The other day, the Prime minister was telling the students at a university in Banaras about the virtues of being young and free-minded individuals they have to become if the country has to move forward.  Maybe the grotesque irony of the situation was completely lost on him.  Because just a couple of days before that, there was a brutal crackdown on a group of students by the police on the campus of one of the premier liberal arts university in the country, the JNU in the capital New Delhi.  Their supposed crime was that they were chanting 'anti India/anti national' slogans.  This peaceful agitation so unnerved the government about the imminent collapse of the mighty Indian state that it used methods which was grossly disproportionate to the so called 'treasonous act' by a handful of disaffected youngsters.  Anyone not familiar with the devious high-handedness of the Indian state would have thought this something out of a banana republic!

   There is a basic problem with the attitude of the government.  They believe that they have a monopoly over what constitute nationalism and patriotism.  When you start defining these nebulous and subjective facets of community life into a rigid structure of your ideological value system; then it is a very short step before your patriotism turns into a worldview grounded in jingoism, reaction and half-truths, that can do incalculable damage to this country.  To me, the freedom of speech and expression is absolute and non-negotiable.  I must have the right to express my views without any fear, and this also includes the freedom to mock and ridicule any religion or nationality, and if in the process, somebody's sentiments are offended, so be it.  As long as people are not indulging in violent activities, why can't the government just let us be?  Even the Constitution has not defined nationalism and has left it to the individual's devices.  I am much more concerned about the health of the Republic which need to be guarded against the growing virus of intolerance.

Nowadays I have almost completely given up on watching national news channels.  I realized that news on Indian television is not about the good old fashioned reporting from the ground, but mostly about talking heads in the studio.  I am certain that it's a part of a deliberate ploy to generate so much sound and fury that the real issues gets hopelessly lost in the mad cacophony.  Instead of adding to my knowledge about anything, they were only giving me headache.  So I stopped, I now occasionally tune into international networks like the BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera.  They are much more sober and have a lot more informed debates and discussion.

  What I do mostly these days, is that almost every night-- except maybe on weekend--I listen to the discourse by Osho.  As soon as I'm done with my supper, I get the audio recordings of his lectures turned on and wrap myself in a cocoon of my own world.  The soothing voice of Rajneesh.  It coaxes and cajoles, provokes and agitates in equal measure, but most importantly, it expands your mind and adds a focus to your consciousness.  So, here I am lying down, trying to get cozy.  I have shut my eyes and I'm just letting the words wash over me.  What is it that I'm looking for?  That truth can only be conveyed and understood in silence.  It is more important to know for yourself than to blindly accept, because when you just accept something in the name of religion or tradition, it is a totally borrowed wisdom and not your own.  There is some meditation on life and death.  You come to understand that your life is just one end of the spectrum.  The other end of that is death and that neither can exist without the other.  When there is no disease, there is health.  When there is no health, there is disease.  When there is no light, there is darkness, just like when there is no darkness, there is light.  This human existence is based on polarity, a kind of tension between opposing forces.  The future never comes, rather what is a slow accumulation of present moment, we delude ourselves as future.  These and plenty of other things swirl in my mind, and then I retire for the night.  

One of the main reasons why I am so hooked onto this highly niche TV show like ‘’ The Affair’’ is that the main protagonist plays the character of a writer.  I have always been instinctively drawn to anyone who is able to write, to be able to put down his thoughts on paper.  To me, nothing can give such a boost to your ego as to see your innermost thinking translated on paper.  Jean-Paul-Sartre has said that you reach the age of reason when you are 30, so ever since I reached the age of reason, I have deluded myself that I am a writer.  It doesn’t matter that I am not a writer nor am I ever likely to become one, but my spiritual connection to the people whose work I look up to and admire will remain there.  I’ll forever be in debt of people like Philip Roth and John Updike for their provocative exploration of various facets of American identity and what it means to just get up every morning and do your level best not to be derailed by life’s wreaking ball.

   But it was only when I discovered the writing of VS Naipaul that I knew what is it like to inhabit the mind of someone who is utterly devoted to the craft of writing.  The anxiety is fueled by the ambition, and the ambition is tempered by the anxiety.  Whenever I try to write anything, I have Sir Vidia Naipaul as a kind of muse in my mind.  His neat sentences, the penetrative power of observation and the ability to see what is unseen tells you not so much about the joys of writing as to the turmoil of the whole enterprise.  What I have learned is that the personality of a writer is a dysfunctional personality.  You have to be a bit of a masochist to endure long periods of silence and solitude.  It is generally believed that if there was a classroom full of writers than Naipaul will be the teacher.  For him every book that he produced was a sheer agony, a torment.  But he kept at it for more than fifty years.  I feel a certain kinship with him in that like him, I have also tried in my limited way to not let this world drag me down and to be able to keep my head above the water.  A vague idea, an unfocussed ambition to be another kind of man, to make your way in the world, to find your center.  You live with something in your head, you procrastinate to the point where every thought becomes a torment and yet you can’t live without this poison and that is the essence of Naipaul for me.  This is what he said once, ‘’ one isn’t born one’s self.  One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas—and you have to work through it all’’

In December 1992, I was 16 and I think I was also a bit of a philistine.  I had an exaggerated sense of deference for the opinions of the elders around me.  I hung on to their every word in matters political and social.  So when the news filtered in on that smoky winter evening on the 6^th December all those years ago that a mob of Hindu zealots had successfully demolished the 16^th century medieval structure known as Babri Mosque; I felt elated.  Even though I am ashamed to admit it now, but and that time I was imbued with a sense of accomplishment at what had been achieved.

