re- create a modern Tower of Babel. A large majority of our elected representatives have never been schooled in theatrics and so their acting is impromptu where their swift movement towards the well is paralleled by their use of lung power. The climax is reached when everyone speaks and no one is heard( a la some of the TV debates on our news channels). The opposition         troops out talking in different voices, bringing the curtains down for the day.  What we witness is a mockery of Parliamentary procedures. Our representatives lack education in cultured behaviour and cultured use of language. They have never been initiated into debates where the first principle is the art of listening. This is followed by the art of understanding, analyzing and logically discussing all important social and political issues using cultured language and measured tone. When there is no listening and only simultaneous speaking by all members, the tower of Babel rises up to its architectural glory. Kanti Bajpai is more than charitable in defining India as a theatre state. It will be truer to call India as a ‘pseudo theatre state’ as the theatricality on display is not even comparable to a slapstick comedy or buffoonery.

Prof Mehta is more caustic in his comments as he accuses our elected representatives for causing political ennui through their mindless play acting. Though he reserves his diatribe more for the Congress charging it with mediocre leadership, pettiness, destruction and inability to come to terms with losing its place in the Treasury benches, he assails the ruling BJP, the present occupants of those coveted Treasury benches  for its hubris, arrogance and visceral hatred of the Gandhis(the mother-son duo). The Theatre of Conflict that our parliament has turned into, no longer witnesses a clash  of the Titans as in the past but a worthless clash between Lilliputians whose knowledge of theatricality stops with the shrill exercise of lung power.

Both Kanti Bajpai and Prof Mehta do see a glimmer of hope in the midst of this chaos. For Bajpai, hope lies in a future date when our society will change from its medieval rural mindset to become modern and urban. But such optimism is more of a hope than a potential actuality as the present members of our Parliament (that includes both the opposition and the ruling parties) who indulge in unseemly slugfest have an educated, urban and modern background. For Prof.Mehta hope lies in the resilience of the people of India who have the rare ability to chug along with stoic accommodation of the mindless players, taking our genetic violent pathology in its stride.

Amidst all these doomsday prophecies, Ziya Us Salam’s article on the Hindu offers  possible hope by understanding history as a cyclical continuum that begins with conflict, moves through cooperation and ends with reconciliation. He recalls his history teacher who had compared history to an unreserved railway compartment where at every station new passengers rush in to get a seat while those already in the compartment try to defend that territory. As the train begins to move the jostling for occupation gives way to some slight accommodation –almost at the edge of the seat. Soon after, there is a gradual beginning of conversation and everyone joins in  and which is soon followed by everyone sharing one another’s tiffin.  By the time the train arrives at the next station, they would have exchanged their address and telephone numbers to continue the friendship forged during the journey. History is also a similar one of conflict starting with a fight to occupy another’s territory.  Once the fight ends and the territory is conceded, comes the mingling of two cultures and civilizations- both of the victor and the vanquished.. The initial period of hostility gradually gives way to a period of peace and progress. History moves through this cycle of conflict, cooperation and reconciliation and ensures that humanity survives.  Ziya Us Salam’s conclusion that history repeats itself and all conflicts –internal and external, all competition for possession of a coveted place or position finally resolves itself and a new civilization emerges as a result of the fusion of the culture of the conqueror and that of the conquered. Citing Bipin Chandra’s monumental work India Struggle for Independence, Ziya Us Salam points out how competitive communalism between Syed Ahmed Khan’s Muslim communal ideology and Punjab Hindu Sabha’s Hindu communal ideology got resolved with the National Congress movement uniting Indians into a single nation  that celebrated its tryst with destiny on August 15, 1947.  A similar drama is being played today with the substitution of names like Owaisi and Amit Shah and the like. While what is happening today is depressing and dismaying, hope lies in the conciliation that makes the last of the cycle that revolves round conflict, cooperation and conciliation.

