India Post

On squeezed middle, occupy and bunga bunga

2011-12-03T14:31:00.001+05:30

It seems the Oxford English Dictionary has chosen ‘squeezed middle’ as word of the year. Of course there’s the desirable kind of squeezed middle, that almost everyone in the upper middle aspires to, but the squeezed middle in the OED is sterner stuff. It refers to British Labour party politician Ed Miliband’s “term for those seen as bearing the brunt of government tax burdens whilst having the least with which to relieve it”.

Maybe the British take their taxes seriously. Here in India, of course, it’s a bit of a joke, haha. Only 33.5 million people of our 1.21 billion pay any personal income tax at all, according to data quoted by our Minister of State for Finance SS Palanimanickam in Parliament in August. That’s 2.77 per cent of the population. If you’re bearing the brunt of taxes, like me, you should be wondering why and looking for ways to get out of bearing this brunt. Try unemployment, or a brief holiday in Tihar jail in the company of many rich and famous personalities, or both.

Some among the 2.77 per cent of us here are ‘squeezed’, and comprise the 'squeezed middle', which raises a very important question: where, in a body, is the middle located? My knowledge of biology and mathematics caused me to suspect that the middle would be sort of halfway up from the bottom...a little above waist level, generally speaking. Of course this is rubbish. In India, as we’ve been hearing expert commissions say for a few years now, somewhere between 37 and 77 percent of the population live on less than Rs 20 a day. The difference between those two percentages is about half a billion people, but hey, no one said statistics is a precise science, or that we know how to count beyond 99,999, except for tax and bribe purposes. Besides, how would we have Important Meetings without some proper sounding numbers? What would the Planning Commission do?

Even their poverty line, pegged at Rs 32 per person per day in urban areas, leaves about 30 or 40 or 50 percent of the population below the said line. Your guess on exact numbers is as good as mine, which is as good as the Planning Commission’s, because actually no one in this country knows the correct answer to this question. They ought to make it the Rs 5 crore question in Kaun Banega Crorepati and wait for the right answer.

So what I was saying is that the squeezed middle here is a part of the 2.77 per cent who pay tax. These are folks who spend at least Rs 100 a day overall, or Rs 3,000 a month each, which makes them rich compared to the poor sods who get by on Rs 32 a day. The squeezed middle is actually near the top! About ear level, I’d say.

Meanwhile a survey by a ‘wealth prospecting’ agency called Wealth X reported last month that 8,200 Really Rich People own more than 50 per cent of India’s total wealth. These are folks who own a minimum of Rs 150 crore each. They’re at the top, and the middle has to be below the top, so again, the squeezed middle is about ear level.

It’s a very thin squeezed middle, so we can safely say that in India’s gargantuan body, there’s very little between the ears.

Perhaps that is also the condition of the Oxford English Dictionary. They had stronger contenders for the global word of the year in English, but chose the one they did.

Occupy, as in ‘Occupy Wall Street’, was among the contenders. There’s plenty more force in that one. The spirit of 'occupy' is moving people and buffeting governments around the world. It’s the genuine angst that fed into the Arab Spring – remember it started with a street vendor’s self-immolation in Tunisia. His last words before he set himself on fire were reported to be, “How do you expect me to make a living?”

He was maddened by poverty and corruption after he’d had his wares confiscated by the municipal authorities.

Think of how many times a day such things happen in India. The municipal truck that comes by and steals away the street vendor’s good until he or she pays a bribe to recover it...you’ve probably seen it happen at some point. The municipal guys, like the beat cops, are from the 'squeezed middle'. They're fighting the Arab Spring, and the Occupy.

Occupy is a meaningful word around the world.

So is another of the contenders that lost out. I refer here to ‘bunga bunga’, meaning parties of the sort former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is world-famous for having. These involve several bare-naked ladies and quality intoxicants.

Now that’s a word with clear appeal all around the planet. Forget Wall Street...who in the squeezed middle wouldn't wish to occupy, or shall we say, squeeze into, Berlusconi's villa?

The beauty of faith and the wisdom of doubt

2011-09-22T16:09:00.001+05:30

There’s a newstudy out in the latest issue of the journal Nature that says people areoverconfident because it has evolutionary benefits. The study’s authors havestated, with confidence, that in the evolutionary scheme of things, in allcompetitive situations where there is doubt about the outcome of a contest,overconfidence is the best strategy.

I always take‘studies’ with a pinch of salt. Given the right funding, I can confidentlystate that a study can prove anything. I’ve read studies that ‘prove’ thatmoderate drinking is good and bad, that vegetarianism is good and bad, thatthis food or that food makes us fat, or doesn’t, and so on.

Why, there areeven studies that say human beings are responsible for global warming, andothers that confidently say this is all hot air!

It seems to methat a lot of researchers are having a lot of fun proving everything and theiropposites. I hope someone will fund me to study this hypothesis.

There may besomething to this overconfidence study, though.

The key point infavour of overconfidence is that it propels people to attempt feats they wouldotherwise give up on even before starting. It makes people attempt the barelypossible, and even the impossible. In many instances they perish in theattempt. In some, they succeed, and thereby make history.

The grandeststories of human achievement and endeavor are made of such stuff. If theadventurers and explorers of yore had not given in to overconfidence, theywouldn’t have pointed their rickety wooden ships at the open and unchartedseas, and set sail, guided by instinct and the stars.

That they didworked to their favour, and arguably, to ours.

A similarspirit, buoyed with a faith in divine powers, inspired and enabled ourancestors to build the great structures they did. It seems incredible toimagine that the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids, and all thegreat cathedrals of Europe were built before machines as we know them had beeninvented. They were all made with human and animal labour, and the most basictools.

Today we have somuch by way of technology, but nowhere in the world do we see marvels ofarchitecture like the ones of old. In India, especially, we only see variationsof ugliness and mediocrity.

A part of thefailing is because of lack of vision and imagination. A part is due to lack ofthe kind of royal purses that enabled those ventures. And a part is probablydue to lack of that spirit of overconfidence, and an erosion of faith.

Anyone who somuch as suggested building a new Taj Mahal in today’s day and age would belaughed at as mad, find NGOs campaigning against them for wastage of money, andwake up to find the Income Tax and CBI at their doors.

We live inpractical times. Our thoughts are of taxes and hikes, not earth and heaven.

Even practicalpeople, however, tend to suffer from a particular delusion that affects themajority of humankind.

It is well knownthat most people think they are right all the time. Psychologists have beennoting this for years. They even have a word for it. It’s called‘overestimation’.

Overestimationapplies especially to beliefs. We all tend to believe that our views and valuesare the most correct, or the theories we subscribe to, the best.

This is whereoverconfidence can start to go seriously wrong. It’s one thing to build a TajMahal or set sail upon an unknown sea. It’s another to embark upon a witchhunt.

The people whowanted to burn Galileo Galilei at the stake (he was let off but spent hisremaining life in house arrest) were probably good folks with firm conviction.They truly believed the earth was the centre of the universe, and decided thatGalileo, who said the sun was the centre, was a heretic. Galileo made his ownposition worse by supporting his fellow scientist Nicholas Copernicus’ viewthat the earth moves around the sun.

In the event, itturned out that the folks who had such confidence in their beliefs - the samepeople who built the magnificent cathedrals and palaces of Florence, andsupported artists from Michelangelo down - were wrong.

And so it goes.Even today, most of the troubles in the world are on account of people’scertainty that they are right.

The worstexamples of this can be seen in fundamentalists of all hues.

For example,Osama bin Laden was a good man in his own way. He followed a certain code ofconduct and fought for it in his own way.

His problem wasthat he believed only his way was right, and every other way was wrong. He wasprepared to kill or die for it.

That didn’t dothe world, or him, much good.

There may begreat value in confidence and overconfidence, but there is at least equal meritin doubt.

Honest doubt iswhat makes science possible. It enables questioning of strongly held beliefs,and allows for modification of those beliefs over time. In science, a theory istrue only until it is proved false, or partially true. That happens with eventhe best of theories. For example, Newton’s theory of gravitation was held tobe universally true, until Einstein’s came along.

The scientificway has brought us far. It has made life much, much better for most ofhumankind. It has literally brought us from darkness into light.

Yet there areunintended consequences.

The scientificworldview has diminished faith. A consequence of this is that it has diminishednearly all human endeavor to the utilitarian.

Our naturalreflex now is to reduce all activity to accounts of profit and loss. We only dothings for comfort and material gain.

And so we areleft with a world that has all the beauty and grandeur of a balance sheet.

9/11: The long shadow in South Asia

2011-09-11T14:53:00.000+05:30

Today is 9/11. It’s a date charged with meaning and history. Few of us who were old enough to remember the day will ever forget what we were doing when the two hijacked planes hit the twin towers in New York a decade ago.

I used to work for India Today newsmagazine at the time. I remember hearing of the first plane hitting the towers, and heading towards the TV a floor below to see it. By the time I got there the second plane had hit. My hair stood on end, because I realised this could not be coincidence.

Half an hour later, the Pentagon took a hit. The US president was rushed to a bomb shelter somewhere because the Americans realised they were under attack from an unidentified foe. They scrambled their fighter jets, but the jets didn’t really know what to shoot at.

In days that followed, it became clear that the attacks had been coordinated by a group named Al Qaeda, and the name of Osama bin Laden became synonymous with terrorism throughout the world.

In the decade that followed, a lot happened. The Americans invaded Afghanistan and found themselves battling Mujahideen forces they had helped arm and train. Pakistan was quickly drawn into the conflict, and had to choose between supporting the Americans or going to war against them, and possibly India. General Pervez Musharraf quickly decided that this was a losing proposition, and so Pakistan began a painful turnaround to confront its former protégés, including the Taliban, which was then in government in Kabul.

The Americans and their western allies have managed to knock the Taliban out of government. They eventually killed Osama bin Laden too, only a few months ago. They have used targeted assassination of key figures as part of the strategy to eliminate terror attacks directed against them.

However, Afghanistan remains a mess, and its president Hamid Karzai is by all accounts little more than the mayor of Kabul. His control does not extend beyond the borders of the capital. The American plans to withdraw from Afghanistan have come to nought. They are stuck there in an expensive and apparently endless conflict, much as the Russians before them.

The American decision to stay on for another decade in Afghanistan may have come as something of a surprise to the Taliban.

Friends visiting from there had mentioned that the Taliban were already wondering if China would be the next to attack them. They had written off the Americans as goners.

The Americans on their part were keen to depart, because they figured they could continue the war through drones and cruise missiles. No one can actually run a government in Kabul, or Baghdad, or anywhere else, unless they have the military hardware to stop cruise missiles and drones.

The calculation was simple: the Taliban could either strike a deal with them, and share power in Afghanistan, or continue the fight and stew.

The Taliban have apparently chosen to stew, and keep the Americans in the pot with them.

The other folks who feel the heat from this conflict are the Pakistanis, and to a lesser extent, the Indians. Pakistan suffers more than we do because they are the frontline state in this conflict. They’ve had a proper war going on in various parts of their country these last 10 years. Their internal convulsions from this war are continuing.

Both India and Pakistan have suffered grievously from terrorism. Yet there is an element of irony in the terror tragedies that befell Pakistan.

Their military headquarters were attacked, a naval base in Karachi was attacked, the Marriott hotel in Islamabad was attacked, to name only a few. The attackers in every instance had earlier found shelter, and even support, from elements in the Pakistani state establishment.

A lot of the monsters they created have turned on them now. And yet, elements in the Pakistani state continue to harbour and protect many of these characters. The raid that got Osama proved this beyond any reasonable doubt.

Pakistani hawks keep their pet terrorists in their protection as weapons to be used as and when needed. Osama, of course, was also a blank cheque because in the name of the ‘war on terror’ the Pakistanis got billions of dollars from the Americans.

The weapons are used to ensure that Pakistan has leverage in bargaining with India or Afghanistan or the US.

The strategic goals of Pakistan are at odds with those of the other countries. India will not give them all of Kashmir, however much they may want it. Nor will the Afghans and Americans give Pakistan’s cronies the keys to Kabul.

The Pakistani state is therefore going to find itself in a bind as long as it continues to desire what it cannot realistically expect to get.

Terrorism has escaped from the camps and spread through the country. The genie is out of the bottle, and will not hesitate to bite the hand that fed it.

India, which is a close neighbour, suffers along because of the conflicting ambitions of Pakistani hardliners. The problem for India is Kashmir. Indian ‘nationalists’ and Pakistani hawks both demand the entire state for themselves. Kashmiris from the valley generally demand freedom, azadi. They have a strong sense of a unique history and identity separate from that of India or Pakistan.

The situation is complicated because the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir was not ethnically homogenous. There’s Jammu, with its largely Hindu Dogra population, the valley of Kashmir with its Kashmiri Muslim population, and Ladakh with its Tibetan Buddhist population.

On the other side of the Line of Control, too, there are various peoples in the Pakistani administered part of Kashmir and in Gilgit-Baltiststan. Jats, Rajputs and various tribal groups speaking different languages live in those areas.

It is unlikely that all of these peoples would choose to live under the rule of Kashmiris from the valley. The demand for a united and independent Kashmir must take this fact into account. Kashmiris have to recognise that Jammu & Kashmir is also a mini India in itself.

Pakistan’s demand for all of Kashmir is even more untenable. India cannot, and is not, going to hand Kashmir over, and that should be apparent by now. Nor does the Kashmiri demand for azadi translate into Pakistani rule. Freedom is presumably not the same as bondage under a different master.

India is the status quoist power in the equation. The Indian government and people would, in all likelihood, settle for a peaceful and democratic administration in the part of Jammu and Kashmir now under Indian control.

The only dispute here is over the extent of autonomy, and that is negotiable, as long as it stops short of secession.

An honourable solution can be found that would end or diminish terror attacks in India, and the painful conflict in Kashmir, if all sides back away from their maximalist positions.

Sarkari style

2011-06-14T03:06:00.001+05:30

I wonder if there is a word for fear of government offices. Google doesn’t seem to know, which probably means there isn’t. However, since this is a common condition that surely afflicts a vast number of people in India, I would like to suggest a term. In departure from the tradition of Greek and Latin roots, we could call it Sarkarophobia.
I suffer from Sarkarophobia. This is strange considering my father worked all his life for the government, and I grew up making occasional visits to his office. This was in the days before computers made their appearance on desks, so files and paperweights and cups of tea were the only objects on desks. It all seemed very innocuous.
The scary nature of the files and paperweights became clear to me much later.
I began to discover the true power and weight of these things when I came to Delhi and bought a third-hand car. I needed a driving license, so I went to the regional transport office (RTO) to apply for one. I was immediately confronted by an army of touts. Walking past these persistent individuals, I tried to find the right forms, but had to ask several people before I was even able to find the right counter to collect this from. There was a rugby scrimmage going on around it. This is not a sport I fancy, but a man must do what a man must do. I entered the fray, and eventually emerged with the form.
It demanded certain things of me that I did not possess, such as proof of residence. I did not have a ration card. I use a mobile phone and had no landline, so the phone bill was not valid proof. The electricity bills were in the landlord’s name, not mine. My rent agreement, while apparently a legal document on stamp paper, was not recognised as proof of residence.
So I did a Kafkaesque run, up and down the building from counter to pillar to post. I took two days off from work to do this and even enlisted the help of a journalist who covered the ministry of surface transport. All to no avail.
Eventually, I had to throw in the towel. I simply could not prove to the honest folks at the RTO that I actually lived in Delhi. Why this should be so important escaped me, since any driving license is valid for all of India. They would be testing me to see if I could drive, so why did it matter what address my electricity bill came to, as long as I was an Indian citizen? I had a passport to prove that!
I eventually got a driving license from my home state, Meghalaya. I have been using it to drive it in Delhi for the last 10 years. The authorities have no problem with that.
I had similar difficulty in proving I live here when I tried to change the address on my passport. I went to the passport office once, saw the scrimmage, and ran away. I went back a second time, with greater resolve, but had to go back because the queue was too long and I had work to do. I went back a third time, bright and early and very determined. The officials were on strike.
Finally, I decided the straight and narrow was not the best path to be on in these complicated times. So I got an agent. The chap took an advance and my documents, but even he couldn’t do the trick. I didn’t have a ration card or voter ID from Delhi.
The whole business has left me bitter and a little befuddled. I don’t understand: if I already have a valid passport, doesn’t it mean I am a citizen of this country? If I am, then why do I need some dodgy document to be able to merely submit my passport form? There is police verification of the current address anyway! So what’s the point of that nonsense about electricity bills and so on?
Truly, the Sarkar has a mind of its own. Or perhaps it has none at all.

99 Things to do Before the Apocalypse

2011-03-21T13:40:00.003+05:30

by Samrat X

The world’s imminent demise has been predicted by all sorts of people down the ages, and by now there’s quite a menu of options to how it could end. Would you like to get knocked off by an asteroid or comet, sink under rising seas as polar ice caps melt due to global warming, or freeze as the next ice age comes upon us, or get sucked into a black hole created in a nuclear experiment? At a pinch, if none of this works, we could always blow ourselves to clouds of vapour in a nuclear war.

The day this will happen is well known. Please mark it on your calendars: December 21, 2012. By now you’ve surely heard of the ancient Mayan prediction that the world will end on that day.

There is, therefore, so much to do, and so little time. To make sure I don’t miss out on anything really important, I’m putting together a list of 99 Things to Do Before the Apocalypse.

For starters, I’ve quit my job and started traveling. Heck, if this world and everything on it including me is going to end up, er, ended up, I want to see it before it pops. What a waste of a world and a life it would be to die without knowing what the world I lived on is like.

Secondly, I’ve decided to spend more quality time with people I like and care about. If life is short it would be wise to spend the time in good company.

Third, I’ve decided to live without fear…to live like I’m dying. Far too often the choices we make are dictated by absurd worries. We then live pained lives trying to convince ourselves we’ve averted a disaster, or even half hoping the worst will actually occur, because we made life choices worrying it might. It’s a bit like sleeping under the bed every night because you’re afraid an earthquake might strike.

Well, buildings do need to be designed to resist earthquakes. That makes sense. Lives, however, cannot yet be designed to avert death. That is a certainty every human is born with. In other words, in the context of human life, the worst will definitely happen. The best design for a good life therefore is one that is not cut unduly short, and allows for time well spent.

Individual ideas of what constitutes time well spent may vary. However there are some things essentially human that people across time and space seem to cherish.

A good meal is one. Good sleep is another. Loving relationships come next. Time spent in creative work or work that contributes to the social good would also count for something. If you’re spending too much of your time of life on other stuff, you’re probably making a mistake. You may not get that now. It will strike you when apocalypse comes, which could be tomorrow or a year and something from now.

It is likely that in the end this doomsday prediction will prove to be as false as all the ones that have come before it. That’s great. We humans need to be reminded of apocalypse from time to time to get some perspective into our lives.

That sales figure, that assignment, that crotchety boss, that lovers’ tiff, that ego tussle…you know what? It’s probably not that important.

This is the first of my columns for DNA

Who needs Valentine’s Day?

2011-02-14T10:35:00.004+05:30

If you’re single and attractive, every day can be Valentine’s Day. If you’re in a stable relationship, the day holds expectation but no real thrill

Are you single this Valentine’s Day? Do those red heart shaped toys everywhere look like they’ve been put up to mock you? Are you seeing only thorns in the roses being peddled? Dear friend, as the Border Roads Organisation says, fikar not. Don’t fret. You may be single but you are not alone. There are a few million of us with you, and a few million who would happily return to our ranks if only that was easier to do. This love day business is just a galumphing capitalist marketing thingamajig, and it’s worth many crores. Money can’t buy you love but it does buy the soft toy makers Mercs.

So don’t worry about V day. For starters, you need to realize that if you’re single, every day is Valentine’s Day. Just fill your heart with love and spend the day, and maybe the night, with whoever you’re feeling the love for. As long as you don’t end up hurting anyone, including yourself, doing this, it’s perfectly cool. If it’s likely to mess up your life, avoid. A mess is easy to make and hard to clear up, you know.

The pleasures of the single life are gradually being forgotten in today’s world. That’s a bit strange, given how relationships all around seem so fragile nowadays. Marriages collapse around us all the time. Relationships akin to marriage flounder before the vows. The world of those in relationships looks pretty from the outside, but is usually less cheery on the inside, teetering as it does between the extremes of stress and boredom.

Traditionally, the single life has been marked as the highest kind of life in many cultures and religions. The Buddha chose to leave his wife and child to seek enlightenment. Jesus Christ never married.

Even thinkers less divine have not been especially enamored of marriage and relationships. The great Greek philosopher Socrates was unhappily married. He had a good quip on the subject: “If you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher!” He became a philosopher.

His wife must have been quite a woman. Plato, Socrates’ most famous disciple, who is said to have had some kind of affair with her, turned gay. He then advocated the view that partners of opposite sex should mate without commitment or love in order to procreate. Do it only for the species was his motto.

Till the early years of the last century, the single life was seen as a most excellent one in many places. From London to Calcutta, life after work revolved around the club, which was usually a ‘gentleman’s club’. The other leisure activities for a gentleman were to play cricket, or go hunting or shooting. Marriage and relationships were concerns for women. Real men had better things to do even when they were not exploring unknown continents or killing hapless animals. On those occasions when they felt the need for female company, they would go to courtesans. That was the custom from Paris to Tokyo to Calcutta.

Now there’s thankfully much greater gender equality, and marriage and relationships have become equal concerns for men and women. That is a good thing but there are side effects. Men in general are more soppy and needy than they used to be, and women, having discovered the joys of freedom, are arguably less interested in marriage and stable relationships. As a result, the default relationship status message now for the modern woman and man is “it’s complicated”.

That’s because contemporary notions of relationships involve far too many expectations.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “While the contemporary Western ideal of marriage involves a relationship of love, friendship, or companionship, marriage historically functioned primarily as an economic and political unit used to create kinship bonds, control inheritance, and share resources and labour.”

In the last 100 years, it’s gone from being a relationship with minimal expectations to one where even love, friendship and companionship are considered insufficient. The idea of a good romantic relationship, created by fiction, drama and poetry, is one where the lovers never cease to feel butterflies in their stomach when they are around one another. Small wonder then that these exciting relationships last the span of a butterfly’s life. Success is their death; the moment they achieve stability, the butterflies depart.

Down the ages, the lover and the husband, or wife, have always been different people.

Remember all those great love stories from around the world - Romeo and Juliet, Heer and Ranjha, Devdas and Paro? They were all tragedies. They ended very badly for the lovers.

All successful love stories end with “…and then they lived happily ever after”. No fairy tale except Shrek goes into the details of the “happily ever after”. Not much drama in, “they drank their tea, and ate their meals, and paid their bills, and remembered anniversaries, for the next 40 years”.

That’s why only new lovers in the first flush of love can be truly happy on Valentine’s Day. For those who have been in stable relationships for a long period of time, it’s another predictable – and hence unexciting - day. For those who’ve been married for a long time, it can be a bit of a bore and a bit of a chore. Both partners must play their appointed roles in the charade of expectations built by advertisements and card companies. They must buy the obligatory roses and gifts and dress up and do the usual ‘special’ things that have long ceased to be special. If the love is gone, the day can weigh heavily on the couple. If the love is still there, it’s probably not what it was initially. It’s more mature, deeper, companionable rather than incendiary.

That sort of love doesn’t need a special day.

Nor do singles who are at peace with themselves.

Samrat’s first novel, The Urban Jungle, was published by Penguin earlier this month

What not to do at a book launch

2010-10-06T14:06:00.000+05:30

by Gouri Dange and others

(PS: for the vast majority of interested, interesting and graceful attendees at book launches, what you will read below is for your amusement, and not aimed at you at all.)

At the recent launch party at the Serpentine Gallery in London's Hyde Park for Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom, someone snatched the novelist's glasses from his face and ran off – leaving behind a ransom note asking for $100,000 for their return.

This piece of news finally made me reach for my keyboard and type out a long overdue list - of things that attendees at a book launch are well-advised not to do. No doubt, making off with the writer’s glasses straight from his nose would head the list, but there are other torts and misdemeanours that people would do well not to indulge in.

This list is not just a compilation from my own experiences, but of the experiences of several writers and writer-friends.

First, when we send you the invitation, don’t immediately mail back querulously questioning a) the venue that we have chosen/ are stuck with b) the date that we have arrived at after much intricate planning c) the choice of personality who has agreed to read from and release the book. Of course it could have been at a better place, better time, better season, with a celeb who you particularly like... and we’re sorry for disappointing you on all scores, but we don’t conjure up book launches by twirling a tinsel wand, we put them together after mental, physical, social and financial contortions of the most fantastic kind. So shut up and tell us in time if you’re coming or not, is all that is expected of you.

We writers, forced to be our own marketers and PR persons, are constantly trying to find the fine line between sending you the invite well in advance so that you can plan to come, but not sending it so early that you will forget about it. So whatever day we choose to send you the invite, do not expect us to continue playing secretary to you. Do have the grace to mark the day on your own, in your own calendar/similar device, and don’t expect us to remind you closer to the time. Some of you tend to snap at us when we do remind you. We can’t seem to get it right on this score, so be a little kind and less imperious.

