This has been a revenge of the underclass.  This angry group of disaffected and many would argue, also disenfranchised working class predominantly WASP voter has come out in numbers and voted with its feet.  It was more of a Hillary Clinton’s election to lose and she hasn’t disappointed on this one.  This election will be dissected and analyzed by the social scientists and political pundits for years to come.  Make no mistake; Donald Trump has been a rank outsider if ever there was one.  He has never held any public office at any level in his life, but was able to cynically harness the collective rage and dissatisfaction of a large chunk of electorate and propelled himself to the highest office of the land.  Sitting oceans away, it is difficult to make an accurate assessment, but just a couple of points. 

   Never mind all that pre-election talk as to how someone like Trump could never hope to win in a changing demographic profile of the American population.  The fact of the matter remains that the United States is still very much a conservative, white Anglo-Saxon protestant country and it’s going to be that way for some time.  A majority of people want to live in here and now, like what’s in it for me and who can I blame for all my troubles.  I think Trump has offered simplistic and disingenuous solutions to the complex economic problems that every industrialized country has to deal with.  He has led so many people up the garden path and they have finally bought into his eminently outlandish ideas.  All through the campaign he has taunted the Clintons and the Obamas of Ivory tower elite having little idea how tough it has been for common folks on the ground in all these years.  One should not forget that he’s very much part of that same elite that he keeps deriding; the only difference I can see is that where their elitism is compassionate in nature, his is the ruthless one. 

   As far as his downright obnoxious and misogynistic views go, who knows, subliminally a core of Trump’s support base might be in tacit agreement with all that shit.  Now that he has been able to pull off one of the biggest political heists of all time, he should be given the chance to succeed.  Trump has promised so much and has projected the image of someone who has got all the answers to every question that you can’t help thinking that he’s setting everyone up for a severe disappointment.  The proof of the pudding would be in the eating.

    Personally, I don’t like Donald Trump for a somewhat different reason.  I don’t think he has got any time for people who are on the margins of society.  Being a person with physical disabilities, I consider myself very much on the margins of society.  He has an undisguised contempt for anyone who does not share  his worldview.  His whole life so far has been a result oriented industry and success is the only currency that counts no matter how unaffordable the cost.  We shall see.  

A few days ago, I happened to watch a video on YouTube.  It was in Istanbul 2010, a literary get-together of sorts.  V.S.  Naipaul was sitting in a chair on a raised platform alongside the host of the evening.  She was trying to draw him out to talk about his lifetime of work as a writer and what drove him to be so utterly consumed by the craft of writing.  I could detect an undertone of humor in Sir Vidia Naipaul’s responses.  Maybe it was my imagination, I’m not sure, but the passage of time and age (he would have been 77 at that time) had certainly mellowed him down.  The asperity of temperament was missing.

   I relate this because I had just finished reading his 600-page book ‘India: A Million Mutinies Now’.  This was his third and final book on India during the course of his extensive travels across this vast land, meeting and listening to all kinds of people from every stratum of society between 1962 and 1988.  I don’t intend to do any kind of review for I am hardly up to the task.  The imagination would not support the effort.  Every time I read anything written by Naipaul, it impels me to examine and come face to face with my deepest emotions.  I think when the integrity of the writer shines through and the personality of the writer recedes humbly into the background, what you are left with is the most distilled aspect of the human condition.  Coming back to that interaction in Istanbul, the video which I referred to, I couldn’t help noticing a distinct lack of articulation.  Some obscure inability to give verbal direction to the life of the mind.  Sometimes it does happen in life that you cannot clearly express what you’ve been doing so diligently all your life.  There was a question about the shift from fiction from early years to the nonfiction in the latter part of his writings.

  Growing up on the small island of Trinidad in the Caribbean of the 30s and late 40s, the despairing feeling of having come to the end of the ‘material’, as he put it, there was this realization that he was not equipped to accurately and truthfully write about other societies whose soil he was not properly rooted in, the inner dynamics he could only feel superficially.  Then, what does he do?  He knows only one fact, that he’s not equipped to do anything but writing.  The passion is all consuming, the burden of ambition is pressing down upon him.  Leaving that small island and the people there with no sense of history or ambition was more than relief; it was also a kind of release.  More than 50 years of relentless travel, undertaking the searing examination of the making and unmaking of post-colonial society, the genius of Naipaul perhaps lies in his great success in overflying the limitations of his own social mornings and turning it into a moment of renewal and liberation.  You take the dark soil of tradition and transmute its energy into arguably the most vigorous and challenging voices of our time, or as he put it ever so simply, ‘’ making my way into the world’’.

   Vidia Naipaul is a master of clean cut prose.  He doesn’t use big words in his neat sentences, and yet he can express the most complicated of ideas, the most profound of human emotions in the simplest of ways.  If you have the ears for it, you can hear the authentic voice of the writer.  You can only know him through his words, there is no other way.  I feel a strong kinship with him.