The Aquamarine cover of the book that came all the way from America gives a surge of joy, which is paradoxical considering that this EVERYMAN by Philip Roth is anything but a joyous read. It involves meditation on his life by an old man from his childhood to his youth, and now he is an old frail man buffeted by the vagaries of time and circumstances and is at death’s doorsteps and there is this wait for the inevitable.

One reason almost all the works of Philip Roth resonates with me is that his novels are peopled by mostly unhappy characters and there is no such thing as happily ever after. Now, I may not have any other talent but I sure as hell have talent for unhappiness.

What do you do? You keep your head down and do the best you can. You plod though even though you are being frog marched to the edge of abyss. Something turns inside of you and you think ‘’what do I care ‘’ ‘’ let them all go to hell’’. These phonies are sowing the seeds of idealism, but soon enough, they will reap the bitter harvest. Those stentorian voices telling you ‘’ you need structure’’ ‘’ you got to have a strategy’’ ‘’ time management is of paramount importance’’. You turn around and just say ‘’ I have given up the ghost’’  

Philip Roth

We all have twenty six alphabet in the English language and we all have decent enough vocabulary, well, some more than others but the point being that we can construct enough sentences to get by and navigate this labyrinth called life. But what happens when these same tools in the form of words acquire a life of their own when used by some people. These people whose business it is to construct sentence after sentence, their words and lines become a force of nature. At times, they give clarity and at times they project a telescopic view to explain human condition.

Philip Roth has been at the vanguard of this special tribe. What can I say about this great octogenarian American writer that has not been said before? He has written 31 books and numerous articles over a career spanning more than five decades. After his last book THE NEMESIS was published in 2010, he said in an interview to Le Monde that he would be writing no more. What I found most astonishing in that statement and the interview was the sheer humility of it all. Make no mistake, Philip Roth is a royalty in American letters and as we know writers and creative people usually have Himalayan egos (Salman Rushdie is a prime example). But Philip Roth said that with THE NEMESIS, he’s reached the end of the road and he has given his all to his writing and he has no more to give. And boy! Has he given or what. From his first work, a collection of short stories GOODBYE, COLUMBUS to THE NEMESIS, he as covered a big arc of variable themes of American identity and the eventual betrayal of American ideals. His semi-autobiographical tone, his constant meditation about old age and death and his provocative exploration of Jewish identity are absolutely fascinating. The small towns of New Jersey are not just an impersonal props but a lived reality in his works. He married twice but it didn’t work out. His first wife died in a car crash in 1968 five years after they separated. He doesn’t have children and to the best of my knowledge, he lives alone in his apartment somewhere in Manhattan.

I can confidently speak for everybody when I say that we don’t love America because of its muscular foreign policy, but because men like Philip Roth live there.  

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Amitava Kunar is someone who has spent a major part of his life in United States now, but Patna never left him although he left the town where he grew up. Coming from someone who earned two master’s degree over there and now teaches at one of the famous liberal arts college in upstate New York, A MATTER OF RATS, A short biography of Patna is a delightful meditation on life in this city without being judgemental or falling prey to cliché. Living here, I found the book fascinating and can definitely relate to it at a subliminal level. There is this old chestnut of how it was the seat of the powerful Mauryan Empire in the ancient India. But this history is older than old, in fact so old that it has acquired a mythical quality which makes you wonder if the time really existed. When you think of it, it is no doubt one of the shabbiest capital city anywhere, so much so that Shiva Naipaul, the writer and brother of the formidable VS Naipaul, who came to the city in the sixties, was so appalled by the dehumanizing poverty that he said that this place defies reason and alienates compassion. There is also another account by another scholar who maintains that Patna can be found everywhere in the world and compared the sheer vividness of the human scale to the ancient Roman Empire. More than anything, as Amitava Kumar rightly mentions, Patna brings you face to face with your own immortality, this looping circle of regeneration and decay and how every life is a failure in the ultimate analysis.

PS  I didn’t know that the great Marlon Brando once visited back in 1965 and spent a night here. He was working with the American charity CARE at the time of severe famine in this part of the country. 

Of late I’ve listening to a lot of film music and also English music from the 80’s, and it got me thinking about that particular period. But before I go any further let me just say that hindi film music from the 80’s was not a very glorious period in terms of melody but every now and then you discovered some priceless gems and also those seductive disco numbers were really peppy, foot thumping kind. But more than anything else, the music took me down the memory lane of my formative years spent in that nondescript small town called Nawada. I am truly a child of the eighties, and when I think about it, a kaleidoscope of vivid recollections floats across my mind. It was a time of command and control economy and it was so bloody difficult get hold of some of the goodies that we take for granted today like cookies, soft drink and butter. There was scarcity all around and the problem was more acute in smaller towns. What surprises me after all these years is how happy I was. I did not know many things but ignorance was bliss; somebody asked me at that time, what is the capital of America is (yes it was simply America for everybody then no US or States) and when I said I have no idea, he solemnly pronounced New York and I quietly swallowed it, he might as well have said Moscow for all I cared. And my English was as good then as my French is now which is to say not good at all. The point being that I was so immersed in a world of my own, a world where I was umpiring on a wheelchair in neighbourhood cricket matches and also trying to collect twenty Rupees for the replacement ball ! Pocket money was unheard of, at least in our case. Those hot afternoons of interminable power cuts and whiling away the time playing Doctor Patient where I would always play doctor and my younger sisters would be forced to play poor patients. But soon they will have their turn at getting back at me for when they played neighbouring housewives, I would be the doorman at one of the houses.

