The Tectonic Shift that triggered TsuNamo 2.0

                                       The Tectonic Shift that triggered TsuNamo 2.0

I had written TSUNAMO 2.0, even while the votes were counted. I tried to resist writing again, but could not control the urge to put down my thoughts as I viewed how the elections mirrored the tectonic shift that has taken place in our ideas and attitudes. The elections were fought (and won) on the supremacy in respect of the binary between Naamdars(dynasts)and Kaamdars. The open, no- holds  -barred  criticism targeted those who had the (mis)fortune to be born dynasts and therefore cursed from being  Kaamdars –people who work. What was implied in such averment that had a direct appeal to people was, all Kaamdars hailed from humble origins and all Naamdars never worked. But what this facetious argument missed to note, ( though lapped up by many millions of Kaamdars ,who harboured grudge and envy of Naamdars,)  was the assumption that the  Kaamdars  rising up to the highest position of the erstwhile Naamdars,  had to  compulsorily remain celebates,  for if they reared a family,  their  progenies would have to suffer the ignominy of belonging to a new Naamdar lineage.  This is in sharp contrast to my early days when we were under pressure to carry the torch so well lit by the illustrious ancestors of the family. One was never apologetic about one’s genes. When I was young, I had to study hard to top my class because my father was a brilliant engineer. My husband had similar compulsion because his father happened to be the headmaster of the school where he studied. We were not given any preferential marks because of our lineage, but the demands on our effort, partly self inflicted and partly imposed by society, ever ready to mock at  our inability to keep up the family honour, were incredible. The family pride was in our DNA and we treasured it and worked hard to live up to its standards.

In the present day, it is a sin to be born a dynast. Today the dynast coming up in life has his sin compounded as no one believes he possesses merit and that he can function as a Kaamdar.  If one gets into IAS, the wry comment will be “Oh! His dad, himself an IAS officer must have swung it for him. It is the same even with Bollywood stars where the non dynasts like Kangna Ranaut make similar disparaging statements about fellow actors who seem to come from celebrity families. The modern day attitude towards dynasts has no place for merit and attributes the son- rise solely to family lineage.   This is in stark contrast to the Biblical God’s proud proclamation about his son, Jesus whom he had sent to the earth to cleanse the people of their sins.

 PM Modi’s charge, shared by all his afficionadoes against Rahul Gandhi was that he was a Naamdar. Certainly Rahul’s birth is not his making or his choice. As Heidegger says, we are all ‘ thrown- into existence’ and we have no say as to  when, where and why we are thrown in.. But this has been made out to be Rahul’s sin and therefore he should be banished into political wilderness for trying to rise up in the political arena of his father, grandmother and great grand father.  The dynasty is criticized for committing one sin after another sin by coveting the party’s top post. But the truth is Rahul has been  elected by his  party just as PM Modi is elected by people. What is the sin committed by Naamdar to be accused that his election was flawed? His election as that of our PM rests on the final assessment where the winner takes it all- irrespective of the winner being a Naamdar or a Kaamdar. But this illogical reasoning repeated a million times, resonated well with a very large majority of people who do not have the good fortune to belong to Naamdar family.

This negative bias against the well heeled  group, at times also  referred to as the Lutyens group or the Oxbridge group or at a crass level Khan market gang  prejudiced the voters against  ‘Naamdars’ to edge them out for their twin sins of being born to a dynasty and therefore accursed never to work hard.  Harvard is no substitute for hard work, thundered our PM and the people went hysterical. Siddharth Bhatia writes: “Those who have voted for the BJP – and mainly for Narendra Modi – don’t merely think he will bring them whatever he promised, but also because they see themselves in him. He is not just their representative, he is one of them because he has risen from among them. The chaiwallah story, true or not, is a compelling one, because it not just inspires, it exemplifies the feeling that a humble man has shown the privileged their place.” The first shift is to accept the skewed perception about Naamdars and hail Kaamdars.

The second tectonic shift is seen in the way voters gather information. This is the age of social media- an extension of our attitude towards instant gratification of our senses, mind and intellect, though the last mentioned ‘intellect’ is not given too much importance today. It is a jet age and everything has to keep pace with it. Hence the demand for instantaneity from conception to creation, from idea to act, from emotion to response, from existence to essence has become the ideal. So gather all information from twitter and social media on your phone. It is instant. No one cares for authenticity or reasonableness or cultured discourse. We devour the information without ever realizing we are party to the instantaneous act of garbage in and garbage out. There is no time to sit and think- it is like stuffing and gobbling sandwiches on the run. Nothing sinks in; it is all surface skimming and that is more than enough to live life mediocre size. The new generation is becoming dumber and dumber and the dumbing down suits those who rule over them. The use of demagoguery in place of reasoned discourse by sleazy politicians is in line with gratifying cheap sensational instincts of a generation that shrinks from intellectual debates.

