Cyber Hub

Nothing can bring home the truth than a visit to the Cyber Hub for dinner that one has aged and is slowly relegated to the group, that often begins any conversation with a prefatory statement “blessed was it in that dawn to be alive/ to be young was  very heaven”.  Cyber hub, established in 2013  in the upscale satellite town near Delhi caters to the  gastronomical needs of young men and women( young today ranges between 18 and 60) whose average salary is higher than that of a upper middle class family,  who are among the best paid people in the country and who can therefore afford the pricey fares in these restaurants.  Being close to the IT hub, it caters to the well placed men and women working in the Cyber city during weekdays and on weekends, it attracts reasonably affluent families from Delhi and adjoining regions of the capital. On an average Cyber hub has around 25000 customers everyday among its 52 restaurants, bars and pubs. The cuisine served is not any fancied or extraordinary fare that one does not find elsewhere or the ambience an exclusive one. But the price of each item compares with any restaurant in a three star hotel. An Indian vegetarian dinner for two should cost a minimum of Rs. 2000 and this does not include drinks ( soft and hard) .

Despite the prohibitive fare, there is a constant coming in of people and one hardly finds any restaurant with an empty chair. Most of those who come early (around eight in the evening) are family groups and before they troop out, the young crowd from the neighbouring offices saunters in -and always in twos and threes. Unlike the formally dressed oldies and their prim and properly attired families, this group is casually dressed with men carrying their trademark business bolsas and women with vintage backpacks, casually slung across the shoulders. No wonder most of them are on the heavy side as they frequently make their nocturnal foray to these restaurants that serve Indian dinner known for its generous use of oil, salt and spice. In the next two decades, whether we score on any other distinction or not, it is safely predicted that India will have the distinction of having the largest diabetic population, thanks to the deskbound jobs where young men and women sit for six hours at a stretch besides poor calorie management and sedentary life style.  If diabetes is on the increase, so is the cardiovascular disease rising at a rapid rate. I learnt from a young lady working for an IT firm saying she leaves home around 7.30 in the morning and returns around 10 at night. On those rare days she does not eat in the Cyberhub, she eats on her way back home the packed cold dinner she had brought with her in the morning. Her husband returns home an hour later and they exchange only two words every day- “good morning” before they leave and “good night” before they turn in. Between the two of them, they earn lakhs of rupees but they have no time to spend except in the Cyber hub!( and hopefully not on the doctors)

As I walked along the long winding corridor that housed different restaurants, I noticed   young girls standing at the doors that open on the visitors with a huge grin inviting them to enter with the corner of their eyes.  It is a difficult choice to make- whom to oblige and whom not to. You meander through the entire corridor and tired, you decide to enter anyone of the restaurants to grab a bite before returning home. Since one had waded through a dense traffic on the way to the Cyber hub- that turned  a ten minute drive into a nightmarish marathon lasting ninety minutes- it is prudent to keep  enough margin to return home before mid night. But for the young, time does not matter at any hour of the night. For them the night walk to the cyber hub after a daylong staring at the computer is a rhapsody on a neon-lit night.  They come not because they are hungry (they all seem well fed even before they sit at the table), but by habit to chew the rag before returning to their hearth-less homes.

 Abba’s famous lines:

                                                   Money, money, money
                                                    Must be funny
                                                    In the rich man's world
                                                    Money, money, money
                                                    Always sunny
                                                    In the rich man's world

kept buzzing through my brain. I was confused. I saw the young people in high spirits with not a care of the world, unbothered by “the fret and fever of the world”, smug and secure with the numerous credit/debit cards lining their wallets.. They have the best of “resume” virtues that contribute to their professional success. They appear self confident and are sure of a still higher status and position in the times to come. When I looked at them, I developed a complex as I had never enjoyed such gay abandon even in the heydays of my professional youth.  I belong to that old generation that looked at today as a step up on yesterday and a build up for the future. From our childhood we were told to be concerned with the future and keep all fun in abeyance and save every penny for tomorrow that may not spell good times. The constant refrain dinned into our ears was “save for a rainy day as the times may be tough in the future”. Yet another ominous warning constantly bombarded into our psyche was “waste not, want not”. For us there was never a today but only a tomorrow; no enjoyment for the present, but wait for it tomorrow (as though future had guaranteed it). The meticulous attention to the credit/debit entries in the bank pass book and the constant conversion of saved rupees to fixed deposits that would mature after ten years with accrued interest was the only way to use our money. Eating out was frowned upon unless it was a free wedding lunch or dinner. Visits to a cinema hall were deemed a luxury and therefore were a rarity. We loved money- but only to see it in our bank balance and not for spending as these youngsters do today.

