The only saving grace in Justice Pratibha Rani's judgment was that Kanhayia Kumar was granted bail.  Other than that, it was an awful judgment, badly worded and full of moralizing sermon on patriotism and nationalism.  I mean, for the life of me, I cannot understand why our judges can't stick to the facts of the case and see that the basic individual rights and provisions in the Constitution are not being violated.  Must they get on a high horse and start offering gratuitous lecture as to how or what a patriotic person should be like?  Whether it's me or Kanhayia or anyone else for that matter, nobody needs a certificate on patriotism from anybody.  Everyone is a patriot in his or her own way.

Arnab Goswami and Sudhir Chowdhry are the bosses of two of the most widely watched news networks in India.  The former runs TIMES NOW, the English one and the latter ZEE NEWS, the Hindi one.  They both earnestly claim to be a conscientious television journalist who are driven by the noblest of the professional objectives; but the reality is quite different.  Every night on Primetime, these gentlemen get on their soap box and launch into a harangue against anyone or anything that doesn't fit into their narrow vision of what constitutes 'National interest'.  To my mind, they have done a great disservice to the community of television journalists in this country.  If you watch them, which I don't by the way, you can't help but being perversely  mesmerized by the kind of reactionary demagogue they become, denouncing anyone who tries to put across a liberal or sober element into the discussion.  Theirs is an agenda driven show in the guise of a news programme, where they would try to suck up to the powers that be and promote mostly the Hindu right-wing world view.  They would ask you a loaded question and then trap you if you are on the side of reason rather than emotion.  The pomposity, the exaggerated notions of patriotism where there is no place for nuance or complexity can be quite unnerving if you are not a smart cookie.  They have been a kind of unfortunate trend setter in that the news stories are not so much reported as they are influenced.  Entrapment of unsuspecting people, morphed videos, manipulated editing, everything and anything is a fair game in the mad rush for getting the maximum  eyeballs, the ethics be damned.   The angry shout, the hectoring tone, this constant bullying into accepting one particular point of view makes you wonder where have all the decency from the public life gone?  There's complete certainty on their part that there can be no competing or contesting ideas of nationalism in this diverse and pluralistic society of ours.

   The white noise of lies, slander and half truths night after night have reduced the public discourse to the level of the gutter.  I have personally seen people who take their cue from these news channels, internalizing the mindset of a lynch mob where there is no room for any doubt about anything whatsoever.  There is a behavior pattern which is animated by an almost puritanical rage against individual liberty and personal freedom.  The old tactics is resorted to where if you can't take on somebody with logic and sober argument, you abuse and become shriller and shriller.  These people might be in the business of asking for banning, hanging and punishing the so called 'anti-national elements', but I would never like that to happen to these pious hate-mongers on Primetime television.  Because no matter how distasteful and offensive I find their proposition to my sensibility, I do believe that they have every right to express them.  I stand in opposition to everything that they represent but I would never like to become intolerant as they are.  What I can do however is keep challenging the bigotry and prejudice, and keep pushing the boundaries of civilized debate.

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.