A New Culture of Dissent against Counterculture.

                                       A New Culture of Dissent against Counterculture.

A recent Saturday supplement of a leading English daily  had a write-up on a Delhi based band Antariksh  formed by three young members who had given up their well paid corporate jobs to take to music as their profession. This is more common in the South where well qualified engineers, software professionals and even doctors have taken to Carnatic music as their preferred vocation.  The famous violin maestro L.Subramaniam who studied for medicine switched to music to create compositions in orchestral fusion which is a blend of Carnatic and Western music.  Antariksh band is the first among Rock bands whose three members, with an overriding passion for music have switched over from the corporate world to the creative world of performing arts.  The band, according to one of its members, attempts to produce modern, edgy and eclectic sounds which would resonate both with themselves as well as with the masses. The themes of their compositions are about emotions that we encounter in our daily lives- ‘emotions such as hope, greed, identity crisis, confusion – emotions that anyone in contemporary times can identify with. The band seeks to present a new sub genre to Hindi music, produced for, of and by modern generation. Coming from the corporate world, the trio turns up in formal dress as they believe it enhances their personality and stage presence and makes people take them seriously.

 It is this idea of formal dressing that distinguishes these young men from other music bands with their casual, rugged appearance which has almost become a signifier for anything modern. This fashion started in the  ‘50s and the  ‘60s of the last century heralding  the arrival of hippies who represented liberal counterculture in US and in UK and which later spread to Europe and other countries of the world. The hippie movement opposed all traditional mores of behavior, dressing, music and dance and preferred a return to  back-to- nature life style, vehemently denouncing all formal  and established values and advocating a culture of dissent that coincided with the early 20^th century movement of “Make Everything New”. Hippie fashion and values had a major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature, and the arts. Since the 1960s, many aspects of hippie culture have been assimilated by mainstream society and one of them is adopting a rugged, casual look that is a mockery of everything associated with elegance and being prim and proper in manners, dress and expression. To be free and not be stifled with social decorum and moral codes has been at the root of Hippyism.  Hippies of the post-‘50s of the 20^th Century perceived the then prevalent culture as a corrupt, domineering entity that exercised undue power over their lives, and championed freedom and liberation from it. Hippie movement was basically a youth movement characterized by unconventional dress and behavior, opposition to war, advocating  peace and love, and having liberal attitudes towards sexuality, the use of marijuana and psychedelic drugs- in short  rebellion against any code or value  in the name of tradition,  which  can be best summed up as one of cultural dissent.

             The hippie movement has declined in the last few decades though  its legacy is seen in social protests such as the gay movement, the feminist movement, its adoption of live-in culture as opposed to marriage as a sanctified institution etc. The vestiges of the hippie movement can be seen today   in clothing and accessories, in personal appearance that distinctly oppose the well groomed types.  All music bands today play to frenzied crowds of young people, rock and psychedelic music, that has evolved into new musical genres such as heavy metal and rap music. The singers and composers on stage have rugged and shaggy appearances, dressed in informal and casual attires.  Today there is no sense of formal dressing (with the exception of corporate employees). We see students in colleges and universities seeking a distinct generational identity by putting on weird and bizarre clothes and sporting an unkempt look. As early as 1975, as a student in UK, I was shocked to see professors dressed most casually in shorts and unironed jeans and shirtsleeves and there was not much difference between the teacher and the taught in matters sartorial. Aping the West is a part of our genotype and I am not surprised to see the new sartorial get up of college teachers in faded and worn out jeans and unwashed wrap-ons, indistinguishable from that of the students. In many ways, it has eroded respect for the teachers as they are not taken seriously. Shakespeare’s line “the apparel oft proclaims the man” which in modern times is expressed as “the cloth makes the man”  is truer today than ever before.  Teachers want to look young and modern and prefer to merge with the young crowd with no distinct identity of their own. As a result, teachers have not been able to enforcestudents’ compliance to academic work and institutional regulations. They have become indistinct as one among a faceless crowd.  Group coherence is the blight of modernity.