Another constant see-saw that we are trying to work is this: We writers-in-launch-mode realise that your Blackberry gags at attachments, so our anxiously designed elaborate e-invitations end up irritating you. This is why we put the gist – place, date, time – in the body copy of the text. Surely that is considerate enough? So desist from writing to us in an offhand way from your wretched devices instructing us to put it all on SMS format for you so that you can send it to your friends. We understand the good intention, but it’s a pain, and why don’t you do it for us if you really love us? As for jpeg, pdf, corel and other such formats, we would love to pander to your every whim about what format you would like the invitation in, but deal with it, whatever format we send you.

If you really do intend coming for the event, stop groaning about traffic and distances, and plan how you will get there. Keep the address with you – either on your phone or scribbled on your palm (the body part or the device), or on paper or in your head. Do not, and this bears repetition, do not call the writer an hour before (sometimes half hour, or 5 minutes, even) the event itself, and ask for directions. And really, this is just not the time to provide a fresh insight into how the venue and day is all wrong and that parking is such a bitch in your city, and all that jazz. We writers do not personally arrange for your city roads to be such a bitch on any given evening.

Once you have made it to the venue, we really do not want to hear about what a hard time you had getting there, how you had to ditch your car somewhere and hoof it, how you went to the wrong store, and how the cabbie didn’t give you change. On any other day we would have some mindspace for this – today, we don’t.

Once the event begins, it would be nice if you would switch off your phone, and also not keep a fake engaged look on your face while you jab at your phone keys. Really, we don’t want just your bodies there, we want your minds, such as they are, present and participating.

Do not bring your own book that you just published to our book launch and hawk it. It’s plain lousy manners. As for working the crowd with your business card, please...I mean really. Some of you also tend to ask questions in the interactive part of the reading/launch, that are only a verbal vehicle to tell people who you are and how you’re so good at what you do. Stop. Just stop. Go do it somewhere else.

Remember, it’s about the book. So questions about finances, advances, and other intricacies of the book business can perhaps be asked of us on our email ids, but certainly not at the book launch. You are more than welcome to ask and tell about what you liked or didn’t like about the book. But asking after the health of my wealth? No.

When it is time to buy your copy and get it signed from the writer, do not leak out of the door empty-handed. Maybe you don’t want to wait in line for a signed copy and that’s fine. But do buy a copy. Well this isn’t a hard and fast rule...but it would be nice if you’d buy one.

If you do come up to our table for a signed copy, do not use this time to catch up on your/our offspring, parents, pets. This is not the time. And this is certainly not the time to tell us about how you had to make elaborate parking/babysitting/office arrangements to be there. Present the book, have it signed, say nice things, and let the queue move.

At launches where there are things like salmon or oysters on toast served, kindly do not eat the tidbit and leave the toast behind. (This is a well-documented occurrence.) This causes the waiters to walk about with just the dry toast pieces on a platter, and less canny guests end up having to eat those; they then become moody and sulky and tend to leave without buying any books.

Do not walk up to us writers after the launch and ask things like “But where’s the media? No media?” This may come as a shock to you, but a) journos don’t show up for most launches – their story is usually that ‘evenings are hellish at the office’ b) you may have not read them, but we do have reviews and interviews out there; it’s just that you may not see a real live journalist at our readings/launches c) it really is more important for a book to have actual readers present than the media, whatever anyone tells you.

Lastly, if you did not attend our reading/launch, do not appear on gmail chat or SMS two days after the event saying ‘How did your thing go? It was when?’ The answer doesn’t really matter to you, and we both know it. Our fingers can tap out only that many things in one lifetime, and telling you ‘the launch was awesome’ or ‘missed you there’ or some such thing is a waste of taps, which we want to save for our actual writing.

Nobody ever finds the one...and everybody finds the one

2010-06-11T10:09:00.006+05:30

A couple of years ago, I found myself dealing with a particularly strong round of parental pressure to marry and the simultaneous absence in my life of anyone with whom there seemed any prospect of a happy life together. As I contemplated the twin possibilities of lifelong singlehood on the one hand and a potentially unhappy marriage to someone my mother wheeled out on the other, my future looked bleak. In a moment of weakness – perhaps brought on by alcohol – I told a woman friend what I was going through.

Shaizia had been an ad film producer in Mumbai before giving it up to run a lodge and restaurant in a Tamil Nadu temple town called Thiruvannamalai. She joked about being the first Muslim woman saint in the place. Her experiences, and the difficulties she had been through, had made her wise. I trusted in her ability to give good advice.

But that day, she said something I had trouble believing. “It’s possible to love almost anyone”, she told me.

When we are in love, we believe that no one else can take the place of the loved one. There is, we believe, something unique about the person that makes us love them. In that state, we forgive – and even like - their flaws and idiosyncracies. Of course this honeymoon generally doesn't last, and the scales fall off our eyes. Love then experiences its true test. If it survives the test, we marry and perhaps procreate. If not, we pick up the pieces of our heart and look again.

Most of us do fall in love more than once in our lifetimes. Every individual on this planet is unique (hence that quip: you’re unique, just like everyone else). More than one of those unique individuals can – and usually does – appeal to us, at different times. In fact, in some life-complicating instances, more than one person may even appeal to us at the same time.

I’ve been in love a few times. None of them lasted, to my regret, but they were all beautiful relationships in their own different ways. Some were incomplete, some even unspoken. They were relationships that simmered under the surface, rich with the possibilities of what might have been.

Thinking back, I realise there is little in common in those women I loved. They were all very different people, from diverse backgrounds. Yes, they were all in a certain age band, they all had a decent education, and they were all attractive. But then, there must be at least a million women in this world of six billion people who fit those criteria.

I could possibly have fallen in love with any of them. It was other factors that had determined my choices in the end.

The first of these was availability. I had only ever fallen in love with women who suggested they might be available – not easily, perhaps, but the door wasn’t shut and bolted. These women had come into my life – and I into theirs – at times when we both seemed open to the idea of flirting and dating. Attraction had had the chance to express itself.

The second was proximity. A relationship could develop simply because the person was around to spend time with. I’ve had incredible bonding with at least one woman with whom no relationship ever happened because we were in different cities. Distance snuffed out the flames before they had a chance to spark romance. After endless long Gmail chats and phone conversations, we had moved on to date other people.

We truly grew to love those ‘other people’. The beginnings might have been guarded, and casual. Yet, in time, the relationships acquired a tenderness and affection that was special. The other people became the most important people in our lives. Of course it wasn’t always perfect – is anything ever – but it was special enough and rare enough.

I wasn’t really thinking of love when I entered this other relationship. It seemed like an interesting friendship, with vague possibilities of becoming something more. Yet, it grew to become an addiction. I had not set out to love her. I doubted there could be a relationship between us. Yet it happened, because I did not stop it from happening.

It’s easy enough, really, to fall in love, as long as one is not decided against it.

MIB to the rescue

2010-05-14T09:54:00.001+05:30

The French and Belgians are considering banning it. The Australians might follow. The Saudis and Iranians are quite appreciative of it. And in our own India, there are all shades of opinion about it. Considering all the excitement this garment generates, you’d think the burqa is, well, the bikini.

The battle of the burqa — or more accurately, the naqab, which is the veil that covers the face — seems to be about a lot of things. It pits the ‘liberal’ West against the forces of orthodoxy in Islam. It pits feminists against male chauvinists. It pits a secularism that denies individuals the right to exhibit religious symbols in public against those who wish to wear such symbols on their faces.

At core, the issue is really simple. It’s about the freedom of adults to choose their wardrobes. If a person wishes to go about in a bikini, that’s her choice. If she wishes to go about in a burqa and naqab, that’s her choice too. No priest or government has any business telling individuals what clothes to wear.

Of course, priests and governments love to take themselves seriously. They love to exercise control. And they have power, of a sort, so defying them is not always easy.

This is where the MIB should come in to zap those evil control freak aliens in our midst. MIB, short for Men In Burqas, would subvert the orthodoxies of both the governments and the priests simultaneously.

It would subvert the governments very directly, by defying the ban against the garment. It would also subvert the mullahs, because it challenges their use of the garment, which is to establish male control over women.

If men in all the places where the burqa is a contentious garment begin wearing it voluntarily in public, it makes a mockery of all the illiberal forces battling over it.

No God in Sight

2010-04-18T09:11:00.002+05:30

Good Hindus believe a dip in the right river at the right spot on the right day resets their sin counter to zero. The Kumbh Mela has grown over thousands of years around this belief. Kumbh bathers believe they emerge from the river with freshly washed souls, and possibly places in heaven.

This year the Mahakumbh is in Haridwar in Uttarakhand till April 28. The river is of course the holy Ganga which is severely polluted like all our major rivers. The perfect spot is a stretch of about 100 m at a place called Har ki Pauri. The right days are 11 holy days, which come once every 12 years. However even among the holy days there is a hierarchy. This April 14 was Mesh Sankranti, the day of the final Shahi Snan, the holiest of holies.

Since there are 850 million Hindus in India, most desirous of clear consciences and heaven, the crowds of bathers on holy days can get rather overwhelming.

Delhi to Haridwar is 208 km. The drive took nine hours thanks to traffic jams. At the end of it, we were deposited in the middle of a jam somewhere on the outskirts of the Kumbh town. Crowds milled around everywhere, carrying bags and bundles on their heads, jostling to unknown destinations. We picked our burdens and joined the unending procession of souls.

It took us another two and a half hours of walking to get to the media centre near Har ki Pauri. It was past midnight when we reached. The officials had left. We had been told there were tents reserved for us, but couldn’t get any. We were homeless.

The HT photographer with whom I was travelling had bumped into a friend on the way. This gentleman suggested we try our luck in hotels. It seemed unlikely we would find a room; the roadsides were jammed with people sleeping wherever they could find space. But Mr Tyagi knew a hotelier, so we went.

Rs 1,200 room for Rs 10,000

It was a plain little hotel near the Ganga called Suryoday. There was one last 3-bed room available. The tariff on the board opposite the reception counter said Rs 1,200. The hotelier said he would give it to us because of his great friendship with Mr Tyagi, but it would cost Rs 10,000 a night. He wasn’t inclined to budge from this price; hotel rooms in the area were being taken for Rs 60,000 for four nights, he said.

Mr Tyagi called a couple of other hotels, and found this to be true. So, after some deliberation, we took the room. Both photographers had cameras and laptops with them. We were all carrying things we were afraid we’d lose. We couldn’t sleep on the pavement.

Over the next couple of days, the crowds increased. On April 14, about 14 million people took the Ganga dip in Haridwar, according to the Uttarakhand police. Haridwar town and district together have a population of 1.4 million. With more than 10 times its population in visitors, the entire town looked like Howrah railway station or Mumbai Central at rush hour.

Everywhere, crowds milled day and night, on their way for the holy dip. No one seemed to know the way. Everyone just walked where the flow took them. It was fine; all roads led to the holy dip. Occasionally, someone would stop, exhausted from the walk, and get shoved along by a waiting policeman blowing his whistle. Stopping was not allowed.

The only places one could stop for a brief bit were the roadside shops. There is an industry of spiritual supplements out there, with stalls selling everything from rudraksha beads to tridents.

Apart from these objects, Babas and Matajis of all hues peddle their brands of spirituality. They stare out of hoardings, selling a range of spiritual options. There’s Soham Baba, whose hoardings call for an end to global warming. And the sants of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, who predictably warn that Hinduism is under threat. And even Yogmata Keila Devi, who is a Japanese woman named Keiko Aikawa. Her cause is world peace.

They all have thousands of followers who crowd into their camps. It’s a bit like Pragati Maidan during the Auto Expo, with tents instead of permanent structures, and brands of Hinduism instead of car brands.

I could feel no spirituality in the surroundings. Not in the greedy hoteliers ripping off all comers for as much as they can. Not in the cycle rickshaw pullers, who demanded Rs 1,200 for a 6 km ride. Not in the priests on the ghats, promising pujas at heightened rates. Certainly not in the politicians on their VIP visits, pretending to wash away their myriad sins. Not even in the Naga sadhus who raced into the waters of the Ganga at Har ki Pauri for the Shahi Snan on April 14. It had been reduced to a media spectacle, because there were only the sadhus, hemmed in by rows of police, on one ghat. And facing them, a tower with the world’s media confined to it like animals in a pen, over an empty ghat from which the pilgrims had been forcibly evicted by the police.

And yet … it’s a great pilgrimage.

In our journey, we had become part of the flow of humanity, solitary souls lost in that great river as it coursed to its inevitable destination. Our possessions had become burdens we were forced to carry. Our companions had been chosen largely by fate. Some fellow travellers, we lost in the melee, and could not meet again for the rest of the journey. We encountered greed and corruption, but also the simple faith of the millions who undertook this terrible journey.

The Kumbh is a great pilgrimage, because it is a metaphor for human life.

A Montaigne essay

2009-12-22T09:51:00.002+05:30

Of repentance

OTHERS form man; I only report him: and represent a particular one, ill fashioned enough, and whom, if I had to model him anew, I should certainly make something else than what he is: but that's past recalling. Now, though the features of my picture alter and change, 'tis not, however, unlike: the world eternally turns round; all things therein are incessantly moving, the earth, the rocks of Caucasus, and the pyramids of Egypt, both by the public motion and their own. Even constancy itself is no other but a slower and more languishing motion. I cannot fix my object; 'tis always tottering and reeling by a natural giddiness: I take it as it is at the instant I consider it; I do not paint its being, I paint its passage; not a passing from one age to another, or, as the people say, from seven to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute. I must accommodate my history to the hour: I may presently change, not only by fortune, but also by intention. 'Tis a counterpart of various and changeable accidents, and of irresolute imaginations, and, as it falls out, sometimes contrary: whether it be that I am then another self, or that I take subjects by other circumstances and considerations: so it is, that I may peradventure contradict myself, but, as Demades said, I never contradict the truth. Could my soul once take footing, I would not essay but resolve: but it is always learning and making trial.

I propose a life ordinary and without lustre: 'tis all one; all moral philosophy may as well be applied to a common and private life, as to one of richer composition: every man carries the entire form of human condition. Authors communicate themselves to the people by some especial and extrinsic mark; I, the first of any, by my universal being; as Michel de Montaigne, not as a grammarian, a poet, or a lawyer. If the world find fault that I speak too much of myself, I find fault that they do not so much as think of themselves. But is it reason, that being so particular in my way of living, I should pretend to recommend myself to the public knowledge? And is it also reason that I should produce to the world, where art and handling have so much credit and authority, crude and simple effects of nature, and of a weak nature to boot? Is it not to build a wall without stone or brick, or some such thing, to write books without learning and without art? The fancies of music are carried on by art; mine by chance. I have this, at least, according to discipline, that never any man treated of a subject he better understood and knew, than I what I have undertaken, and that in this I am the most understanding man alive: secondly, that never any man penetrated farther into his matter, nor better and more distinctly sifted the parts and sequences of it, nor ever more exactly and fully arrived at the end he proposed to himself. To perfect it, I need bring nothing but fidelity to the work; and that is there, and the most pure and sincere that is anywhere to be found. I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more, as I grow older; for, methinks, custom allows to age more liberty of prating, and more indiscretion of talking of a man's self. That cannot fall out here, which I often see elsewhere, that the work and the artificer contradict one another: "Can a man of such sober conversation have written so foolish a book?" Or "Do so learned writings proceed from a man of so weak conversation?" He who talks at a very ordinary rate, and writes rare matter, 'tis to say that his capacity is borrowed and not his own. A learned man is not learned in all things: but a sufficient man is sufficient throughout, even to ignorance itself; here my book and I go hand in hand together. Elsewhere men may commend or censure the work, without reference to the workman; here they cannot: who touches the one, touches the other. He who shall judge of it without knowing him, will more wrong himself than me; he who does know him, gives me all the satisfaction I desire. I shall be happy beyond my desert, if I can obtain only thus much from the public approbation, as to make men of understanding perceive that I was capable of profiting by knowledge, had I had it; and that I deserved to have been assisted by a better memory.

(This is part of an essay by Michel de Montaigne, a 16th Century French philosopher)

Let the climate change if it must

2009-12-13T13:32:00.005+05:30

For the longest time, I didn't know what to think on this whole climate change business. It seemed very important and exciting but it was also rather hard to tell where the truth lay. As a concerned citizen, someone who cares for trees and animals and the planet, I was inclined to side with the environmentalists. I had seen the beautiful hills of Northeast India being decimated. I knew that the song of the pines could no longer be heard in the towns there. We had mosquitoes, and traffic jams, and it was warmer, so people had fans in shops and even houses. All this was new, and definitely not nice.

The thinking got a little complicated because I also figured that the things causing the pollution are things I, for one, am not prepared to live without. I need my electricity. If it comes from polluting thermal plants, which 70 per cent of it in India does, well, too bad. I'm not giving up on bijli because of pollution far away.

I also need my car and plane. I've done my time in buses and traveled the breadth of the country unreserved on trains. I can afford a flight now, so I will take it.

If this is how I feel, it seems rather mean to deny others like me the right to a better life. The half a billion or so people in this country who live without electricity can't be faulted if they too want it. The morality on cars and planes may be a little more complicated, but surely, if someone gets an education, finds a job, and buys a car or planet ticket from his own hard earned money, there's nothing wrong with it?

So let the climate change if it has to. Technology will hopefully find a way, like it always has, to keep us ahead of doomsday scenarios like Malthus'. It's a risk we really can't avoid.

We can, however, ponder two statements. Gandhi once said the earth has enough for every man's need, but not every man's greed. Some years ago, I asked Amartya Sen about his thought on this, and he said, no one can curb the desire of people for a better life.

No terror without safe havens

2009-12-04T09:54:00.001+05:30

Do you remember the pictures of Saddam Hussein when he was caught? The dictator who had caused three major wars and sent more than a million people to their deaths looked like a beggar. He lay on the ground, with a bloody mouth, disheveled. It was possible suddenly to feel pity even for him.

V Prabhakaran’s end was worse. The ‘tiger’ who had killed so many lay in the mud with half his head blown off.

The point of invoking those memories is to say that in the end, they were both ordinary mortals. Without the protection of their soldiers and their states – a temporary de facto one in Prabhakaran’s case - they were nothing.

That is the fact which leaders of some of the major insurgencies in India’s northeast are probably coming to terms with now. The United Liberation Front of Asom and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland have been feared forces in Assam. They derived a large part of their power from the fact that their leaders enjoyed safe haven in Bangladesh, out of reach of Indian forces.

Now that haven is gone, and suddenly, the leaders of both these groups find themselves in captivity. They are powerless and their groups are in disarray.

It only took a change in government policy in Dhaka to bring about the sudden change in conditions. The capture of ULFA chairman Arabinda Rajkhowa, which could not be achieved since 1979, was finally done in days, without military action.

There is now a window of opportunity for the Indian government to bring lasting peace to the northeast. The extremists who will never give up their delusions of grand homelands can be sidelined. The corrupt, who make a living out of terrorism, can be safely jailed. The moderates can be talked to, and heard.

A similar chance of peace might have emerged across South Asia if the government of Pakistan were to do what the Bangladesh government did. It is known and acknowledged by pretty much every government in the world that the leaderships of the Taliban, al Qaeda and Lashkar e Toiba are in Pakistan. Dawood Ibrahim has been known to live there for years.

Yet the United States is forced to send 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan and spend 30 billion more dollars because the Pakistanis won’t deliver five or six gents to them. India loses less; it is forced into a silly and pointless exercise of sending dossiers, and a much more useful and necessary exercise of getting its police and intelligence agencies in order.

The al Qaeda is in disarray. The Taliban is divided and on the run. Yet Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar remain sources of power, because they are protected by powerful interests in Pakistan. Their protectors retain them as bargaining chips and pawns, despite the risks to their own country.

President Obama’s Afghan strategy is likely to achieve little without real cooperation from Pakistan. Merely holding Afghanistan’s population centres will ensure status quo at best. Any lasting improvement will come only if the real powers in this game – those who protect Osama and his ilk – stop doing so. That would be real cooperation, and it would help stabilize all of South Asia.

This is not to say that all political violence in the region would end if Pakistan’s military changed its policy. The Maoists in India and Nepal, for example, would still be around. The desire of many Kashmiris for independence or more autonomy would still live on. Governments would still need to address legitimate political and social grievances.

But the random bomb blasts that kill innocent civilians might hopefully become a thing of the past.

Thief! Or, How the Net Stole my Time

2009-07-12T10:24:00.002+05:30

It’s going to be a tearaway fast busy day at work. I look at the clock as I sit down before my computer, and log in to my mail to check for important messages. Must hurry, I’v got to get to work early. Oh, the first five messages are from Facebook! Nothing terribly important, of course, but it’ll only take a moment to see what they are about. Great, a friend request from a guy I haven’t met since college! That’s so wonderful. And an invitation to a friend’s book launch. Darn, I won’t be able to make it. I must let him know.

So I log in to Facebook. There’s a funny status message from a pal asking who among us would make the best private detective. Everyone is nominating himself or herself, so I nominate myself as well. A couple of other status messages also demand action. There’s one saying “zeitgeist: raat bhar, aapki tweet aati rahi”. Haha. Zeitgeist: All night, your tweets kept coming. Wonder who that could be. Shashi Tharoor?

Reminds me, I must log in to Twitter and see what Twitter Minister has updated now. His tweets are often interesting. Today it’s about him speaking his first words in Parliament. “Alas, they were formulaic: I beg to lay papers on the table of the House”, the writer-diplomat-minister laments. Would have been more fun if he’d started with a quote from… Michael Jackson. For that matter, the Budget speech would have been more fun if Pranab da had quoted Michael Jackson.

There’s a tweet from New Scientist magazine as well. Monkeys have a memory for grammar, it says, but like the rest of us, they occasionally misuse apostrophes.

I guess that proves Darwin was right, finally. Now enough of creationism.

I quickly scan the rest of the Facebook and Twitter updates to see who’s doing what. Lucky sod, she’s in Scotland. Oh, that bastard is gloating about the Bangalore climate. And what’s that nincompoop doing with a hot babe in Manali? Life is so unfair.

Ah, a bit of useful info, finally. A geek friend has put up a link to how you can remote control your PC using email, Twitter or SMS. Wow. It seems you can actually turn your computer off or on, or log out from pretty much anywhere in the world, with just a tweet or SMS! All it takes is one free app.

Would I want to remote control my PC? What if something goes wrong and someone else takes over my PC via remote control? Hm. Let me think. Actually, let me Google. And Digg.

Oh, here it is. Some guy who calls himself Johan Marcus Guy has written that he got the instructions wrong, and now his PC is controlling him via Twitter and SMS.

“Just moments ago, my Windows sent me an SMS request to attack my dog with a golf club. I think he'll be fine, but he did sustain traumatic injuries.

This is not the main problem however, the emails are.

In the past three hours I've been made to buy 25 shipments of Viagra, and to look for hot grannies in my neighborhood. This has hurt my self-esteem, but it seems that Windows is a cruel mistress with no calculations for caring or the basic principles of love,” he writes.

Maybe I should stay away from this free remote control download. I don’t want my PC controlling me. Heck, no.

Oh no! What time is it? Damn, I’m late!

Zen and the art of Charlie Wilson's war

2009-07-07T10:47:00.004+05:30

I'm not much of a TV fan, but once in a while it is quite pleasant to watch. A few days ago, finding myself at home with nothing much to do, I switched on the TV and flipped channels past Rakhi's swayamvar and suchlikes, stopping finally at the film Charlie Wilson's War on, I think, HBO.

It's a terrific film, and claims to be based on facts. It shows how one US Congressman may have influenced the course of history.

Congressman Charlie Wilson happened to spot on TV that the Afghan mujahideen were getting smashed by the Soviet Union because the Soviets had far better weapons. The mujahideen were fighting using a few WW II rifles while the Soviets had tanks and aircraft. So Wilson decides to lobby for more money and weapons for the mujahideen.

The rest is known. The mujahideen get their Stingers and their AKs and RPGs and eventually bleed the Soviet Union pretty much to death.

When the Soviets leave, the Congressman has a huge party. He asks CIA's station chief in Afghanistan why he doesn't look overjoyed. The guy narrates a Zen story. It goes something like this:

An old farmer had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit.

"Such bad luck," they said sympathetically.

"We'll see," the farmer replied.

The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses.

"How wonderful," the neighbors exclaimed.

"We'll see," replied the old man.

The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.

"We'll see," answered the farmer.

The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.

"We'll see" said the farmer.

Armchair activists and the struggle in Iran

2009-06-30T10:10:00.006+05:30

I feel sorry for all the good natured armchair activist types. They rarely know what fight they are really fighting. Take the recent protests in Iran, for example. A lot of armchair activists around the world joined in support. They wrote Twitter messages and Facebook status updates, and some even went so far as to send forwards! They probably had the best of intentions, mostly, but it is quite likely that they were actually supporting one bunch of radical Shia against another.

In a report released today, the US think tank Stratfor has analysed the causes of the present unrest in Iran. Their analysis is that it is primarily a fight between the class of clergy that came to power after the Iranian revolution of 1979 and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who wants his own appointees in the ruling clergy. George Friedman writes that the focus of the current power struggle was not Mir Mousavi, a founding member of the Islamic Republican Party who was prime minister of Iran during its disastrous war with Iraq, but Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Here is part of what Startfor wrote:

Rafsanjani represents the class of clergy that came to power in 1979. He served as president from 1989-1997, but Ahmadinejad defeated him in 2005. Rafsanjani carries enormous clout within the system as head of the regime’s two most powerful institutions — the Expediency Council, which arbitrates between the Guardian Council and parliament, and the Assembly of Experts, whose powers include oversight of the supreme leader. Forbes has called him one of the wealthiest men in the world. Rafsanjani, in other words, remains at the heart of the post-1979 Iranian establishment.