Times have changed. Even old people like me now  visit these special places but unlike the nonchalant spenders of today, we pay the bill with shocked and bewildered reluctance and then work out  how cleverly we can scrimp on the tips to the waiter.

The question that props up within me is whether we were stupid and lost out on fun and enjoyment all these days or whether the present generation is a lot more wise in splurging their prosperity with no care for the future. We scrimped and saved for the future of our children- educating them and settling them in life; we scrimped and saved so that we could meet our health expenses in our old age. I have heard many of my father’s generation putting aside in a small trunk a tidy sum for their funeral expenses. There was always the fear of the unknown future that blocked any sense of enjoyment. But then there was the satisfaction that the money was well spent in the cause of the family though we personally denied ourselves the joy and excitement of our youth when physically and mentally we were in a position to enjoy life at its fullest.

But that is the argument of the young people today. If you don’t enjoy now, when can you enjoy- certainly not when you have lost your agility, alertness, energy and even a love to enjoy! Your waiting for that day when you can savour life to the full is like waiting for Godot( Samuel Beckett’s play where Godot never makes an appearance while the two central characters wait for him to deliver them from a life of abject boredom and ennui). “Make hay when the sun shines ‘’ is their credo and they live for the day, by the hour, by the minute, by the second. Looking at the hordes of young men and women, laughing, chatting, fooling around, indulging in  fun and frolic, I wondered if they had a thought for any other person of a different and less privileged class , of a  lower and deprived group who struggled to have at least one square meal in a day.  But then, I had my own conflicting argument that even we with all the saved bank balance did not think beyond ourselves, our sons and daughters and their sons and daughters. The two basic differences are we had the feeling of living for our progeny while the modern young men and women live only for themselves and secondly we never enjoyed life (not even now in our old age as we are constrained by age related illnesses) while the modern youth goes full blast to enjoy, knowing that this time will not come again.

I envy the present carefree generation because I was never care free.  But do I dare now enjoy as they do? I was reminded of Eliot’s Prufrock who after asking the question “Do I dare disturb the Universe” chickens out and accepts the fact

                                           I grow old ... I grow old ...

                                           I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

                                           Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?

                                           I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

                                           I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

                                       I do not think that they will sing to me.

The visit to Cyberhub made me realize that I can never be a part of it. For me it was a visit to another world- the Cyberspace  or the virtual reality- an artificial environment where one  suspends belief and accepts it as a real environment so long as one is there. Out of cyberhub, I was back to my old self-neither desiring joy nor lamenting the denial of it. I learnt each much stay true to his/her generation and not seek after a reality that is not his/hers.

Silence of Sound

                                                                    Silence of Sound

I often hanker after silence because I could listen without hearing. But silence has always remained too pricey to be had because wherever we go, whatever the time of the day or night, we cannot escape noise, not even for a flick of a second. Even in the wee hours of the morning, the stillness of the dawn is broken by the cacophony of birdsong what scientists call the dawn chorus.  Birds can sing at any time of day, but during the dawn chorus their songs are often louder, livelier, and more frequent. The only interruption to the birdsong in those twilight hours is the shattering sound of the bigger bird that roars across the skies at great speed to reach the passengers from one continent to another.

But not many are early risers to have the early on advantage of a comparatively higher degree of quietness. But those who have the luxury of blissful early morning sleep are jolted out of their bed with the thud of the newspaper hitting the front door. Our apartment is on the first floor, about ten feet from the ground level. Summer or winter, rainy or cloudy,t he newspaper boy is on the dot around half past five  and sitting atop  his bicycle, pedalling backward to keep it in balance, he swings the newspaper, tubularly folded  by the thinnest of a rubber band, high up with an accuracy that always makes me wonder why these boys aren’t in our cricket team to throw the ball with accuracy from the boundary right on to the stumps.  