A recent Harvard Study calls the approach to casualness as the red-sneaker effect practiced by a few who wear informality on the skin and violate the office dress code as one way of standing out among the conservative conformists to express their self-confidence, power and status. The  Harvard study cites the examples of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates as successful tie-droppers who carried their intentional casualness with aplomb and self assurance. But the important question is how many Zuckerbergs and Bill Gates do we find among the casual dressers and how many  are there who go beyond casual wear and make casualness the pivot of achievement? The shaggy haired, unkempt looks in a bizarre outfit cannot make them Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, as their style does not make any impactful statement. You cannot climb up the social and professional ladder only by casual wear. Substance can make the style, but not style, the substance.

Antariksh band is a revolution among music bands who have understood that too much of casualness in appearance trivializes serious import of any kind. The band in its formal elegance seems to go counter to the counter revolutionary culture that has now slowly waning to become a period fad. The consumer society is adding its might to beckon young men and women to splurge in elegant wear, well groomed looks, neat and tidy appearances and hopefullythis  will bring back a little more beauty and order in a world that had forgotten what it is to live life gracefully and tastefully.  Nostalgic? Maybe true, but therein lies the spark for change.

Waiting for Go(l)dot

                                                            Waiting for Go(l)dot

Rio is over. Over to Tokyo.  Many of us may not be aware that Rio is a city where droughts are rare and yet it had seen the worst drought in 2014-15 when the water supply to the entire metropolitan region got severely affected. India, always sympathetic to fellow nations and especially of the BRICK, has stood solidly by RIO  by a parallel display of  a medal drought, though that was spoilt a trifle by Sakshi and Sindhu . Dipa Karmakar almost played the spoil sport by vaulting down, but at the end missed her berth on the victory stand. The male athletes were more determined to express a sense of camaraderie by refusing to ascend the victory podium and they deserve Har Ratna for their magnanimity to yield the slots on the victory stand to all other competitors from the rest of the world.

Reams and reams of words have been written about our athletes , about our caring Ministers overflowing with milk of kindness and concern  for their nation’s  sportsmen and women  and about officials for their invisibility when most needed and for their faultless  visibility during selfie time. The cricket crazy nation diverted from its first love had  turned to the Olympics only soon to regret its passing fancy as it recorded a medal-less outing to Rio(with the exception of the two ‘S’s) . Many gratuitous advisors have suggested how a repeat Rio should not happen in Tokyo and how to give up our age old chivalrous tradition of “aap pahle”(you first) to competitors from other countries.   The ‘do’s and ‘don’ts  for our athletes, coaches and officials are getting documented every day and soon it  will be a hefty tome that no one will even glance at, but more likely that tome  will never see the light of the day. The hon’ble deputy Chief Minister of Telengana has come out with the most presumptuous prescription for Sindhu to win a gold in Tokyo by giving her a new coach. Since Telengana and Andhra are both claiming Sindhu exclusively  as their beti,, one will not be surprised if Andhra offers yet another coach for Sindhu !  All men and women who have never wielded a racquet or a javelin, a hammer or a pistol, who have never been off the blocks or vaulted with or without pole or jumped high and long, have come out with suggestions so that our National Anthem is played every day during the 2020 Tokyo games.

 But Tokyo is still four years away. The players and in particular the officials have to recover from the jet lag. Why talk of Rio or what went right and what not! The hon’ble Parliamentarians may seek an answer – especially those in the opposition bench about the medley of failures if they don’t have any new scandal to haul the ruling party over the coals.

The officials will have a busy time compiling the highs of our Rio performance where a near miss will be deemed equivalent to an outright win and an entry into the second round to an achievement as marvelous as entering the finals. The self glorified Media, wise as Solomon and enjoying unbridled license to cavil at anything and everything will stop flogging all the officials and politicians connected with sports as soon as it  gets another Breaking News  to fire. As for the politicians, they will feel smug after announcing rich cash awards to the Rio winners as though it is from their private pocket and not from the tax payers’ money. As for the vox populi, Rio and Sindhus and Sakshis, Dipas and Jaishas will be forgotten when Virat Kohli and his men take centre stage in India or in some part of the globe.

Four long years to go, forty eight months before Tokyo is on the sports map, one thousand four hundred and sixty-one days to be numbered before we shall wake up and feel the adrenalin rising and then WAIT like Samuel Beckett’s tramps for …an ever absent  Go(l)dot!   