It is time for our political leadership to see the conflict of interests through the prism of history. Congress has yielded the space to the BJP after a decade of rule. The BJP should see that the decade long Congress rule was a mix of good and bad governance. Instead of attacking and humiliating the Congress –as though its humiliation at the hustings was not emough, but has to be constantly rubbed in, it should be magnanimous to give Congress its due on GST Bill, Land Acquisition Bill etc while appropriating the same for boosting up the nation’s economy. The Congress, having yielded the treasury bench territory to the BJP should accommodate the ruling government’s new schemes that are modified and improved versions of the earlier ones. Cooperation and not conflict can bring them into reckoning in the future elections. History has shown that the spirit of give and take constitutes conciliation leading to a period of peace and progress. Can our leaders go back to history and look at it in a new way on the analogy of the railway compartment? If History has chronicled the  three ‘C’s  from ancient times to modern times and if India has survived invasions and conflicts and has emerged as one nation absorbing pluralistic cultures, civilizations, religions and languages, we can hope our present political leadership will engage itself to write a new history of a united, urbane, modern India combating conflicts through cooperation and conciliation.

We welcome bans; we are argumentative Indians

It is a normal thing with all of us to talk incessantly about ourselves even if there is just one captive listener, though ideally we are at our best when there are a whole lot of listeners. It is also a normal thing that we always take the moral high ground seeking a sense of superiority- often false and unjustified-  to prove that in all our encounters with  ‘the other’, we  are fair and just and are the  unfortunate victims of the indefensible and illegitimate manipulations of ‘the other’. If you do not suffer from auditory problems, and listen to any talk between two or more persons on the street, you cannot but notice the voice of wounded pride of a victim who is at the centre of the conversation. Often in parks, I have heard maids vying with each other to speak about the unjust and harsh treatment they experience everyday from their “mem sahebs”, from their incessant fights with their neighbours, from the taunts they receive from their in-laws, from their quotidian conflicts(without which life does not exist nor move) with  X,Y.Z etc. This is not just maids’ talk, it is also that of the mem sahebs( except for the change of venue from the street corners  to the clubs),  of  men’s talk of all categories  and in all these , the querulousness of the complainants cannot be missed. “I just gave it back to him/her” will always remain the climactic refrain at the end to affirm one’s uprightness and deny the other’s attempt to usurp it.

 “We are right and there can be no two opinions about it” is a common stand with all of us. It is the source of all conflict and is the source of the relentless cacophony that we hear on the TV debates every evening.  The spokespersons of the different political parties whose  difference is between tweedledum and tweedledee and who all claim to be the champions of the  marginalized, downtrodden and subaltern groups, proclaim this sameness of being right  loudly and simultaneously on the TV channels so that the listeners can hardly discern who says what except for the certainty that everyone seems to be wronged.

The present Government’s numerous diktats – or can we say bans – as to what we should read and not read, what we should eat and not eat, what we should see and not see, what we should watch and not watch on the TV and in the cinema halls, what we should and should not listen to, what we should do and not do even in the privacy of our homes- in short, what we should and should not do with ourselves everyday- have come in for heated debates on the TV channels. In the din created by a million voices represented by five or six spokespersons, the debates peter out to all sound and fury signifying nothing.

Surprisingly this present government of ‘bans’ has not yet banned debate on TV channels though it has issued notice to four channels including the soft and mild mannered NDTV for airing views contrary to the Government’s decisions. The present government started its second innings ( a decade after the ending of its first innings under the balanced and benign leadership of Vajpayee) with  a slogan of “Congress mukht Bharat”, almost its first ban on the 140 year old Congress party. Then there was the ban on all the septuagenarians at 75 and 75+ from holding any office in the government,  scotching the ambitions of Lal Krishna Advani,Murali Manohar Joshi, Yashwant Singh  and others.  The Modi party rose to power with the ambitious slogan of banning corruption and in less than a year it has banned all the voices that press the resignations of its tainted leaders at the Centre and in the states. The diminished Congress party (yet to be completely wiped off the face of India) that was mewing for nearly a year suddenly started roaring inside and outside Parliament and immediately incurred a ban on 25 of its members for five days from entering the sacred portals of the temple of democracy. Both the ruling majority and the prime opposition minority with its around one-tenth of seats in the Lok Sabha have put on a holier than thou art attitude and claim to righteous indignation over their concept of morality in political affairs.  Like the maids with their brooms, the principal opposition party had the placards on their hands seeking the resignations of three top functionaries- the female RSS-Raje,Sushma and Smriti besides that of Vyapam tainted Chief Minister Of Madhya Pradesh. Somewhere in the din the corruption scam of Pankaj Munde of the Maharashtra ministry was forgotten. The obstruction stalled the passing of two important ‘modi’fied  bills- the  Land acquisition bill and the GST bill  though when the same bills without the ‘modi’fication were initially the infant bills of the erstwhile ruling Congress party. Like the fights in the fish market and on the streets, the two national parties indulged in  ‘tu tu mein mein’ ( ‘you -you, I- I ‘squabble)that led to an unofficial ban on parliament functioning.