Ahmadinejad expressly ran his recent presidential campaign against Rafsanjani, using the latter’s family’s vast wealth to discredit Rafsanjani along with many of the senior clerics who dominate the Iranian political scene. It was not the regime as such that he opposed, but the individuals who currently dominate it. Ahmadinejad wants to retain the regime, but he wants to repopulate the leadership councils with clerics who share his populist values and want to revive the ascetic foundations of the regime. The Iranian president constantly contrasts his own modest lifestyle with the opulence of the current religious leadership.

Recognizing the threat Ahmadinejad represented to him personally and to the clerical class he belongs to, Rafsanjani fired back at Ahmadinejad, accusing him of having wrecked the economy. At his side were other powerful members of the regime, including Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani, who has made no secret of his antipathy toward Ahmadinejad and whose family links to the Shiite holy city of Qom give him substantial leverage. The underlying issue was about the kind of people who ought to be leading the clerical establishment. The battlefield was economic: Ahmadinejad’s charges of financial corruption versus charges of economic mismanagement leveled by Rafsanjani and others.

When Ahmadinejad defeated Mir Hossein Mousavi on the night of the election, the clerical elite saw themselves in serious danger. The margin of victory Ahmadinejad claimed might have given him the political clout to challenge their position. Mousavi immediately claimed fraud, and Rafsanjani backed him up. Whatever the motives of those in the streets, the real action was a knife fight between Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani.

This may not be the whole truth either, but since Startfor (www.stratfor.com) is not known as the ‘shadow CIA’ for nothing, presumably they know a little more than the rest of us.

So next time before you jump on to a bandwagon, look before you leap.

Let's move the capital of India!

2009-06-27T10:28:00.000+05:30

Mothers smeared their children with mud, and men swathed themselves in wet towels. Tar oozed in the streets…In India last week not even mad dogs or Englishmen went out in the midday sun.”

This could have been written last week. In fact, it was a report on the Indian summer in Time magazine in the first week of July, 1958.

The monsoon is late. Everyone from the prime minister to the marginal farmer is waiting anxiously for news of rain that hasn’t come. So far, the weatherman has only this to say: that it’s not going to be a good monsoon, and that temperatures are even higher than they always are at this time of the year.

It didn’t take thermometers or experts to tell. We’ve felt it in Delhi. It has been about five degrees above the normal, hitting 44 degrees Celsius on Wednesday. With rain clouds nowhere on the city’s horizon yet, both water and power supplies are beginning to falter.

To be stuck in this searing heat without electricity or water is rather uncomfortable. Add a fire and it could be a version of life in hell. There is no shortage of devils here; that deficiency won’t be felt.

This is when a Raj-era practice begins to make sense. From 1864, every summer, the British began moving the administration to a summer capital up in the Himachal hills in Shimla. It was quite an effort — the national capital then was in Calcutta, 1,700 km away.

This very civilised practice was discontinued after Independence.

Perhaps India should think of reviving it. If the British empire at its zenith could rule its Asian territories from Shimla long before there was telephone or Internet or air travel, surely it is not impossible to do so now.

Another alternative might be to take the capital to a city with a more salubrious climate, like Bangalore. There, the summer maximum temperature rarely rises above 33 degrees Celsius, or the winter minimum falls below 15 degrees.

Making it the capital would do Bangalore — and India — a world of good. The city’s identity crisis would be resolved for good. It would stop being conflicted between its laid back small town self and its identity as a global city. Its infrastructure problems would be addressed seriously, like Delhi’s have been.

The sense that south India is like a whole other country would also evaporate. At present, the general impression among most people in other parts of India is that all of south India is one homogeneous mass, where everyone speaks either Tamil or Malayalam, and eats dosas and idlis. Nothing like transplanting an army of these ignoramuses to the southern heartland and exposing them to Andhra, Chettinad and Mangalorean meat and fish dishes.

There would be other benefits as well. The capital would be 2,000 km further away from the borders with Pakistan and China, for one.

Of course Bangalore and Shimla are not the only options. Capital cities can and have been built from green field up — Brazil did that with Brasilia. It deliberately located the new capital in an underdeveloped region to take development to that part of the country.

So, on third thoughts, maybe India can build a new capital in the hills of Northeast India somewhere near Shillong. Moving the centre is really the best way to make the periphery feel it belongs.

There is reincarnation, at least for bureaucracies

2009-05-28T10:46:00.003+05:30

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US Railroads.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
Why did "they" use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads?

Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads?

Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. And bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses!

Now, the twist to the story

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs.
The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory at Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.
The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains.
The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.

The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass.

And you thought being a HORSE'S ASS wasn't important!

NOTE: This is a forward I got, and I don't know who wrote it. I loved it so here it is.

A win beyond their dreams

2009-05-16T22:13:00.002+05:30

Even Priyanka Gandhi thought it was going to be 'touch and go', but in the end, it's turned out to be the biggest victory for the Congress since 1991. Who would have thought, 24 hours ago, that this was coming? Not the Congress itself, because its leaders were still in touch with potential allies of all shades and shapes. Not the President, who was consulting constitutional experts on her options in the event of a hung parliament. Not the pollsters who again got it wrong - every single one of them. They predicted that UPA would be ahead, but were off target by about 50 seats on averge. And yes, not the media, or even the wise bloggers, who all thought it was going to be a close call.
In the end, it was a wave no one saw coming. And yet, it's with relief that one notes that everyone was wrong. The nightmare scenarios didn't come to pass. There will be no loonies ruling us in the next few years. Instead, we can hope for a government with some ministers of some capability and talent.
Much punditry is on already about why the Congress won the victory it did. It's all speculation, none of it based on fact.
But here's what we do know: the Congress fought this election on the slogan, "Aam aadmi ke badhtey kadam, har kadam par Bharat buland". Translated, that means, "The advancing footsteps of the common man, a stronger India at every step". In other words, the Congress targeted the common man in these elections, and did so suggesting this would lead to a stronger India. Its campaign song, set to the tune of "Jai ho" from Slumdog Millionaire, was similarly an aspirational tune addressed to the common man. Even its advertising was about empowering the masses, empowering rural India and empowering youth.
The party has evidently won support from all these sections. To some extent, it would have done so because of the work the government did, especially through generous acts like the NREGA and the Rs 65,000 crore dole to farmers. That has paid off.
Rahul Gandhi's campaigning has also doubtless played a part, especially the image of him in contrast to the octogenarian Advani. The poor old man lifting weights to try and prove a youth he no longer had will remain among the sad images of these elections.
A lot of the credit for the Congress win in Uttar Pradesh must also be given to its regional rivals in the state. They have so thoroughly discredited themselves that the only party left for anyone to vote was Congress. Something similar happened in Telengana in Andhra Pradesh, where TRS was decimated, and even in Bengal, where the Left had become the party of hubris.
The internal divides in its opponents helped the Congress in states like Rajasthan. The same factor hindered it in Karnataka.
The takeaway message from this win for ALL political parties in India should be that the common man is no fool and cannot be taken for granted. Good work and a measure of honesty are becoming important for winning elections. That's why Nitish Kumar won in Bihar, and Lalu and Paswan lost. That's why Naveen Patnaik won in Orissa. And even Modi in Gujarat.
Politicians must now earn their votes. They can't merely buy them.

The next Indian government

2009-05-14T12:04:00.004+05:30

Looks like it's going to be a well hung Parliament, so here's what our next Cabinet may look like:

Mayawati: PM. Will put up statues of herself at India Gate , Gateway of India, and Taj Mahal. May sell CBI to a detective agency owned by herself.
Jayalalitha: Home. Will put up giant cutouts of herself at India Gate and Gateway of India, and launch an attack on Sri Lanka using state police forces and CRPF
Prakash Karat: Finance. Will shut down the stock exchange and nationalise airlines and banks
Sitaram Yechury: External Affairs. Will walk out of Indo US nuke deal and sign friendship treaties with Venezuela, North Korea and Iran
Deve Gowda: Defence. Will wake up to sign huge deals that will help all humble farmers become as rich as Bellary barons
Chandrababu: Agriculture. Will introduce IT into the farming sector. Do micrchips grow into mother board trees?
Shibu Soren: HRD. Will sell IIMs to Arindam Chaudhuri and IITs to a coaching class in Kota.

Ok, joking. Sorry if I scared anyone :)
Even if a Third Front government comes to power, it will be with Congress support, and they'll have to pay much heed to the Congress. Plus, the BJD is not accounted for.
But if the Parliament is well hung, it wouldn't be too surprising if the country ends up getting thoroughly screwed.

The attack on Lanka's team

2009-03-04T11:13:00.000+05:30

The question is: Que bono. Who benefits?
Not India, who gain nothing from strengthening hardliners opposed to it in Pakistan or Sri Lanka. Nor the Pakistan or Lanka governments.
Sometimes the most likely suspects are really the ones whodunit. In this case, that would be Lashkar+Taliban. If intelligence agencies can cooperate, so can terrorists and insurgents.

After Mumbai

2009-01-15T18:49:00.004+05:30

As suspected, it has turned out to be LeT terrorists with backing from the ISI and al Qaeda who carried out the Mumbai Nov 26 attacks. As expected, Pakistan's military has prevented all attempts at cooperation in bringing to justice the perpetrators of these attacks.
The arrests of these terrorists and their detention in Pakistan can be expected to yield no benefits for India. This is just a sham, and meaningless. Criminals run operations from their jail cells even here, without state patronage. Surely they can do so from jail there, with a little help from their friends.
The US and UK will not help India any more than they are. Like true romantics, they are unable to give up hoping against hope that the Pakistan ISI will somehow have a change of heart, someday, and really start fighting against terrorists instead of training and arming them.
India must therefore learn once again to help itself.
A first step in this regard would be the launch of a trade contest versus Pakistan. The products they mainly export - garments, textiles, yarn, petroleum products - are items India also does business in. The areas they export to are also our markets.
We must therefore suspend trade with Pakistan immediately and attempt to replace their goods with ours everywhere.
Pakistan government officials have already admitted that the attackers were Pakistani and said they had camps inside Pakistan. International economic sanctions against the key individuals and organisations named for involvement in the attack must be pushed through.
If UN sanctions could be imposed against Col Gadaffi's Libya (over handing over of two terror suspects), why can't they be imposed against at least the individuals and organisations in Pakistan who are known supporters of terror?
All this eventually is also in the world's, and Pakistan's, interest. A Talibanised Pakistan wouldn't be very good to Sherry Rehman, for example - or to anyone who prefers the 21st Century to the 16th.

Why they attacked Mumbai...

2008-11-30T21:51:00.005+05:30

The attack on Mumbai is having its political fallout at this moment. It will continue till at least the general elections around March 2009. Perhaps I should worry about that, but frankly, both the BJP and the Congress have proved to be bunches of dickheads when it comes to matters of national security. There's little to choose between the two. The only difference is in the noises they make.
So my concern is more about who launched this attack and why. Several observers are saying it was Lashkar-e-Toiba with al Qaeda strategising. A few are saying ISI and Pak army - their SSG commandos. On Thursday and Friday, I was telling folks in office it's the former, but today, in light of more information, I'm more inclined to think it's the latter or an amalgamation of both. This was most likely strategised by elements in the Pakistan establishment. Training was excellent, Pak army. Execution - we'll know soon, for sure.
My initial hunch was this was done to ease pressure from the al Qaeda on the Pak-Afghan border, besides hurting India, and other countries hated by Pak extremists, like USA, UK, Israel. However there are other strategic factors that also may have played into this.
The Pakistan military is worried about the possible balkanisation of the country, and those fears have grown since the appearance of maps put out by US agencies showing exactly this. The US's recent National Intelligence Committee report questioning whether Pakistan would hold together until 2025, and talking of the erasure of the Durand Line, can't have done much to ease the worries of those chaps. In early November, maps also appeared on billboards in NWFP that showed a free Pashtunistan. Wonder who put those up - the moderate, nationalist Pashtuns or friends of the Taliban?
The Taliban is looking for a homeland, but in whose interest is it to give it to them? Is Mumbai the first point on a trajectory that will lead to a war which will see either the creation of a new country between Afghanistan and Pakistan or the fall of Kabul?
I have no access to information to be able to analyse this properly, and no time after my day job to give it a proper go. However, those who do may perhaps ponder deeper into the matter. And do let me know what your thoughts on this are.

Watch out for more trouble

2008-10-27T18:59:00.003+05:30

It doesn't take a genius to point out that this country, like much of the world, is living once again through troubled times. Perhaps we do need to take proper stock, however, of the size and number of problems facing the country at present.

There's the so-called 'meltdown'. It is apparently quite bad, the Sensex is down to less than half its highest-ever peak of a year ago. It is making some people - about 3-4 per cent of the population, at most - less rich.

There's the Marathi vs 'North Indian' in Mumbai. This is more serious and has greater long-term consequences. It affects more people directly; it also spreads and hardens sentiments of regionalism and parochialism around the country. The Bihari who is beaten up in Mumbai goes back and attacks trains in Bihar. Marathis there are no longer safe. The virus can easily spread further afield, as chauvinists everywhere learn by example and apply the same methods in their own areas of influence. So Bangalore and Chennai and even Ahmedabad could see similar movements. Similar things have of course happened in Assam and across Northeast India in the past, and it will be no surprise if they recur. In fact the Gorkhaland movement in Bengal owes a lot to the anti-outsider movement in Meghalaya. Nepali-speakers who were displaced from Shillong went to Darjeeling and helped fuel the fires for a homeland there.

There's home-grown Muslim terrorism, and now, home-grown Hindu terrorism. This is cause for major concern, because it has the potential to do serious harm to the country and the region. The hard Right among Hindus is growing in strength again, across the country. It's riots in Orissa and Karnataka and bomb blasts in Gujarat and Maharashtra, but it's bad news all around. Since every extremism always strengthens its opposite pole, it is natural to expect the Muslim and Christian Right to gain in influence too. One can argue about who started it, but the end is likely to be bloody. By sheer force of numbers the majority would expect to survive. However the inability of military means to subdue large groups is by now evident around the globe. India itself has failed in Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland and Sri Lanka. The only success - in Punjab - came because of Sikh officers leading a Sikh force. It stands to reason that the rise of the Right needs to be defeated if the country is to be saved.

There's the growth of the Maoist Left. This is a group that commands support in rural pockets from the Nepal border down to the Arabian Sea coast of Karnataka. It is bound to gain support given the kind of unfair and unequal development the world, and our country, has witnessed. The 'middle class' here is much glorified, but largely mythical. It is defined as people whose earnings are between two and four times the poverty line, which is $1.25 a day in purchasing power parity terms. That's about Rs 15-20 in real terms. Does Rs 1,200 a month buy a 'middle class' living? I'd think not. So I expect further violence and bloodshed as the deprived poor struggle for their place in the Indian sun.
Wait for it, and watch out.

Enemy of the state

2008-09-06T09:49:00.005+05:30

Will the nuclear deal, whatever it is, go through? We'll know soon, though whether it will make a heck of a difference to anyone in the forseeable future is another matter.
Will the Singur land deal go through? We'll know soon too, and that WILL make a heck of a difference to a lot of people in Bengal, immediately. This was the first real chance for Bengal to regain its place as a centre of industry, and Mamata di and her lumpen party have managed to ruin this. They are blocking jobs for thousands of educated youth now, and of tens of thousands in years to come, not just in Tata and its ancillary industries, but in all those that would have followed if this experiment was successful.
Every parent now wants his or her children to be educated. This includes most people in rural areas as well. There is widespread realisation that education can lead to improvement in quality of life and living standards, since it leads to better jobs and greater ability to work a trade or a business - except, of course, that in Bengal there are not many employment opportunities. This could have changed, but Mamata di will not allow it. She is an enemy to the Bengali's welfare and growth, and an enemy of the state of West Bengal.

No denying responsibility for terror

2008-08-02T18:53:00.009+05:30

I've always liked all the Pakistanis I've met, but clearly the people I've met are not the people launching terrorist attacks.
Yesterday, The New York Times ran a story saying:
"American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan’s powerful spy service helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, according to United States government officials."
The story went on to quote a US State Department official as saying there was finally 'direct proof' of ISI involvement in aiding a terrorist attack, specifically the one on the Indian embassy in Kabul.
The ISI is supposedly this 'state within a state' that goes off on its own and helps the Taliban, Al Qaeda, pretty much every terrorist group operating in Kashmir, Dawood Ibrahim, and anyone else in this part of the world who wants to start their own terror franchise.
The Pakistani state denies knowledge of all this.
It works just fine for the Pakistani state, but it's not so hunky dory for the people who come in at the receiving end of the terror.
Since the Pakistani state has proved incapable of locking up its loonies, shouldn't someone else go in and do it for them - maybe someone who's bearing the brunt of their incapacity? The Pakistan government can't really talk about sovereignty if it's not in sovereign control of its own spy agency. I wonder if the Pakistan government would believe it if an Indian missile were to land in downtown Karachi, and Mr Singh were to adjust his spectacles and say, "Er, sorry, I don't know who did it."
That wouldn't make everything all right, would it?

India could be left hanging

2008-07-22T23:58:00.003+05:30

The UPA has won the confidence vote in Parliament today, and staved off elections for a while - perhaps till February-March 2009. However, the churning of the political pot that this trust vote has caused will only pick up force in the interim. We now have a preliminary view of the shape of things to come. For one, Mayawati has emerged as a prime ministerial contender at least one election before anyone expected. The channels yesterday and today were full of talk about how she has stolen the thunder of being the main opposition from Advani.
This is correct; she did indeed make an impression.
Q: What next?
Well, I'd say, yes, a new Third Front. But not one that's likely to win a majority in Parliament.
In 2004, the BJP won 138 seats, the Congress won 145, CPI and CPM together won 53, BSP won 19, TDP 5. Constituents of the NDA and UPA including parties like the NCP, RJD and DMK won significant numbers of seats in the home states of their leaders.
The alliances have been tested and apparently firmed up by this trial of trust. In other words, the 'Third Front', if there is to be one, will stand without any Lok Sabha seat-winners anywhere outside UP, Kerala, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh. Deve Gowda in Karnataka has 3 MPs, and lost one to the Congress today. He cannot hope to better his tally, and is likely to remain politically insignificant at the Centre. Other constituents would be similarly insignificant.
In UP, Mayawati and her new allies led by Ajit Singh will come up against an SP-Congress alliance, which is a force to reckon with. The BJP is also a contender in 10 seats out of 80. In Kerala, the Left Front will come up against the pressures of incumbency and a charged Congress. In Andhra, Chandrababu will have a new threat from filmstar Chiranjeevi, who is launching a political party. His tally of 5 is unlikely to improve much. That leaves Bengal, where the Left appears comfortable - but a Trinamool-Congress alliance would significantly dent Left prospects. Mamata abstained today, so that option remains open.
In other words, the Third Front will do well to cross 110 seats.
Assuming the BJP gains a few, and Congress loses a few, as trends would appear to indicate they will, we're looking at a Parliament where no group has a majority.
Wonder how the bribes to MPs issue will play out.

Here comes Election Baba

2008-05-28T12:42:00.003+05:30

Now that the election results are in, allow me to wipe the egg off my face, and smile. Like every astrologer, psephologist, 'expert commentator' and exit poll survey, I was wrong. My prediction, based on the exit polls, was that the JD(S) would be left with 35-40 seats - in which case they would probably have had a key role in government formation. As it turns out, they have ended up with 28 seats. This is the crucial difference.
My hunch that the exit polls might be wrong, and the BJP might get enough seats to come to power on its own, has however proved correct. Perhaps I should stop looking at exit polls, turn to election astrology full-time, and become 'Election Baba'.
While I'm waiting for future prime ministers to come with offerings and sit at my feet, I shall keep you entertained with the occassional prediction.
First one: Yedyurappa is going to become CM of Karnataka. Soon. What, you already heard?
Second: Yeddy wants Advani as PM. What, you heard this too?
Third: He may well get his wish, because the way things are going, a refurbished NDA could come back to power in 2009. The BJP can't pull it off by itself. It's alliance time.

Ban bans

2008-05-21T11:55:00.003+05:30

In the last two days, 171 people in Karnataka and neighbouring districts in Tamil Nadu have died after drinking poisonous locally-brewed alcohol. The 'hooch' is suspected to have been methyl alcohol rather than the drinkable ethyl variety.
Karnataka banned arrack last year. Clearly the ban has not worked. Liquor bans never do.
In Gujarat, alcohol is banned and has been for donkeys years. This means everyone has his or her own bootlegger, who will home-deliver the boooze you want, for a price. Everything is available; there's a whole economy that works to make it available. Typically, the local policemen, political neta, and goondas are part of the racket. Any individual who gets in the way of this very lucrative business is shunted out of the way, or intimidated into silence.
I figure things are no different here. The arrack ban probably benefits the very people who are supposed to enforce it. They look away, for a price.
That price is now 171 human lives.
It would be better if there was no ban, but quality standards instead.

What pollsters call anti-incumbency

2008-05-11T00:22:00.004+05:30

So everyone's been looking southwards for a bit now, to see which way the polls in Karnataka will go. The general expectation is that this will be a portent of things to come: a foreshadowing of trends going into the general elections.
If this is true, we're headed for interesting times. Different exit polls suggest different things, but this much is clear: the Gowdas aren't going to be as wiped out as a lot of people were hoping. In fact, they may even be left with enough seats to be able to play the role in government formation they have been salivating for.
The smart money was on the Congress going into Phase 1 of elections. However, it appears now from the exit polls that the party has not done as well as expected. The New Indian Express-CFore-Suvarna TV survey suggests it will get 39-42 of the 89 seats. NDTV says the swing is in favour of the BJP, and against the Congress, and predicts the former will garner 31 seats.
Either way, the JD(S) seems set to end up with 35-40 seats . In the house of 224, that could be crucial if the BJP fails to get absolute majority - which it now seems capable of doing.
If that happens, it would be the first BJP government in South India. And the parliamentary elections would become a whole lot more interesting.

Advani might make it to the PM's chair yet.

Endings

2007-12-21T18:43:00.000+05:30

This time last year, I was moving to Mumbai from Delhi, a city that after six years had finally begun to feel like home. And yet it wasn't, but perhaps Mumbai would be...
Now, I'm moving again, to Bangalore...perhaps this city will be home.

Endings

Things do not explode,
they fail, they fade

as sunlight fades from the flesh,
as the foam drains quick in the sand,

even love's lightning flash
has no thunderous end,

it dies with the sound
of flowers fading like the flesh

from sweating pumice stone,
everything shapes this

till we are left
with the silence that surrounds Beethoven's head.

by Derek Walcott

A hand to Providence

2007-11-12T21:56:00.000+05:30

Just before the release of his last film, Chak de India, in which he acted as a hockey coach, Shah Rukh Khan gave an interview to Gulf News. He was asked if he had looked to any real-life coach for inspiration.

Shah Rukh told them: “When I was studying at St Columba’s, I had a teacher, Brother Eric D'Souza, who used to teach us soccer, hockey, cricket and various subjects apart from sport. He would be more an ideal teacher than a coach and has been instrumental in turning me into the person that I am.”

This teacher now lives and teaches in Shillong, Meghalaya. He spends much of his time trying to turn children too poor to afford an education into productive members of society. To this end, he has started a school named ‘Providence’. Children who gain admission here are given a free education, and the books and stationery they need for their studies. Only children whose parents have a monthly income of less than Rs 800 a month are allowed.

There are 200 such children in the school now. They range in age from four to 15. Br D’Souza says in most cases their parents bring them to him after hearing about the school from someone they know. The school itself runs in a few previously unused rooms on the campus of the relatively posh St Edmunds School. Everything in Providence is an unsolicited donation from someone. The whole of Providence runs on help from providence.

When it started in 2000, Providence was a route to get kids into age-appropriate classes in other schools, says Br D’Souza. Only, that didn’t work. “What’s the point of getting them into age-appropriate classes elsewhere? So they go there and drop out because they can’t pay their fees?” he says. Then the idea of training the children so they could get a certificate from the National Institute of Open Schooling emerged. Along with this, Br D’Souza also decided to impart trade skills to the children. It would give them a better chance in life, he says.

There’s a vegetable patch just outside the classrooms that the children tend to. They learn how to grow food, and cook it. They make paper, candles and confectionaries by hand, for sale. Some of them do a beautician’s course at the school itself. Others tinker around in a garage that Br D’Souza is still trying to set up.

“We are finally going to evaluate whether the Class 10 exam is necessary for them,” he says. “We are not sure if society requires a Class 10 academic certificate.” So what, instead of a certificate, does he want to give the children?

“We want them to have literacy, numeracy, financial literacy, and communication and media skills. For example, I want the student from the confectionary to be able to make the confections, keep the accounts, communicate with potential customers in the local languages and English, and carry on the trade. I want them to be able to have the good time that many people in India are now having.”