Freedom at 70

    

                                                            Concept of Freedom at 70

The ideas in this article relate to the concept of Freedom  and are mainly addressed to University scholars and faculty members because they have the opportunity to translate these ideas into reality through an engagement and dialogue with their students.  Whether in practice or not, the idea of University, apart from its focus on academic studies, is it should serve as a platform for creating opinions, for debates and discussions, for germination of new ideas and theories that will focus on development of the society and its people. While academic learning is towards understanding and specializing in different branches of knowledge, the ultimate goal of higher education is to turn out enlightened citizens with intelligent and independent thinking, imbued with a sense of responsibility towards themselves and also towards their less fortunate fellow beings in the society. Hence this article is an appeal to the professors and scholars in our universities and colleges to introduce and incorporate the concept of freedom, in all  academic studies and  activities.

When we talk about “Freedom” the first speech that the mind recalls is Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech with the opening sentence: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that ‘all men are created equal’". This year is special for us in India as we celebrate the birthday of our independence that we got three score and ten years ago. But many of the new generation may not understand the value of that freedom because they have not experienced un-freedom. The only time the young,modern generation raises its protest is when by a fiat from a paternalistic authority, it is denied simple freedom such as the sartorial freedom and the freedom to chill out, in short freedom to not do anything. For those of the present generation, the Independence Day celebrations are more of a ritual and have to be compulsorily observed as it seems to be imposed on them.

On the morning of our Independence Day, while going on my daily walk, (which the younger generation mocks at as a daily ritual of the older generation who have nothing to be anxious about except their health), I heard the full blare of patriotic songs, sung off tune by school teachers and rounded off with a stentorian exhortation to the young boys and girls wilting in the sun, to add voice to their off key renderings. It was certainly a way to engage them till such time the hon’ble Chief Guest arrived to hoist the tricolor flag. (In India one will never be invited to be a Chief Guest if s/he has the reputation to arrive on time. The more the delay, the greater is the status of the CG.) I wondered what would be going through the minds of the youngsters. Certainly anything but patriotic musings during this interminable wait in the strong sun with throats parched drier by the periodical  shouting of “Bharat Mata  ki Jai” as per the teachers’ instructions. Even if there had been a vestige of patriotism in them it would have vanished with the ordeal of standing, waiting and screaming almost muttering ”our spirit is willing;  but the flesh is weak”

I returned from my walk to listen to the loquacious TV anchors waxing eloquent about how our Bharat was, is and will be “Mahan”(great). The continuous surge of words eloquently exalting our greatness sounded nothing but empty rhetoric. In fact the Breaking news ironically scrolled at the bottom of the TV screen flashed one more day of our medal-less outing in Rio Olympics. The TV anchors debated about the PM’s speech-its hits and misses, but no one said a word about the President’s address on the eve of the Independence Day. President Mukherjee had quoted from the Upanishads: “May God protect us; may God nourish us; may we work together with vigour and energy. May our studies be brilliant; may there be no hostility amongst us; may there be peace, peace, peace” almost reminding us of T.S.Eliot’s famous last lines in The Wasteland “Om Shanti, Om Shanti, Om Shanti, where the Thunder in the parched Wasteland spoke from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad “Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata/Shanti, Shanti, Shanti”(giving, compassion and control) as the three ethical concepts to provide rain (hope) for mankind. The President’s address  was a  sober, wise and open-minded speech that spoke to the men and women of India to practice these three qualities to counter forces of divisiveness and  intolerance, to prevent  attacks on the weaker sections of society, and to strike back at  the demonic power of terrorism used as a means of subjugating the world to one single control.

As I recalled these three words, Datta, Dayadhvam and Damyata, I tried to understand what freedom at 70 means for all of us today. Pandit Nehru had ushered freedom at midnight in 1947, but seventy years later that freedom, instead of ushering in the arrival of a new dawn every morning, has gradually been frozen to darkness at noon. We have become a nation of selfish individuals blinded by our own avarice with no thought of sharing and caring for others around us. The small degree of economic development since Independence has made us greedy for more. No giving, no compassion, no control over one’s greed for more acquisition.