It was the era of renting VCR and whole night of movie marathon depending of course on availability of electricity because we had to get our money’s worth. I also associate that time with first LP record and then cassette players and enjoying Kishore Kumar who had acquired a real grainy voice by then that was, if anything even more enriching and at one fine evening hearing the news of his demise on the All India Radio. The memories are too numerous to enumerate but judging from the vantage point of today, I notice a curious symmetry. Nowadays I am depressed most of the time, back then I was happy all the time. Now I spend all my time indoors, then I’d be outdoors mostly. Now in the virtual world I have many friends but none in the real world, then I had friends in the real world and there was no virtual world. Now I know many things about the world, back then I was a reckless fool who’d try to burst a firecrackers in his hands! The more I think of this symmetry or asymmetry depending on one’s point of view, I think I have lived two lifetimes.  

Death of a Salesman

In the spring of 1948, Arthur Miller disappeared into his log cabin somewhere in Connecticut. He emerged out of it some six weeks later ready with his first draft of his play ‘ Death of a Salesman’. And as they say rest is history. It won the Pulitzer prize for best drama  that year and when it was premiered on Broadway the following year, it created massive waves and huge critical  acclaim for Arthur Miller as a playwright. When I read this play recently, I underwent most of the emotions that our anti hero Willy Loman goes through and that to my mind is the beauty of great work of fiction. It brings you face to face with your innermost core that you knew existed but were hardly aware of and this work of his also tells you what can happen when you lose the grip on the forces of life. The passage of time has not dated the topicality or relevance of this timeless classic.

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE

Having finished a densely written 422 pages ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, I can say with utmost conviction that Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a master spinner of yarn of the finest quality. The fabric that he creates in the form of this novel has a texture of magic realism and is designed with the uneven patches of Colombian history interspersed with the trials and tribulations of the Buendias family. The fictional village of Macondo could be taken as a microcosm of the Colombian nation. It is a great work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez whose whole career has been defined by this one book although he has written several others and which former president Clinton has been on record saying it as his all time favourite novel. Some people may find it a difficult read because the narrative though linear at one level, also stretches back and forth in time and adopts this tragi-comic tone throughout and where the mundane and extraordinary events take place simultaneously and seamlessly merge into each other to create a world like no other. So if you stay with it, you will get sucked into his web. I have no doubt in my mind that Salman Rushdie has drawn heavily from the style of Mr. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and that MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN has its template this luminous ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE.

[Bitter harvest ]

There has been a colossal tragedy in the foothills of the mighty Himalayas. Over a thousand dead and still counting. And one can’t even accurately assess the magnitude of the destruction of properties and livestock. The fury of nature knew no bounds and the catastrophe has indeed been of Biblical proportions. You can’t but be saddened by the scale of this human suffering. But why do I have a kind of mixed emotions about the whole thing? Why do terms like ‘just deserts’ and ‘they had it coming’ doing summersault in my head?  Disasters at the pilgrimage sites in this country is not a new phenomenon in fact, it has become the norm rather than exception. This latest catastrophe could be attributed to the wrath of nature but the man has done his utmost to contribute in equal measure to this terrible tragedy.  It is a very fragile ecosystem in the foothills of not only the Himalayas but almost all the biodiversity hotspots where these religious sites and shrines are located. The nature has managed to achieve a very delicate balance over there. But in this day and age of the mammon, everything is an opportunity to mint money and what we are witnessing is that a lot of unscrupulous elements in cahoots with builder-politician-bureaucrat nexus have wreaked havoc at these places by attracting ever larger number of people when in actual fact these so called holy places are just not meant to be visited by such a huge throng of people no matter what. That is where the ever increasing religiosity in our society comes into the picture. Year after year, the throng of people visiting these places is getting humongous which has had a terrible cost on the fragile ecology and limited infrastructure along these sensitive zones, but the greed of some people knows no bounds. Lots of guest houses have been constructed right up to the river banks in the shallow waters and when these were buffeted by heavy flooding due to swollen rivers, they collapsed like house of cards resulting in so many losses of lives.