Br D’Souza’s inspiration for this radical departure from the regular academic path comes from an unlikely source: the Brazilian Left-wing writer Paulo Freire. “Have you read ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’? he asks me. “I don’t want to train the oppressed so they can rise ten levels and become the oppressors.” That is why he is placing a greater emphasis on self-employment, he says.

He has an even greater criticism of the formal school system. Students of the formal school system are losing their connection with life, he says. “I believe there is a universal language of nature which we have fallen out of touch with.”

The school draws heavily upon volunteer efforts. Many young people give their time to teach there. Br D’Souza says this is important too. “It gives the goodness of youth a chance.” Jodie, a 20-something girl from Ireland, has been teaching there for two years – without pay.

So what is your wish list for the school, I ask. “That the kids get the start in life we worked for,” he says. “That they never oppress anybody.” And there is a third: “That other schools elsewhere provide similar opportunities to those in need.”

For long, Brother D’Souza spurned media interviews. He was my class teacher in school, but he wouldn’t let me do a story on his work, or take a photograph of him. This time, he agreed, because he’s had his fifth heart attack.

He wants the work to go on, with or without him. And oh, he also wishes one of his best students – a certain Shah Rukh Khan – would start to help the poor and downtrodden. “I don’t hear of him doing that,” he says.

The secrets we keep from ourselves

2007-10-31T21:25:00.000+05:30

There are many things we bury in the recesses of our minds and hearts, things we need to keep secret because they matter ... our own secrets, other people's secrets, professional secrets, perhaps, if you are an important bloke, even national secrets. Yet of all that we hide, the secrets that matter most are the ones we bury deepest.
They are the secrets we keep even from ourselves.

A little light music

2007-10-12T18:32:00.000+05:30

From the Rubaiyat-i-Omar Khayyam:

Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter - and the Bird is on the Wing.

From Before You Came by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, translated by Agha Shahid Ali:

Before you came,
Things were as they should be:
The sky was the dead-end of sight,
The road was just a road, wine merely wine.

From The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot:

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats	5
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …	10
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

That old dilemma

2007-10-01T16:12:00.001+05:30

India's Northeast is one of the last 'unglobalised' spaces in the world. That is due to change soon, and I've found myself unable to decide whether it is a good thing or not. The face of change we see now is not pretty. Development looks like felled trees and hills blasted to bits. It looks like naked brick and tin slum houses replacing the old 'Assam type' wood and bamboo ones. It is traffic snarls, and crowds, and plastic waste clogging mountain brooks.
But it is also other things, and I got a sense of this during a recent trip to the West Khasi Hills. We started from Shillong before seven in the morning. By 3.30 in the evening, we had still not reached the village, barely 120 kilometres away, that we meant to go to. There was no road to get there. The four-wheel jeep struggled along over a track cut in the hillside at about five kilometres an hour. We drove over one stream, and a few mini landslides, until we came to a place where the track had caved in completely. Nothing on wheels was going to get past that. We trekked a little further, until we came to another stream. Then we had to return because we couldn't have driven back on that road after dark. In those hills, in autumn, 6 pm is dark.
I spoke to a villager we met on the way there, at the last village we crossed.
"What do you do?"
"A little farming...and some charcoal business."
The trees around had all been felled, to be burnt to charcoal and sold for a few meager rupees.
"What happens if someone falls ill?"
"We carry the person on someone's back and walk to Wahkhaji. It takes one day. Then we stay the night there, and drive to Shillong the next day...if we can find a vehicle. Mostly the person dies on the way."
The man was happy a road is now being built. It's not much of a road, but it means a lot to him.
The people who want to open up this region will bring roads, electricity, telephone and mobile phone services, airports, rail lines, and all the other infrastructure they need to exploit the region's abundant natural resources. They will profit from it, certainly, but the thing is, so will the local people. It may start with outsiders and foreigners cornering all the plum deals, making all the money, while the poor local only gets the road and electricity. However, even that is better than what they have now. Moreover, the outsiders will slowly be displaced by locals over a period of time. That happened during colonialism, and even if we view this as no better, we must concede that we did gain much from being colonised.
The British are long gone but the infrastructure they built has stood us in good stead. The roads, railways, telegraph, telephone and radio were their contributions. So too were the ports. The administrative structure - ICS turned IAS - came to us from them. And much else too.
A lot of what they did was wrong, but barring Partition, I don't think any of those wrongs has had as much lasting impact as the 'rights' they did.

Who can buy a cup of coffee?

2007-08-30T22:09:00.000+05:30

I've often wondered, while having a forty or fifty rupee cup of coffee at a Barista or Coffee Day, about what percent of the Indian population can afford this little indulgence. I think I've finally found a credible answer: four percent, at most. That's the percentage of the population with a daily average per capita consumption of Rs 93. The remaining 96 per cent of the one point something billion people in India are living on less than that a day, according to a report by Arjun Sengupta, Chairman of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector.
The middle class, according to Sengupta, is 19.3 percent of the population and has a daily per capita consumption of around Rs 37. The remaining 76 percent plus are living on less than this every day. They are the average Indians.
So next time you go and piss a few thousand rupees down the pub drain on one usually less-than-happy night out, remember that old joke about all the starving children. You're pissing away an amount of money that would buy a decent meal for a hungry kid somewhere.
I'm not trying to inflict guilt upon all party animals. As long as there's a bit of a social conscience somewhere - some attempt to give back to society - it's all good. A fellow who parties but finds it in his heart to give to charity or help the poor is all right in my book.
It's the utterly and haughtily self absorbed, for whom the poor are just eyesores that need to be thrown out of the city, who I find annoying. These fools do not realise what a tiny minority they are. If all those hundreds of millions of poor, hungry people were to start walking into the cities tomorrow - just walking in peacefully - they could take over the cities, and no government in India would have the capacity to stop them.
For the sake of the self absorbed rich, I hope they will not face what the French nobility faced during the revolution there.
Although that would only be fair.

A disclaimer: This does not mean I am a Leftist. The Indian Left is a bunch of hypocrites and anti-nationals who have never in their history been on the right side of anything. They did nothing for Independence, they were sympathetic to China during the 1962 war, they opposed the 1991 economic liberalisation without which we would still be standing in queues for telephone connections and chugging along at the 'Hindu rate of growth'. They are active supporters of the caste system - they do nothing to dismantle it. And as several observers have pointed out, their entire Politburo put together wouldn't win a municipal election without support from their more progressive comrades in Bengal and Kerala. They have, essentially, been part of the problem in every problem this country has ever faced.

The real clash

2007-08-21T17:03:00.000+05:30

This is a piece I'd written for the Hindustan Times last October. News of a taxi service with only women drivers in Mumbai reminded me of it. Oh, and remember the recent Taslima incident in Hyderabad? And the new thing about women not being allowed to become bartenders in Delhi?:

There is a project called the Blank Noise Project being run by a few people in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad. It seeks to establish that eve teasing is a sexual crime, and is unacceptable. I recently sat in on a meeting of this project’s volunteers in a café in Delhi.

It was a very small gathering. There were three people. The two women, who were part of the project, began by trying to decide on their course of action for the day. They had planned an ‘intervention’ in Connaught Place that would consist of them pasting posters against street sexual harassment in small shops in the area, and stenciling similar messages on the pavement. However, the thin turnout deterred them, so they ended up talking about what could be done to sensitise Delhi’s men to the fact that leching, groping and passing remarks is not the best way to win girlfriends and influence people.

One of them said she could not understand why men behaved in this manner. What joy does it give them, she asked? What pleasure is there in making a lewd remark or grinding an elbow into someone’s breast?

I told her I do not know why men behave in this manner, but I am certain this behavior is driven by the gonads rather than the brains, because it makes no sense. I can recall boys in college getting in groups to stare at girls and pass remarks. They did seem to feel good doing it. Almost none of them ever tried it when they were alone, or when there were possibilities of repercussions like a date with the police.

The fellows that do these things do them because they get away with it. They know very well that what they are doing is not right. No culture or society promotes such behaviour.

So what can be done to prevent such incidents? That is a difficult question. In fact, it is possibly the most important question in the world today.

The Blank Noise Project seeks, in my understanding, to alter men’s thinking so that none of them reacts with whistles and comments to women wearing skirts or low-waist jeans. Its stated aims include reclaiming public spaces for women, so that men do not react with excitement to the sight of a woman walking alone in a park at night.

These aims are based on the principle of equality of men and women. Its adherents ask why men can do these perfectly innocuous things – like wearing the clothes they want, and then going for an evening walk – whereas women do not have the liberty to do so unmolested. The entire liberal, Westernised world would be on the side of the Blank Noise Project women on this.

There is, however, the other camp. This lot would say that women should learn to behave in a manner that does not excite the unwanted attention of men. They should walk with eyes lowered, and refrain from wearing revealing clothes or going out alone in public places. They should not try and do all the things men do, because they are not men.

Most of the Islamic world, and conservative Hindus and Sikhs, among others, are on this side.

It is a difference of opinion that divides the world.

In its March-April 2003 issue, Foreign Policy magazine had published an article by US professors Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris. The article was called “The True Clash of Civilisations”. It was based on the cumulative results of the World Values Survey (WVS), conducted in 1995–96 and 2000–2002. The authors wrote that, “Based on questionnaires that explore values and beliefs in more than 70 countries, the WVS is an investigation of socio-cultural and political change that encompasses over 80 percent of the world’s population.”

This is what they found:

“A comparison of the data yielded by these surveys in Muslim and non-Muslim societies around the globe confirms the first claim in (Samuel) Huntington’s thesis. Culture does matter—indeed, it matters a lot. Historical religious traditions have left an enduring imprint on contemporary values. However, Huntington is mistaken in assuming that the core clash between the West and Islam is over political values. At this point in history, societies throughout the world (Muslim and Judeo-Christian alike) see democracy as the best form of government. Instead, the real fault line between the West and Islam, which Huntington’s theory completely overlooks, concerns gender equality and sexual liberalization. In other words, the values separating the two cultures have much more to do with eros than demos. As younger generations in the West have gradually become more liberal on these issues, Muslim nations have remained the most traditional societies in the world.”

The current controversy over the use of the veil in Britain, and the earlier one concerning headscarves in France, highlight this clash. The Blank Noise Project in India is also, in my opinion, a small example of the same phenomenon. Professors Inglehart and Norris would probably find that Hindu, Muslim and Sikh India are all ‘traditional societies’ that largely favour democracy and economic growth, which means the market, but, to different extents, mostly oppose sexual liberalization.

It would be easy and tempting to conclude that these traditional societies are in urgent need of modernization, and therefore, that liberal ideas and views must be taught to the people who hold that men and women are not equal.

However, to do so would be to forget the conclusions set out by John Stuart Mill in his essay On Liberty. Mill wrote that:

“First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.

Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.”

The opinion that men and women are not equal is derived from the view that gender follows naturally from sex. In other words, a man is masculine by birth and a woman is feminine. There are obvious flaws in this logic – as the growing numbers of gay men and lesbian women show – but it is likely that this opinion does contain “a portion of the truth”. Even if our genes do not determine sexual orientation, as some scientists claim, the fact is that for the vast majority of the world’s population, feminine and masculine traits do match their sexes.

There is certainly need for greater gender equality and sexual liberalization in certain societies. For example, every person should have equal rights to education, regardless of whether they are male or female, or for that matter, rich or poor, Dalit or Brahmin. Similarly, every person should have equal freedom to pursue a career or hold a job, and that includes driving taxis, selling paan and fighting wars.

You might agree with this, but the question is, would you want a ‘clash of civilisations’ to universalize this worldview?

The rock star minister and his mission

2007-08-13T10:22:00.000+05:30

I think I am in real danger of becoming a real blogger. Not only did I begin to think it has been too long since my last post, I even began to imagine that people might be interested in my personal account of things I have to say - and observe, I'm writing this entirely in the first person. It's all I-me-myself. Yay! I'm a blogger now!
It's been a month away from Mumbai, and the internet. This post comes to you from a cybercafe in Shillong, Meghalaya. After a few days spent working on my own writing at home, I began eventually to go out and meet people.
This morning I met arguably the coolest politician in the country, and the one I admire most. His name is RG Lyngdoh. He's known around here as Bob. Bob, a distant senior from my school, used to be songwriter and percussionist for Shillong's most famous band, the Great Society. He then became founder member of a blues band called Mojo - and it was a damn good band, too. Somewhere along the line he decided to get himself an MBA and off he went to XLRI. I don't know how he got into politics but suddenly he was Home Minister. He's the guy who ended the militancy in this place. He's also the only minister I know who has a tattoo.
The dude has written a book, fiction. It's called 'Who the cap fits'. If you find it, read it. There are few more readable accounts of militancy in the Northeast - it's racy. It is also well informed. Few people have more of an insight into the matter than Bob.
He's now working on a festival called the Roots Festival to bring the peoples of the Northeast together. He hopes to be able to project the more positive facets of the region to the outside world. Which is why I'm writing this post - to remind you guys and gals that this place may have its faults, but it has some great qualities, too.

To the far blue hills

2007-06-29T00:58:00.000+05:30

This picture is of the Naga Hills. I don't have a scanned photo of the Khasi or Jaintia Hills, but trust me, there's a lot of places out there that would give Mr Tolkien's Shire a run for its hobbit money.

Not that human money will allow the Northeastern hills to stay beautiful. Its transforming power is everywhere in evidence: ugly buildings, dynamited hills, aspirational drinking holes and smokestacks.

Development zindabad.

Rajnikanth for president

2007-06-24T11:51:00.000+05:30

For the past few weeks, the papers have been full of news about candidates for India's next president, and none of it has been good. First there was talk of Home Minister Shivraj Patil being the UPA candidate. His claim was based on the same talent that got him the home minister's job: the ability to suck up to The Family. Then things came unstuck because allies didn't want Patil in Rashtrapatri Bhavan, at which some genius promtly replaced one Patil with another. Pratibha Patil's claim to the job appears to be based on the fact that she is a Congress party member, a woman, and a Shekhawat by marriage. It helps that she is also from Maharashtra, since it confuses the Shiv Sena. Diplomatic skills and political acumen are probably not her forte: her first widely reported pronouncement was about the Muslims imposing purdah in India. Since then, she has said nothing, and cartoonists have had a field day with images of her with a gag around her mouth.
She will probably win the presidential elections over Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, now that President Kalam has decided not to run. This will mean more control over the country's institutions for The Family and a new version of a 'goongi gudiya' in Rashtrapati Bhavan.
That does not bode well for democracy. It is unfortunate enough that the greatest and most important political party in India is one that cannot function without a Nehru-Gandhi at the helm. To have all the institutions of government in the service of The Family is to return once again to the age of empires.
In this situation, one can only hope that good sense will prevail, and a strong contender will emerge to take on The Family's protege.
Let's have Rajnikanth for president :)

Mayawati and the caste system

2007-06-08T09:15:00.000+05:30

Behen Mayawati has declared her intention to aim for the Prime Ministership of India in the next general elections. It will be wonderful if she does indeed manage to build the kind of 'rainbow alliance' she will need to take her there. After all, she seems to be the only politician in the country with the gumption - and the political position - to do anything constructive in the matter of caste.
For far too long, the vote-bank politics of reservation has been propagated by politicians as the cure to social and economic backwardness. The political classes - including the communists, with a few individual exceptions - became so greedy in their pursuit of Dalit, ST and OBC votes that they even refused to follow the Supreme Court's order asking for the benefits of reservation to be taken away from the rich among the backward classes. In other words, they wanted sons and daughters of ministers and IAS officers from these classes to corner the benefits intended for the backward.
Behen Mayawati has declared her intent to introduce an economic consideration into reservations. I am unaware of her position on the creamy layer. However, it is a positive start: even the so called communists in this country have refused to introduce economic backwardness as a criterion in determining the beneficiaries of affirmative action. They have justified this plainly daft position by much hocus pocus and mumbo jumbo. If Mayawati can at least remove caste as the sole criterion for determining backwardness, she will perhaps have done more to remove casteism than anyone since Babasaheb Ambedkar.

The new slaves

2007-06-07T10:18:00.000+05:30

I know a lot of people who work very hard. Most of them are in their 20s or early 30s. They slog non-stop from morning to night, and often take work home after all that. There are times when they spend whole nights in office, working.
Their personal lives are usually pathetic or non-existent because they barely have time to catch a movie, let alone maintain a healthy relationship. They earn whatever it is that they do, and have no time or energy to spend it. The only release they get from all that working is the drinking binge, usually with colleagues, at some pub or bar somewhere. This is seen as highly a highly cool and rewarding exercise by many of the people who live this life.
To me, it looks like they have sold themselves into slavery. The definition of a slave is "one that is completely subservient to a dominating influence". The dominating influence in these lives is the job, which is done not for the love of it, but for money. None of these people - bar a few exceptionally stupid ones - really want to be living the kind of lives they are. They know they are not saving the planet or achieving self-actualisation by being corporate lawyers or ad filmmakers or glorified soap-sellers. Those idealistic goals often engender silly, fanatical behaviour. The people who spend all their youth slogging their butts off on money-making jobs - and then pissing the money they do it for down the pub drain - are different. They are lost souls, not fanatics. They are people who lost their way on the highway of life because they were misled by the fake 'glamour' of the 'hep' life. How else does one explain an existence whose weekly high point is a night out in a loud place with strangers, getting drunk? Or purchasing a certain brand of clothes? There is not much joy to be had in these activities - it is by telling people about the 'cool' place they went to, or showing off the 'happening' brand, that these people validate their entire lives.
If that is not a meaningless existence, what is?

Rain Rain Go Away

2007-06-01T21:25:00.000+05:30

Perhaps you’ve heard of a place called Cherrapunjee. It used to be in the record books for being the ‘wettest place on earth’. It gets about 450 inches of rain a year. It’s 56 km from Shillong, where I grew up. Don’t give me all that stuff and nonsense about the joys of rain.
Rain is a wonderful thing to sing songs about and for when you’re a marginal farmer somewhere in the vast, dry backsides of beyond that make up our great country. I can imagine those poor unwashed sods singing “kaali megha” and doing Amir Khan-style rain dances. Just don’t expect those of us who come from the wet backsides of beyond to have similar sentiments.
In my part of the country – the Northeast – we get enough rain to flood much of Assam and a good part of Bangladesh every year. Luckily for us, there are a lot of hills out there. So the water runs down the hills – to Bangladesh. It’s terrible, what happens there every year. The scenes are like something out of Mumbai on 26/7. The trouble is, the awful situation lasts for many more days.
Bihar doesn’t fare much better. Every year, the floods kill a hundred or two there as well, and render some millions homeless. The situation always inspires ministers to hop into their helicopters and go sight-seeing.
None of this makes it to Bollywood movies. Since we Indians learn our responses to situations from Bollywood, the absence of an appropriate song-and-dance for the times when floods drown people leaves millions huddled, wet and miserable, and without a ready-made song on their lips.

Conflict of our times

2007-05-26T11:14:00.000+05:30

The latest in this debate. I might not have bothered to follow it if it did not seem to me somehow symptomic of the great conflict of our times - the conflict between, for want of a better word, 'nativist' and other conservative forces (including religious) on the one hand, and the liberal 'Western Enlightenment' ones (though liberalism was never limited to the West or their Enlightenment). It is not a conflict with only two sides, however. The range from conservative to liberal is a continuum, so the conflict is all along this continuum. Thus, for example, George W Bush is a liberal representing unwelcome Enlightement ideals and the forces of modernity to both Osama and his cohorts and Shia Iran. However, he is a conservative by the standards of his own country and those of much of Europe.
I say this is the great conflict of our times because it is the one that has replaced the Cold War, which was fought between communism and capitalism. It is less neatly delineated - it's the religious right everywhere versus liberals, but of course inter-religious conflicts haven't ceased either.

Response to VC Soni’s Report on the ‘True’ Facts
A Brief Report on the Recent Incidences At the MSU, Baroda
09May 2007 – 11 May 2007

The Maharaja Sayajirao Universiy of Baroda is amongst the top Universities in the country with very high global repute. The Faculty of Fine Arts is amongst its very best Faculties and is one of the top ranking institutions world-wide in the field of Fine Arts.

University Claim: On 9 May 2007, the citizens of Vadodara lodged their strong protest at the Faculty of Fine Arts, of the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. The protest was against an exhibition displaying a number of artworks deeply hurting the sentiments of Faith and decency of the society at large.

Response: The University claims that it took all its actions based on a strong protest that the ‘citizens of Vadodara’ had lodged. These so-called citizens have not been identified by the University authorities at any point. Where were their protests lodged? If with the University, why did the University authorities not communicate this to the authorities at the Faculty of Fine Arts? If not, the question is why were the University authorities not present when serious police action was being undertaken and examinations at the Faculty were being disrupted by these ‘citizens’. This was in spite of repeated phone calls made by the then i/c Dean. He was helplessly trying to apprise the University authorities of the situation when these so called ‘citizens’ were abusing staff and students of the Faculty, pushing them and manhandling the student.

University Claim: It is noteworthy that during his telephonic conversation with the Vice Chancellor over this incidence of protest, the then in-charge Dean Professor S. K. Panniker (who is currently suspended from the University Services) also termed these works of art as “objectionable”.

Response: This statement is misleading. Professor Shivaji K. Panikkar said that the issue is not whether the art work is objectionable or not; rather the issue is about a student of the University being arrested on the basis of his examination work without prior information given to the University or Faculty authorities. There are legitimate ways to lodge one’s objections and if it is overlooked by the concerned authorities (University/ Faculty) only then the question of lodging a complaint to the police or making a protest arises. Further, it is a shame that a person of a Vice Chancellor’s stature should try to misrepresent a part of the remark made over a telephonic conversation and try implicate or even insinuate that Professor Shivaji K Panikkar is also among those who found the art works “objectionable”.

University Claim: The protest was verbal and peaceful. The citizens had come to the Faculty of Fine Arts having read a news item in the Times of India dated 07 May 2007 and Gujarati daily Sandes dated 09 May 2007. These news items mentioned that the Works of Art created by the students of the Faculty as a part of their Annual Examination were open for public display on the 9th May 2007. Such public display has been a tradition. In fact, one of the teachers of the Faculty had sent messages through SMS inviting people to the display at the Faculty of Fine Arts. Thus, the claim in the media that the display was not open for public is untrue.

Response: Why are the University authorities saying that the display of examination work by students at the Faculty is a public exhibition? It is actually curious that the University authorities are now suddenly trying to designate the long standing examination procedures as a public exhibition. In its long history, the practical examination of the students in the Faculty has always culminated in a presentation of art works through display procedures. It is not an organized public exhibition. The Press information about the presentation of works was not issued by the Faculty/University. There are no invitations, no inauguration or any press note.
How does a private SMS which could be sent by people in their private capacity constitute evidence that the presentation of works at the Faculty of Fine Arts was a ‘public exhibition’?

University Claim: These citizens noticed that some of the works of Art displayed at the Faculty were highly deplorable.

One of the so-called work of Art was a huge Christian Cross where Lord Jesus Christ was shown with his penis out on the Cross, his palms and feet hanging from the two sides and the bottom of the Cross, respectively. Semen was shown as dropping out of his penis into a real toilet commode placed beneath the Cross. The toilet contained fishes.

Another very large sized painting showed a woman in nude posture. A baby was shown as attempting to come out of the vagina of the women. The picture depicted the women trying to attack the baby with a Trishul. The painting had the words “DURGA MATA” written at the bottom.

Similarly Lord Shiva and Lord Visnhu were also depicted in a highly derogatory manner in other so-called works of Art.

Response: The above descriptions of the works are repugnant and visually illiterate. It proves that a naïve verbal description of a work of art is inadequate to its understanding. It is appalling that the University authorities would indulge in such paraphrasing of works of art and would offer such crude and obscene readings of the images concerned. Regarding the image of a suffering Jesus on the Cross, the work is not figurative but symbolic. It can be interpreted to mean several things: one among them could be that the suffering of Christ on the cross has led his body to a condition of utter dissolution, turning Him into a fleshless state symbolized by water (fluids of the body). As His body drains into a receptacle (a modern commode) it takes its form as new life of elementary creatures (fish). In fact, the theme of water flowing out from the body of Christ after his crucifixion by those who disapproved of his ideas is mentioned in the Bible and is a revered part of the story that is read out in churches all over the world at the remembrance of his death that takes place each year on Good Friday. Also the themes of suffering, sacrifice and regeneration are key themes in most world philosophies and religions. Nothing could be more atrocious than the reading made by the University authorities of the water dripping from the cross as ‘semen’.

In the context of the second work described by the University authorities, it might be pertinent to note that images of naked birth-giving goddesses are entirely part of Indian religious iconography (Ref: Gopinatha Rao, Hindu Iconography; 3 vols). Here, in this painting, the courageous Goddess Durga is enacting the crime of foeticide (a practice routinely followed in patriarchal societies) in order to call attention to the horror and violence of the act that amounts to murder in the very womb. The overwhelming motif underwriting this piece of work is that of birth and death. Here the Devi is seen giving birth not to a baby child as the untrained eyes of the University authorities claim but she is actually giving birth to a fully grown man and is attempting to kill him in the process. The anger of the goddess is obviously directed against men as she safeguards the processes of fertility. We know that the killing of the girl child has become a rampant practice in our time to an extent that we are daily confronted with governmental campaigns to ‘save the girl child’. It is therefore quite possible to locate these artworks in the conditions of our present times. There are innumerable instances where, when confronted with the crisis in a society, artists have often recalled traditional iconographic representations to offer critiques of evil practices in their present society.