The newspapers make all the sounds. Words, words and words, comprising the verbal onslaughts by politicians, pontificating editorials, tongue-in-cheek banter of intellectuals, inane gossip of page three,all tom-tom through the brain. Breakfast time has its unique cluster of sounds of spoons and forks, plates and knives. But overriding them is the endless chit-chat on puerile topics culled out of the newspaper glossy supplements. Everyday at the breakfast table, I am reminded of Eugene Ionesco’s play( he called it ‘anti-play’)  The Bald Prima Donna consisting mainly of a series of meaningless conversations between two couples that eventually deteriorate into babbling. The couple Mr. and Mrs. Martin, sitting at the table start a conversation. They are surprised to find that they are both from the city of Manchester, that they both took the same train to London, that they both traveled second class, that they both reside at No. 19 Bromfield Street, that they sleep in the same bed, and that they both have a two-year old da ghter named Alice with one red eye and one white eye. They come to the conclusion, of course, that they must be husband and wife: “So you are Mrs. Martin, my wife. “And you are Mr.Martin, my husband” and they embrace.

A ride on the Metro or on the roads by a car or public transport is deafening. Everyone shouts to be heard over the general din, partly contributed by the incessant hooting by cars and trucks, buses and scooters and every sound is layered on top of the other to create a cacophony that can at best be rivaled by the racket created in the two Houses of our Parliament. Everyone talks, no one listens, no one hears. It reminds one of lyrics of the The Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel:

Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

One cannot have a moment of silence with noise to the right of us, noise to the left of us,
noise in front, noise behind,   volleying and thundering all day long until the cows come home. Evening time is TV time and the murderous debates on different channels with the anchors over-shouting the shouting brigades of spokesmen and spokeswomen of all political parties make one wonder if the sounds earlier during the day were sounds in silence in comparison!  

The nights are not spared either as the silence of the nights is more often than not rent by the eerie hooting of the ambulance or the police van or the fire brigade. This is the age of Sound- loud music in theatres and pubs, loud chattering in open hanging out places in the Malls, loud bargaining amidst the din of markets, loud shouting on the streets- and there is no getting away from it.

It was one of those nights when I was jerked out of deep sleep by the phone ringing. Nervously I picked up the phone and was relieved it was a wrong call. But once sleep is disturbed, it becomes difficult to keep the mind still and all nightmarish thoughts and irrational fears crop up. The eerie stillness of the night , further intensified by the hooting of the owls and the howling of the dogs made me wonder if silence is all that worth desiring. I would rather have someone chatter away at midnight than encounter the disturbed silence.

These dark hours keep the mind flitting through myriad thoughts. I realized a strange paradox of our life. We come into this world, shrieking partly out of nervousness to get out of the cosy security of the womb and thrown into existence about which we have no knowledge. But when we go, we go silently – eyes shut, ears closed and voice stilled. Isn’t it strange that all through our waking life we are weary of sound, but at the time of departure, we dread the silence that surrounds us! We want to hold on to people, talk to them, hear their voice, listen to the clutter clatter that comes from every nook and corner as we await the impending final call.

For the first time I understood the significance of sound. In Bible too, it is said, ‘In the beginning there was a word and the word was with God and the word was God.”  The most sacred symbol of Hinduism is “OM”, where Om is the sound of creation, the Sound of the Universe, the seed of the whole creation. There is a beautiful verse in the Guru Granth Sahib, which begins with ‘Ek Omkar Sat Naam, Karta Purakh’ – From Om everything has come, in Om everything dwells, and into Om everything will dissolve; both matter and consciousness. In the Sanskrit tradition, this sound is called "Anahata Nada," the "Unstruck Sound." Normally we know that sound occurs when two things strike each other. But the unstruck soun, according to  David Gordon, the New Age music composer  “that is not made of two things striking together is the sound of primal energy, the sound of the universe itself. And the ancients say that the audible sound which most resembles this unstruck sound is the syllable OM. Tradition has it that this ancient mantra is composed of four elements: the first three are vocal sounds: A, U, and M. The fourth sound, unheard, is the silence which begins and ends the audible sound, the silence which surrounds it. For millennia, mystics have recounted their experience of this energy, which is said to manifest in our hearing awareness as a humming vibration around and within everything else. Ancient teachings and modern science agree:  you, I, all living things, all things in existence are made up at their most essential level of vibrating, pulsing energy.”

It was a Eureka moment for me when I understood the Silence of sound. My restlessness vanished and I went back to sleep till the newspaper made its rendezvous with my front door.