The larger point I would like raise is this growing craze of the Indian middle classes to visit ever exotic religious places in such a huge and unmanageable numbers that would stretch the resources of any place never mind these fragile and delicate zones like the foothills of the Himalayas.  I have very little idea where my latent rage trying to aim at, but I’m frankly appalled at the ever increasing religiosity among a growing section of the middle classes. It would be all worthwhile if this religion thing had helped the people becoming more compassionate and ethical in conducting themselves in the real world, but unfortunately the reverse is the case. What these millions gathering at such places denotes is a kind of unbridled consumption in the Gods market; every pilgrimage site has become a religious super market where you would like to flaunt your ability to consume in ever greater numbers at the wares on offer. I mean how smug they are in their certitude about their place in the larger scheme of things, these people who wouldn’t bother to give alms to a beggar or a leper, would go to any extent to strike a bargain in the divine marketplace. When something goes wrong, like this recent calamity for instance, they would blame the same Gods with whom they had come to bargain in the first place! Ultimately, you have to accept that your blind faith may give you momentary respite from your pain but what about suffering? There is no getting away from it for pain is external but suffering is internal. Whether you do good or you do evil, suffering will always be your reward and there is no escaping the punishment. So why bother the Gods  needlessly. 

facing the music, literally

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Listening to good music is more than a pastime for me. It is an spiritual experience for me. When I tune in to my favourite songs, I drop everything else and just immerse myself in the sea of melody and forget about everything around me. Not for me listening to the music and reading simultaneously or talking with somebody at the same time. Music for me constitutes an act in itself requiring my full attention. Whether it is Indian music or western, I go for the older stuff like 60’s, 70’s or 80’s and I don’t like to experiment too much and look to meaningful lyrics and aching melody. They say that great art do not intend to blaze a new trail or reinvent the wheel but they point us to the direction that we already knew but we didn’t know that we knew! So whenever I listen to the likes of Sinatra, Doris Day or Pink Floyd or Nat King Cole or Bob Dylan, I am confronted with the emotions that existed deep within my core and were brought face to face. The same goes for the Indian music. The strange thing is that when I think about books, I want to read this book and that book as soon as possible for I feel I don’t have much time on my hands, but  as far as music is concerned, I want to make sure that I have just the right kind of peace and quite and I am willing to wait. It’s like delayed gratification because then I think that I have all the time in the world. 

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My cousin gave me a Hindi novel to read and I thought okay let’s read some Hindi for a change. But after fifteen pages I felt that it was not only taxing on my eyes but also on my nerves. Don’t get me wrong, I am not one of those snooty types who look down upon Hindi in fact, ,my formative years of reading have been grounded in Hindi magazines and books so there is no question of unfamiliarity with the Devnagri script in which Hindi is written, but the matter goes somewhat deeper than that.

For quite some time in my early years, I would avoid having anything to do with English, it would seem too formidable a language to gain any control over as far as I was concerned. I would always look at easy way out and go into the comforting embrace of Hindi. As I came of age both literally and figuratively, the world was changing around me real fast and there was a great danger of being left behind more so in my case because I was never a part of a formal education system. The moment of epiphany struck when I was about to turn nineteen and it was kind of embarrassing to have such a poor grasp of the language; I thought it was time I did something about it. I ditched Hindi reading and adopted English mind body and soul. I read, I watched and I observed how truly educated people communicate. Not only I embraced the language, I also internalized a whole new value system and cultural mores. As the years went by, my connections with Hindi became more transactional, in other words what would I gain if I stick with Hindi and my conclusion was, nothing much. So I pursued English with missionary zeal and without sounding immodest, I can justifiably take pride in my accomplishments, whatever little they are. Coming back to the point I made at the beginning, as I tried to peruse the text of that Hindi book, I felt dyslexic. It was like my eyes were a kind of vehicle that is on a jerky ride on a damaged road. Whereas when I read in English, it is like my eyes are gliding on a smooth surface registering both text and context. On balance, I would say that I have gained more by my association with English than would have been possible had I stuck only with Hindi. Now I completely identify with the observation of our first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru ‘’I have become a curious mixture of east and west, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere’’.

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It really pisses me off big time but I have known some female member in my extended family who shall remained unnamed, who want to forge their identity in relation to either their spouse or father or brother. It isn’t as if they have been devoid of opportunities in life, it is just that they are dumb enough not to grasp it. Whose footsteps are they following? Their mother and grandmother? At least they could be excused for being the product of their time. But what excuse these lotus eaters have? Except that the allure of the proud badge of domestic drudgery is too irresistible to let go? If I come across a bit too harsh, then I can’t help it for what is not being appreciated is that any hint of defiance and determination to break out and create your own place under the sun is one more nail in the coffin of paternalistic and patriarchal ethos in this country. 

Indian Profane League

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The emperor has no clothes and everybody is naked in the Turkish bath. The events that have transpired in the week gone by, have clearly prove that this whole business of IPL is corrupted to the core. The mind simply reels by the extent to which all norms and ethics have been thrown to the wind in order to make a quick buck. If the involvement of the players in the spot fixing was not bad enough, it turns out that one of the owners of the most coveted franchise has been caught with his hands in the till. Rather than being remorseful about the whole thing, look what is happening. The men who matter in this cosy club called the BCCI, they are closing rank on the one hand to protect their damaged reputation, but they are also using this opportunity to manoeuver themselves in an advantageous position in this power game. It doesn’t matter that most of the people who genuinely love the game feel cheated and betrayed. What really matters to them is that this gravy train of theirs continues on its onward journey. The one important question to be asked is why are the so called ‘’objective voices’’ silent in all this, these influential commentators like Gavaskar, Shastri, Manjerekar and Bhogle have all colluded in this conspiracy of silence. They are never critical of the IPL, it’s as if they exist in an alternate world where everything is as pure as driven snow in so far as the IPL is concerned. They and many others like them have been gagged with wads of currency notes, so why would they bite the hand that feed them. Like the mafia does, the ex-players have either been co-opted or bought over. In this hopeless situation, we the powerless can do nothing but despair. The least we can do is let’s turn our back completely on the IPL and also boycott tonight’s final.  