In the iconographical vocabulary of Indian art traditions, the Durga image is available in multiple forms, ranging from the benign to more wild forms. It is just that our eyes are used to seeing the pleasant forms of the goddess. The Vice Chancellor’s reading shows that there is a massive loss of memory of her wilder forms. In fact, in our religious literatures such as the Devi Mahatmya, Chandi Purana and Shiva Purana, the Goddess Durga is described in most ferocious terms, often without clothes, killing demons, drinking their blood and wearing the heads of the demons as garlands. There is a enormous archive of visual as well as textual material representing the sexual union of Shiva and Shakti. Apart from these widely known brahminical forms of Durga, there are numerous forms of the Goddess in various names and forms in folk and tribal traditions where the Goddess is worshiped in her most fierce form. The graphic work by the student draws its visual vocabulary from such a rich repertoire of visual and textual traditions and practices in India. It draws elements from a long tradition of Durga iconographies in order to express the rage of the mother goddess over all who in our time commit the heinous crime of female foeticide.

Here, we are not arguing that the readings that we offer are the only possible readings. We only want to point out that works of art by virtue of their special character allow multiple interpretations and is a matter for discussion. Why are the University authorities quick to endorse the reading of these art works as proposed by right wing ideologues? If these are the citizens on whose behalf the University takes a stand, what about all the citizens who would like to see alternative readings of these art works? The University should be a place allowing for contestation and debates over meaning and frameworks of seeing.

University claim: The media had already arrived by this time and were witnessing and recording / photographing the events that followed.

Response: The speed with which the police and the media arrived just after Mr. Niraj Jain’s intrusion into the display site shows that the whole incident was well orchestrated and preplanned to get maximum political mileage out of such an unfortunate act. In fact, the media was called by Niraj Jain and his associates.

University Claim: When the group of citizens led by Mr. Niraj Jain, as per his letter, protested and requested the student who had created these so-called works of Art to remove these objectionable works of Art from public display, the student refused to do so.

Response: There was no question of any request or legitimate protest; they came with the police and media, without Faculty or University permission and disrupted examination proceedings for cheap political mileage. They stormed into the examination hall shouting slogans, using abusive language and pushed and pulled the students around. They manhandled Mr. Chandramohan and his friend who was helping him in the display process. With the help of police, both of them were taken away. They were then detained in police custody. Later, due to strong student protest they released the other boy (Mr. Venkat Rao of Andhra Pradesh). These events have been extensively covered by both local and national media.

University Claim: Again the group of citizens requested Professor Panniker, the then in-charge Dean of the Faculty to intervene and get those objectionable works of art removed from public display. Professor Panniker refused to do so.

Response: Mr. Niraj Jain and associates did not ‘request’ Professor Shivaji Panikkar, to take down the work; rather they threatened and abused him and other staff members with dire consequences. This can be corroborated by media footage which clearly shows Professor Shivaji Panikkar being pushed around by Niraj Jain. They did not give Professor Shivaji Panikkar a chance to inquire into the matter or consult with the Head of the Graphics Department or any other Faculty member. All this happened after the student was whisked away by the police at the behest of Mr. Niraj Jain.

University Claim: The protest was entirely peaceful and verbal. No damage was caused to the property of the University. No injury whatsoever was caused to any person.

Response: The protest by Niraj Jain was neither peaceful nor merely verbal. Even a cursory look at the media coverage and footage would prove the contrary. The question is how the University authorities can make the blatant claim that the so called protest was ‘entirely’ peaceful and verbal when an enquiry into the incident is pending and the report awaited. We are therefore compelled to conclude from such declarations that the University authorities have already exonerated Mr. Niraj Jain and his associates thus preempting the enquiry in their favor.

University Claim: On the request of the then in-charge Dean, the University officials arranged for police reinforcement with a request to provide necessary protection. The police promptly arrived at the venue.

Response: This is incorrect chronology. The police had already arrested student Chandramohan by then. During this arrest, the police neither took permission from authorities at the Faculty or at the main University. Professor Shivaji Pannikar had kept the University authorities informed of the developments telephonically, and the decision to call in the police was taken by the University authorities, as they claim. Even though the Dean had informed the Vice Chancellor and other authorities of the events taking place on campus, no help was forthcoming from their side. None of the higher authorities visited the Faculty. The University authorities (i/c Registrar MM Beedkar) came to the Faculty 5 hours after the incident had taken place, only to oversee the sealing process of the ‘objectionable’ art works. The University authorities had been apprised of this by the i/c Dean. During all this time, Mr. Niraj Jain was playing a terror game with the traumatized faculty staff and student fraternity without any hindrance. There was no attempt by the University authorities to protect staff and students from the offensive language and violent behavior of Mr. Niraj Jain and associates.

University Claim: After a very long and consistent persuasion, those objectionable works of art were removed and placed in a room, which was locked and sealed by the police on the basis of a complaint filed by Mr. Niraj Jain and in concurrence with the provision of relevant Law.

Response: The police ACP, T. R. Parmar ordered that the offending five works be taken down and sealed. This was communicated to the Vice Chancellor. Indeed, there were discussions between the police and the i/c Dean, but this concerned the modalities of sealing and the safety of the works. Even after the police arrived and ordered the removal of the ‘offensive’ pictures Niraj Jain and his associates roamed freely in the campus threatening staff and students alike threatening to tear down the works and vandalize them. The in-charge Registrar, Mr. Beedekar arrived only towards the end of the sealing process.

University Claim: None of the so-called works of art was damaged in any manner.

Response: The works have been dismantled from frames and roughly rolled.

University Claim: On the basis of a police complaint filed by Shri Niraj Jain in his individual capacity as a citizen, the student – Mr. Chandra Mohan, who had created those objectionable works of Art was arrested by police under relevant legal provisions. The University authorities deputed an official to provide all the possible help to the student.

Response: Police did not ask permission to enter the campus from either Faculty or University authorities. As PVC had informed Faculty members on an earlier occasion, even police cannot enter the University campus without permission. This violation of rules by the police as well as the consistent refusal of the University authorities to file FIR against Niraj Jain for unlawful entry and disruption of examinations suggests collusion. With regard to the student, NO help whatsoever has been provided to him by the University.

University Claim: Subsequently, the University received a high number of representations and memoranda from several organizations, groups, individuals of high repute and common people from a cross section of society strongly urging the University officials to intervene and disallow the exhibition of such works of art that deeply hurt and offend the sentiments of Faith of various communities.

Response: If so, why didn’t the University authorities communicate this to the Faculty and ask for a report which is the prescribed procedure? It may also be noted that prior to the unlawful intrusion into the university premise and the disruption of the smooth functioning of the examination by Mr. Niraj Jain and his violent associates, Professor Shivaji Panikkar who was the i/c Dean had no inkling about complaints made about any part of the examination display. If the authorities were in possession of such information, earlier to the i/c Dean as it has been clearly stated in the report, not informing the Dean is a criminal negligence on the part of the University authorities.

University Claim: Thus, with a view to respect the sentiments of Faith of very large communities, as well as honoring the University’s social sensitivity and responsibility, the University officials including the Pro-Vice Chancellor and the Vice Chancellor requested Professor S. K. Panniker, the then in-charge Dean of the Faculty several times to wind-up the exhibition.

Response: There was no need to give a verbal order to close down the examination display, [the ‘exhibition’ according to University authorities]. It was already closed down by the students themselves who were now busy writing complaints and pleas to the police and university authorities. Since Niraj Jain had arrived with the media who had covered the entire episode, news had spread across Baroda and the country. There were concerned calls from all over the country but not a word of concern by the University about the students who were being terrorized by the goons who the VC calls respectable citizens.

University Claim: Since the exhibition had already hurt the sentiments of Faith of very large societies, the then in-charge Dean of the Faculty was also requested to issue a statement expressing at least regret and apology over such unintentional consequence of the exhibition. During such meetings of the Pro-Vice Chancellor and the Vice Chancellor with Professor Panniker, the then in-charge Dean, his colleagues were also present.

Response: The i/c Dean was called to the University office the next Day (10 May) where he was asked to tender a public apology. This was discussed in a staff student meeting at the Faculty. There was complete consensus that any public apology offered without active support to the Faculty and concrete actions against the intruders by the University authorities would be equivalent to abandoning the interests of students and giving tacit encouragement to vandalism inside the University campus. Therefore, it was decided that all legal help should be provided to Chandramohan and that an FIR be lodged against Mr. Niraj Jain. A memorandum to this effect was submitted to the University authorities.

Significantly the VC’s account of the ‘Truth’ of the incidents at Faculty of Fine Arts makes no mention of the memorandum signed by all the staff members of the Faculty. Moreover, the manner in which these decisions were taken shows that the i/c Dean, far from acting in an arbitrary manner, took all his actions in consultation with staff and students of the Faculty, and in their support.

It is very pertinent to note that the i/c Dean had in fact expressed, along with other staff and students regret for inadvertent and unintentional hurt caused to any member of public. This expression was carried in the memorandum given by the Faculty members to the University. Why has the VC consistently refused to look into the legitimate demands of the Faculty, even though the examinations were disrupted by the entry of Niraj Jain and associates?

University Claim: The then Faculty in-charge Dean, unfortunately, did not heed these requests. Regrettably, adding fuel to the fire, he made such offending public statements, which further hurt and flared up the common citizens’ feelings demanding strong action. In one such statements printed by the media, for instance, Professor Panniker, the then in-charge Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts, is quoted as saying that the Faculty of Fine Arts is like his personal bedroom and therefore, he is free to do whatever he desires there! Thus, the protest of the citizens of the city grew manifolds. Consequently, there was a huge public outcry from a cross section of society including the students of the University, demanding strong action in the matter.

Response: Professor Shivaji Panikkar’s statement to the media has been misquoted and further distorted by the VC. Professor Shivaji Panikkar told the media that the University is like a private space and that the general public cannot enter and comment on examination work; he used a metaphor to suggest that such an act by the ‘public’ is like barging into a private bedroom. It is very important to remember that the i/c Dean in consultation with his staff members had, in fact, issued a press statement expressing regret for inadvertent and unintentional hurt caused to any member of public. The press statement issued by the Faculty on 10th May 2007 says: “In the unfortunate circumstances of any published image, seen out of context, has caused hurt to anybody, it is regretted”

University Claim: As if this was not enough, in sheer defiance of the University officials requests and even executive orders, on 11th May 2007, once again, the then in-charge Dean, organized an exhibition in the evening displaying nude paintings in the name of an Indian culture!

Response: Professor Shivaji Panikkar did not organize any exhibition. The exhibition on Indian Tradition was organized by the students on their own initiative. It was a civilized and silent protest against the arrest of their fellow student, disruption of examination process by outside forces, their continuing presence in the faculty premises and the apathy of University authorities. By then, Chandramohan had been in jail for 3 days and students were feeling helpless. The exhibition was put together to educate the general public and the press about the long tradition of the nude present in Indian culture.

The exhibition was more of an illustration from works that students are supposed to study and be familiar with through their course work. These were images copied (Xeroxed) from scholarly books on Hindu sacred art along with the European traditions, drawn from academic curriculum of the Art History Department and used daily to teach the iconography and aesthetics of traditional Indian art. These cannot be termed as a display of “nude paintings”. Here, it is also important to note that far from saying he would arbitrarily refuse to follow authorities, the i/c Dean said that he need not ask for permission from the VC to support a peaceful illustrative exhibition mounted by the students drawing on artworks which are an integral part of their Art Historical curriculum that is approved by Board of Studies and the University Syndicate. This is deliberate distortion of facts by the University authorities.

University Claim: Since this unwarranted act of the then in-charge Dean could have sparked large-scale social disharmony and caused disruption, the University Authority deputed two Deputy Registrars and one Assistant Registrar for requesting the in-charge Dean Prof. Panniker, for not organizing the said exhibition. When these officials reached the Faculty and spoke to the then in-charge Dean, he refused point blank to stop the display and reacted that he was not required to take permission of anybody including University Authority for doing anything in the Faculty.

Upon this, the Authority deputed Registrar-in-charge with a written order directing the in-charge Dean to close the display. After acknowledging the letter of the Registrar-in-charge after a lot of dilly-dallying, Prof. Panniker adamantly continued on his stand of not closing the display and said he would keep the display open throughout the night and disobey the University authority’s lawful orders.

In spite of such disobedient behaviour of the then in-charge Dean, the Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University, Professor S. M. Joshi, along with the Senate and Syndicate members and leading citizens of the city went personally to the Faculty premises and repeatedly requested the in-charge Dean to close the display. Even then, the then in-charge Dean remained adamant and refused to heed the requests / orders of the Pro-Vice Chancellor.
Response: The report has given a long account of repeated orders and requests that were not ‘obeyed’. We would like to know since when did the verbal orders become official documents in this University. This, in a University where even the pettiest of official work is done through writing, through proper channel and procedures! That apart, we must consider the reasons for the i/c Dean’s action: The argument put forward by the Dean was that the students had sought the help of the University authorities a number of times. Since students felt that there was no help coming from the University authorities, the Dean was in no position to order the students to stop the exhibition. The students were already feeling morally oppressed and any order to stop the exhibition at that point would have led to a flashpoint in the Faculty. The Dean reiterated that he would stand by the students and staff. The authorities then sealed the exhibition and the Regional Documentation Center.

Why was the i/c Dean not asked for an explanation before he was unilaterally suspended? Why has the University acted in such unseemly haste to suspend him barely 2 hours after the sealing up of the Regional Documentation Centre and before Professor Shivaji Panikkar could even consider tendering his resignation as Dean? Why were there no attempts to talk to the students or staff? Why have the University authorities in a move that has no parallel in contemporary India sealed the documentation center at the Faculty? The fact that students and staff have stood behind Professor Shivaji Panikkar is an index of the loyalty and trust that he commands in the Faculty. This is evident in the mass CL taken by ALL the staff members and from the memorandum that they submitted in full support to the i/c Dean and the student protests over the last few days.

University Claim: The Faculty of Fine Arts is an integral part of the prestigious The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, known for its substantial contribution in placing Gujarat & Baroda on international cultural scene, and as such cannot be left solely on the whims & wishes of any one individual.
Response: It is very gracious of the report to acknowledge the importance of the Faculty of Fine Arts. It surely cannot be left solely on the whims and wishes of any one individual. But the question is can the running of such a prestigious Faculty be left to the hostile and punitive University authorities?

University Claim: In the event of the adamant refusal of the then in-charge Dean to heed the repeated requests from the University officials and his blatant refusal to obey lawful orders of the University officials and that too in such grave matter of hurting the sentiments of decency and societal harmony, the University had no other option but to suspend the in-charge Dean, Prof. S. K. Panniker from the University services for three months with immediate effect under the rules of the University.
Response: The University has paid no attention to the legitimate grievances of the Faculty of Fine Arts, nor has given the authorities in the Faculty a chance to explain the situation, nor have spoken to the students on this matter. On the other hand it has been overenthusiastic in supporting the allegations and interpretations of Niraj Jain and associates over that of Faculty members. University authorities have completely refused to file FIR against Niraj Jain for unlawful entry and disruption of examinations. The University has not taken any steps to provide legal help to Chandramohan the student. Rather it has suspended the i/c Dean Professor Shivaji Panikkar for taking steps to protect the Faculty of Fine Arts and to redress the grievances of its students. This suggests collusion by the University with Niraj Jain and associates in this shameful episode.

University Claim: The University authority has constituted a committee headed by Professor Syed Maswood, Dean Faculty of Law, with clear terms of reference for investigating entire matter in detail, identify all person/s responsible for this incidence, and recommend appropriate action under rules of the University.
Response: The Chancellor of the University has expressed concern at the nature of the Committee constituted by the Vice Chancellor to probe the issue. (TOI, May 19, 2007) Reports say that “The committee’s composition has come under severe criticism from several quarters as many believe that the members would go by the administrations view regarding the entire episode.” (TOI, May 19, 2007)

University Claim: The Chancellor of the University, Her Excellency Dr. Mrunalini Devi Puar, has publicly condemned such exhibition depicting divine personalities in derogatory manner.
Response: The invocation of the Chancellor’s remarks is only partial. In fact, from the beginning she has expressed concern over the intrusion of outside forces in the University affairs. Recently, she has also expressed her distress over the composition of the Committee instituted by the University to enquire into the incidence leading to the suspension of the i/c Dean Professor Shivaji K Panikkar.

In addition to a very large number of social organizations and common people, the leading citizens including Maharaja Ranjitsingh Gaekwad, Padmashri Sitanshu Mehta, Renowned Painter Shri Gulam Mohmmed Sheikh, Professor Dhruv Mistry, renowned Sculptor, Noted Poet Madhav Ramanuj and several distinguished personalities have issued public statements condemning the exhibition of objectionable works of Art that caused deep hurt to the sentiments of Faith of a very large society.
Response: The truth is that there has been widespread condemnation of the attack on the artist and the i/c Dean from all over the country. While many distinguished personalities have sought to understand the turn of events in the Faculty of Fine Arts, their remarks on the issue cannot be construed as a ‘condemnation’. For example, we know for a fact that Professor Gulammohammed Sheikh by no means expressed condemnation but rather supported the student and the i/c Dean as well as the courageous stand of the Faculty of Fine Arts. Even Padmashri Sitanshu Mehta has condemned the attack on art works and has expressed his concern over the nature of protest. In fact, the remarks made by these distinguished personalities call for debates around issues of art and sentiments of faith.

A University should be a place providing for critical thinking around issues concerning civil society and curricular freedom and the autonomy of educational institutions. In fact, the significant support, received by Professor Shivaji Panikkar has to be seen in the light of his defense of the University as a critical space where thought and ideas are nourished and nurtured. Debates on works of art in a free manner are essential to a critical democratic culture and the function that art performs within it. We would like to reiterate this point especially in the context of a long tradition of artistic and academic integrity at the Faculty. Instead, the University authorities have allowed the University space to be held hostage by a handful of local politicians who do not have any respect for civilized debate and concern for the reputation of the University.

Steps Taken to Restore Normalcy

University Claim: 01. The Security, particularly in the Faculty of Fine Arts, has been enhanced right from 09 May 2007. The Security personnel are ensuring that only those students and Members of the University fraternity are allowed entry inside the Faculty Campus who hold valid identity card or authentic identity document. Due care is also taken not to put genuine visitors to any inconvenience. The campus is totally peaceful.
Response: This claim of the University is absolutely misleading and is not based on any factual evidence. About 50 people came inside the Faculty premises on 13 May and tried to disrupt the silent protest-sit-in-dharna by the students and staff members of the Faculty with provocative slogans. Moreover the media was always allowed into the campus. It was allowed every day and has been reported by all the news media. The security measures in fact came into force only on the 14th of May when eminent citizens, alumni of the Faculty and artists from across the country converged to show their solidarity. The so called security measures were only part of attempts to put hurdles to a peaceful convergence of concerned citizens from all walks of life.

University Claim: 02. The Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Professor Deepak Kannal is on leave and is currently in the U.S.A. on an academic assignment. He has been requested to pre-pone his return to India and is likely to resume his duties at the earliest possible.
Response: It is such an irony that Professor Deepak Kannal, Dean of the Faculty, who is on an academic assignment in the US has now been asked to cut short his schedule to clean up the mess that the University authorities have created at the Faculty of Fine Arts.

University Claim: 03. Since during the absence of the regular Dean, none of the senior members of the Faculty was willing to take the charge of the Faculty, Professor G. C. Maheshwari, Dean Fculty of Management Studies has been appointed as the Officer on Special Duty in-charge of the Faculty of Fine Arts till the Dean Professor Deepak Kannal resumes his duties.
Response: The very fact that no senior Faculty members were willing to take charge of the Faculty shows the unity among the staff members of the Faculty of Fine Arts and their faith in Professor Shivaji Panikkar and his rightful actions. The Faculty stood by Professor Shivaji Panikkar in all his actions, even at the time when i/c Registrar Mr. Beedkar came with a written order from the University Authorities to close down the exhibition of Indian Traditions, it was not just Professor Shivaji Panikkar but all the Staff Members signed and received the order to show that the decision about the exhibition was not just a whimsical act of any one individual but a careful decision taken by the staff collective considering the nature and the manner of the organized illustrative exhibition.

University Claim: 04. The results of the examinations of the Department of Museology, one of the six departments of the Faculty of Fine Arts, is declared. All the possible steps are being taken as to the conduct of the examination and the declaration of the results at the earliest possible.
Response: The Museology Department has a separate Academic Council and has less than seven students for their MA level Examination. All the other five Departments of Faculty of Fine Arts have a single Board of Studies and all the students in these Departments have Art History and Aesthetics as a compulsory paper for the Degree Program. The unfortunate action taken by the University Authorities to seal this Department has led to the further disruption of examination procedures. The entire examination papers of students are stuck inside the Department. Besides, Professor Shivaji K. Panikkar teaches and evaluates maximum number of papers for MA level students and as the Head of the Department he oversees the examination/evaluation of papers. His suspension from the post of i/c Dean and banning of his entry into the University premises has stalled the evaluation work. Some papers come under specialized category and only a person of Prof. Panikkar’s expertise and experience can evaluate them. Till today the University has hardly taken any measure to resolve the deadlock.

University Claim: 05. A committee of the following members is constituted on 12 May 2007 to investigate about:
(i) the incidence that occurred in the Faculty of Fine Arts on 09 May 2007 and subsequent developments related to it, and
(ii) the role, conduct and behaviour of Professor S. K. Panikkar, the then in-charge Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts with regard to the above referred incidence and frame charges against him.

01. Professor Syed Maswood, Dean, Faculty of Law, Convener
02. Dr. Prakash Shah, (M.D.), Syndicate Member, Member
03. Shri Mukundbhai Shah, Syndicate Member Member
04. Advocate Shri Rajendra Trivedi, Senate Member Member

The Convener is authorized to co-opt any other member(s) or invite artists for consultation.
The Committee is requested to submit its report at the earliest possible.
The Terms of Reference of the Committee will be as follows:
01 To ascertain the facts and evidences about the incidence that occurred in the Faculty of Fine Arts on 09 May 2007 and subsequent developments related to it.
02 To examine the role, conduct and behaviour of Professor S. K. Panikker, In-Charge Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts with regard to the above referred incidence.
03 To identify person(s) responsible for the incidence and subsequent developments related to it, and recommend appropriate action(s) with regard to those responsible.
Response: The nature of the Committee and the political affiliations of most of the Committee members are already known to the public through media reports. It exposes the intention of the University authorities and raises serious doubts about the inquiry procedures and the possible outcome. The Faculty of Fine Arts has a long and illustrious history and has alumni which is known world over. An inquiry into the incidence which involves art works does not have a permanent member who comes from a Fine Arts background. The Honorable Chancellor Mrunalinidevi Puar has also publicly expressed her dismay over the legitimacy and credibility of the Inquiry Committee (TOI, 19th May 2007, Front Page).

Administration of a university involves the application of rules and regulations that are crucial to the everyday functioning of the institution. In such a situation, it is of fundamental importance that the university practices its regulative function wisely and in a manner that keeps in view the customary practices of all its Faculties. The action of the administration riding roughshod over the Fine Arts Faculty's customary functioning is a clear instance of loss of administrative wisdom and failure of administrative competence. In such a situation, what needs to be judged is the whole set of actions and reactions, including the high-handedness of the Vice Chancellor and his administration. It is for this larger reason that the very act of the Vice Chancellor setting up an inquiry committee needs to be challenged.

All through his position paper, the Vice Chancellor has clearly endorsed all the sentiments and opinions of Mr Jain. He has already prejudged the matter even before hearing from the University’s own inquiry committee. The closed mindedness displayed by the Vice Chancellor and other University authorities forebodes the dismantling of academic and scientific values of careful and unbiased investigation. Their actions seem to have no respect for the democratic ideals of discussion and debate that have contributed to the rise of this university to its present status.

In the given situation, we demand that the inquiry be conducted on broader lines by an impartial national body. We also demand that the Vice Chancellor be disallowed from any further involvement in this issue.

The VC's Statement

2007-05-19T12:03:00.000+05:30

Did I err in instinctively taking the side of the artists against the BJP activists? Isn't it true that BJP supporters are also citizens, and in Gujarat, a majority that democratically elected their government to power? If I stand for liberal and enlightened values, can I look down upon a person of faith - who may well believe, also, in blasphemy?

This is what the Vice-Chancellor of MSU, Dr Manoj Soni, had to say about the recent events in the Fine Arts faculty. I am posting his message, unedited:

The Maharaja Sayajirao Universiy of Baroda is amongst the top Universities in the country with very high global repute. The Faculty of Fine Arts is amongst its very best Faculties and is one of the top ranking institutions world-wide in the field of Fine Arts.

On 9 May 2007, the citizens of Vadodara lodged their strong protest at the Faculty of Fine Arts, of the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. The protest was against an exhibition displaying a number of artworks deeply hurting the sentiments of Faith and decency of the society at large.

It is noteworthy that during his telephonic conversation with the Vice-Chancellor over this incidence of protest, the then in-charge Dean Professor S. K. Panniker (who is currently suspended from the University Services) also termed these works of art as “objectionable”.

