Chak de or Chuck de AAP

   

                                                             Chak de or Chuck de AAP

AAP’s vroom of 2013 and 2015 has gone silent. Political analysts have called it a referendum on failed politics of complaints - a new tag added to politics such as politics of appeasement, politics of conciliation, politics of constructivism, politics of confrontation… All analyses will be made in relation to AAP’s mistakes with an end homily that AAP should reinvent itself if it does not want political obituary to be written before the next elections.

 I am not here to discuss the fairness or the unfairness of EMVs with the jingle ‘ Fair is foul, foul is fair/ All’s well with the poll’. AAP stands synonymous with Arvind Kejriwal very much on the lines of the much vilified phrase “India is Indira, Indira is India”. Similarly a majority of analysts today wanting to be more loyal than the King have substituted Modi for BJP to the point of saying ‘India is Modi, Modi is India’. Even Hindutva is now called Moditva. We have new coinages like Modinomics, Modified policies and strategies, Modimonetisation,ModiAPP etc. No other name figures in political discourse without the Modi tag.  The same happened to AAP with the media lens on Arvind Kejriwal. Swim or sink with Arvind became the focus of the media. So fall of AAP is fall of Arvind. Fall of Arvind is fall of ego, hubris, vanity, cheap populism, ambition, cronyism …list is getting larger and larger as the media sycophancy of the victor grows louder and louder.

Very few- and one can count them on the fingers- look at the rise and decline of AAP by focusing on the people who gave it respectability, credibility and support a couple of years ago. They have switched their loyalty from AAP to BJP. The question is why did Delhi vote for AAP in the first instance- and that too massively? A simple answer – much too simplistic for the media lexicon, nevertheless true to the point- the vote was for change. AAP promised that change- change from a pedestrian form of governance to an exciting form where the aam admi was to be given the pride of place in decision making. Who will not covet such a change? -that too, when one is treated as a VIP whose decision becomes sacrosanct with the rulers. So AAP rose to power on the pledge that ‘Delhi is you, you are Delhi.’  This sounded inspiring, motivating and impressive as a slogan but soon came the realization that to rule means pleasing some and displeasing many. Government cannot be run with masses in the decision making mode and sooner than later Arvind found himself in a knotty situation when  he had to take decisions without the masses and be responsible and accountable to them.

He did well on some of the promises he had made. I have been personally a beneficiary of two of his major decisions- water and electricity tariffs. I realized that if water is not wasted and kept within 10000 litres per month, my water bill would be nil. It is not just the nil expenditure that I benefitted from, but it has been a lesson in conserving water. So has been the electricity tariff where one’s use of power, if kept under check, helped to minimise the expenditure. Water and power are precious commodities and not to waste them is one of way our contribution to the society. I salute AAP for this policy that has helped me discharge my social responsibility. AAP had not reneged on the promises it made with regard to education and mohalla clinics- the latter coming for praise from the Western countries as a model for healthcare programmes. The odd-even plying of cars was another big decision that certainly eased the congestion on the roads and brought down- even if infinitesimally to a small degree- the pollution levels.  Then the question comes back as to why AAP lost the recent municipal elections?

The answer is again simple.  It is the way of the world, what is given is taken for granted and therefore not valued or appreciated. What is not given is an issue for flogging. I was astonished that the autorickshaw drivers were angry because Arvind Kejriwal did not give them auto stands as promised. There is no reason why those in the lowest rung of social hierarchy were disillusioned with AAP for they got the basic amenities promised to them like water and electricity. The upper class on the other hand has no need to be thankful to AAP for such ‘poor’ blessings , but it got  worried when told to form car pool and when subjected to  odd-even scheme  that denied them   their divine right to use  their own cars on roads  that were its  exclusive privilege. No doubt they either voted out AAP or stayed away from the polling booths.

So it was left to the Middle class, the erstwhile staunch supporter of AAP to decide whom to favour. It blamed AAP for the (a)swachch Delhi. The media joined the chorus to highlight garbage piled up in all parts of Delhi because of MCD sweepers’ strike. But MCD was in the hands of BJP and yet the blame was put on Delhi Government though the latter claimed it had released payments to MCD towards sweepers’ salary. AAP like the dumb Congress could not match the rhetoric of BJP to convince the masses that the blame should not be deflected from the BJP led MCD onto AAP.  AAP resorted to whining and complaining and it became a laughing fodder for the Dilliwalas comprising mainly the middle class.