Mother pious

So, last Sunday was mother’s day when we are supposed to show our love and gratitude for our mothers for making all kinds of sacrifices in order to bring us up in this big bad world so that we can become a balanced human beings. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for doing our bit for our mothers for it is not a joke to rear a child and see him through to maturity. I think we have become too much of a sucker for tokenism in our rush to compete with the western world to take this opportunity to look into the issue of the average Indian male’s mother fixation from cradle to the grave forget about just one day in the year. Being a mama’s boy is a proud badge of honour in this country and its manifestation is in every walk of an average man’s life, from the choice of his hairdo to the kind of life partner he will end up with to the type of job he should hold and a lot of other stuff without even realizing how this emasculation of his individual self will hinder him to have an independent existence. Healthy respect for your mother is absolutely fine, but I have known some people who shall remain nameless, whose obsession with their mother has really messed up their heads so much that they can’t be relied upon to have a meaningful relationship with the opposite sex that is outside and independent of the maternal orbit. The point I am trying to make is that let us all have love and respect for our mothers but let’s not fall for this tokenism in this country that will contribute to the prototype of the stereotype.  

The allure of Babudom

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A few days ago, the results of the civil services exams were out and it was quite interesting but not surprising that so many boys and girls from north India found themselves in the top half of the merit list. It got me thinking what could be the reason, the underlying motive if you will, for such a large number of aspirants from this part of the country who slog day in and day out for this shot at the pinnacle of achievement in the context of Indian society where a great store is set by your ability to exercise power and influence over peoples lives. At one level you can’t help admire the determination and bloody mindedness of these men and women  most of whom come from small towns and villages of this vast and poor country, who attend so many mushrooming coaching classes in faraway places like Delhi and other major cities at a great hardship living in one room tenement and dealing with Shylocks in the form of landlords who would milk them dry. If they succeed, they would go on to become part of the so called steel frame, the power elite the very Bramhins of the establishment.

Make no mistake, it is still the most impactful way to make a difference in the lives of the ordinary people if you have joined the Indian bureaucracy because you are the main interface between the elected government and the people. This gives you tremendous authority to wield power and curry favours with your political bosses which in turn will lead to your personal enhancement of every kind. The men and women who go for a career in civil services have at some point in their lives seen the power dynamics first hand due to the fact that the tentacles of the Indian state reach every aspect of their lives in some way or the other (this could be a topic for another day ). So even though they  become the top officers of the government with a lot of idealism, soon the cynicism gives way and they are co-opted into the system and get aboard the gravy train and start employing the same method that they themselves resented when they were mere citizens and not aligned to the powers that be. And that is the nub; this aphrodisiac of power and pelf to lord over their subjects in a feudal society like ours. So what if these young men and women lead their stultifying working life in some remote outpost of the country. There will always be the wife in big city to indulge in endless shopping, a son who would get into an Ivy league university with plenty of resources to finance it not to mention a daughter who will be able to snag a good match in the marriage market because the father can easily pay off whatever amount of dowry is needed. When they peer into the telescope of the future, this I suspect is the vision they see in the harsh glare of reality and not the kind of utopia which they saw with their Rose tinted glasses when they were sweating it out in not too distant past in a corner of Mukherjee Nagar in New Delhi. 

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So are we seeing the first casualty of the grotesque execution of Afzal Guru in the form of Sarabjit Singh who was brutally assaulted by the inmates of the prison in Pakistan where he was on the death row for terrorist act committed in that country. It always seemed on the cards when the news reports started filtering in that a lot of people were baying for his blood in a kind of tit for tat reaction to Afzal’s execution even though Afzal was not a Pakistani citizen. But the whole point is that when the Indian government is trying to get one of its own to come back home from a Pakistani prison after that man has been given death sentence, it is downright insensitive to hang somebody who hails from Kashmir with all its attendant history and bad blood with Pakistan not to mention the unfairness of the act. When I heard of the unfortunate man’s death in coma, I thought about the incident yesterday when the Supreme Court hear in India commuted the death sentence of a terror accused to life imprisonment on the ground that the President took too long to decide on the mercy petition of the convict. I just wondered couldn’t the court have shown the same consideration to Afzal Guru? Then maybe we would have a sort of bargaining chip with the Pakistanis for an exchange of a goodwill gesture where Afzal is not hanged and Sarabjit’s sentence is also commuted to life. But sadly, that opportunity has been blown by our govt on this side engendering a reaction by a blood thirsty mob on the other side. What a crying shame!