The protest was verbal and peaceful. The citizens had come to the Faculty of Fine Arts having read a news item in the Times of India dated 07 May 2007 and Gujarati daily Sandesh dated 09 May 2007. These news items mentioned that the Works of Art created by the students of the Faculty as a part of their Annual Examination were open for public display on the 9th May 2007. Such public display has been a tradition. In fact, one of the teachers of the Faculty had sent messages through SMS inviting people to the display at the Faculty of Fine Arts. Thus, the claim in the media that the display was not open for public is untrue.

These citizens noticed that some of the works of Art displayed at the Faculty were highly deplorable.

One of the so-called work of Art was a huge Christian Cross where Lord Jesus Christ was shown with his penis out on the Cross, his palms and feet hanging from the two sides and the bottom of the Cross, respectively. Semen was shown as dropping out of his penis into a real toilet commode placed beneath the Cross. The toilet contained fishes.

Another very large sized painting showed a woman in nude posture. A baby was shown as attempting to come out of the vagina of the women. The picture depicted the women trying to attack the baby with a Trishul. The painting had the words “DURGA MATA” written at the bottom.

Similarly Lord Shiva and Lord Visnhu were also depicted in a highly derogatory manner in other so-called works of Art.

The media had already arrived by this time and were witnessing and recording / photographing the events that followed.

When the group of citizens led by Mr. Niraj Jain, as per his letter, protested and requested the student who had created these so-called works of Art to remove these objectionable works of Art from public display, the student refused to do so. Again the group of citizens requested Professor Panniker, the then in-charge Dean of the Faculty to intervene and get those objectionable works of art removed from public display. Professor Panniker refused to do so.

The protest was entirely peaceful and verbal. No damage was caused to the property of the University. No injury whatsoever was caused to any person.

On the request of the then in-charge Dean, the University officials arranged for police reinforcement with a request to provide necessary protection. The police promptly arrived at the venue. After a very long and consistent persuasion, those objectionable works of art were removed and placed in a room, which was locked and sealed by the police on the basis of a complaint filed by Mr. Niraj Jain and in concurrence with the provision of relevant Law. None of the so-called works of art was damaged in any manner.

On the basis of a police complaint filed by Shri Niraj Jain in his individual capacity as a citizen, the student – Mr. Chandra Mohan, who had created those objectionable works of Art was arrested by police under relevant legal provisions. The University authorities deputed an official to provide all the possible help to the student.

Subsequently, the University received a high number of representations and memoranda from several organizations, groups, individuals of high repute and common people from a cross section of society strongly urging the University officials to intervene and disallow the exhibition of such works of art that deeply hurt and offend the sentiments of Faith of various communities.

Thus, with a view to respect the sentiments of Faith of very large communities, as well as honoring the University’s social sensitivity and responsibility, the University officials including the Pro-Vice Chancellor and the Vice-Chancellor requested Professor S. K. Panniker, the then in-charge Dean of the Faculty several times to wind-up the exhibition.

Since the exhibition had already hurt the sentiments of Faith of very large societies, the then in-charge Dean of the Faculty was also requested to issue a statement expressing at least regret and apology over such unintentional consequence of the exhibition. During such meetings of the Pro-Vice-Chancellor and the Vice Chancellor with Professor Panniker, the then in-charge Dean, his colleagues were also present.

The then Faculty in-charge Dean, unfortunately, did not heed these requests. Regrettably, adding fuel to the fire, he made such offending public statements, which further hurt and flared up the common citizens’ feelings demanding strong action. In one such statements printed by the media, for instance, Professor Panniker, the then in-charge Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts, is quoted as saying that the Faculty of Fine Arts is like his personal bedroom and therefore, he is free to do whatever he desires there! Thus, the protest of the citizens of the city grew manifolds. Consequently, there was a huge public outcry from a cross section of society including the students of the University, demanding strong action in the matter.

As if this was not enough, in sheer defiance of the University officials requests and even executive orders, on 11th May 2007, once again, the then in-charge Dean, organized an exhibition in the evening displaying nude paintings in the name of and Indian culture!

Since this unwarranted act of the then in-charge Dean could have sparked large-scale social disharmony and caused disruption, the University Authority deputed two Deputy Registrars and one Assistant Registrar for requesting the in-charge Dean Prof. Panniker, for not organizing the said exhibition. When these officials reached the Faculty and spoke to the then in-charge Dean, he refused point blank to stop the display and reacted that he was not required to take permission of anybody including University Authority for doing anything in the Faculty.

Upon this, the Authority deputed Registrar-in-charge with a written order directing the in-charge Dean to close the display. After acknowledging the letter of the Registrar-in-charge after a lot of dilly-dallying, Prof. Panniker adamantly continued on his stand of not closing the display and said he would keep the display open throughout the night and disobey the University authority’s lawful orders.

In spite of such disobedient behaviour of the then in-charge Dean, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University, Professor S. M. Joshi, along with the Senate and Syndicate members and leading citizens of the city went personally to the Faculty premises and repeatedly requested the in-charge Dean to close the display. Even then, the then in-charge Dean remained adamant and refused to heed the requests / orders of the Pro-Vice-Chancellor.

The Faculty of Fine Arts is an integral part of the prestigious The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, known for its substantial contribution in placing Gujarat & Baroda on international cultural scene, and as such cannot be left solely on the whims & wishes of any one individual.

In the event of the adamant refusal of the then in-charge Dean to heed the repeated requests from the University officials and his blatant refusal to obey lawful orders of the University officials and that too in such grave matter of hurting the sentiments of decency and societal harmony, the University had no other option but to suspend the in-charge Dean, Prof. S. K. Panniker from the University services for three months with immediate effect under the rules of the University.

The university authority has constituted a committee headed by Professor Syed Maswood, Dean Faculty of Law, with clear terms of reference for investigating entire matter in detail, identify all person/s responsible for this incidence, and recommend appropriate action under rules of the University.

The Chancellor of the University, Her Excellency Dr. Mrunalini Devi Puar, has publicly condemned such exhibition depicting divine personalities in derogatory manner.

In addition to a very large number of social organizations and common people, the leading citizens including Maharaja Ranjitsingh Gaekwad, Padmashri Sitanshu Mehta, Renowned Painter Shri Gulam Mohmmed Sheikh, Professor Dhruv Mistry, renowned Sculptor, Noted Poet Madhav Ramanuj and several distinguished personalities have issued public statements condemning the exhibition of objectionable works of Art that caused deep hurt to the sentiments of Faith of a very large society.

Steps Taken to Restore Normalcy

01. The Security, particularly in the Faculty of Fine Arts, has been enhanced right from 09 May 2007. The Security personnel are ensuring that only those students and Members of the University fraternity are allowed entry inside the Faculty Campus who hold valid identity card or authentic identity document. Due care is also taken not to put genuine visitors to any inconvenience. The campus is totally peaceful.

02. The Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Professor Deepak Kannal is on leave and is currently in the U.S.A. on an academic assignment. He has been requested to pre-pone his return to India and is likely to resume his duties at the earliest possible.

03. Since during the absence of the regular Dean, none of the senior members of the Faculty was willing to take the charge of the Faculty, Professor G. C. Maheshwari, Dean Fculty of Management Studies has been appointed as the Officer on Special Duty in-charge of the Faculty of Fine Arts till the Dean Professor Deepak Kannal resumes his duties.

04. The results of the examinations of the Department of Museology, one of the six departments of the Faculty of Fine Arts, is declared. All the possible steps are being taken as to the conduct of the examination and the declaration of the results at the earliest possible.
05. A committee of the following members is constituted on 12 May 2007 to investigate about:
(i) the incidence that occurred in the Faculty of Fine Arts on 09 May 2007 and subsequent developments related to it, and
(ii) the role, conduct and behaviour of Professor S. K. Panikkar, the then in-charge Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts with regard to the above referred incidence and frame charges against him.

01. Professor Syed Maswood, Dean, Faculty of Law, Convener
02. Dr. Prakash Shah, (M.D.), Syndicate Member, Member
03. Shri Mukundbhai Shah, Syndicate Member Member
04. Advocate Shri Rajendra Trivedi, Senate Member Member

The Convener is authorized to co-opt any other member(s) or invite artists for consultation.
The Committee is requested to submit its report at the earliest possible.
The Terms of Reference of the Committee will be as follows:
01 To ascertain the facts and evidences about the incidence that occurred in the Faculty of Fine Arts on 09 May 2007 and subsequent developments related to it.
02 To examine the role, conduct and behaviour of Professor S. K. Panikker, In-Charge Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts with regard to the above referred incidence.
03 To identify person(s) responsible for the incidence and subsequent developments related to it, and recommend appropriate action(s) with regard to those responsible.

RULES REGARDING DISCIPLINE AND CONDUCT OF UNIVERSITY EMPLOYEES

‘Chapter XLIX’ (Page No. 341 of the Handbook of the MSU) states as under:

No.2
During the hours fixed for his duties, he shall devote himself diligently to his work, AND GIVE FULL CO-OPERATION IN ALL UNIVERSITY WORK.

No. 5
HE SHALL RESPECT ALL LAWFUL ORDERS FROM HIS SUPERIOR OFFICERS AND CARRY THEM OUT FAITHFULLY.

No. 6
HE SHALL SEE THAT THE UNIVERSITY PROPERTY, ARTICLES, APPARATUS, MONEY ETC. IN HIS CHARGE ARE USED WITH REASONABLE CARE, and proper precautions are taken against any possible damage to them or loss to the University.

No. 9
HE SHALL STUDY THE PROVISIONS OF THE ACT, STATUTES, ORDINANCES, RULES, REGULATIONS AND PROCEDURE SO FAR AS THEY CONCERN THE PROPER DISCHARGE OF DUTIES ATTACHED TO HIS POST, AND SEE THAT HE CONFORMS TO THEM IN HIS DAILY DUTIES.

No. 13
Unless generally or specially empowered in this behalf, he shall not communicate directly to outside persons or associations or to the press any documents or information which has come into his possession in the course of his duties or has been prepared or collected by him in the course of these duties, whether from official sources or otherwise.

No.16
THE UNIVERSITY TEACHERS SHOULD REFRAIN FROM ANY ACTIVITY WHICH TENDS TO CREATE COMMUNAL DISHARMONY.

Here is the other side of the story:

http://www.artconcerns.com/html/baroda_leadstory.htm

All Modi's Men

2007-05-16T21:07:00.000+05:30

I've just discovered - about five minutes ago - that I actually have at least two readers, and that both of them are probably more knowledgeable, intelligent and incisive than I. Just look at the comments in response to my piece on small arms and you'll see what I'm talking about.
This is very heartening, and a trifle scary: Here I was, thinking there's no editor to worry about in this place, and then I find TWO of them. Darn.
However, I think I will continue to indulge in the occassional spot of quick ranting here, mainly because these editors can't fire me :) There's also the afterthought that the time to start a debate is when an issue is 'hot', and the mechanism of the rant is a better catalyst than most.
This time's rant is about the moral police in India.
Recently, an art student in the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Vadodara was arrested and spent five days in jail for creating an allegedly obscene artwork. The artwork in question had not been placed on public display. It was created for an internal examination of the Fine Arts faculty. However, a local BJP leader got a phone call informing him about the existence of this 'obscene' work and promptly landed up at the Faculty with his goons. This, and what followed, is by now well known.
The episode came close on the heels of the 'Shilpa Shetty case'. No, not racism, the Richard Gere kiss.
So who are these morons who get so hot and bothered about such trifles? Why? How do they find the time to fight such 'social evils' as a nude painting or sculpture or a peck on the cheek?
For a long time I had a vague notion - quite unexamined - that they were 'fundamentalists'. The word conjured up images of mainly hirsute gentlemen of various faiths. In the above two instances, for example, the image would be of hirsute 'Hindus'.
Upon reflection, however, I realised that the word 'fundamentalist' was actually obstructing my view.
I lived in Gujarat for seven years. Now I live in Mumbai. In between, I was in Delhi for five years.
I got thrown out of my first rented house in CR Park, Delhi, because my good Leftist Bengali landlord was shocked to discover that my flatmate and I - both men then in our mid 20s - actually drank alcohol! He had no idea until he found a few bottles that our maid had stashed away to sell to the kabadi-wallah. "Not in my house", he declared, moustache bristling, after berating my friend about "wasting money, this is what you do, your parents sent you here to do this?" So we moved to another Bengali's house in CR Park, and lasted a whole year there, until we both acquired girlfriends. Then, of course, we had to leave, because how could we have girls in the house after sundown?
In Gujarat, funnily enough, all this was never a problem. We could drink, though it's a dry state. I've driven around Vadodara in an open jeep, drinking rum out of a Coke bottle in the company of my Gujarati landlord. He was more open about it than most, but of course everyone drinks in dry Gujarat (which means, of course, that bans don't work, so why bother about nuclear non proliferation?) We could have girls over at our places. We could do jolly well as we pleased, so long as we paid the rent and didn't do anything OPENLY.
Mumbai is not so liberal. Well-travelled landlords here will tell you, in perfect English, that they only rent out their flat to Hindus, or Muslims, or Jains, or Parsis. That they only allow you to eat this kind of food and not that. Perhaps that smoking and drinking is not allowed in their house which you will rent out from them at enormous cost, and that you will be evicted if a neighbour complains that you eat meat or drink alcohol.
These people do not conform to the image the word 'fundamentalist' immediately throws up. However, they get hot and bothered about what another person eats or drinks or does in the privacy of his or her house. Their concepts of acceptable behaviour are far narrower than those defined by law. To them, only the food they eat, the drinks they drink, the clothes they wear, and the gods they worship are tolerable.
I've accordingly reconfigured my image of the fundamentalist. It's no longer an Osama or Modi-like character. It's a clean-shaven, regular-looking sort of chap, with a look of low cunning shining in his face, who drinks in secret and gets an erection every time he sees a nude painting or a peck on the cheek.

Riverbend's blog

2007-04-30T19:41:00.000+05:30

Riverbend, the young Iraqi woman who has been writing about life in Bush's Baghdad, is finally leaving that ancient, cursed city. This is what she has to say about the experience of becoming a refugee:

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

We, the grandchildren of Partition, can perhaps empathise with her. The sun may set on empires that divide to rule, but the evil they do lives on after them.

Stupid White Men and their Daft Gun Laws

2007-04-20T18:57:00.000+05:30

Yes, yes, Wild West and all that jazz is great in movies and JT Edson and Louis L'Amour books. But isn't it time those colossal idiots got rid of their phallic gun fixation? People don't need to carry guns any more. The damn things are a death threat to everyone, owners included.
I mean, I'd understand if people in countries where the effects of US foreign policy are most in evidence - like Iraq and Afghanistan, for example - felt the need to carry guns. They are living through bloody anarchy; there's a lot they need to protect themselves from. What does a student at Virginia Tech need guns for?
Really, Stupid White Men, really. All your policies are wrong...and they come back to bite you in the ass. Like your one-time policy of supporting Saddam and Osama, like your dumb gun laws.
Wait until a few islands go under; you'll find that there really is such a thing as environmental catastrophe as well.

Here's a link to an article on small arms that predicted the insurgency in Iraq. Considering that the world's only hyperpower has been whipped by a few guys with guns, you'd think Mr Bush & Co would have learnt to appreciate the power of small arms. But no. They remain resolutely blinkered. And go on and on about 'homeland security' and nonsense. Hello! If any loony with an automatic can shoot you in the street, how secure are you? Where's the friggin 'homeland security' then?

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/smallarms/2003/0423cas.htm

Empower the people

2007-04-15T20:52:00.000+05:30

Let’s cut the crap and talk reality: India, would-be superpower, is a country without power. I mean electricity. Most of this nation is still literally in the dark.
I experience this every time my reporting work takes me outside the brightly-lit, superficially modern cities that I live and work in. A tour of Amethi, the parliamentary constituency represented by Rahul Gandhi – and his father before him – brought this home to me in 2004. Amethi had eight-hour power cuts daily.
It’s like that for most towns and villages across the country. In Bihar, where I wandered all around Raghopur, Rabri Devi’s constituency, most places don’t even have electric wires – they have been cut away and sold off. Only the poles remain.
In Maharashtra, the district of Sindhudurg on the Konkan coast, from where former chief minister and now revenue minister Narayan Rane comes, experiences an average of eight powerless hours a day.
The statistics show that these scattered observations are part of a larger picture of powerlessness.
The Draft National Electricity Policy of 2004 set the goal of providing access to electricity for all households in the next five years. In the same sentence it went on to say that, “As per Census 2001, about 45% of the households do not have access to electricity”. If we remember that there are over 1000000000 people in this country, 45% of the households would mean close to half a billion. There's no way that many more people in India will get electricty by 2009.
Our per capita electricity consumption was 561 KWh in 2001 according to the UNDP Human Development Report. This was up from 173 in 1980, a great leap. However, it's less than that of countries like the Bahamas (5407) and Trinidad and Tobago (4219). Let’s not make comparisons with the US etc just yet. Everyone always wants to know how we compare to China in everything – they use up 1139 KWh per capita.
Per capita electricity consumption is an indicator of development. We’re really not doing so great after all. However the per capita consumption is rising, which means shortages are getting worse. Our ancient thermal plants are creaking under the strain. The darkness is spreading; it has already reached the borders of Bombay, and every summer, when temperatures are at their peak, along with demand, it hits Delhi.
Meanwhile, important people pontificate on pipelines and energy security. These dickheads live in VIP areas where there NEVER any power cuts. They should live in places where there’s no electricity and the temperature is 45 degrees Centigrade.
If they did, they might want to adopt an alternative approach to energy security – one that places the individual at the center of the planning. This is what I had proposed at a conference on South Asia in the UK in 2004.
The basic idea was to treat energy security as a subset of human security. Not a top-down, hubs-and-spokes-only model, but a more inclusive, bottom-up model that starts with the goal of providing electricity to every individual, and then adopts any technology that will enable this in a sustainable way.
So, for example, energy cooperatives and distributed generation might help; connect these to an intelligent grid if feasible. Strengthen and modernise the existing grid. Use run of the river micro-hydel; promote bio-diesel in a big way. Let jatropha be cultivated as a cash crop. Empower the people.
It’s happening anyway. Every time the power goes and the generators drone to life, it becomes apparent that people who can are already making their own arrangements. Surely the underprivileged can be empowered to do the same, in a way that does not strain our scant oil reserves.

Fair & Handsome

2007-04-09T23:53:00.000+05:30

I peek in through the glass door of the neighbourhood chemist shop. A neighbour is inside. Maybe I can come back after eating some panipuris, I think, but she's still there 10 minutes later – in fact, there are two more now. This is going to take another visit. Next time is better. The coast is clear. I walk in and am about to place my order when a neighbour walks in. I buy Vicks lozenges and leave, crushed. It is only after a smoke and a shot of vodka that the man in my soul perks up. There is a job to be done, he says, and great sacrifices will have to be made. Chin set, I march into the chemist shop and ask for a tube of ‘Fair and Handsome’.
Of course the fellow didn’t have it that day four weeks ago when the Editor of Brunch asked me to sacrifice myself to the cause of science. My brief was to use the recently launched fairness cream for men, and write about the effects. Any hope of getting off the hook due to non-availability of the product was shattered a day later when the Editor herself handed me a tube.
The experimentation began. I was to use the cream twice a day for the following four weeks. Experiment design was an issue. How was anyone to judge whether the cream worked or not? Since I have only one face, the idea of applying the fairness cream to half the face didn’t appeal too much to me. It’s difficult enough finding a date anyway; who will go out with a guy with one fair cheek? Our Editorial Director Vir Sanghvi came up with the solution: use it on one hand.

Day one: I’ve read everything that’s written on the tube a few times. This is going to “penetrate my tough male epidermis to regulate melanin production”. It will also “create a natural sunscreen to protect against UV rays”. No problems there, but what would father think? He might start wondering why I haven’t married yet. Gravely, I apply a dab on my face and left hand, and survey the consequences.

Day two: I think I’m looking fairer already. This thing works instantly! And I’ve seen the ad too, the one where a giggle of girls drape themselves around the model after he starts using ‘Fair and Handsome’. Maybe I should go to a well-lit pub today; someone might drape herself all over me saying ‘Hi handsome’.

Day seven: The double strength peptide complex for tough male skin doesn’t last too long. I forgot to use it for a day and am back to being myself again. Well, at least I know now that the experiment is reversible.

Day 12: I have to be careful about this thing. Today a woman landed a peck on my cheek and then looked at me very queerly indeed. It must be the smell – this cream has a sweet, feminine smell to it.

Day 13: Wonder how double strength peptide interacts with aftershave? There’s only one way to find out. If I end up mottled pink, say on my epitaph: “For your tomorrow, he gave his today. Now use Fair and Handsome without aftershave”.

Day 13: I’m still all one colour, thank God, and white as a sheet - from fear and peptide. But at least I smell straight.

Day 22: No limousine, no mansion, no little boys yet. I’ve been expecting to wake up as Michael Jackson, but from the available evidence it seems I’m still me.

Day 24: Today a colleague asked if I was using the cream. She couldn’t say if I was, though. Maybe I was always this fair. And handsome, of course.

Day 28: Eureka! Archimedes! Whatever. Today I subjected myself to intense non-medical examination by the Health Editor. I asked her to say which hand was fairer. She chose one, then the other, and finally plonked for the wrong one. Looks like I’m not dappled like a horse. On the other hand…now the girls won’t drape themselves all over me, will they?

Jeet's poem

2007-04-04T10:27:00.000+05:30

This is a poem my friend Jeet Thayil sent me a little over a year ago. I remembered it now after an event that still seems impossible, unreal. Jeet's wife Shakti, beautiful, talented, vivacious Shakti, died suddenly last week. She was barely 25.

WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR WIFE, THE DANCER?

When it rains, the dead descend.
You appear,so real I can smell the rainwater in your hair,

can touch the circle I placed on your finger.
And the box that our future was wrapped in,

does the scent of happiness still linger
on the paper, the velvet, the ribbon?

Your lips, clear of the color you always wear,
are not new to me, they're lovely and bare;

and our old argument still turns, it burns.
How soon will you forget me if I die?

By the water in my eye and the way it returns,I swear:
If I forget you, let the world die.

When it rains, the dead ascend. You disappear
where I can't follow: into the upper air.

There's something wrong with the world today

2007-03-24T11:22:00.000+05:30

Ahem. Excuse me, there’s something wrong with the world. For the past week, I have been meeting an unusually large number of people who feel this way. Either I’m hanging out with the wrong people, or we’re all going nuts in a synchronised sort of way … or there really is something wrong with the world.
I think it’s a bit of all three. The first shouldn’t worry anyone except me, and the folks I hang out with. The last is cause for concern for everyone who’s not from outer space.
My colleague Narendra, despite appearances to the contrary, is not from outer space. The other day he spent the better part of three hours telling me how we are really in the middle of the Third World War, and how the entire social and political structure that currently exists must make way for ‘something better’. In his calculation, this can only happen by the spontaneous appearance of a messianic character called The Maverick.
The Maverick will really have a tough miracle to perform: not only must he transform the planet; he should do so without really doing anything – by ‘just being’. Narendra himself will do nothing to assist the Maverick in his labours. He had some very convoluted excuse which I can’t recall but I think it’s actually because he’s a Bengali bhadralok.
This is all very funny of course. The funnier thing is, I broadly agree with Narendra. He may be wrong about the details but for all we know he may actually be right – there’s no predicting the future. And his basic idea, that there’s something wrong with the way the world runs at present, finds resonance with me. I’ve long felt the same way myself. If the world is being run right then why is almost everyone dissatisfied more often than not? Why do we have so many wars and insurgencies? Why is there crime? Why is all this increasing rather than diminishing?
It’s not as if only the poor are dissatisfied with their lot and unhappy. Some of the richest, most successful people on earth have died unhappy deaths. Howard Hughes was the richest man on earth when he gave up business, cut himself off from the world and began to self-destruct. He died after destroying large parts of his own empire.
Nor is it about recognition: who would say Marilyn Monroe or Kurt Cobain lacked fame? They killed themselves. I don’t suppose it can even be about self-expression or ‘doing what I like’. Earnest Hemingway expressed himself in great works of literature, but he also shot himself dead. And, in a very different way, Casanova (the original one) who led a famously full life doing what he wanted (and who he wanted) was an extremely unhappy person in his later years, and is said to have died of grief.
The World Values Survey last year found Nigeria to be the happiest country on earth. Mexico was second; the US was fifteenth and India twenty-first. In case it makes you happier, Pakistan was 23rd. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious correlation between standard of living and happiness, at least from this survey.
So what is it then that brings happiness? Can it be ‘true love’? For a long time I thought it was. By simple Sherlock Holmes style deduction, when you rule out the other possibilities, this seems the one that’s left, but I find myself increasingly doubtful about it. That’s because of all the possibilities we’ve considered this is the most abstract and depends almost entirely on chance.

