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.”