DAVID: The one minute review

The characters are fascinating, the music is excellent and varied, most scenes are beautifully shot, the actors are variously menacing, or quirky, or charming, as required by their various roles, the actresses are all talented and very beautiful except Isha Sharvani, who is ethereal...it's all good, except that the three strands of the story never become one coherent story. Was that the whole idea, that it SHOULD remain three separate strands? Well, then, I'm afraid that left me feeling rather unsatisfied as a viewer.

As anyone who's ever written a book of fiction can tell you, there is a crucial difference between real life and fiction. Real life can get away with not making sense, not having a neat resolution, not bothering with a nicely paced progression. Fiction mostly can't. 

That's the trouble with David. I went looking for a film with 3 lives, and 3 destinies that I expected would somehow be connected by the one name. I got exactly what was advertised: 3 lives, 3 destinies, one name. And no connection. Well, very little. In that lack of connection between the Davids, the filmmaker lost his connect with me.

Nonetheless, David can be pleasurably watched just for all the things that are right about it, and director Bejoy Nambiar should be complimented for all the things he did right. He also deserves kudos for showing the courage to experiment, in a field where playing safe is the default option. 

Vishwaroopam protesters, irritants without a cause

So I went and heard what Kamal Haasan had to say, and watched his film Vishwaroopam. After watching it, I think the protests against the film were complete rubbish, and entirely unwarranted.

The film is an action thriller on the theme of international terrorism. It is set in New York and the region now known as AfPak, meaning the badlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan.Both the main villain in the movie, played by Rahul Bose, and the hero, played by Kamal Haasan, are shown to be Muslims. This Good Muslim vs Bad Muslim formulation itself is perhaps not very imaginative, but that is the worst that can reasonably be said against it.

As mainstream entertainment cinema, it does what it is supposed to do, which is entertain. There is plenty of action, a bit of song and dance, and a dash of suspense.
It cannot reasonably be considered more offensive than plenty of other films that have been made on the subject of terrorism in recent years, including many that played to packed halls in India. For example, Aamir Khan's Fanaa had him playing a Kashmiri terrorist, which is certainly closer to home than Rahul Bose playing an Afghan terrorist.

We also see similar stories playing out in the daily news with rather alarming frequency, and have, for at least the past 13 years. It's been on TV, there are enough and more clips online, and those who are especially unfortunate have seen some of it live, in places like Mumbai, for example. Those acts have been perpetrated by terrorist groups that operate in the name of Islam. It is known around the world as Islamist terrorism (and if there are terrorist acts by Hindu extremists in the name of Hinduism, it should be called Hindutva terrorism. Denial never changes truths).

As Javed Akhtar pointed out, those fringe elements from the Muslim community who are protesting the film now for showing a certain kind of terrorism in fiction did not come out in protest when there was actual terrorism in the name of Islam in fact. They are accusing Kamal Haasan of projecting Islam in a bad light, but what light do the real actions of Al Qaeda, Taliban and the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba and their ilk project Islam in? People's impressions of Islam have been formed, and ruined, by the actions of those groups, not the cinema of Kamal Haasan.

The kind of people who are protesting now are the ones who give their community a bad name. They should be told to shut up, because they are annoying and silly.

Fast track horror?

It makes me very sad to even think of this. Imagine if there was already fast track courts for rape cases, and the death penalty for rapists. That night when that girl and her friend boarded the bus after watching The Life of Pi, perhaps they would have got home safely, because the men who raped her would have been scared of the consequences of doing what they did.
Or, maybe, they would have done it anyway; it was not a planned act, it was something that started with words, led to blows, and then led to rape. It was a situation that escalated. If they had raped her knowing they could be hanged for it, they wouldn't just throw her and her friend out of the bus. They would be too scared to do so. Instead, they would probably drive them in the bus to some remote spot, and kill them both, and destroy the bodies.
The poor parents and families would then have to go to the police saying they were missing. The police would probably not take it seriously, thinking the couple had eloped. They might register a missing person complaint, at last. The case would languish for years, because there would be no special fast track system for missing person complaints.
It is possible that no one would ever know what happened.