The third tectonic shift is a descent from collective humanity to insular nationalism, to spawning hatred in the name of security and hypernationalism that believes in the superiority of one's nation and its hoary past and seeking to establish a hegemonic society in which its ideology and its supportive religious faith  become so normalized that it is difficult for people to imagine alternatives. The old world values of integral humanism have no place in the war hysteria generated by leaders who are portrayed as the new avatar born to destroy all enemies within and without. The idea of India as a nation for the Hindus who are forced to tolerate  the co- presence of Muslims and Christians, Jews and Parsis is far removed from the earlier idea of an inclusive India.  The orchestrated cry against s(i)cularism and pluralism goes against the basic premise both of Hinduism and our Constitution. The move away from  the broad,  inclusive and pluralist vision of the idea of India has shifted to a narrower, distorted and bigoted idea of India  which has failed to make a distinction between Hindutva(or Moditva as the ‘bhakts’ call it) and Hinduism. Core Hinduism is based on the idea of acceptance while Hindutva seeks a superior role to it over all other faiths. As Shashi Tharoor says: “Hinduism is a very large, eclectic, vastly encompassing religion that has tremendous amount of choice of freedom within it, which is actually one of the greatest strengths of Hinduism. The problem with Hindutva is that it takes this vast all encompassing religion and tries to reduce it to something much narrower and specifically tie it to a political identity." The belligerence of Hindutva and its insistence on being a political ideology violates the basic tenets of Hinduism that believes in co- existence and accommodation of plural faiths, creeds and beliefs. The shift from Hinduism to Hindutva has been a major change in our views on religion and its inherent encompassing power. Hindutva imposes obedience while Hinduism celebrates individual freedom of worship and acceptance of diversity.

That leads us to the next shift in our admiration for muscular strength. Gandhiji, a frail looking man got us our independence through eschewing violence and aggression. His moral strength and fair means were enough to bring down the might of the Colonizer. Today all talk about love, peace, genteel manners, cultured language and civilized demeanour have become passe^’ and it is replaced by aggression, violence, uncultured talk and gestures. People love this display of macho aggression in preference to   soft cultured discourse and dialogue   as they are opposed to Gandhian concept of non violence and gentle persuasion.

This election is remarkable for seeking votes in the name of one individual. The personality cult that it has spawned is at total variance with democratic collective consensus. The shift that is unlikely to be reversed in the near future is an unknowing and unconscious endorsement of democratic dictatorship from the democratic slogan of governance for, by and of the people. Those who questioned the legitimacy of the slogan “India is Indira, Indira is India’ have now shifted to a new slogan )Indiais Modi, Modi is India” It is now Moditva, Modinomics, Modi sarkar and this shift has taken root to endorse authoritarianism behind the façade of democratic sanction.    

One other major shift is the banning of the word ‘loyalty’ from our political ethics. Loyalty is no longer a virtue. One shifts loyalty without the least embarrassment like one changes clothes.  Shifting to the winner’s party s justified as it is done in the larger interest of the nation. Money speaks and money buys. Being loyal is defined as being faithful to one's oath, engagements or obligations. It means being honest and do not make it conditional. Our politicians loyalty is directly proportional to what they can get from those that have the power to throw crumbs. Loyalty, thy name is politician.

Lastly the tectonic shift is seen in our preference for shadow over substance,  for the immediate present, the ‘here’ and the ‘now’ over a sustainable far reaching insight into the future, for existence over essence, for conflict over dialogue, for hype over moderation, for vitriol over geniality and for chauvinistic intolerance to gracious acceptance of pluralistic ideas.

These shifts have taken place. They constitute today’s reality. One has to accept it. The question is  do we dare  to speak about tectonic shift without being labeled a naamdar, an anti national, a  pro liberal, a Lutyen’s votary, a Khanmarket gangster, an angrezi chamcha etc etc? Is silence the best way to protect our sanity or do we continue our inherited culture of being an argumentative Indian and seek  a reasoned dialogue to mirror the tectonic shift that has taken place?