In this melee all other bans that needed full throated shouting was missed out. The government had set high moral standards to tell its immature children :

Johnny,Johnny, yes papa,

Eating beef , no papa

Freedom of speech, no papa

Private affairs, no papa

Right to privacy, no papa

Criticism of govt, no papa

Cuss words in films, no papa

Left historians, no papa

RSS historians , yes papa

German study, no papa

Sanskrit study, yes papa

Invasion of privacy, yes papa,

Ban on porn, yes papa

Valentine's day, no papa

What is right is what government does and what government does not do. What is not right is what it bans and what the opposition protests. What is right for the government is what is wrong for the opposition. What is wrong for the government is what is right for the opposition. Our politicians are like anyone of us- the aam admis and therefore they will speak as we do-affirming our superiority and decrying that of the other.  Bans of different kinds unite us together. We welcome bans;  we are argumentative Indians.

The Partial Opening of the Present and the Partial Closing of the Past Modes of living

My mind is in a swirl. I had always prided myself of not feeling my age though slow physical decline prompts me to accept the truth that I have crossed 75. I resist acknowledging the fact that I belong to the past and do not belong to the current X/Y/Z/ generations. I was born into World War II generation- the generation of ‘Baby Boomers’ that enjoyed the fruits of a slow economic recovery after the hardships of the war time. I should say that we who arrived at that time in India have seen a rise in our economic status thanks to education and our post-independence development.  In my case the rise was from average middle class to upper middle class with reasonable luxuries and comforts that followed the ascension to a higher status.

As I moved to my late twenties and thirties, I found myself in a state of dissonance with Gen X - born between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s, characterized by greater openness to diversity and a streak of rebelliousness against the staid and the orderly way of living that we had been used to. The new generation was that of the flower children rejecting the established culture and advocating extreme liberalism in politics, lifestyle and arts. Though there was a veiled admiration for the new generation’s spirit of freedom, it left a strange sense of disquietude among us, brought up to unquestioningly accept paternalism that among other things  had denied us the liberty of choice.

Generation Y known as the Millennial generation refers to those born between the 1980s and 2000, coinciding  with revolution in technology and  surrounding itself with  gadgets such as   cell phones, laptops, I-pads and I-phones, always seeking connectivity with the world outside. This generation looked down on us- the Baby boomers generation who knew only work culture and never had learnt to enjoy life other than work. We in turn, though critical of the new work culture made easy by technological appliances, secretly admired the swift moving Millennials to forge a new work-life balance and despaired over our lack of technological skills to keep pace with them.

Today, the Baby boomers are just a little less than a quarter of a century from turning hundred. Thanks to modern medicines and qualitative changes in life style, we do not look like zombies with “dry brains” in the “dry season” of our age. We are now the great grand-  parents of Gen Z, the children of Gen X and Gen Y. Gen Z youngsters are in their teens though they are  highly connected, effortlessly using high-tech communication, living a technology- driven lifestyle and  depending hugely on social media for interaction with the world  that provides a built-in shield to protect  them from any degree of intimacy and closeness while nurturing  illusory connectedness. We marvel at their dexterity in the usage of “apps”. Their new lingo, shorn off grammar and proper expression and characterized by abbreviated spellings is different from our familiarity with our grammatically and idiomatically formulated  language, full of politeness and courtesy, signifying correctness in behaviour and conduct.

