Every day, roughly four hundred people in India leave their homes but they do not return.  Almost all of are killed in road accidents around the country.  India has the terrifying and dubious distinction of being the country with the highest number of road accident deaths anywhere in the world.  The tragic death of a newly appointed cabinet minister and a prominent leader of the BJP, Mr. Gopinath Munde a few days ago in the heart of metropolitan New Delhi is just one of the latest in a series of chilly reminders about the realities on the Indian roads, where anything goes, might is right and the law of jungle prevails.  It is seriously appalling how anyone can get a driver’s license and become a Rambo on the road in this country.  Even my neighbours thirteen years old son has a free run of the family car, in fact, the parents take a lot of pride in the fact that their son can handle a four wheeler at this age, never mind that he could grievously hurt a few on the streets.  The traffic rules are observed more in breach than practice in this country.  In most cases, the violations of rules don't incur a fine of more than hundred rupees, that is less than two dollars, whereas in the US it could be anywhere between a hundred to a thousand dollars.  But here even if the cops catch you DUI, all you have to do is just fish out a few crisp currency notes in his face and you have made the day for the poor sod!  From not wearing a seat belt, to overcrowding, to overtaking from the wrong side, everything is par for the course in a place where human life has no real value with people falling off the bus tops, people falling off train tops, people tumbling down from construction sites.  There have been quite a few instances where some big shot or high and mighty mowing people down while they were sleeping on the footpaths by their shiny SUVs and then trying to buy their way out of trouble. The mind reels at the senselessness of it all.  With India adding ten million vehicles every year, the situation is only going to get worse if we don’t make safety and following the rules and regulation a national and moral mission. 

A renowned doctor in my city, a dermatologist who also happens to be the principal of theoldest medical college in the region, the Patna Medical College and Hospital, the other day molested a female patient of his whom he took inside his chamber on the pretext of examining her in private.  The girl screamed for help, and her parents, who were waiting outside, gathered other people around and forced the police to lodge a case and take the doctor into custody.  To the utter disbelief of many, the culprit was released after completing some formality.  It goes without saying that the law is not uniformly applied across the country.  If you have power and money, the chances are that you can literally get away with murder.

Thinking about the incident, I asked myself, what kind of a disgusting creature would do a thing like that?  What madness possesses those who are in position of power and authority to force themselves sexually on an unwilling party? It is not a power game because you already have it. It can’t be about pleasure for unless the both people are willing participant, it can be anything but pleasing.  I suspect it comes from a sadistic core of human heart that finds its refuge in darkest form of perversity and the only weapon at our command is a fearful exposer of these men.

Modifying the Modification

I am writing this some three weeks before the results of the national elections come out, and barring some major miracle, this present Congress led government is history. But boy, what an election it is.  I don’t think that in recent times we have seen an election that is so full of vitriol and scorn being hurled at each other by the rival camps.  It has all come down to one -man and what he stands for. I don’t know if any one political leader has polarized public opinion so much as has Mr Narendra Modi.  This three time chief minister carries excess baggage from his dubious past. His admirers see him as this strong and decisive leader who has turned his state of Gujrat into a land of untold prosperity and riches and given a chance, would wrought similar transformation across the whole of India.  On the other hand, there are legions of his detractors who are pathologically opposed to him and believe that he’s got blood on his hands of innocent Muslims who were systemically butchered in a pogrom unleashed in the aftermath of the ghastly burning alive of over sixty Hindu devotees in a train coach when they were returning to Gujrat from the holy town of Ayodhya.