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I like to believe that I have faith but no belief. Let me explain, to believe in the existence of God and to not believe in the existence of God are two side of the same coin if you ask me in that both parties are firm in their respective beliefs and will brook no challenge to their positions. But my point about having faith and no beliefs is that you simply don’t know for sure about the veracity of the claims and counter claims made by both sides in fact can anybody tell for sure. You implicitly repose your faith in an unwritten rule, a kind of unseen rhythm that regulates the ebbs and flows of life. But to believe in an almighty God who will always be benevolent towards us has proved to be patently false. How would you make sense of all the misery and strife surrounding us? Where is real justice? Most of the time, those who have professed a belief or propagated a religion, have done so with no meagre assistance from threat, intimidation and this constant fear of the unknown where a divine retribution awaits those a private code and public taboo. Even the staunchest of atheists, at the time of personal tragedy have been known to rush back to the same Gods who they have denounced all their life. What absurdity is this? As a human being you are entitled to meditate upon the deeper questions as to are we the sum and sub total of our consciousness? What happens after we have turned into ashes and dust? What is really about the ultimate truth? Questions galore and your mind reels at enormity of the burden. But what a stupid and dumb people we are that we can’t swallow our pride and just say that ‘we don’t know one way or another’. It may seem like a caravan but you are on an inner journey of and on your own.     

Invitation to an execution

Ever since Afzal Guru was executed for his supposed  involvement in parliament attack case, I have to a large extent stopped watching those meaningless TV debates on the issues of so called national importance. The incident has really bothered me at many levels least of it all is the unjustness and unfairness of the punishment. The man was sent to the gallows without having had any legal representation in the lower trial court during the crucial early stages of the trial. The  lawyer that was assigned to him by the court was actually working as an assistant to the court than actually doing the groundwork of defending him and there was also the small matter of him not visiting his client even once in the jail during those months! Then we had this bizarre observation of the Supreme Court while upholding  the death sentence to him that though there was no direct evidence of him being involved in the actual act of conspiracy to attack members of parliament, the collective conscience of society will only be satisfied if he is given capital punishment.
The last time I checked, you don’t hang somebody to death merely to ‘’satisfy the collective conscience of society’’. This malevolent tale of blood lust doesn’t end here. The way he was executed in such a crude secrecy defying all norms of graceful and civilized behaviour add to the fact that he was not allowed to meet the loved ones in his family, completes the sordid picture of a vengeful political establishment that would have done Gestapo some credit. Shame on us and more importantly, shame on those worthy people in the media (barring a few notable exceptions) whose job it is to ask uncomfortable questions to the powers that be, to ferret out the truth from the maze of misinformation and disinformation that governments usually indulge in, in order to hold a mirror to us. But they were too busy swallowing the govt’s version hook, line and sinker maybe in the hope of a largess from the State at a future date all of course, in the national interest. The Indian State has really not covered itself in glory.

Death Rattle

A man was sent to the gallows yesterday morning for his involvement in the attack on parliament. I guess judging by the kind of gloating by the political cabal and sundry news anchors, the ‘’collective conscience of the society’’ in the words of the Supreme court, must have been satisfied. The general reaction to Afzal Guru’s hanging was reminiscent of the blood lust you hear about the days of Roman Empire. The purpose of this piece not about the specific case of Afzal Guru, but about the larger issue abolishing the death sentence from the statute books. What is so distressing in all this, is the collective howl of indignation of a vast section of the middle classes and the media at the mere broaching of this question. If you are against capital punishment, you are termed a wooly headed liberal and worse, an anti national. My contention is we must move away from this medieval and barbaric practice of allowing the State to take away life of its citizen no matter how vile that person has proved to be and opt for the kind of sentencing where the guilty convict is made to spend time in prison till the end of his natural life in the case of murder. The whole purpose of punishment and sentencing brutal and hardened criminals is that the society is free of the fear of his presence on the streets and we can do that by compromising on his basic human right to life by taking him away from our midst and putting him in jail. All the evidence suggests that death penalty is hardly a deterrence against crimes like murder. I know I’ll be thrown arguments like how would I feel if I had a loved one who was subjected to murder and other heinous crime. This is the kind of loaded and hypothetical argument proffered by those who have run out of any coherent argument in favor of retaining capital punishment and whose only aim is to guilt trip you into agreeing with their point of view.

After all, more than one hundred and fifty countries have abolished death penalty in order to move their society and people towards a more humane form of justice and even in US where it is a matter governed by individual states, the fact that seventeen of the fifty states of the union have stricken off death sentence from there books is a clear pointer to the fact that a lot of people are disgusted with this method. But the most poignant example of a country and a society’s commitment to the compassionate human values is Norway where a couple of years ago, a rabidly right wing lunatic youth called Anders Breviek mowed down over one hundred and seventy young boys and girls who were part of a youth summer camp organized by the opposition labor party on an island, he stealthily approached the camp as if on a commando mission and launched himself with grenade and assault rifle, unleashing a horrifying carnage. Can it be anybody’s case that those who lost their near and dear once did not feel the pain and hollowness of their loss? Even during his trial, he did not show even an iota of regret or remorse. But it is a tribute to the resilience and commitment of its people and judiciary to stick by the values of compassion and decency that it did not allow the emotion to get the better of it and make an exception by giving him death, but stuck to its mores and convictions and handed him 70 yrs in jail. So for all practical purposes, he will not emerge out of jail alive. What does it tell about them and what does it tell about us.       