Which is why the world needs to change. Narendra, with an air of Newton watching the apple fall, pointed out something that many wise men have said – that people mistake pleasure for happiness.
The problem as I see it is that the entire structure of society is geared towards getting and spending. If tomorrow people everywhere were to declare that they are happy with what they have, the global economy – and civilisation as we know it - would collapse. If the tribes living in the world’s last forests were to say they don’t want the joys of development and globalisation, they’d have to be ‘educated’. If a country were to say it did not want to sell oil, it would have to be conquered.
I can’t do without electricity or my car or phone. Therefore it’s not for me to knock development. But I do hope that human ingenuity continues to stay a step ahead of human wants, as both capitalists and communists wager it will, because the earth has finite resources, and the danger that we may lose even the bittersweet ‘fruits of development’ is very real.
And somewhere along the way, I hope we find a way of life that’s not built on forever wanting more. We need a new direction; our rudder is set wrong.

(This first appeared in my column in HT Next in 2004)

Quitting drink

2007-03-19T00:53:00.000+05:30

It’s a mad, bad world, as any man who’s ever tried to quit drinking or smoking will tell you. Everyone looks at you differently the day you announce your intention to turn over a good, new leaf. Friends check your temperature, ask you if you’re having a hangover, and offer you cigarettes and coffee with worried looks on their faces. Some enquire whether you plan to become a monk. Your sex life will run dry, they tell you, so you just as well might.
An air of gloom pervades your entire social life.
Your descent into solitary confinement begins soon after. “Hi, we’re going out for a drink”, colleagues will tell you. So maybe you go and sip orange juice while everyone else has a great time. The only satisfaction you can get out of that is by telling everyone the next day how hilariously silly they drank themselves. It’ll go like this: “Ha, ha you were so piss drunk you thought the pot was your ex-boyfriend – and you, you wanted to go up the wall because you thought you’re Spiderman!” And then they’ll never call you again unless they need a driver.
The professional losses are no less than the personal. Try inviting business contacts over for a tea party. They’ll thank you profusely, say how good tea is for health, and erase your number from their phones. There might be a few discreet enquiries about your religious beliefs and sexual orientation, for purely professional reasons of course.
The trauma of all this social rejection can seriously damage the psyche. As a consequence, you could become a drug addict.
Even those of ultra-strong mental construction, who escape such a fate, must come to terms with their newly found free time. Since evenings will always be free, they will have to take up something healthier than television to kill time. Joining some strange cargo cult and spending the evenings prostrating before pictures of the only superhero currently more powerful than Spiderman might be a good idea. I refer to the friendly hood, Taxman, who is reportedly slinging webs even Spidey can’t escape.
Women who quit smoke and drink somehow seem to get a better deal. They still get invited everywhere, and get free orange juice and sympathy because they’re such good girls. Men, those hypocritical ding-a-lings, suddenly want to take them home to mama after years of trying to just take them home.
There might be some common fringe benefits for born-again teetotalers of both sexes. Lower credit card bills are guaranteed. The money previously spent in bars can now be spent in salad bars. The beer belly could well recede, especially after the distinction between morning and night becomes clear.
Days and nights would obviously seem to stretch longer as well. If, after all the sacrifice and heartache, you still don’t live any longer, you’ll at least feel like you did.
Having considered all the pros and cons, my plan is to quit drink, but to leave a loophole in the law (Safety valve feature to prevent drug addiction). Even teetotalers are allowed to drink fruit juices. And wine is but a special sort of grape juice, after all, isn’t it?

Watered down and out

2007-02-20T15:12:00.000+05:30

I am told that Roger Waters recently sang some songs in Mumbai. I was there at the concert, but I would not vouch for his presence. I did not see him.
Of course the songs were his; the voice was, too. But one can never trust technology these days. It might just have been a new, big iPod connected to some fancy speakers. And the gent reportedly on stage – I could not see anyone on stage – could easily have been Bah Bling, the Khasi gent from Cherrapunjee in Meghalaya who, according to Shillong lore, has claimed close communion with UFOs. After all, there was a UFO sighting over the Bandra Kurla Complex where Mr Waters was allegedly performing. A large pink pig with graffiti on its body was spotted flying off into the distance.
I saw the flying pig. Seeing is believing for me, and I now believe that pink pigs can fly. Apart from this, I am certain that the queue for the Rs 2000 ticket entry was more than a kilometer long. And that the gentleman with the ‘God made grass’ T-shirt next to me did enjoy some of God’s own produce.
I would have had more faith in Water’s presence at the venue if I had seen anything apart from the backs of people’s heads in two hours there. It was a Wall, thick and impenetrable. No amount of standing on toes and craning the neck helped. Nor did tireless attempts at finding an opening in the Wall.
Maybe you were there, in which case you were just another prick in that Wall.
Sorry for the rudeness. It’s just frustration. What does one do when, after booking a ticket for Rs 2000 weeks in advance, and queing up expectantly at the venue for 45 minutes to get in, all one gets to see is the tops of three big screens and the lights on the ceiling of the stage? The show started with six white lights shining down on stage; it was the best view of the stage I could get.
Thereafter, I saw and heard a Munna Mobile next to me give a running commentary of events at the show. “Now he is singing ‘Shine on you crazy diamond…Now a pig is flying! Now there is a fire on stage!” His view could not be much better than mine since he was only a few inches taller, but he managed to keep up the false air of excitement that is the mark of a good commentator.
I must say I felt envious of all the slim young women out there who happily climbed on to big beefy men’s shoulders. Perhaps they can confirm Mr Waters was there. I also felt envious of everyone in the Rs 2000 enclosure who was more than 6 feet 6 inches tall. They could look over the wall.
I guess the people in the Rs 1000 enclosure further back also saw the Wall, or, if they were more than eight feet tall, faint images of a white man with a guitar. Some of the rich ones with the Rs 3000 tickets may have been close enough to see the facial features and recognise the man from his pictures.
For this wonderful experience, and the pain in the neck I got from craning my neck, I would like to thank the intellectual luminaries who organized the concert and made the stage so low. Thank you, thank you.

Balls to researchers

2007-01-18T19:16:00.000+05:30

This is an article I'd written in 2005 for the Hindustan Times. It was published in December '05. The recent brouhaha over Indian penis sizes reminded me of it.

A new law

A recent study has found that bats with big balls have small brains, and vice versa. This was reported in last week's issue of The Economist in an article called 'Bats and Balls', and also found mention in The Guardian. The study, conducted by Dr Scott Pitnick of Syracuse University and two of his colleagues, studied measurements of brain size and testis size in 334 species of bats before making their conclusion.

According to The Economist, "The hypothesis they were testing came in two parts. The first was that in any given species, the average male's testis size as a fraction of body weight will depend on the behaviour of that species' females — in particular, how promiscuous those females are. The second was that, given that brain tissue and testis tissue are among the most expensive to maintain physiologically, and that bats have a very tight energy budget, bigger balls would result in smaller brains".

Both hypotheses proved correct. The findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society.

The scientists have not given their law a name yet. However, since it appears to be a law of conservation, like Einstein's 'Law of conservation of mass and energy', perhaps it should be named in similar fashion, with 'mass' being substituted by 'balls' and 'energy' by 'brains'.

Bats are mammals like humans, and it is quite possible that similar results might be obtained in a study of mankind. The implications of this law are therefore no less staggering than that of Einstein's. I'm not smart enough to figure out all the consequences, but things look bad for Einstein, scientists in general, chess players, class toppers and the IIT-IIM types. It's worst for scientists who are so smart that they can get funding for a study like this. On the other hand, politicians who get caught taking bribes on camera and then say they did nothing wrong obviously have a lot of balls. I shall say nothing of clever journalists who catch them and win awards for bad sex writing.

The new law of conservation proves once again that life isn't fair. There is a very difficult choice involved here, for men as well as women. The dilemma for men will be in deciding how they want to project themselves. People out of IIT and IIM, for example, might be forced to write atrocious books to dispel public doubts about their testes.

For women, the dilemma is greater. Apart from the obvious one of what they value more in men, there's also the other part of the theory: The more promiscuous they get, the more dim men become. This has obviously been happening for a bit now. The evidence is all around us.

Perhaps further studies will indicate what the optimum balls-brains ratio is. This would require a great deal of research, and significant going about with callipers and IQ tests. The Indian Council for Medical Research, which once funded a study on the size of the Indian penis, may want to look into this.

The harried male has another existential crisis to cope with. There is a silver lining, though: We can finally feel good about all the stupid things we've done. Maybe the sizes fluctuate – that would really explain everything. Of course I could be wrong, and just having a testicular moment.

Poverty as roulette

2006-12-19T19:03:00.000+05:30

There is a game I have been forced to invent. I call it ‘travel roulette’. The rules are pretty simple: You go alone to a place you have never been before, where you know no one, with the minimum amount of money you need to get there and back. If, for example, you are going to, say, Athens, you should just take your return ticket, money for your hotel stay, and local bus fares. Nothing extra. You win if you enter the airport on your way back with zero euros on you. If you miscalculate and run out of money, you get stuck in whichever place you are at.
I’ve never managed to achieve the zero cash state. I got out of Paris with ten euros on me. It was all the money I had. I got out of Istanbul with five turkish lira on me. Again, it was all the money I had.
But my best performance so far came this week, on a trip to Mcleodganj. I got out of the place with Rs 2.50 in my possession.
Apart from the thrill of danger – not a quick adrenalin rush, as happens in a fight, but a tension that coils up inside you – travelling like this is also an excellent way to learn some values in a hurry.
The first thing you learn is thrift. Spending 60 rupees on a cup of coffee or a thousand on a night out is all very well; however, when you have no money to spend, you suddenly figure out what is wasteful and what is necessary.
The lack of money also translates into a different lifestyle. You stay in a cheap place, so there is no television. That immediately changes the way you spend your leisure. From staring vacantly at a screen and flipping channels, you go to reading, or maybe sitting in a park watching life go by. There is more time for contemplation.
There is probably not much money to throw on alcohol or cigarettes either. Good, healthy habits replace drinking and smoking. Instead of getting drunk until late in the night and waking late with a hangover, you will probably sleep early and wake up in time for a morning walk.
You’ll be walking a lot through the day too – there will be no money for taxis or autos. The choice is between figuring out the buses or using your own two feet. Either way, enough exercise is guaranteed.
You will also learn humility. There is a certain swagger that most people acquire through money. They behave in a certain way, not because of who they are, but because of what they have. They are defined by their possessions – the rich guy or girl, the one with the swank car, etc. A very good way to discover what you are really made of is to leave these crutches behind, especially if you haven’t earned them yourselves.
The most important thing that anyone learns from travelling penniless in a strange place is to value the things that one does have. On my way back from Mcleodganj, with Rs 2.50 in my pocket, I found myself without money to buy dinner when the bus stopped at a dhaba in the middle of the night.
I bought myself one roti with the Rs 2.50, and I was happy.

What militants look like

2006-10-16T17:36:00.000+05:30

The word ‘militant’ occurs with increasing frequency in our daily news and lives. What it means, though, is hazy to most people. No one seems to know what ‘militants’ do, or what they are like.
The answer is, they are usually like regular people.
I recently met a quiet, middle aged man from Sri Lanka at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in New Delhi. He spoke softly and laughed easily. He seemed very like a college teacher. It turned out that he was the leader of a militant group that had attempted to take over a country.
D Sitharthan is the head of the People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE). He knows LTTE leader V Prabhakaran from childhood. They were friends for a time, until their goals and paths diverged. Sitharthan went on to join PLOTE, a group founded by a former LTTE chief known as Mukundan who had left the Tigers in 1980 after a power struggle with Prabhakaran. Mukundan and Prabhakaran faced off in a gun battle in the streets of Chennai in 1982. Both of them escaped unhurt, but both were subsequently arrested by the Tamil Nadu police. Both were released on bail.
The LTTE later fought a bloody battle with other Tamil separatist groups in Sri Lanka. It destroyed all of them, including PLOTE. By 1986, there was no doubt which group was the king of the Sri Lankan jungle: it was the Tigers.
That apparently got the PLOTE leaders thinking. They figured they needed a base somewhere. North and east Sri Lanka were under LTTE control. The rest of the country was dominated by the Sri Lankan armed forces. There was no room for them anywhere on the island.
So the PLOTE leaders did some ‘out of the island’ thinking. They decided to take over the Maldives.
On November 3, 1988, 80 PLOTE men, backed by some Maldivian dissidents, landed in the Maldives capital, Male. Sitharthan says they were in control of the city for four hours. They were forced to flee the next day, when Indian commandoes landed on the island. The militants had made a mistake: they had not attacked communication facilities, because they planned to use those themselves. Unfortunately for them, the people they planned to overthrow used them first.
Sitharthan now laughs about that attempt. He looks embarassed at the mention of the incident. His group gave up arms after the Indo-Sri Lanka peace accord of 1987, he says. They are re-arming again, though, because of the failure of the accord.
The PLOTE is now a marginal force in Lankan politics. Sitharthan himself lives in Colombo, and is much like any other political worker, though he does seem more direct and honest than the average politician.
His predecessor Mukundan is dead. He was shot dead in Colombo.
Most of the people I have met who might be called militants are like Sitharthan. On the surface, they are quiet, friendly people. Except, of course, for the fact that they believe very, very strongly in a certain political goal — and they will do whatever it takes to achieve that goal. The generally live quietly eventful lives. Some of them, like Mukundan, die sudden, violent deaths.

Troy!

2006-09-30T22:10:00.000+05:30

After Helen

Most airports get pretty forlorn at three a.m. Delhi is no different. Stifling yawns, I walk into the departure lounge and look around to see who else will get airborne with me. The sight wakes me up. This Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul is full of burly men wearing Daler Mehndi T-shirts.
Most seats are taken. I find myself a place next to one of the men in Daler T-shirts. He is a big sardarji. We say hello. It turns out that he is Daler paaji’s elder brother. The whole Daler troupe is on its way to a performance in Istanbul. Balle balle on the Bosphorus, I tell myself.
Less than six hours later we’re over that famous waterway. From a kilometre up in the sky, it looks like an arm of the blue sea thrust into the belly of the green-gold land. Dots that are ships weave long white trails in the water behind them.
Istanbul airport is pleasant and thoroughly modern. The first impression, for the visitor from Delhi, is that this is more Europe than Asia. The city itself is more confusing. On the ride from the airport, it looks neat and Western – but there are those ancient minarets rising into the sky. And every now and then, there’s a glimpse of a Byzantine ruin here or an Ottoman one there.
It’s quite clearly a fascinating place. For now, though, it is not my destination. I am on my way to another place out of myth and history, older than Constantinople. I am headed for Troy.
A flying carpet or winged horse seems the appropriate mode of transport to a place like that. Unfortunately, however, I can only get a ticket on an air-conditioned bus. It’s a long ride – more than six hours – to the quaint little town of Canakkale at the mouth of the Dardanelles Strait, 310 km away, where we will halt for the night. Gentle hills clothed in sunflowers roll past on one side of the road for most of the way. On the other side is the Sea of Marmara. We stop once for a cay (chai-tea) and corba (dal-lentil soup) break at a highway restaurant that has a zoo in its backyard. Meal over, some of us from the Troy bus wander around, looking at the strange birds and sad monkeys.
By afternoon we’re at the site of an old battleground. Around 250,000 soldiers died here on the Gallipoli peninsula at the far end of Europe during World War I. Across the Dardanelle Strait, in easy view, is Asia – and the town of Canakkale.
The Battle of Gallipoli was one of the bloodiest ever fought anywhere. In 1914, a combined Anglo-French naval attack orchestrated by Winston Churchill was defeated by the Ottoman Turks at the mouth of the Dardanelles near Gallipoli. The aim of the attack was to open up the sea route from the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas to the Black Sea in order to help Russia. Following this defeat, the Allies realised that a land attack was needed to support the naval offensive. In 1915, Australian, New Zealander, British (including Sikh and Gorkha) and French troops attacked Gallipoli. They were held off till January 1916 by Turkish forces, including some led by Kemal Ataturk, and departed in defeat.

Today the wooded green hillside and the gentle Aegean Sea are the only remaining witnesses of this epic battle. They show no evidence of the slaughter. Captain Ali, our guide and a former submarine captain in the Turkish Navy, points to two narrow ditches on either side of the narrow road. Those are the trenches, he says. Barely 10 feet apart. Men shot each other at that range. They killed each other in thousands without either side gaining an inch.
Eventually, the Allies won the World War, and the Ottoman Empire was dismembered. Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Palestine (now Israel) were among the territories carved out from it.
A massive statue of Ataturk stands at the site in Gallipoli where he was shot – and saved by a watch he kept in his chest pocket. He was the hero for the Turks. He went on to lead Turkey.
We click pictures, and depart, shaking our heads at fate, will and the boundless inhumanity of the human race. The bus drives down the hill and onto the ferry.
Night comes late in these parts. It’s 9 p.m., and still light. We are in Canakkale, Asia. We have a dinner of octopus and fried calamari in a seaside restaurant overlooking the Dardanelles. Drinks follow, interrupted only once by the cry of the muezzin. Our Turkish friends put down their beers and cigarettes, uncross their legs and sit up straight until the call to prayer is over. Then everyone picks up where they’d left off.

Next morning, bright and early, we head for Troy. The first sign that we are on the land where Achilles, Hector and the beautiful Helen once walked is a touristy wooden horse. The replica Trojan horse is as big as the original, we’re told – the only design changes are windows from which sheepish-looking adults and excited children stick their heads out for photographs, and a sort of hut on its back.
Little remains of the famed seventh city of Troy that was immortalised by Homer, and much later, Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom. Captain Ali walks us into the city through the main gate – the one that Hector supposedly walked out of in the movie, for his last battle with Achilles. The real gate is just a gap in the stone walls now. It’s less imposing than Warner Brothers would have you believe, but more clever.
The gate is not visible from outside. It’s hidden by an outer wall, and is set at a sharp turn. This construction feature made it impossible for attackers to use battering rams against the gate of Troy – one reason that the Greeks had to employ trickery to get into the city.
We walk around looking at the remains of the legendary city. Three thousand years have taken their toll. The temple where Paris and Hector worshipped is a few small piles of stones. The tomb of Achilles, where Alexander the Great came to pay his respects in 334 B.C., is nearly obliterated.
Looking out over the Trojan plain we see a peaceful scene; fields and, in the distance, the glimmering sea. It reminds me of Gallipoli. Captain Ali takes us to an ancient amphitheatre and insists we sit on the seat where royalty used to sit. I wonder if Helen ever sat there, and feel both incredulity and goosebumps.
Excavations are still on in Troy. Archaeologists are still trying to peel back layers of time from this place where so many cities have been built, and legends born. The last of the nine cities of Troy was built by the Roman emperor Augustus in days when Jesus walked the earth. It fell into decline about 400 years later, after the birth of Constantinople, and was lost and forgotten in the course of the centuries until a German grocer-turned-indigo merchant- turned archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann found it in 1873.
Schliemann later discovered a treasure at the site, said to be the treasure of King Priam. He dug out the jewelry, gold cups and silver goblets, and weapons that were perhaps wielded by the Trojan heroes, and smuggled them out of Ottoman Turkey. The treasure eventually found its way to Nazi Germany. It disappeared from Berlin at the end of the Second World War, and resurfaced in Moscow in 1993. It can now be seen at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. It is a bone of contention between Russia, Germany and Turkey to this day.
Only a few artifacts from Homeric Troy are at the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul. On my return to that city, I spent the better part of a day wandering around the place, and still saw only a little of the museum’s collection. The Trojan collection here isn’t very impressive – it could hardly be, considering most of it is in Russia. However, there are enough Greek, Roman and Ottoman treasures there to take one’s mind off this absence, at least for a day.
Up the hill from the Museum, at the corner of Sultanahmet square next to the Hagia Sophia, there’s a lovely little café where one can watch the trams and the people flow by, and reflect on life and its evanescence over a cup of delightful Turkish coffee. It’s the sort of place that evokes such strange moods – thoughtful, melancholic and joyous, all at once.
The view from there includes the magnificent 17th Century ‘Blue Mosque’ of Sultan Ahmet, where worshippers still gather at prayer times. The Hagia Sophia, once the centre of power of the Byzantine church, and later a mosque after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, is now a museum.
I sat there, alone, reading Orhan Pamuk and wondering where I might see more of the huzun – melancholy – of Istanbul he wrote so much about. Only a businesslike, modern city with a colourful past and a split personality showed itself.

Rougher than Rough Guides, Off the Lonely Planet

2006-08-07T16:39:00.000+05:30

The welcome to Tawang is promising enough. A board placed just outside town greets visitors with the message, "Welcome to Arunachal Pradesh…Explore exotic locals & Enjoy warm hospitality". After spending three hours stranded in the snow at Se La pass, 13,700 ft above sea level, warm hospitality sounds good. And as for "exploring exotic locals" – well, maybe tomorrow.
The ride up to here has been harrowing. The 330-km bus ride from Itanagar to Bomdila was bad enough. We crossed a rainforest, with its cover of perpetual fog, in the middle of the night. Our headlights only showed an endless wall of white in all directions – and no road. The driver kept swerving right on, all the while busy playing DJ. Even the large mongoloid man with the foot-long knife in his belt who was sitting dozing next to me, his head on my shoulder, woke up and cursed the driver for playing so much music.
The 185 km from Bomdila to Tawang was worse. I lost count of the number of hairpin bends. This driver was a real DJ; he had his girlfriend alongside, and periodically would leave the steering for her to manage while he bent and pounded a troublesome cassette. The road was covered in snow, and it had taken the bulldozers of the Border Roads Organisation (Motto: Fikar Not) a while to clear a path. The scenery was ice-covered rock wall on one side and a drop into an abyss on the other. Perfect for a little synchronised driving with the girlfriend.
Now I’m relieved to be finally in Tawang. It has been a non-stop 24 hour journey by road from Itanagar. The Monyul hotel is the first we come to, and I have no energy to go further. There’s no one at the reception or anywhere else. Finally the boy who looks after the hotel walks in and gives me a room. It is unheated and uncarpeted, like all others. I look at the snow outside and ask if there’s no heating system. "We give electric heaters in cold weather", he replies. Since this is April, it must be summer.
Tawang has one main street about 500 m long. Here you’ll find the Monyul arts centre, the Monyul hotel, the Monyul lodge, and a few other Monyul establishments. They all belong to the local Monpa people. Up the mountain from Tawang is the most famous sight in the town – the 400-year-old Tawang monastery.
Life in Tawang for long revolved around this monastery. Legend has it that the site was chosen by the horse of the Lama who founded the monastery. That’s why it’s called Tawang – ‘Ta’ means horse, and ‘Wang’ means chosen. That horse must have been the reincarnation of an architect. The monastery is beautiful, and beautifully located. It has a sheer, vertical cliff, behind it, and all of Tawang before.
You’ll find the maroon-robed monks everywhere in Tawang. They are there in the shops, buying shoes and jackets, in government offices, getting work done, and even in the local Playwin lottery counter. Renunciation doesn’t seem to be the mantra here.
But then, it probably never was. This is the birthplace of the Sixth Dalai Lama, the one who’s famous for being a poet and a lover of wine and women.
For two days I rush around in Tawang meeting government officials and lamas, and sneaking the occasional visit to a Gompa. I’ve brought the bustle of the city dweller with me; no one else in this little town seems ever to be in a hurry. Life ends at dusk here, and dusk is 5 p.m. With mornings spent clearing the roads of snow, there’s not much time left for work.
Two days later, I leave the beautiful, magical Shangri La. This most peaceful of places is now at the centre of a border dispute between China and India. It has been for the past 50 years. All along the road, memories of the 1962 war when the Chinese captured Tawang and marched downhill up to Bhalukpong are alive.
Signs of another war are evident too – the war between tradition and modernity, city and countryside, contentment and economics. The enchantment is about to go.