 

Variety is the Spice of Life

One of the pleasures of early rising, apart from a steaming cup of coffee ,is a quick walk through the walkway circuiting the colony.  I have deliberately chosen coffee over tea, as stimulation of tea is quiescent than that of coffee. Further as talk of cultural cleansing gains in, it is better to discard tea that has a British flavour. The bracing air, the serene skies and the quietness all round relieved by the musical cooing of the nightingale and the whistling of the parrots are adequately invigorating and refreshing to face the rest of the day’s encounter with air pollution, noise,  chaos and bedlam that we encounter for the major part of our waking hours. I do not ever miss these few moments of unalloyed pleasure unless incapacitated by the seasonal flu or other related illness. These momentary fragments of happiness, I shore against the turmoil and disorder that follow us till we retire to bed at the end of the day.

This was a habit that I cultivated when I was In England as a student. I loved getting out before others woke up and aimlessly walk through the dormitory encircled by green lawns.  I would return to my dorm to the smell of toasted bread, fried eggs,  bacon and sausages uniformly floating  from all the kitchens, underwhelming the olfactory senses of a pure vegetarian like me. I used to wonder how conservative the British were in matters of food and specially that of breakfast (the fact is, the British breakfast continues even today to be hidebound in this respect).  For them there can be no deviation from the standard breakfast of bread, bacon, cheese and eggs that best indexes British conservatism.

Back home, the morning walks are a pure delight to my olfactory senses. The colony I live in is a mini India with a mix of Tamils, Punjabis, Telugus, Bengalis besides those from the Hindi belt. The aroma of breakfast prepared in the different kitchens is a testimony to the diversity of taste and culture that is uniquely Indian. The smell of dosa and vada, aloo paratha, pesarattu upma, luchi and cholar daal, kachori and aloo sabzi and fried onions comes wafting from the many apartment kitchens– a contrast to the stale egg and bacon smell of the English kitchens. But what is still more unique is that there is a mix of these culinary delights in the different households as they are not restricted to the regions they come from. A Tamil delights as much in aloo paratha as a Punjabi in vada sambar. So is the case with a Bengali smacking his lips with pesarattu upma and a Telugu enjoying his cholar daal. The culinary open-mindedness has contributed to our cultural heterogeneity much more than any other factor.

India is distinctively known for heterogeneity much more than for homogeneity. In fact, the latter had been an one-off happening that manifested itself during the pre- Independence movement. In a recent book A Children’s History of India, the author Subhadra Sen Gupta chronologically delineates the history of India and highlights how our land, with the passage of time had made many of its various invaders its own , absorbing and assimilating their culture which finally progressed into a spirit of nationalism during the Independence movement. This is the quintessence of indianness- a unified culture accommodating the diverse cultures of the Mughals, the Afghans, the French, the Portugese and the British invaders within its fold. This is our strength –often referred to in the clichéd phrase “Unity in Diversity”, rephrased in the  modern jargon as homogeneity in heterogeneity.

Our idea of a secular India emerges from this syncretism, which encourages every citizen of this country to follow his own culture, religion, belief and custom and brings about the reconciliation of all the diverse practices. It is strange that today in place of cultural syncretism, we hear phrases like cultural cleansing, seeking to rid India of its diversity and imposing a certain form of homogeneity very similar to what ISIS is attempting all over the world. ISIS is destroying the artifacts, temples and cultural heritage in the Middle east and believes that  pledging allegiance to the new Caliph is a duty for every Muslim, and those who fail or refuse to do so shall be deemed as apostates, and will be fought and struck down, thereby making Muslims a major power in all fields. They drive American trucks, use computers, internet...all the luxuries of the West, and then drumming up the cult of Islam!  Aside from being subhuman, ISIS war on culture is, according to the Guardian correspondent, Martin Chulov,  ‘a sledgehammer to civilization”.

 Our present day Hindutva  brigade is also embarking on a similar mission to cleanse the nation of what it calls alien culture. What a difference to our genetic trait of indianness- of accepting, accommodating and synthesizing different civilizations and cultures to build a composite new culture! But harping on the ancient past of governance that went by the name Raj Dharma, where the code of conduct was given by the just and benevolent monarchs, the Hindutva brigade forgets that those were days before the advent of  the  modern states  when monarchical form of governance was  founded on” structures that did not recognize individual liberty and rights in the modern sense  of democracy… a genuine secularism in India requires that the forces of individual liberty be given priority over social orthodoxy, that our rights as citizens becomes progressively detached from our particular identities, that there is genuine distrust of the state’s intrusive power over individual lives.”(Pratap Bhanu Mehta).