The shaming ark

The choice before us is depressingly simple. Either you make a dumbass kind of movie which is an insult to your intelligence and rather than offending anybody, goes out of its way to appease everybody, then no question is asked and everybody goes home happily. Or you make the kind of movie or produce a piece of art that not only raises the troubling questions of our times but also draws us out of our comfort zone in order to communicate the creators vision for change, and you have an infernal crisis on your hands. You will be made to look like the biggest imbecile on the planet. You would be advised to be careful, exercise restraint and given all kind of drivel about  the so called ‘’sensitivity’’ of the vast section of the unwashed masses. The old apologist for the old order will be back explaining  that the freedom of expression enshrined in the constitution comes with reasonable restrictions in the name of public order, morality, decency and all kinds of other laundry lists. At moments like those, you really feel like one of those stupid school kids who need to be disciplined for going against the grain of conventional thinking. You are at a loss to deal with this surging tide of anger at the injustice of it all where the government, instead of protecting the rights of individuals, bend over backwards to kowtow to the laws laid down by the bullies and thugs. And then there is this embarrassment coupled with the realization that gradually dawns upon you that maybe our culture that a lot many of us set a great store by, is not conducive to anybody who takes a contrary view against the prevailing mores of society. Someone who is willing to court unpopularity to make a larger point about anything is not looked upon as worthy of respect. If it was only a question of respect, then fine, I am not looking for respect, just leave me to my own devices but no, they are not going to let you be. You have to bend according to their wishes, their eddy of fury will not be calmed till they have dragged you down to their level to wallow in their own mediocrity.   

Text and context

The way some sections of the society have treated one of our most eminent of social scientist Prof. Ashish Nandy over  his alleged slur on the Dalit and OBC community during the course of an interactive session at the Jaipur literature festival is beyond shocking. The mind simply goes numb to think what this country is coming to as far as freedom of speech and expression is concerned. Every passing day we are witness to the bizarre spectacle of one fringe group or the other taking offence to one thing or another whether a film or a book, a song, a play, the list could be endless as if these cretins decide to pick one item from the menu everyday to feel offended about just in order to validate their existence.

But coming back to Prof. Nandy, his comments in the course of a discussion on corruption about the hypocrisy of the elite and how the hierarchy of corruption made the corrupt practices indulged in by the lower classes and Dalits seem more gross and abominable was made in a specific context. But the poor man fell victim to the tyranny of the age of sound bytes where one sentence or remark is not only taken but wrenched out of context by the news channels and is used to create a spurious controversy. Even if what came out might have been grating on the nerves of a few members of the community, the answer is not the threat of arrest or intimidation but equally forceful denouncing  and challenge of the said view on an intellectual plane. If a book or any other piece of art is not congenial to your sensibility or sensitivity, the best way to respond is to write another book or produce an alternate piece of art to contest the assumption or just ignore it and let it pass. Instead what we are seeing today in this country is the increasing prominence the bigoted and reactionary elements are gaining in the public discourse.     

Text and context

The way some sections of the society have treated one of our most eminent of social scientist Prof. Ashish Nandy over  his alleged slur on the Dalit and OBC community during the course of an interactive session at the Jaipur literature festival is beyond shocking. The mind simply goes numb to think what this country is coming to as far as freedom of speech and expression is concerned. Every passing day we are witness to the bizarre spectacle of one fringe group or the other taking offence to one thing or another whether a film or a book, a song, a play, the list could be endless as if these cretins decide to pick one item from the menu everyday to feel offended about just in order to validate their existence.

But coming back to Prof. Nandy, his comments in the course of a discussion on corruption about the hypocrisy of the elite and how the hierarchy of corruption made the corrupt practices indulged in by the lower classes and Dalits seem more gross and abominable was made in a specific context. But the poor man fell victim to the tyranny of the age of sound bytes where one sentence or remark is not only taken but wrenched out of context by the news channels and is used to create a spurious controversy. Even if what came out might have been grating on the nerves of a few members of the community, the answer is not the threat of arrest or intimidation but equally forceful denouncing  and challenge of the said view on an intellectual plane. If a book or any other piece of art is not congenial to your sensibility or sensitivity, the best way to respond is to write another book or produce an alternate piece of art to contest the assumption or just ignore it and let it pass. Instead what we are seeing today in this country is the increasing prominence the bigoted and reactionary elements are gaining in the public discourse.     

Text and context

The way some sections of the society have treated one of our most eminent of social scientist Prof. Ashish Nandy over  his alleged slur on the Dalit and OBC community during the course of an interactive session at the Jaipur literature festival is beyond shocking. The mind simply goes numb to think what this country is coming to as far as freedom of speech and expression is concerned. Every passing day we are witness to the bizarre spectacle of one fringe group or the other taking offence to one thing or another whether a film or a book, a song, a play, the list could be endless as if these cretins decide to pick one item from the menu everyday to feel offended about just in order to validate their existence.