On the ghost road to Burma

I am heading now to the other end of Arunachal, to another remote area – the Myanmar border. There’s a legendary road there that snakes its way from Assam through Arunachal into Myanmar and China. It’s called the Stilwell Road.
During World War II, the Nationalist Chinese army of Chiang Kai-shek and the Americans were united against a common enemy: Japan. The Japanese had already captured eastern China and controlled its seaports. After they conquered Burma, the only Allied supply route to China, the Burma Road, was cut off. There were fears that China would fall to the Japanese. This would free up Japanese forces for attack elsewhere. The Americans decided they needed to prop up the Chinese, and so, US army General Joseph Stilwell built a road from Ledo in upper Assam to Kunming in China.
Stilwell was Chiang Kai-shek’s Chief of Staff. He was the second foreigner after Marco Polo to command a Chinese army. The road he built was one considered impossible until it was done: through rainforests, swamps and minefields, under enemy fire, with equipment brought in from the US 12,000 miles away. It was a road built on the bodies of men who fell building it – a grand and tragic exercise. More so because it was abandoned and forgotten barely five years after it was built.
The drive from Tawang to Tezpur in Assam, the first major town on my route, is 325 km. Tezpur is army territory – the headquarters of IV Corps. It takes more than 12 hours to do this distance. My next stop is Dibrugarh, another eight hours away, and the road now winds through elephant country. This is the edge of the Kaziranga National Park. It’s also militant country: Sibsagar, on the route, is where the ULFA was founded.
I reach Dibrugarh on a rainy evening. It’s been raining non-stop here, and the Brahmaputra is over danger level. The rain is also affecting the tea crops, and worrying planters.
From Dibrugarh through Makum, the first place in India where oil was found, to Digboi, where the first refinery in Asia was built, the road passes through a series of tea gardens. It’s a rich land with a past steeped in adventure, and a present taut with many tensions.
Then we are at Margherita, the tea town named, no one remembers why, after a queen of Italy. Next is Ledo. We cross coalmines and find ourselves driving alongside an abandoned railway track. The Assam Rifles soldiers with the AK guns look suspiciously at our car as it crosses the 25 Battalion headquarters. A sign just across says we are at the starting point of the legendary Stilwell Road. It’s 30 km from here to the Assam-Arunachal border, and 1736 km to Kunming.
The land begins to change. The inhabitants here are Singphos – the same people who are known as Kachins in Myanmar. The Assam-Arunachal border is at nearby Jairampur, a little collection of ramshackle houses and huts. The dominating feature on the road here is a sign that says, "Militancy is dangerous". The NSCN has been known to kill district officials in these parts.
An Assam Rifles guard stops us to check our papers, and sends us back. We need a special permit to go to the border. The local Extra Assistant Commissioner, a Mr Roy, has the authority to grant the permit but is reluctant. He eventually lets us through but by then it is 3 p.m. – too late to push for Pangsau Pass, the border point between India and Myanmar. We’ll have to come back the next day.
Next morning we resume our unusual journey. The Stilwell Road is now alongside us at some places. At others, it’s the road we are on, in its new avatar as NH 153. The government wants to take this highway to Nampong 14 km from Pangsau Pass.
Development has begun to make inroads here. New tea gardens stretch almost the entire way to Nampong. Locals say they belong to politicians. The rain forests that killed so many men in Stilwell’s time are dying. It’s only after Nampong and the last DTH television antenna that we get a glimpse of things the way they were.
The road ends here. Only a bumpy mud track that was the Stilwell Road remains. For us, travellers chasing a road rather than a destination, that is good enough. I bump my head against the roof of the four-wheel drive as we inch along in the mud through forest where ferns grow as tall as trees.
The 14 kilometres take one hour to drive. A Burmese border guard with an AK and no uniform stops our vehicle and tells us to walk on. Our visa is a cardboard token that we have to return at the border. We’re on the other side, in Myanmar, and looking at the Lake of No Return.
The road goes on. China and India want to open it up, make it a highway. Powerful commercial interests are at work here. It will bring ‘development’, I know, but a part of me is sad. Like Tawang, this is one of the few places on earth that has not sold its soul to globalisation. It will grow up to be just like everywhere else. It will lose its innocence.

The Tour Map

Take a flight or train to Guwahati. From there onwards, the journey is by road through Tezpur up to Tawang. Buses and Sumo taxis ply regularly. Alternately, take the flight to Tezpur from Kolkata – but this is only twice a week. To get to Myanmar side, follow the route described in the article, or fly to Dibrugarh. You’ll have to hit the road from there. Travel advisory: Make sure you have all your permits. And don’t attempt the journey without a four-wheel drive. Also, don’t attempt it between April-September if you don’t want your plans washed out by rain.

Sitaram Yechury's response

2006-07-01T22:02:00.000+05:30

A piece I'd written for the Hindustan Times, which is also on this blog, invited this response from Sitaram Yechury. Mr Yechury's article appeared in HT's Edit page on June 29.

THE IMMEDIATE provocation for this fortnight’s column is a piece that appeared on these very pages a few days ago (CPI(Muddled), June 22, by Samrat). It goes on to characterise the CPI(M) as the Casteist Party of India (Mandal). This echoes the widely misplaced and inadequate understanding of Marxism as looking at society in terms of “only two basic classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat”. Such a mechanical simplification of Marxism ignores its rich analysis of society, in which exists a large section of people who Marx called petit bourgeoisie, which includes the peasantry. However, let us move to the central issue: since communists believe that class struggle is the mover of social change, they ought not engage their attention with matters of caste.
The living essence of Marxism is the concrete analysis of concrete conditions. The coexistence of precapitalist forms of production with growing capitalist relations in India means that the process of development of our society, divided into modern capitalist classes, is taking place constantly within the caste stratification that has come down to us over centuries. Despite all the refinements and changes within castes and between castes that have taken place over the years, the basic structure, in so far as the oppression of the Dalits or the backward castes is concerned, remains.
Since the process of class division is taking place within the existing class stratification, the issue is not one of class vs caste. To a large extent, the most exploited classes in our society constitute the most socially oppressed castes. There is a casteclass overlap. And, to that extent, the struggle against class exploitation and the struggle against social oppression complement each other. It is this complementarity that needs to be recognised, and on the basis of such recognition follows the important task of the communists to seek the integration of the struggles against class exploitation with the struggles against social oppression.
Both these constitute the two mutually inclusive aspects of the current class struggle in the country.
The source of provocation referred to above goes on to say that, “The caste system is an anachronism that needs to be removed from Indian society. This can only be done when the terms on which people identify themselves and one another are changed. Therefore, to begin with, all surnames that indicate a person’s caste should be dropped.” My name at birth was Yechury Venkata Sitarama Rao. The caste title has ceased to exist, by my own volition, for over three decades. Nothing has changed substantially in our society during this period. On the contrary, the number of NRIs — many of whom have never set foot in India — seeking alliances in their specific sub-castes, in matrimonial columns has increased.
However, let us leave aside these minor aspects and try to understand why the curse of caste oppression continues to plague us after all these years of Independence. Mahatma Gandhi had coined the term Harijan and appealed for a change of heart in our attitude towards Dalits and lower castes. Among other giants who stand out in the powerful anti-caste movements in the country was Jyotiba Phule. He was a great secular democrat who wielded a significant political influence in his time.
The Satyashodhak movement that he launched continues to hold influence today. Baba Sahib Ambedkar, one of the most outstanding and tireless fighters against caste exploitation, had to finally ask his followers to embrace Buddhism to escape the injustices of high caste Hindu socie ty. The powerful Dravidian movement led by Periyar E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker roused strong feelings against caste oppression and untouchability. His influence and that of the movement he launched continues to have its impact on presentday politics in Tamil Nadu.
Yet, despite such tall leaders and the powerful movements that they launched, caste oppression and discrimination continues to plague us. Despite the glorious uncompromising role of such leaders, the objective of ending caste-based social oppression could not be achieved. Why?
The answer lies in the communist analysis of how to eradicate this social curse. Mere appeals for a change of heart or behaviour cannot and will not eliminate this obnoxious system. In order to do so, we require to bring about a radical realignment in the economic empowerment of these sections. This means the implementation of sweeping land reforms that will empower the vast majority of the socially-oppressed sections. With economic assets as the basis, the struggle against social manifestations of caste oppression can be conducted.
Mere moral outrage or even a correct understanding of the social roots of the problem cannot lead to its elimination unless sweeping agrarian reforms are implemented. It is precisely this that the dominant political leadership of Independent India did not do. It is precisely this that communists seek to achieve. The implementation of land reforms in West Bengal and Kerala may not have eliminated caste identity but have surely led to a quantum decline in caste-based social oppression.
Since we continue to work for such changes elsewhere in the country, our support for reservations, therefore, cannot be seen as the final solution for ending caste oppression. Reservations in the present conditions are a necessity that offer some relief to some individuals in these communities, enhance their confidence in their advance and seek to make them more equal in the vastly growing unequal society in India. However, by themselves, reservations cannot be the final solution to the problem. The final solution can come only with a sweeping agrarian revolution that economically empowers these sections.
This is attested by the fact that even after five decades of reservations for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in our country, the overall status of these communities has not radically changed. Between 1980 and 2000, the total enrolment in the primary stage for SCs went up from 15.11 per cent to 17.98 per cent and that of STs from 6.41 to 9.37 per cent. However, 49.35 per cent of SCs drop out at the primary stage, 67.77 at the middle stage and 77.65 per cent at the secondary stage. The similar figures for STs are 62.52, 82.19 and 85.01 per cent.
This, naturally, reflects in the entry of these sections into higher education. In all courses of graduation and above, only 8.18 per cent of SCs and 2.9 per cent of STs are enrolled as against the 20 per cent reservations provided for them. Hence, the fear that extension of reservations to the OBCs will deprive the general category of students must be tempered with this reality.
Clearly, while reservations are not the final solution, the benefits of this should naturally reach the most needy sections within the OBCs. Introduction of an economic criteria, which the CPI(M) alone had suggested in the Nineties, was mercifully upheld by the Supreme Court in its definition of the ‘creamy layer’. This will have to be integrated with the OBC reservations in higher education.
The CPI(M), while supporting reservations, is engaged in strengthening the struggles on the larger agenda of the economic empowerment of these sections. This alone can render the caste system and the associated caste oppression as an ‘anachronism’ in modern India.

Superheroes

2006-06-26T17:38:00.000+05:30

Krrish is here, and Superman is flying in faster than a speeding bullet. The superheroes look like they will win a few battles at the box office.
Like most guys I know, I love superheroes. Like most guys, I don’t know why. It’s been many years now since I was in school. I am way past the age when I could allow myself to believe that a nip from a radioactive spider would do me wonders. Yet here I am, a journalist and a hardbitten cynic, getting all excited about alleged descendants of aliens.
Is it fascination with the powers they have that still engages the adult me? Or is it fascination with the double life that every superhero, inevitably a tortured soul, must lead? Or is it perhaps some strange satisfaction in seeing one’s version of 'good' triumph?
Perhaps it’s the combination.
The typical tale of every superhero is one of pain. He is always the ordinary guy who comes to have extraordinary powers. He always becomes a superhero in very difficult circumstances. Superman became superman because his planet was destroyed. Batman had it easier; only his family was destroyed. Spiderman’s grandfather died before he became Spiderman.
Every superhero uses his powers to protect the values he believes in. This brings him into conflict with others who have different values, and with his own self. Every superhero is always lonely. For, the superhero must suffer pain and loss to keep his secret even from the few who love his ordinary avatar. He knows he will live a life of danger – does he have a right to endanger those he loves?
Thus Peter Parker, the lonely, shy, gawky, bespectacled boy who is Spiderman, walks away from Mary Jane. Bruce Wayne, the brooding, solitary man who is Batman, must risk looking the rake before his love Rachel. Superman keeps running away from Lois and is eventually ditched by her after a decades long courtship. The Hulk, arguably the angriest superhero of them all, has it all bad – he can’t be with his girl because of the power he has. Our own Krrish is luckier in the end, because he is from Bollywood, but he too lives his entire life until superher-dom in a cloud of loneliness.
Of course the superhero soldiers on with his job of saving the world. That’s why we love them. They have problems, like everyone else. They suffer reverses. Yet when they are down, they find strength within themselves. They have courage to do the right thing. In the end, they always win. It is in this mythical ‘coming good’ of the loser, and the eternal victory of good over evil, that we rejoice.
The philosophical question – what is good – is not so easily answered.
The superhero always stands for the status quo. He stands for preserving the existing order or restoring the old order. He isn’t on the side of revolution. Continuity and incremental change are more to his taste.
Would any superhero support an uprising against the government? Or a new religion? I think not. Those are things villains do. They are the agents of change. They may do evil, but they are potentially catalysts for good. That's why the Kauravas went to heaven, like Ravana.
Obviously, there’s more to superhero stories than meets the eye.

2006-06-15T19:16:00.000+05:30

I'd always thought CPI stood for Communist Party of India, and CPI (M) for Communist Party of India (Marxist). However it now seems that Iwas mistaken: CPI is the Casteist Party of India and CPI (M) is Casteist Party of India (Mandal).
Communism looks at society in terms of class. It recognises only two basic classes, the bourgeois and the proletariat. Accepting a religiously ordained system of social stratification like caste is quite clearly against the most fundamental principles of communism. Yet that is what both these political parties have done, apparently after much thought. In deciding, time and again, to support the Mandalisation of society, they have betrayed both their hunger for power, and the ideals they pretend to espouse.
Perhaps they were concerned about the fact that their leadership since Independence has been predominantly high-caste. In that case, they should have done something about inner party democracy. They should also have fought to demolish the caste system itself. Instead, they accepted it as a historical reality. By accepting the paradigm ofcaste, they became followers of Manu and Mandal rather than Marx.
The caste system is an anachronism that needs to be removed fromIndian society. This can only be done if the terms in which people identify themselves and one another are changed. Therefore, to begin with, all surnames that indicate a person's caste should be dropped. The so-called communists, instead of supporting certain castes at the expense of others, would do well to start by dropping the caste identifiers from their own names. They can also campaign to motivate others to do the same.
The terms of the debate about equality of opportunity need to be changed. No sensible person would argue against equality ofopportunity. However it is difficult for any sensible person to accept that only people from certain castes are backward, especially considering the absence of empirical data on this. Instead of framing the argument for equality on caste terms, a more modern way to do it would be to devise and apply deprivation indices to the population. If the communists are indeed concerned about the backward classes, they ought to have no problems with all backward people being identified as such, regardless of caste.
If after identifying the backward in a scientific manner, it is found that a certain percent of the population, say 27 per cent, need a helping hand from the government and society, they should be given all help. Development experts should chalk out the best strategy to ensure that each of them can develop their talents to the fullest. This will probably entail good school education and a revamp of the entire school system in India. It is a mammoth task, but it needs doing.
This prescription is of course no panacea. However it has what I consider a significant merit: It is not derived from any 'ism'.
When a person is seriously ill, he or she only wants to get cured. He does not care whether the doctor curing him is Hindu or Muslim, allopath or homeopath. He is likely to try everything. His interest is in whatever works for him. Similarly, a backward person will be interested in whatever helps him deal with or overcome his situation. The solution may come from socialism, communism, capitalism or religion – to him the theory matters far less than the cure.
Yet the people who have to provide the cures can't think outside their boxes. They are allopaths or homeopaths, communists, or capitalists, or fundamentalists, or something. These types often genuinely believe that their cure is the best cure – or even the only cure – and try to apply their medicine to all situations. They are angry when it does not work, or others disagree.
It would benefit humankind if all the believers of all the 'isms' learnt to apply their minds to solving problems, instead of trying to apply their pet theories to every problem.

The scary modern woman

2006-06-11T22:36:00.000+05:30

Will Durant in his Mansions of Philosophy has this story from Maxim Gorki’s Reminiscences of Tolstoi. Gorki and Tchekov were walking in the Crimea. They came upon Tolstoi as he sat on the beach, his great head bent in meditation, his beard sweeping the sand. They sat down beside him and began to talk about women. For a long time, Tolstoi listened in silence. Then suddenly he said: “And I will tell the truth about women only when I have one foot in the grave. And I will tell it, jump into the coffin, pull the lid over me, and say, ‘Do what you like with me now.’”

This story has two morals: One, that the wise and the great have always been smart enough to be scared of women. And two, that Tolstoi was a bit of a wimp. In the time that he and his gang were having this chit-chat about women, things weren’t even half bad. Mankind’s dearest enemies were still a lot weaker. They hadn’t really taken to wearing pants or carrying whips or smoking, swearing and drinking. They were different from men. Now, of course, you sometimes need a medical test to tell the genders apart.

That’s because the modern urban woman has decided to become a man. The confusion that resulted from this move on her part is causing a growing number of men to do unmentionable things to each other. Of the rest, some marry, and are never heard of again. Very few survivors remain. They end up as poets of solitude. Once in a while, a passing woman fires a flaming arrow with ‘love’ written on the shaft in their direction. However, wise poets duck, and refrain from offering any delicate parts of the anatomy – heart etc – as target. The ghost of Tolstoi has spoken to them. They are scared, because they know some truths about the modern woman.

Truth #1: Aggression

Perhaps it’s the demands of city living. Perhaps it’s the bad men, the rapists and molesters. Perhaps, as some women say, it’s payback for centuries of oppression. Whatever the cause, the modern, urban woman is often a virago or an amazon. Loud and foul-mouthed, she’s one helluva tough cookie. Suspicion is her shield. She will knock off any friendly advances with this. She herself isn’t averse to making a move on some man she fancies. Then it’s perfectly fine for her to welcome her prey to her parlour. Or invite herself to his.

Woe unto him if he shows disinterest. The best he can hope for after that is to have his sexuality, virility, ability and mental equilibrium questioned. She will lean forward in her low-cut blouse and ask him questions like, “And so, where’s Manish these days? Have you two been having fun? Oh I thought you two were living together…he is quite cute.” If the man gives in to the taunts and the blandishments, he will have only himself to blame. For his life will be dominated by two themes: surrender to her, and conflict management. He might boss over the rest of the planet; she will boss over him.

If he can’t be conquered by force, he will be subdued by subterfuge. She will buy him pink shirts and make a metrosexual of him. After that, he may well lose his manly instincts. He may even begin wishing he’d settled down with Manish.

Truth #2: Expectation

What does the modern, urban woman expect of her man? Well, only that he should be tall, dark, handsome, smart, rich, intelligent, well read, successful, with a good sense of humour, caring, passionate, strong, sensitive, romantic, stable, dependable, adventurous, from a good family, not a mama’s boy. If in addition to all this he’s also a good cook, loves traveling, has a beach house and a nice car, knows about wines, is socially well connected, plays a musical instrument, and has no ex-girlfriends on the same continent, he’ll get high marks on the eligibility test and a test-run at a relationship.

This is when he really must perform. The female discourse on intercourse has contributed greatly to global warming because it has claimed the lives of several forests. So much has been written about it that every time a man gets into bed, it’s like he’s going on stage. Not only must he do a porn star turn; he must also remember his lines after.

However doing all this in no way guarantees that he will last the long haul: he might find himself out of favour for being caught admiring Sushmita Sen, or going out drinking with the boys, or forgetting to bring flowers on her mothers birthday, or telling her to come home early from work, or not knowing how to dance, or any of a hundred other things. And should he dare to suggest that she needs to lose weight, he will die a painful death.

Truth #3: Instability

Perhaps this follows from the burden of unrealistic expectations. Instability seems to have become a part of the nature of relationships. You’ll see it operating all around, in broken affairs and marriages. Acceptance, adjustment and contentment are bad words now. The operative word is ‘more’. If you’ve got money, you want more. If you’ve got sex, you want more. If you’ve found love, you want more. Whatever the ‘item’, there’s no joy without conspicuous consumption – or an upgrade to the latest model.

The tenure for a mere boyfriend-girlfriend thing is therefore about three months. Of course there are occasional endurance records where people hang on till the first anniversary mark before telling each other to piss off. Since everyone knows that this is a likely situation, they also take good care to keep a backup in case the main goes down. Thus, if the favourite boyfriend or girlfriend suddenly discovers that you are a jerk, you should be able to call the helpline and get a replacement within 24 hours. This is true for both men and women.

However there is one difference between the genders that may be beginning to play a role here as well. This is the love of shopping. Women, as everyone knows, shop till their better halves drop. Men by contrast shop only when driven to do so by women or necessity. Now that women are beginning to shop quite openly for male attention, they often have difficulty getting themselves to stop.

Truth #4:

Angst and self-pity

Of the women I know, about 80 to 90 per cent seem to be suffering from various degrees of angst and self-pity. The corresponding figure for married men is 100 per cent, and for single men is about 20 per cent.

There is nothing new in women bitching about men, each other and everything else under their sun. Now, after their liberation, it’s the expansion and the increasing sophistication of the crib list that is fascinating.

When they stayed at home, they cribbed about the housework. Now they crib about the housework in office and the office work at home. Having spurned one and not quite conquered the other, they are now in a state of transition that leaves them forever looking for security. The atavistic instinct that once upon a time drove them into the arms of great warriors now often drives them to great moneybags – and to unhappiness about their own bank balances. The yin and the yang in them tug in opposing directions. Schizophrenia becomes their natural condition.

There seems little likelihood that things will settle down anytime soon. Unprecedented technological changes in the past century drove social change. Industrialisation happened. Women began to work in offices. Easy contraception was invented. The biological need for modesty thus disappeared. Electricity, piped water, cars, telephones and a thousand other amenities made life easier. Healthcare improved. Ailments moved from the physical to the mental and emotional levels. The World Health Organisation now says that mental ailments and heart trouble (which is largely lifestyle-related) are two of the greatest – and commonest - dangers that people face.

The rate of technological change is still growing. Consequent changes in society are inevitable. Women and men will change a lot more before the next generation (thirty years) is through.

Man, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

That Studied Look

2006-06-04T11:05:00.000+05:30

There’s nothing on earth that a ‘study’ hasn’t already studied. There’s also nothing that a study has proved, that another, appropriately funded, cannot disprove.

A study recently proclaimed that drivers of white cars are ‘status-seeking extroverts’. Black cars are apparently driven by aggressive, rebellious types. So for the first time in recorded history, we have a satisfactory explanation for taxi driver behaviour.

However the bit about white cars seems a little iffy. White cars cost less than the other colours, which is a damn good reason for people to buy them.

The best personality is apparently that of pink car drivers. These are ‘gentle, fun-loving and affectionate’ people. I would have rushed to get my car painted bright pink to proclaim my fun-loving nature, but I’m afraid it might send the wrong signals.

I guess there’s only one solution. We white car owners must fund a study to prove that we are the nicest people on four wheels.

There are a few other issues to clear as well. For example, a study on the ‘Reactions of felines to bearded men’ proved that cats don’t like bearded men. The methodology consisted of holding cats in front of photos of bearded men and checking their response. If I remember correctly, they had done this to a few thousand cats before the animal rights people got in on the act and stopped the study on grounds of cruelty to animals. Every bearded man with a pet cat therefore has a moral responsibility to contribute one day’s salary towards research that proves that their cats love them.

The air-conditioning properties of the beard have also been studied. A gentleman who shaved off the beard from the right half of his face, while leaving the rest intact, found that the bearded side felt warmer.

Now somebody’s gone and done research to prove that keeping the cell phone in the trouser pocket makes men impotent. This came after research that proved that keeping the cell phone in the shirt pocket sends the heart into a tizzy, and holding it next to the ear fries the brains or something. The thing to do, therefore, is to tow our cell phones behind us on a leash, or start carrying handbags (and driving pink cars).

On the other hand, there’s also great scope to use this impotency property of mobile phones. Considering the billions of dollars being wasted on finding a ‘male pill’, it might be simpler to just ramp up the dose of whatever electromagnetic waves knock sperms out, and market this as the ‘pill mobile – two-in-one fun’. Imagine, India could get its population under control.

The way features are being added on to mobile phones, it’s only a matter of time before something like this happens. There’s already a phone for women that keeps track of their periods and all. I’m not sure how it operates but if it’s selling, it must work.

Of course, mobile vanity is touching new heights as well. These days, if you don’t have a phone with advanced features, people look down upon you like you’re a worm. Anyone who uses the phone for talking is treated like a second-class citizen.

A friend of mine, who has an ancient phone without colour screen, polyphonic ringtones, GPRS, or any of the other things you don’t really need, recently had to put up with some munna mobile quizzing him on his cell phone’s properties. His answer elicited such shock-horror that he had to tell the guy he already had a separate digital camera, and was waiting for a cell phone with a built-in washing machine and microwave.

Paris and Delhi

2006-06-04T10:37:00.000+05:30

An old friend wrote from Paris the other day. “Life is wonderful”, he said. “There’s not much work and I stay at home a lot. I watch TV and cook biriyani. I am very good at both. My wife has stopped shouting at me. She shouts at the dog instead. Her taste buds remain French. She would rather have baguette than biriyani.

I am very worried about my driving licence – I don’t have one. These French, I tell you. They charge 1,000 Euros for a driving licence! That’s more than 50,000 rupees. I got my first licence in India when I was 16, and it cost 1,000 rupees. I didn’t even have to go for the test. The money was paid; the licence was home-delivered.

Office is okay. I got out of Kiev the day their presidential election riot was happening. I was worried the flight may be delayed. They now send me brochures and marketing data from Kiev. I suspect it is machine translated. It says things like “turbine excellent give electric wind”. Since I have to sell it here, there is no problem. I don’t know Ukrainian and speak very little French, and my customers don’t know Ukrainian and speak very little English, so I explain the turbine’s operations in sign language. They read the specifications and see the product and figure out the rest.

Everything else is fine except that the biriyani is beginning to show around my waist. I have started morning walks, but it spoils my day to see that the neighbour’s dog has chosen my car to do his poo-poo. It’s always there, just next to the front door. I think I will shoot that dog. Lucky for him I’m from India and not some other part of Asia. Otherwise I would have him on a platter.

You should visit Paris in summer. Life is wonderful out here”.

I wish I could take up his invite.

Life is great in Delhi too, I replied. It’s full of activity. There’s office and there’s home and there’s the adventure of driving between the two. Apart from that, it’s pretty uneventful. I find no time for cooking. And I have cancelled my cable TV connection. There was no time to watch TV. I eat vegetarian food. The fish market is some way off. There’s no time to go shopping for fish. I am suffering from fish deprivation.

For the rest, all is well. I have to make my tax plans. The deadline is near. I go for walks too. I don’t even eat biriyani. Yet my belly insists on looking like it’s well fed. Walking is great, there’s a park just behind my house. In the morning you can see a procession of joggers flowing through it. If you are careful you might avoid bumping into anyone. Today I saw a man in a blue office shirt and cream trousers jogging. It was very funny. I wonder whether he was jogging to office?

There’s only one problem with living in Delhi. Pesky insects are everywhere. It’s growing hot too, but the insects bother me more. There’s a line of ants next to my bed. I have been watching them for two days. Every time I sweep them off, they are back. I have tried to confuse them with turmeric but again they are there, climbing, driving me up the wall.