I have now understood the term ‘generation gap’. Even if I still have mental astuteness, I find it difficult to attune to the gadget culture around me. Though gadgets are meant to save time and energy, I wonder what is to be done with the extra time and energy on hand?  Is the new generation with the surplus saved energy stronger and healthier than we the Baby Boomers? Does the additional time on hand make them more productive than the previous generations?  On the contrary we, the old staid characters were able to compete our work and return home almost in fixed hours while the new age office goers keep late hours , missing their family life with wife and children, missing on some little fun in the evenings, missing on home meals, grabbing a rich burger to bite to soften the hunger pangs and a fizzy cola to wash it down and returning home straight to bed. By the time they are in their forties, they have blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes and other ailments which demand a full chest of medicines for daily consumption. Since there is no time to do any physical work, they have to hit the gym during weekends and labour to stave off those extra kilos piled during the course of the week.

In the past, shopping even in the kirana store was one way of stretching one’s legs. The daily needs of bread and butter, milk and coffee/tea, cereals for breakfast and fruits were purchased from the morning stores. The fact is one walked to the stores. Today we have the Apps that lists out all that we need( and even more than what we need) and sitting at home or lying in the bed holding the smartphone we seek greater and swifter mobility through the Apps. Even that short walk to the corner store is no longer there. The automobile mobility is available to preserve our energy expended on physical walking. All the time, there is the racing of the heartbeat and pulse rate as we have to beat the traffic to reach the workplace and beat even the Sun before it punches its rays through the grey skies. No time for cooking, no time for washing, no time for cleaning,  no time for breakfast. All these daily chores- often termed as drudgeries can wait for the weekend when the machines will do the work. Till such time, stuff all the dirty clothes in a corner of the cupboard and let the house take care of itself. Every young / middle-aged man and woman suffers from frozen arms/ shoulders, from pain in the knee joints, from migraine induced by stress and from spondylitis through bending over the computers. The result is frequent motor drives to the orthopedic specialist, for knee transplants, for physiotherapy, for Xrays and CTscans- all because of a total surrender to the gadgets and not using our naturally endowed arms and legs.

I was amused the other day when I saw a friend of mine seeking the I-pad to get directions to reach a shopping mall from her residence. Gone are the days when people like me would mentally map the roads to be taken before starting the car. So is the use of the mobile phone. I had trained my mind to be a phone directory to store important numbers of more than a hundred people. Now the mobile phone has undone the mental capability to remember. Though I make it a point to dial the numbers rather than pressing the contact button on the phone to do my bidding, I find that the intrusion of cell memory has wreaked havoc on my grey cells. The vacuum cleaners are still a boon as they require our physical effort to clean and mop the floors. But today one hears about the robot doing it, literally nibbling like a mouse at all the dirt present and imagined. Even guiding a vacuum cleaner is no longer a physical activity.

What a paradox! The proud cry “I have no time” contradicts all the spare time that gadgets have freed for you  and the moot question is what do you do with the spare time- spend more hours in the office ? The modern generation follows Parkinson’s Law: “work expands to fill the time available for its completion”.  So there is the illusion of timeless working! At least in US and in the West, people return home at the appointed time. No late working , no sacrifice of family and children during the weekends for the sake of office. But in India, there is no time for home, for fun and play, but inversely expand all the available time to fill it with office work.

Isn’t it time to wean the Gen X, Gen Y and Gen Z from the monstrous clutches of gadgets and becoming a slave to them? Isn’t it time for all these younger groups to use the gadgets minimally and wisely and be the Lord and Master over them? Aren’t the gadgets defrauding them of their physical and mental potential?  Can we  turn the clock to our age civilization and  make them understand that there is a time for work there is a time for rest; there is a time for others, there is a time for oneself; there is a time for professional work; there is a time for personal work; there is a time for colleagues; there is a time for family…(apologies to the Ecclesiastes)

We the Baby Boomers are open to the new age civilization of gadgets but with moderation. We appeal to the new age generation to be open to our old age civilization with adequate modification. The future lies in the partial closing of the present and the partial opening of the past modes of living.