The middle class, a perpetual whining class blamed the absence of the broom for the ills of Delhi and used the ballot as their stick to beat AAP. Never once did the middle class lift its small finger to take responsibility for environmental cleanliness but at the slightest whiff of garbage stink, it thumbed its nose at AAP.  It did not matter to the middle class if corruption had come down- something even the political pundits not inclined to AAP did admit.  But for the middle class such a corruption free luxury, was its rightful due and hence did not value it.  The middle class, like Oliver Twist is ever grumpy and keeps asking for more and more. When the AAP failed to satisfy the perennial demands of this class, the latter turned against AAP. Did the middle class ever question whether MCD had delivered all these ten years when it was in power to provide for better services such as water, sanitation, power and health benefits? Did it ever notice that many of the pre poll promises of the BJP like depositing 15 lakhs per account could not be done because of its impracticability? Has not the BJP reneged on LokPal which was used as a stick to beat the Congress? The BJP on the other hand used GST, MNREGA, AADHAR which they had opposed vehemently when the UPA introduced those schemes to showcase their governance. It is to the ruling party’s credit that they found the worth of these schemes and did not dump them.  Has the middle class asked why there have been too many vigilantes roaming around in the country during the last 30 months, often ending in brutal assault on the innocent poor? Has the middle class questioned why Kashmir is burning and why our soldiers are getting martyred every day? Has the middle class asked why prices have not come down?  No, because the middle class had survived hardships earlier during the UPA rule by their own ingenious ways( one of them being corruption) and now with ease can bear the present hardship using it to get more DA from the government besides employing its stock weapon of corruption. As for the other unasked questions, unless each one of the middle class had experienced personal tragedy that is happening to the Kashmiris and our soldiers, it will not be bothered about anything happening outside of Delhi. The middle class gathers news from the TV channels and whosoever speaks louder is what they believe to be the truth. The government- whether AAP or BJP cannot do anything more than what they have done- given the limitations of a vast democracy and its insatiable demands besides the edgy geo-political complexity among nations. No government is foolish to venture beyond what it can possibly achieve and therefore one should not complain bitterly against BJP or AAP. The only factor the two have to guard itself- a lesson that Congress will hopefully learn – is not to close its eyes on corruption, nepotism and deliberate acts of provocation.

The media has joined the chorus of victors to lambast AAP for trying to grow too big for its boots. Is it wrong for a party- even if it is a fledgling party, winning the very first elections it entered- to grow wings? Is not the BJP seeking a Congress mukth and an Opposition mukth Bharat and remain the only one party to rule from Kashmir to Kanyakumari? If this is not ambition, then why blame AAP for entering the polls in Punjab in the North and Goa in the South to gain acceptance as a national party? It is easy to call those, whom media wants to vilify as suffering from bloated vanity and as the Tamil proverb goes the media functions like the horse that not only pulls down the driver but digs the ground for his burial.

 This is an indictment not of BJP or AAP but only the middle class which is genetically selfish. For them “your pain is yours and not mine. I will cry when it is my pain.”  So Chak de AAP became Chuck de  AAP. The only problem with AAP was to believe in the impossible task of pleasing everyone and in that infructuous effort resorting to politics of complaint and confrontation. It has to remember you can please some people for sometime but not all people all time. Let us hope that both the victor and the vanquished- BJP, now at the crest of power and AAP floundering to recapture the momentum that it had lost- remember, “Don’t blow off another’s candle, for it won’t make yours shine better.”

                                                       

Chetan ban gaya Classical Author

                                                 Chetan ban gaya Classical Author

Delhi University is currently mulling over inclusion of Chetan Bhagat’s novel Five Point Someone in the syllabus for second-year undergraduate students pursuing English literature honours and elective courses under the Choice-Based Credit System (CBCS). Even a loud thinking on just one point-whether the book merits  inclusion in Literature course- condemns one to face trial by trollers led by the author with his sardonic twitters. The discussion immediately descends into a polarized debate between elitists and populists- the former today being more of a pejorative marker. Terms like elitism, perfectionism, idealism and classicism are frowned upon as promoting binary class consciousness between patrician and plebian, between high class and common class(high brow and low brow), invariably leading to a mockery of those who seek elegance, refinement and rarefied taste in manner, behaviour and language-subsumed under ‘elitism’. It has become politically astute to err against elitists even if one’s sympathies are not fully aligned with the common man.