TsuNamo2.0

TT

TsuNamo 2.0 is pounding the opposition with a velocity unimaginable-almost with a nuclear intensity. The results have banished the brother-sister duo, the Bhuva-bhatija duo, the MGB castle dream of Chandrababu Naidu and Mamta as also the imaginary dreams of KCR and YSRCP of being the Kingmakers  There is no need to wait for Congress to leave for exile , if not for Agyaat Vaas(living incognito) for the next five years. In fact the scholarly Professor Yogendra Yadav has expressed a death wish for Congress, though at no time he extended his party Swaraj India to support Congress in its fight against Goliath, the non-sicular giant.  Following Yadav’s pre-mortem analysis, there will be a whole lot of post- mortem wisecracks on the irrelevance of Congress. The FM, Mr.Jaitley had written a clairvoyant blog a few days back that the Congress of today is a non sequitur.  The floodgates of social media will be thrown open to millions of posts waxing eloquent about the non Lutyen, non Khan Market philistine warrior demolishing the well heeled, angrezi educated Harvard and Oxford returned pretenders to Indian culture and civilization. The media channels will be patting their backs for their accuracy in predicting the results while the newspapers will be full of articles on “didn’t I say so?” In this melee, hardly will there be an analysis of what went wrong as the enthusiasm to be on the “right’ side will make all the media barons chant ‘Namo, Namo’ and speak about how Namo made the right noise at the right time, during his whirlwind tour of India , how he .was on Maunavrat on tricky disturbing issues of his sarkar for the last five years,    how the chaiwala emerged from a cave in a sartorial outfit that would put to shame all those millions and millions of our saffron robed sanyasis....

 I write this with a stuffed laddoo in my mouth( I have taken a selfie  I can show if needed) I for fear of being lynched if I do not participate in the Laddoo festival. I do not want to be called anti national and bumped off to Pakistan. The one good thing about the Laddoo festival is it somehow lessens the noise pollution with the Bhakts’mouths stuffed with Laddoos, arresting the “Namo’ chant from reaching a crescendo. As for the losers, they don’t even have a voice to squeak. Sitting at home watching the numbers flashing on the TV screen, I have switched on the ‘mute’ button to give some rest for my ear drums from the excited cry of the anchors and their chosen commentators for they all know the way to Modi’s heart is through the ears.

In the quiet of my home, I sit and try to analyze what has caused this TsuNamo? The youth knew that jobs were not there for the asking, the farmers  have had the most stressful five years with increasing number of suicides, the economists were worried about the decline of economy and alarmed over the fudged data put up by the government to say all is well with economy, liberals were aghast at the decline of secularism, freedom of speech and all institutions established for just and honest governance, educationists were disturbed over the loss  of autonomy  and the covert efforts to encourage private universities at the cost of Central and State universities, the critics of the government were dismayed over the draconian arm of the CBI and the police to house arrest honest people who raised their voice for justice,  the brushing aside of all inquiries about Rafael deal, about the Nirav Modis and Chokseys , the total avoidance of any mention of its non performance  and last but not the least the divisiveness that have been brought within India in these lastfive years …. And despite all these TsuNamo has drowned everyone of the opposition and liberal intellectuals.

The simple answer is  this is the victory of frenzy over rationality, best  seen in the victory of Pragya Sadhvi with her fulsome vitriolic against Hemant Karkare and Gandhi, her extolling of the fall of Babri masjid ( and her own contribution to this mighty act) . The hype over nationalism by showing all those opposed to Modi as anti nationals , the macho image of the leader crying like our ancient kings “Aaakraman”  and prodding the otherwise lazy, fun-loving soldiers  to fly and bomb Balakot, his deafening silence over the number of our army men killed in Uri, Pathankot and Pulvama  but shattered by a photo-op with Abhinandan to show the oozing of the milk of kindness and grace,  and his war cry  with lies and half lies and barbed attacks on the dead and forgotten PMs of the past, created the right hysteria that got translated into votes.

Leave aside all these. The undeniable truth is all those who believed in the old values of decency, honesty and truthfulness have been relegated to  the dustbin. These are old timers like me now inching their years into the seventies and eighties. Not much is left of them to fight irrationality with rationality,