But coming back to Prof. Nandy, his comments in the course of a discussion on corruption about the hypocrisy of the elite and how the hierarchy of corruption made the corrupt practices indulged in by the lower classes and Dalits seem more gross and abominable was made in a specific context. But the poor man fell victim to the tyranny of the age of sound bytes where one sentence or remark is not only taken but wrenched out of context by the news channels and is used to create a spurious controversy. Even if what came out might have been grating on the nerves of a few members of the community, the answer is not the threat of arrest or intimidation but equally forceful denouncing  and challenge of the said view on an intellectual plane. If a book or any other piece of art is not congenial to your sensibility or sensitivity, the best way to respond is to write another book or produce an alternate piece of art to contest the assumption or just ignore it and let it pass. Instead what we are seeing today in this country is the increasing prominence the bigoted and reactionary elements are gaining in the public discourse.     

Who is on the dope?

The way the world has treated the seven time champion of Tour de Franc Lance Armstrong in recent time is nothing short of despicable and clearly illustrates the kind of dangerous moral absolutism the world is coming to. In any sporting activity that stretches the limits of human endurance to the maximum like cycling in Tour de Franc, as a competitor you would want to have as much advantage over your opponent as possible. By taking some performance enhancing drugs, he was not doing anything outrageous or involved in cheating but he was doing as the term suggests, he was merely enhancing his performance to the maximum possible extent through the means of science and medicine. In fact, I would postulate that every sports person should be allowed to use whatever means available at their disposal to gain any kind on advantage possible. And let’s be honest, Lance Armstrong has not won the most grueling race in cycling for seven consecutive times because he was imbibing some kind of potion. He has done it because he is a fantastic specimen of a human being when it comes to stamina, endurance and the bloody mindedness to survive against all odds for lest anybody forget, he is a cancer survivor and anybody who’s got any idea about the nature of the illness will tell you invariably lose the will to survive but to not just survive but to overcome and triumph in the sporting arena is monumental and Armstrong is a living example of this.

I know that many people will jump at my throat and accuse me of encouraging cheating and match fixing by the same token. But where is the question of cheating in this? I accept that match fixing is different. Here you take money to under perform and throw away the match deliberately for pecuniary gains. That is a clear cut case of cheating and must be punished by all means. But in the case of doping you are doing your damn best to not only perform but over perform to ensure medals for your country and in the process anything that would help you marginally to be one up on your opponent should be par for the course. If anybody seriously believes that Mr. Armstrong won seven consecutive Tour de Franc only because he doped and not because of his superhuman ability to focus and persevere is himself on some kind of dope! In this day and age, sport is a multi billion dollar industry and rather than being on some kind of faux moral crusade to cleanse every sport of drug use, we should focus our time and energy on making the whole thing more scientific and transparent so that the sports person are able to use it rather than abuse it to the detriment of their health. But the times that we live in, we have made a fetish of morally correct behavior like we see quite often in the shrill debate around  legalizing Marijuana. What we have seen in recent days and weeks is the utter shaming and humiliation of one of the colossal sporting figures of our time and in doing so we have also diminished ourselves a quite a bit.

  

Notes on friendship

Once upon a time, in the distant past I did have some friends and when I look back on those times I can’t really reconcile my current situation with the time I had all those years ago. It was the childhood in its elemental form. There were cricket matches with me umpiring on wheelchair! There were petty squabbles and then making up, some sharing of secrets and being perpetually short on money but not minding it too much and looking forward to another day. There were three brothers with whom I was especially close with and whatever those four years were, there was never a dull moment. And then the march of time and tide took them away from my orbit and I also moved away and found my own orbit to navigate without the attendant stars.

And just imagine my surprise when I found them on facebook after so many years. When you think about it, it’s like strapping yourself to a time machine and zooming 23 years forward. You have been thrust into this unfamiliar terrain of familiarity. What do you do, how do you react? I mean, is it possible to be completely cut off from some people for well over two decades and one fine day connecting with them just like that without undergoing the kind of emotion where you come face to face with your own future or what might have been a close approximation in somebody else’ projection. Seeing all those photographs of them with their wives and kids makes you think gosh! This is what happens with ordinary people. You think that in the cosmic order of things, so many pieces would have fallen into places. That same anxiety about making the right career choices, picking the right engineering or business institute. Would they have fought for their right to choose their life partners or would have accepted the bloody compromise. I am assailed by questions like these even as I was preoccupied with the business of surviving from one day to another. The glimpse of the future through the prism of the past.   google.co.in

white noise

They say that you can change your friends but you can’t change your neighbor. Like most clichés, this too has a kernel of truth but that only applies if you are an individual. What happens when you are not a person but a country? Then you don’t have an option of moving away. You have to live with your neighbor and do the best you can. What can one say or add more to India-Pakistan relations that has already not been done, except that I believe it is a zero sum game; a classic dialogue of the deaf where what I say you can’t hear and what you say I can barely understand and this absurd pantomime goes on. Death by a thousand cuts and we are afraid to even complain forcefully lest they kill us! It is pretty hopeless situation borne out of frailty of mind of reasonable men who set too much store by the mind of reasonable men and women. Like a grave mistake was made by a moment but the price will be paid by eternity and now there is only white noise of words like Kashmir, Loc, free trade, people to people contact, 26/11, terrorism, samjhauta express blast, Hafiz Sayid, it is like drowning in so many words and symbols without achieving any clarity. Indo-Pak relations have become like one ghost chasing another ghost. So many lives lost, so many opportunities squandered away, unbelievable amount of resources on both sides chucked down the drain for this one-upmanship   where these could have been employed for the betterment of the desperately poor people in both countries. Earlier I used to delude myself that we are somehow a superior society than them, that we are more self assured as a people and as a nation than them but no more. I think we are almost an exact mirror image of each other. What we do is reflected in the other, we both are neck deep in shit and the funny thing is, we are not unduly bothered by the stink. In a nutshell, I am quite pessimistic about future scenario of this relationship with Pakistan. My only hope is that the future generations of both people will be more enlightened to find a common ground and that they will not be encumbered by the burden of too much history. They will have the advantage of having lived in a globalized world to be able to make an informed decision. Out of box thinking will not be just a corporate jargon but something that will bring about clarity of purpose. It is time to bury the ghosts and move ahead.   