Universities that always had  the singular distinction of promoting intellectual skills and enabling young minds to develop balance, beauty, objectivity and rationality have been now forced to concentrate more on occupational skills and dilute academic standards in order to cater to  the humungous number of students admitted to colleges. It is unfortunate that in a literature course, it is difficult to keep to canonical literature i.e., literature with standards established and recognized as a model of authority or excellence. In the rush to meet the demands of the times, all aesthetic and intellectual standards have been diluted in favour of redressing the difficulties of the vast majority of students, sympathetically viewed as the victims of historical injustice. The introduction of popular fiction in literature course is a sign of the times.

Popular fiction can be best described as airport fiction-novels that are enjoyable and easy to read, novels that you buy at an airport to read on your flight. Those who wait long hours at the airport, those who are bored with the same in-flight magazines during flight prefer to read these novels that are entertaining, easy to read and provide inexpensive entertainment.

(1)Classics are books one reads and re-reads. 

Unlike a classic which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading, popular fiction does not imprint itself  on our imagination and in our subconscious. It is like TV serials whose names even we do not recall after they are over, unlike a classic cinema that leaves an indelible impression in our minds. We should understand the distinction between entertainment and enlightenment. Writing with intellectual supremacy, with a sense of beauty and imagination have been reduced to writing with social energies, about here and now. What Chetan Bhagat has written with ease and humour is limited to IIT experience that is not shared universally beyond India.

 (2) A classic is universal and timeless.

A classic is a book which even when we read for the first time gives the sense of having read it before.  We are able to see cross connections between the past and the present. We are able to intuit the experience of the characters that we come across in the classics as they are universal and transcend all boundaries of nationality, race, culture and tradition. Darcy and Elizabeth are not just the 18^th C characters in Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice, but they are present amongst us today as they will be tomorrow as well. A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe.  

(3)The classic characters are characters of Creative Truth and not Creative Falsehood.

 (4) We label a work as a classic when we can trace it to classics of earlier times and assign it its rightful place in the genealogy of classic works.

 (5) A book rises to the status of a classic when it relegates the noise of the present to a background hum. Similarly in any great work, a classic is present as a background noise and one cannot ignore it.

 If Five Point Someone has these Five Point classical characteristics, certainly it merits inclusion in a Literature course.

A Passionate Appeal by a Young Septuagenarian

                                             A Passionate Appeal by a Young Septuagenarian

I am still in my ‘70s with a few more years left to get my promotion to the octo- phase and be on course to reach the higher heavens (at the risk of lacking in modesty, I claim to be certain of not landing in the nether regions). I feel I still have adequate passion left for causes I hold dear. I am passionate about politics; I am passionate about art, theatre,  music and dance(that have a high degree of creativity, modernity and originality-and  not the stereotyped run of the mill kind); I am passionate about sports; I am passionate about Nature in all her extravaganza  as well as in all her subdued austerity during the winter months; I am passionate about reading and writing to relieve me of the burden of bottling up my emotions and thoughts and above all I am passionate about people as I have always been a people’s person.   I don’t feel embarrassed to admit that in my present advanced age, if given an opportunity, I will, like Eliza Doolittle, sing and dance all through the night. It was Christian Nestell Bove who said ‘Genuine passion is like a mountain stream; It admits of no impediment; it cannot go backward; it must go forward.’  Thus as I move up in age, my passion carries me forward to express even utterances such as are regarded unpolitical and therefore unutterable. Even if my voice is not robust as in the past, it still has enough tonal strength to be heard by the youth, breaking through the sound barrier of their earphones and easily by the old without the need of any auditory aid.

This takes me to the obvious question my listeners would like me to answer- what is this momentous appeal you want to make and what has triggered it off at this point in time? There are two reasons-one that is common to all of us, the other is my serendipitous sighting of a great statement made by Thomas Mann on Wolfgang van Goethe. The first is the quotidian news we access through the media- print, television and social media about things happening all around us both nationally and globally. In India, we have the sudden rising of many vigilantes in our society starting with the cow vigilantes to beef vigilantes,(that includes what is cooked in the kitchen, what is stored in the fridge, what portions are to be served on the plate, etc), drink vigilantes to love vigilantes, faith vigilantes (about being religiously correct in all that we say on any issue related to Hindu gods)  to traditional vigilantes(who protect our archaic  and antediluvian mindset),  irrational, superstitious vigilantes against rationalists and modernists, book vigilantes(what to read and what to publish)to film vigilantes(what films to be screened and what to be banned)… the list is endless. To put it in a nutshell, the Big Vigilante is watching you- what you eat, what you drink, what you say, what you read, what you write, what you see , what you paint, what you listen to, what you believe in, whom you love and how you love - in short what you do all the waking hours of your life. This sends the shivers down my spine bent double with age, just as it does to you (unless you have developed a dinosaur dense thick skin) and hence this passionate appeal against the universal vigilantism in practice today.