hatred with compassion, prejudice with objectivity, frenzy with moderation.  Whatever is left of our  frail energies to speak of fair means towards a destined end  was uttered  sotto voce lest we should be trolled and labeled  as antinationals. Our geriatric  group is slowly on its way to oblivion and the new generation has not shown any inclination to follow us as that demands a great deal of intellectual exertion. There is a perceptible decline in IQ among the youth and the middle aged groups and all their so called information is from twitter that  demands the least exertion to think and analyze. Twit-twit-twit, instantaneous online shuttle shots. No time to spend on in depth understanding, thinking and forming discerning judgement. Even in developed countries of Europe and America, we notice the slow spread of intelligence crisis. In India also we see this decline in cognitive skills. In a thought provoking article Evan Horowitz writes “One leading explanation is that the rise of lower-skill service jobs has made work less intellectually demanding, leaving IQs to atrophy as people flex their brains less”.  Our educational system in India right from CBSE to graduation is tailor made to cater to the lowest common denominator.  The young men and women who come to college and universities and the school leaving 18+ boys and girls are hardly tested on their problem solving abilities .As such these crucial years which constitute the learning period are frittered away as no demands are made on them to apply their minds to larger social , economic and political issues of the day. Barring the really bright students who form a miniscular minority(and who disappear going  abroad seeking newer pastures) , the average youth is getting dumber and dumber and experiences a steady decline in intelligence. Skills are no substitute for intelligence in making analysis and  discernment that is so essential for the preservation and sustenance of democracy. To quote Evan Harowitz “a global intelligence crisis that undermines humanity's problem-solving capacity and leaves us ill-equipped to tackle the complex challenges posed by AI, global warming and developments we have yet to imagine.”

It is not a question of who is winning  but what bothers me and should bother every right thinking individual is how is one  winning. Do we succumb to hysteria and frenzy over hyper nationalism and hyped up patriotism or do we learn to understand and be discerning on questions that are knocking down the very foundations of democracy? Can we have the courage to raise questions “was it a fair poll?” or demur in fear “All is fair in war and elections”. The victory by a huge margin seems to me a pyrrhic victory for it has annihilated the opposition that is a major force in democracy.

As I write this the skies have opened to heavy thunder and lightening. I do not know what this thunder means, but I know the last lines of the last section “What the Thunder said” in T.S.Eliot’s poem The Waste land . The lines are Datta, Damyata, dayadvam

                                               Om shantih ,Om shantih, Om shantih

The poem ends with a series of disparate fragments from a children’s song, from Dante, and from Elizabethan drama, leading up to a final chant “Datta, Damyata, dayadvam/ OmShantih Om shantih, Om shantih”—the traditional ending to an Upanishad. Eliot, in his notes to the poem, translates this chant as “the peace which passeth understanding,” the expression of ultimate resignation.

N.B. I am neither a Lutyen nor a Khan Market hanger on. I belong to the average middle class, who had been educated in ordinary government schools and  colleges, , a person who had come up in life through hard work, a  self developed individual who had imbibed the philosophy of the East and the West and a proud practitioner of Gandhian  thought and ideals of simple living and cultivating humanity,  a modest academic who follows Tagore and understands nationalism as an inherent part of larger humanism.

TsuNamo 2. has come again. Though the full results are a few hours away, there is no need to wait for Congress to leave for exile , if not for Agyaat Vaas(living incognito) f or the next five years. In fact the scholarly Professor Yogendra Yadav has expressed a death wish for Congress, though at no time he extended his party Swaraj India to support Congress in its fight against Goliath, the non-sicular giant.  Following Yadav’s pre mortem analysis, there will be a whole lot of post mortem wisecracks on the irrelevance of Congress. The FM, Mr.Jaitley had written a clairvoyant blog a few days back that the Congress of today is a non sequitur.  The floodgates of social media will be thrown open to millions of posts waxing eloquent about the non Lutyen, non Khan Market philistine warrior demolishing the well heeled, angrezi educated Harvard and Oxford returned pretenders to Indian culture and civilization. The media channels will be patting their backs for their accuracy in predicting the results while the newspapers will be full of articles on “didn’t I say so?” In this melee, hardly will there be an analysis of what went wrong as the enthusiasm to be on the “right’ side will make all the media barons chant ‘Namo, Namo’ and speak about how Namo made the right noise at the right time, during his whirlwind tour of India.

At home I have stuffed  a laddoo  for fear of being lynched if I do not participate in the Laddoo festival. I do not want to be called anti national and bumped off to Pakistan. The one good thing about the Laddoo festival is it somehow lessens the noise pollution with the Bhakts’mouths stuffed with Laddoos, arresting the “Namo’ chant from reaching a crescendo. As for the losers, they don’t even have a voice to squeak. Sitting at home watching the numbers flashing on the TV screen, I have switched on the ‘mute’ button to give some rest for my ear drums from the excited cry of the anchors and their chosen commentators for they all know the way to Modi’s heart is through the ears.

In the quiet of my home, I sit and try to analyze what has caused this TsuNamo? The youth knew that jobs were not there for the asking, the farmers  have had the most stressful five years with increasing number of suicides, the economists were worried about the decline of economy and alarmed over the fudged data put up by the government to say all is well with economy, liberals were aghast at the decline of secularism, freedom of speech and all institutions established for just and honest governance, educationists were disturbed over the loss  of autonomy  and the covert efforts to encourage private universities at the cost of Central and State universities, the critics of the government were dismayed over the draconian arm of the CBI and the police to house arrest honest people who raised their voice for justice,  the brushing aside of all inquiries about Rafael deal, about the Nirav Modis and Chokseys , the total avoidance of any mention of its non performance  and last but not the least the divisiveness that have been brought within India in these lastfive years …. And despite all these TsuNamo has drowned everyone of the opposition and liberal intellectuals.