Had the situation been not so tragic, it would be downright funny. The way our politicians and other sundry gurus are coming up with all sorts of explanations and theories about the rising number of sexual violence against women, just defies credulity. It is as if there is a mad rush to show who can come up with the most stupid statement regarding Indian women. These men and also a few women must have mastered the art of constantly hopping on one foot for the other is always in the mouth! From comments like ‘’rape only happens in India and not Bharat’’ to ‘’if that girl had addressed her attackers ‘bhaiya’, they might have spared her’’ to ‘’these protesters are mostly dented(sic) and painted women’’. The list could be endless considering that this country is never in short supply of dolts, but what they signify is something more darker and deeper. They clearly point out the fact that so many of these old men are out of reality and out of sync with an India that is modernizing and where more and more women are joining the workforce to claim the public sphere. A great majority of them are ready to push the envelope of so called ‘conventional behavior’ and live life on their own terms. This has resulted in the kind of backlash where these men with their hard eyes are looking for the phantom everywhere but which is essentially in their heads. At the mere sight of a confident and independent woman who is secure about her place in the world and is not looking for a benefactor in men, is more than enough to trigger the most vile and basest of emotions in them and they must lash out with all the fury at their command. There is always some amount of misogyny in every society but in India this reservoir runs a lot wider and deeper that is more than enough to provide fuel to this raging inferno. 

media ethic

We live in an age where history is getting compressed. The kind of changes which took at least 30 years to materialize is taking place in a matter of five or six years. And nowhere is this trend more visible than in the media world. A paradigm shift has taken place in the way we use and consume information. Nowadays, we get our information from diverse sources, unlike in the past when people were passive recipient of news and information handed down from state and traditional broadsheet newspapers, today we are increasingly relying more and more on the world wide web. To say that the advent of internet has radically altered the whole template of media industry would be an understatement. This digital age has enabled us to not only consume information but also create content and subjecting those to peer review. It has democratized knowledge and information in a way which was unimaginable some twenty, thirty years ago. Recently we saw the power of social media like facebook and twitter during that shambolic election in Iran when people used the medium of micro blogging site like twitter to expose the real state of affairs in the country in fact social media was being seen as more authentic source over there than the conventional media in terms of getting the real news of the high handedness of the regime out there in the public domain. And how can one forget the so called ‘’Arab Spring’’ in Egypt where hundreds and thousands of people galvanized themselves on the ground in Tahrir Square using social media to garner support world wide to get rid of tyrannical Hosni Mubarak regime.

In most of the countries today, the governments are waking up to the reality of this modern day information age. They see the last vestige of control over their people slipping away from their hands and they are becoming paranoid. They see phantoms everywhere and are forever devising new ways to either control or censor the internet which has resulted in a severe backlash from the online community who are trying to be one step ahead of the government. It is a kind of cat and mouse game at the moment which will have serious implication for the future of free flow of speech and ideas.

The above mentioned is one facet of the power game going on in the media world. The other disturbing trend is the traditional media’s too much closeness to the powers that be where the proprietors and editors of newspapers or  news networks start to curry favors with those in positions of power and authority in order to gain access and also to feather their own nests. The recent scandal surrounding the media Moghul Rupert Murdoch in UK is a very grim reminder of what happens when all the journalistic ethics are given a go by to chase a story just to be one up on your rivals. Even if it means hacking into the phone of ordinary people, one of whom happens to be a dead rape victim. The Leveson inquiry that followed clearly exposed the rot in the British media. Here in India we are increasingly seeing the menace of paid news where political parties are quite willing to pay large amounts of money to newspapers to get positive coverage and lots of papers are ready to do their biddings. There was a shameful spectacle of two reporters of Zee news brazenly negotiating the price for blacking out a coverage where a steel company promoted by the Congress MP Naveen Jindal was alleged to have indulged in corrupt practices to get a coal block allocated. Fortunately, the same media fraternity raised this matter after the tape of the meeting was leaked by that MP complaining that he was being blackmailed by those reporters. These two gentlemen are in police custody and are awaiting the outcome of an investigation. But they were caught, we don’t know how many go scot free because of this insidious nexus between those who holds the levers of power and those whose job it is to be the watchdog and hold up a mirror to the society. The journalists are in a unique position to have a ringside view of the goings on in society and polity at large. They literally write the first draft of history, but they must do this as a spectator and not become players.