 As for the world wide web we are all caught in, we have recently heard the trumpet call of US about MOAB(mother of all Bombs),followed by the Putinesque claim about Russia’s  FOAB(father of all Bombs) and sooner or later there will be a Chinese boast about GMOAM(Grandmother of all Bombs) and a North Korean call of GFOAB(grand Father of all Bombs). Can our civilization survive the clash of Mother, Father, Grand father, Grand mother FOABs and MOABS? What about chemical weapons unleashed on innocent children, men and women in Syria?  If US bombed Syria one day and Afghanistan a week later and warns North Korea as next in line, it bodes for certain the annihilation of humanity. All these are only non- nuclear responses. What if there is a nuclear response from North Korea, US, Russia, China, India, Pakistan at different fronts, can humanity survive the nuclear holocaust? Hence this urgent appeal to humanity to wake up to the threat of catastrophe that looms around us.

Now let me come to the second reason. I spend my time reading great classics that I had not had the time to read all these years. While reading Goethe, I came across this perceptive comment by Thomas Mann on Goethe’s Faust:

“A ‘clear word’ and a benevolent one, pointing out the better course, seems powerless today; world events pass all such over with brutal disregard. But let us hold fast to the anti-diabolic faith that mankind has after all ‘a keen learning’ and that words born of striving may do it good and not perish from the heart”.

In the aftermath of  the recent 4/17(Syria’s chemical attack), 6/17(US bombing Syria in retaliation) and 14/17(obscene, pointless US bombing of Afghanistan),we can understand the relevance of  Goethe’s enlightened humanism that emphasized secular salvation contained in the phrase ‘anti diabolic faith’ The only way for the survival of value and survival of humanity is to maintain the anti diabolic faith to prevent religious and pseudo religious wars and mad gesture bombings one boasts about.

The irony of democracy is it gives constitutional validity to leaders who ride on populism that cheers and applauds sabre-rattling warmongers as people of courage and machismo. If Modi talks of surgical strikes at opponents, he wins the elections. If Trump brags about MOAB, his stock soars among the Americans including the liberals. The new age leaders are able to influence the masses with their veneer of democracy behind which can be seen a ruthless narcissistic urge to rule authoritatively. The use of ‘appropriate nationalism’ has an emotional appeal that defeats all rational and sane voices which warn against majoritarianism and isolation from outside influences. Make in India and Make in America make the right appeal to furthering the interests of the sons of the soil which excludes all others who are either settlers for centuries but regarded as outsiders because they subscribe to faith and religion other than that of the land  or migrants belonging to other races, with darker shades of skin, different from the lily pure white skin of the natives and who have sought and appropriated the citizenship of the country they have migrated to -for what it offers them in  wealth and comfortable living that are unavailable in their own homelands.

In this new phase of democratic dictatorship exemplified by US and India, the real casualty is humanism and its attendant virtues of tolerance, human welfare, fraternity, liberty of thought and action, equality and justice. Writing about the thrust of Indian-ness in education that advocates closing of the Indian mind to western influences and focusing on traditional knowledge, Pratap Bhanu Mehta says: ”…nationalism is a very un-Indic ideology. For, a culture that supposedly is about the dissolving boundaries of the ego and the self, it makes no sense to replace the ego and the self with the collective narcissism of a larger self. Sure, for political and civic purposes, we need some form of solidarity. But the ahamkara of nationalism, its arrogant absorption of individuality and plurality, its limiting of our intellectual horizons to the nation, is surely a diminution of our indigenous aspirations.”

My passionate appeal is to bring back the famed argumentative Indian back into reckoning, make him/her to expand his/her reasoning faculty, to restore democracy to its original definition, to understand and appreciate the value of cultivating humanity and respect greatness in words and deeds. No doubt, there will be many critics who would scorn my appeal as the rambling of a septuagenarian, but I have learnt to accept scorn with modesty because greatness is not valued today. Greatness is unique in that it oppresses as much as it blesses us.. We fear great people as much as we love to have them around us. My passion for restoring political and human credibility, well supported by  my years of experience, have emboldened me to appeal to all-Indians and to all others world- wide over- to develop ‘keen hearing’ of my appeal for humanism without which we will be more easily seduced by brutality. 

.  Let us keep in mind Aristotle’s wise words about A Full Life: “We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts not in breaths; in feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.”