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.