The simple answer is  this is the victory of frenzy over rationality, best  seen in the victory of Pragya Sadhvi with her fulsome vitriolic against Hemant Karkare and Gandhi, her extolling of the fall of Babri masjid ( and her own contribution to this mighty act) . The hype over nationalism by showing all those opposed to Modi as anti nationals , the macho image of the leader crying like our ancient kings “Aaakraman”  and prodding the otherwise lazy, fun-loving soldiers  to fly and bomb Balakot, his deafening silence over the number of our army men killed in Uri, Pathankot and Pulvama  but shattered by a photo-op with Abhinandan to show the oozing of the milk of kindness and grace,  and his war cry  with lies and half lies and barbed attacks on the dead and forgotten PMs of the past, created the right hysteria that got translated into votes.

Leave aside all these. The undeniable truth is all those who believed in the old values of decency, honesty and truthfulness have been relegated to  the dustbin. These are old timers like me now inching their years into the seventies and eighties. Not much is left of them to fight irrationality with rationality,

hatred with compassion, prejudice with objectivity, frenzy with moderation.  Whatever is left of our  frail energies to speak of fair means towards a destined end  was uttered  sotto voce lest we should be trolled and labeled  as antinationals. Our geriatric  group is slowly on its way to oblivion and the new generation has not shown any inclination to follow us as that demands a great deal of intellectual exertion. There is a perceptible decline in IQ among the youth and the middle aged groups and all their so called information is from twitter that  demands the least exertion to think and analyze. Twit-twit-twit, instantaneous online shuttle shots. No time to spend on in depth understanding, thinking and forming discerning judgement. Even in developed countries of Europe and America, we notice the slow spread of intelligence crisis. In India also we see this decline in cognitive skills. In a thought provoking article Evan Horowitz writes “One leading explanation is that the rise of lower-skill service jobs has made work less intellectually demanding, leaving IQs to atrophy as people flex their brains less”.  Our educational system in India right from CBSE to graduation is tailor made to cater to the lowest common denominator.  The young men and women who come to college and universities and the school leaving 18+ boys and girls are hardly tested on their problem solving abilities .As such these crucial years which constitute the learning period are frittered away as no demands are made on them to apply their minds to larger social , economic and political issues of the day. Barring the really bright students who form a miniscular minority(and who disappear going  abroad seeking newer pastures) , the average youth is getting dumber and dumber and experiences a steady decline in intelligence. Skills are no substitute for intelligence in making analysis and  discernment that is so essential for the preservation and sustenance of democracy. To quote Evan Harowitz “a global intelligence crisis that undermines humanity's problem-solving capacity and leaves us ill-equipped to tackle the complex challenges posed by AI, global warming and developments we have yet to imagine.”

It is not a question of who is winning  but what bothers me and should bother every right thinking individual is how is one  winning. Do we succumb to hysteria and frenzy over hyper nationalism and hyped up patriotism or do we learn to understand and be discerning on questions that are knocking down the very foundations of democracy? Can we have the courage to raise questions “was it a fair poll?” or demur in fear “All is fair in war and elections”. The victory by a huge margin seems to me a pyrrhic victory for it has annihilated the opposition that is a major force in democracy.

As I write this the skies have opened to heavy thunder and lightening. I do not know what this thunder means, but I know the last lines of the last section “What the Thunder said” in T.S.Eliot’s poem The Waste land . The lines are Datta, Damyata, dayadvam

                                               Om shantih ,Om shantih, Om shantih

The poem ends with a series of disparate fragments from a children’s song, from Dante, and from Elizabethan drama, leading up to a final chant “Datta, Damyata, dayadvam/ OmShantih Om shantih, Om shantih”—the traditional ending to an Upanishad. Eliot, in his notes to the poem, translates this chant as “the peace which passeth understanding,” the expression of ultimate resignation.

N.B. I am neither a Lutyen nor a Khan Market hanger on. I belong to the average middle class, who had been educated in ordinary government schools and  colleges, , a person who had come up in life through hard work, a  self developed individual who had imbibed the philosophy of the East and the West and a proud practitioner of Gandhian  thought and ideals of simple living and cultivating humanity,  a modest academic who follows Tagore and understands nationalism as an inherent part of larger humanism.