The banning of meat during the holy days of the Jains is a case in point. The BJP governments indifferent states  explain it as a rightful measure to protect the sensitivities of the Jain community during their festival of Paryushan. Can these governments in the same voice say that there should be fasting during the holy months of Ramzan!  Can they declare the forty days of Lent as a period of fasting?  Can they ask all the restaurants in their states to close during the fasting months observed by different religious denominations?  On the contrary Hindus have hosted Iftar parties during the Ramzan month to forge fellow feelings, friendship and brotherhood between Hindus and Muslims. Christmas and the arrival of Santa Claus are celebrated in many parts of the country. There are no longer stand alone festivals in India designated for individual religious communities. Holi is played with equal fervor by the two communities  and Diwali is a festival of lights for every Indian.

In such a contxt of a pliuralistic society like ours, banning beef (and now meat during the Jain festival) comes close on the heels of banning English language which was given special priority during the recently concluded World Hindi Divas. Can India afford to give up English which has given the country a leg up over the mighty China specially  in the IT sector and in the success of the Indian diaspora in US and Australia? Cleansing of English and replacing it by Hindi may please a few chauvinists but in a globalized world, it will prove a disaster. Banning books that do not meet with the professed ideology of the Hindu chauvinists, rejecting all books on history by reputed historians because they had a left leaning , being intolerant of Valentine’s Day, imposing dress code for young adults in colleges and universities, all these are retrograde steps , not in sync with modern development, liberal outlook and forward thinking. What is attempted is past forward and not present forward. A new equation is being worked out that looks at future as present minus and past plus.

India’s famous heterogeneity all through history has been built on the principle of amalgamation where the assimilation of racial groups and ethnic cultures constantly takes place, resulting in an improved cultural fusion.   Indian civilization is more analogous to  a compound than a mixture. The latter  is a mixture two or more substances that comes unstuck because there is no bonding while the former  is a fusion of different substances that has a an attractive bonding to hold them together.

We have this heritage, what is known as Sanatan Dharma , the Eternal Law or the Eternal way resulting from the union of intuition and reason. Our intuitive appreciation of our glorious heritage is to be fused with our rational understanding of other cultures of the world to bring about synthetic thinking that is central to global connectivity. This should not be bartered away in the name of cultural cleansing. We should recall how the end of colonization in Asia, Africa and other parts of the world in the 20^th century had marginalized the hegemony of the West. But unfortunately a large number of the newly decolonized nations with their fierce loyalty to their own culture and civilization have used religion for asserting their superiority resulting in violent clashes between the West and the rest of the world.  The dethronement of the colonizers had meant dethronement of their religion, culture and civilization. The assertion of indigenous cultures of different states has thus become the new hegemonic order replacing that of the colonizer. Instead of assimilating the salient features of the erstwhile colonizer’s culture into their own, some of these newly liberated states, that had earlier resented the marginalization of their indigenous cultures during the colonizer’s regime, have almost become fanatic to claim insularity from all cultures. This they do by adhering to practices and rituals claiming for themselves religious sanction and prescription. What could have paved the way for co-existence, enhancement and enrichment of different world cultures has unfortunately given in to ‘cultural atavism’ citing divine sanction to inflict cruelty on those with different identity. “Cultural origin is the new aristocratism of the masses.  The emphasis on difference, which in principle should have made us more sensitive to the existence of others, has on the contrary mainly served to sharpen our craving for identity. Every culture is arrogating to itself the right to be inhuman, and cultural rights are the prerogatives of the inhuman.”

It is time for our Hindutva votaries  with their frenzied love and admiration for our rich ancient culture  to recognize the dangers of cultural and religious insularity in the 21^st century  where the coming together of civilizations and cultures  alone can erect a bulwark against the inhumanity that is presently unleashed by violent fundamentalists like ISIS. If we fail to perceive the universal oneness in different cultures, we may be instrumental in bringing about the collapse of civilization and disintegration of humanity. A simple walk in the morning, enjoying the aroma of culinary delights, has greater power of healing our disturbed thoughts and minds, adding variety to our daily life and promoting a healthy co-existence of humanity that owes allegiance to different religious and cultural sects  that exemplify  oneness among multitudinousness.