What can we wish for today? Rather the question is how to get rid of the negative qualities that we have acquired, to make freedom once again a possible reality?  This, inter alia, translates into the question as to what kind of freedom do we want?  Let us once again recall Pt. Nehru’s speech when he began with the famous sentence: “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now that time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially”. He had the foresight to observe that the pledge cannot be wholly redeemed but at best, very substantially.” The time has come to acknowledge that we have failed to honour the pledge and to map out where we have failed significantly to do so. Pt. Nehru had exhorted us to dedicate ourselves to the service not just to the country but to humanity as a whole. This can be achieved only through acceptance of mankind without any bias in the name of religion, caste, colour, class and gender. We have to rediscover and bring back the religious pluralism and humane values in our public sphere and discourse. So the first wish is for

* freedom from religious bigotry, freedom from xenophobia, freedom from chauvinism and jingoism and freedom from colour discrimination.

 Freedom brings with it responsibility. Responsibility is two-fold- responsibility towards oneself and responsibility towards others, but the two are not confrontational. Responsibility involves accountability to one’s own standards of conduct and behavior and by extension to the observance of general laws of propriety, humanity and justice in dealing with others. One has to be authentic in all dealings and remain true to oneself.  Our responsibility is to serve the millions of people in India who constitute the last rung of the social order, who live below the poverty line. We have to work hard to end poverty, hunger and disease. In serving others we serve our own cause because no one can live apart or in isolation. No one can be free if others are not free. Rousseau’s famous statement” Man is born free; he is always in fetters” should spur us to act with responsibility.  The Bible says "Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you. This is the essence of all that constitutes responsibility.  The second wish is for

*freedom from selfishness and inauthenticity in our actions and words and freedom to be ever true to what one really is.

To understand the value and worth of service before self, to valorize authentic living, to recognize the worth of religious pluralism and to cultivate humanity, we need to be well educated. Unless the cobwebs of illiteracy and ignorance are removed, our minds cannot reach higher ideals that are essential to preserve our hard-won freedom. Plato said “Ignorance is the stem and root of all evil”. It is an oft repeated fact that one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.  Unless the country educates every one of its citizens- young and old alike, the country cannot articulate the idea of freedom. The third wish is for

*freedom from illiteracy, ignorance and mental darkness

If the country is to be a homogenous unit, if the nation has to contribute to the solidarity of mankind, the essential requirement is Peace.  “Peace”, to quote Pt. Nehru,” has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this One World that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.”. The idea of “One Planet, the Earth, One Family, Mankind” has to be reinforced to strengthen Peace against forces that attempt to destroy the idea of unity within diversity.  The fourth wish is for

*freedom from the scourge of hate mongers who seek destruction of diversity and coercive unification of mankind through violence and massacre of innocents.

We are witnessing violence all around us. The gun culture is the newest import from the West. It has removed the word “disagree’ from its vocabulary. There is no space for ‘ the other’ to occupy or for the other to say  “I beg to disagree”. The only response is the gunshot. The fifth wish is

*Freedom from violence and the gun culture and freedom from compliance to unethical and unlawful forces that demand compliance to their diktats.

We suffer from lack of work ethics and work culture. We lack faith in the uplifting value of work that has an inherent ability to strengthen our character and personality. The sloth and slovenliness that we see around us is an index of the great Indian mantra of chalta hai, the devil- may -care, happy- go- lucky attitude of mediocrity. The sixth wish is for

*freedom from misogyny, rape, mental torpor and physical inertia and above all freedom from lack of will to work and achieve excellence.

Our Rio outing is a clear representation of our personality/character matrix. What we lack is aspiration to reach the infinite. Unfortunately we identify ambition and aspiration as synonymous terms. Aspiration is a strong desire for achievement, a will to succeed. But    “Ambition is like hunger; it obeys no law but its appetite.”(Josh Billings)  It is Marcus Aurelius who distinguished the two thus: "A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires." Hence the seventh wish is for

Freedom from ruthless ambition and freedom to develop our personality with an aspiration to reach beyond one’s grasp.

The overarching wish to encompass all the above is

*Freedom from corruption, freedom from indiscipline, freedom from negative ambition, freedom for expression and action(within the framework of the Constitutional Law) and freedom from uncleanliness in words and deeds..

The 70 year old  pledge that Pt.Nehru envisioned can be redeemed if we practice Datta, Dayadhvam and Damyata- for in the act of giving, in the practice of compassion and in our ability for self control we serve ourselves as well as humanity. Freedom at 70 is to see one in many and many among one.  

I believe and affirm that we as teachers are the only group who can redeem the pledge of 1947 and develop in our young students the desire, the energy and the will to preserve, protect and nourish our freedom.