  My happiness was on two counts, one, I swallowed willingly the propaganda launched by the right-wing that how that historic monument was an insult to the Hindu pride since, according to them, this was place where Lord Ram was believed to have been born.  And two, because this issue had been festering for such a long time and had created so much unrest in the country, that I thought if the cause will disappear, the effect will cease.  Not for me all this talk in the press about the image of the nation taking a fearful beating.  I hardly cared that this mob vandalism was almost filled with incomprehensible fury that was tribal in nature and scope. 

  Now that I am older and hopefully wiser, and with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that the destruction on that day was the thin end of the wedge, and triggered a vicious cycle of reaction and counter reaction fueled by intense hatred on the part of both reactionary Hindus and Muslims on either side and we have paid and are still paying a terrible price for it.  But what stays with me is how much distance I have covered from being one kind of a person I was from another kind of person I am.  

There is a kind of asymmetrical divide in India between people who like and admire Arundhati Roy and those who positively hate her.  I belong to the former and I make no bones about it.  I recently read a piece where writer and critic Amitav Kumar was in conversation with Roy.  It was a fascinating piece in that the questions were not your usual run of the mill stuff but quite probing and intelligent.   It helps that the person who is asking the questions also happens to be a very perceptive writer and critique in his own right.  But in my mind I kept thinking what is it about Arundhati, this petit and gracefully ageing lady that continues to arouse such strong emotions in this country?  So much so that even though I have enormous respect for her as a writer and a public intellectual, I tend to avoid discussing about her in a gathering, not because I can’t, but because the kind of vile things that would be said about her will be highly intolerable to me, that’s why I escape.  I suspect part of the reason behind this outrage by a large sections of the middle classes could be that she doesn’t conform to any of our preconceived notion of celebrity hood in this country.  She is not part of the charmed circle where you feed off and feed into the illusion of India having become the superpower of the globe; she doesn’t coddle us with tired clichés about human rights and democracy.

       For her these are just the non-negotiable starting point towards the larger question of the idea of justice, without which any society would implode.  Her polemics on big dams and the possible ecological disasters, her ceaseless advocacy of the rights of the tribal and all the other marginalized sections of this land who have fallen by the wayside in our march for development and her uncompromising stand against any country having nuclear weapons never mind India, has shattered the carefully constructed certainties of the elite and middle classes brought up on a heady dose of material development and aggressive nationalism.  She is your party pooper, a rain or your parade if you will.  And nobody likes that.  Just to think it could all have been so different.  When she won ‘’The Booker’’ prize in 1997 as a luminously beautiful 35 years of age, the world was at her feet.  She could have churned one bestseller after another, could have been part of the jet setting literary circuit.  But she spurned all of that and not only has she not written another novel since, but she launched herself full throttle into taking up lost and unpopular causes.  For many this decision of her has been nothing short of betrayal.  It really takes courage to go against the grain, swim against the tide of history.  Roy is neither an armchair critic nor does she lives in her own Ivory Tower.   She is a remarkable woman.  She lives a pretty lonely existence in her Zor Bagh apartment in South Delhi; in fact, she doesn’t even employ a housemaid.  But she refuses to be part of the narrative of victimhood.  She travels extensively throughout the country. From the distant North East to the Narmada valley of Gujarat, from the heavily militarized zone of Kashmir to the hotbed of Maoist insurgency in the dense forests of central India, our very own heart of darkness, constantly engaging with the people at the receiving end of the tyranny of the Indian state.  She amplifies their struggle in a uniquely mesmerizing prose of hers.  I may not agree with her all the time but I salute her courage to court unpopularity and gaze unflinchingly at the sordid and the unpleasant.

   

The enemy is hard to distinguish.  The enemy is hiding in plain sight.  Those barbarians who committed this ghastly massacre of innocents in Paris were thoroughly radicalized by the crazed fanatics who have The Book to fuel their grand delusion of a pious and heavenly afterlife.  They use ancient and primordial grievances as their weapon of choice to rage against the way of life of us infidels.   We all know how all this is going to play out from hereon.  The state will react with all the fury at its disposal, it has no choice really, and it has to be seen to be doing something after all.  There will be further shrinking of the already eroded civil liberties, the tyranny of snooping and surveillance will intensify even more.  International travel is going to become even more of a nightmare than it already is.  So, in a sense the terrorist have succeeded in one of their objective that is to destroy the implicit trust we have for one another as a human beings, that trust which is bedrock of any civilized society.  Anyone trying to proffer ‘root cause’ theory just to put things in perspective will be shouted down as a traitor and worse.  Ultra-right-wing forces will have a field day with a kind of ‘I told you so’ expressions on their faces.  I just keep asking myself where and what should we aim our incoherent and unfocused anger at?  Should we just keep going round in circles like a headless chicken with our numb despair?  

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.