If you ask me, where do I stand in all this, then for a wishy-washy liberal like me, I would say that I am neither in this camp or that but am firmly sitting on the barbed fence of public opinion and as anyone can see, it can be a very uncomfortable experience!  I am not somebody who is hopelessly in love with Modi and identify with his muscular nationalist impulses, in fact, once upon a time I positively hated him. But with the passage of time and gaining of perspective, this has changed somewhat.  And I am certainly not from the club of bleeding hearts, who see in him the Devil incarnate. As is usually the case, there are facts and there are interpretation.  For every argument made on his behalf by his admirers, there are counter arguments offered by his detractors, and since the principal opposition party the BJP has named him as its prime ministerial candidate, and there is more than a good chance that he would become one, thanks to the appalling level of economic mismanagement and stinking corruption by the present Congress led government, we have to be ready for the possibility.  Now that Mr Modi from the early age of eight has been trained by the RSS.  This right wing Hindu cultural/religious/nationalist organisation must have had a profound effect on the man in his formative years.  The RSS is a bigoted entity whose world view is imbued with a strong sense of Hindu chauvinism and large scale antipathy against the religious minorities, particularly the Muslims.  Once Modi famously refused to wear a skullcap, a common headgear for the Muslims and when recently asked about this in an interview, his reasoning went something like how it is his choice to honour his tradition and ethos, but that doesn’t mean that he disrespects the cultural ethos of others, and anyway, he has never believed in the politics of tokenism, according to him, it should be justice for all and appeasement to none.  Of course, any intelligent interviewer would have asked then how come on the campaign trail he is seen putting on all sorts of gear, from Sikh turban in Punjab to tribal headgear in Nagaland, why he even wore Mundu, the traditional attire down south when he visited over there. Wasn’t that appeasement or pandering to a particular ethnic group? Or does he believe that at a subliminal level, these groups are part of the larger pan-hindutva heritage? In that case the targeted sections are hardly likely to be amused. But it was not asked and we would never know.

To go into cynical politics behind the communal violence in this country is beyond the scope of this write-up, except it would suffice to say that no, absolutely no political party worth its salt in this country is above using religion, caste or ethnicity to promote its vote bank and even justify their existence.  Just that some have done it brazenly and some have been more subtle and devious about it.  Coming back to Modi phenomena, first, you have to understand what has gone before.  We have had such a lacklustre and uninspiring leadership over the last decade under Manmohan Singh that the vast majority of the voters are thirsting for change (yours truly included).  Our current prime minister is a very shy, retiring and self-effacing kind of personality.  Although a decent human being and a scholar to boot, he has always been conscious of the fact that he owes his job to the goodwill of Sonia Gandhi.  Add to the fact that he is not given to the rhetorical flourish of an Obama, you are saddled with a man who has brought a baffling timidity to the job that has led to all round drift and paralysis in governance.

Now turn all these attributes around hundred and eighty degrees, and you’ve got Narendra Damodardas Modi. In fact, never in the history of an Indian elections has anyone been putting himself forward for the top job with such a gung-ho approach as Mr Modi is doing. He looks like a man possessed with a messianic zeal, our own Moses leading his followers to Mount Sinai to deliver Ten Commandment! He not only will and does relish the heat of the battle, but seems right at home.  For most of the middle class and poor Indians, life is a hard slog at the best of times in India, and these are far from the best of times if you have to survive on a modest income.  In comes a person who promises a complete rupture from the past and who knows how to tap into the simmering discontent of the people, he is selling them the dream of rapid upward social mobility, and the masses are lapping it all up. In the final analysis, elections in a poor and under developed country like India are almost always about protests.  And to that extent, people are really coming out in numbers to register their, support for Modi, who has seemingly evolved over the years.  Only time will tell whether so many people are buying into false dawn or a paradigm shift has indeed taken place. I am neither apologising for Modi nor am I demonizing him. I have only stated what I have felt and observed.

I can live with the term patriot but I can’t abide by the tag nationalist attributed to me. Batause for me, nationalism is another form of racism. It appeals to your primal instincts for superiority and territorial one upmanship. In this election season where hyper nationalism and the demand for muscular leadership is gaining a lot of traction among the voters, I feel somewhat disillusioned by it all.  The growing intolerance, the thinking that you can shout and bully your way in to whatever it is that you want to achieve and all sense of civility and propriety be damned. Being disillusioned is also a way of caring for your country.  Except that rather than wallowing in disappointment at the shrinking of the liberal space, you cultivate a kind of irreverence for the authority and disdain is the only weapon to puncture a lot of bloated and self-righteous egos.  It is not that by being more religious is fostering some kind of spiritual renaissance in society.  On the contrary, all kinds of mumbo-jumbo is being touted as a panacea for all the ills with such a profound smugness that you can’t help but being mesmerized by the awesome retardness of the human mind.

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.