26/11 and the dark side of globalisation

Yesterday, Mumbai commemorated four years of 26/11 with speeches and homilies and the kind of rituals that India is famous for. The security measures we have managed to implement since that day are also largely limited to speeches and rituals. On ground, little has been done to prevent another 26/11.

Mumbai’s ambitious coastal security plans are largely just that, plans. The patrol boats have technical issues, the bulletproof vests are still being purchased, bomb squad vests turned out to be substandard ‘Made in China’ ones, costal police stations still don’t exist.

All this is only to be expected. If a system as a whole is sick it is silly to expect it to suddenly start working perfectly after one kick.

Procurement throughout the government is mired in corruption and controversies. The police force is struggling to deal with modernity and technological change, quite apart from corruption and rampant political interference in transfers and postings. It is understaffed, underpaid, and insufficiently trained.

Instead of making serious efforts to restore basic systems to health, our leaders appear keen to perform some ritual cutting of ribbons that would magically fix everything.

This is emblematic of the Indian mindset.

When corruption is recognized as a problem, a Jan Lokpal Bill starts being touted as a magic bullet. When terrorism is a problem, a new National Counter Terrorism Center becomes the magic cure. For everything, the emphasis is on some shiny new therapy. Meanwhile the body itself continues wasting away.

Reasoned thinking would force one to conclude that basic systems and processes must start to work efficiently before the larger issues can be reliably solved. In a broader context, this would have to happen across South Asia for terror attacks to stop.

Most terror attacks emanate from Pakistan. In that country, the systems are weaker than here. Democracy is fragile, the courts dare not act against terrorists – the rare judges who have passed judgments against terror groups have had to leave the country and go underground – and even journalists are routinely subjected to lethal attacks. 

Indian Right-wing extremists, who see all of Pakistan as one, don’t seem to realise any of this. 

All indications are that the democratic government, large sections of civil society and media, and many traders and businessmen are in favour of better ties with India. It is in the interest of all Indians to extend the hand of friendship to these sections in Pakistan. This reality was recognized by the BJP as much as the Congress. Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani both made efforts to reach out to them.

Renewing such efforts will be especially important in the next two years, as US and Nato forces leave Afghanistan, and the situation in the region starts to deteriorate.

It is likely that Afghanistan will return to a state of chaos, with Taliban gaining influence. Everyone knows this and is preparing for it. The security establishments of India and Pakistan will find their interests colliding. The terror groups will find space again, and possibly return to action with renewed vigour.

It is important that India gets its basics right in policing and security before 2014 to prevent murderers like Ajmal Kasab slipping in. At the same time, the country must pursue peace with Pakistan, move towards peace in Kashmir, and stay out of military engagement in Afghanistan. The Americans may want us to get in deeper there, but that is fraught with danger. The Soviet Union failed there; the US and NATO have failed. There is no reason for us to enter that minefield.

All this talk of foreign affairs may seem far away, but it is not. Kasab came here from Karachi because he was motivated to fight for Kashmir. The Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and ISI are said to have launched the attack with an eye on Afghanistan, because Pakistani forces were being forced by the Americans to fight the Taliban. Another theory says the LeT was losing cadres to the Taliban and wanted to stop staff attrition. An American named David Headley did the site mapping. The whole thing was quite international.

It was a manifestation of the dark side of globalisation. 

Late Bal Thackeray, man of peace?

In his lifetime, Balasaheb Thackeray was a divisive figure, known for his vitriolic remarks against South Indians, North Indians, Biharis, Muslims ... pretty much anyone who was not his beloved Marathi manoos. In death, remarkably, he became, at least for a day, a unifying figure, a man of peace.
Thackeray’s funeral procession started from his home in Bandra East and surged into the adjoining neighbourhood of Mahim, an area dominated by Muslims with a smattering of Christians, Parsis and others. People lined the roads. There were men in skullcaps and women in burqas. All shops were shut, and even water was hard to come by. Some among the Muslims provided drinking water for the masses in the funeral procession.
Further down the road, a small church, the Victoria Church, was having Sunday service. They wanted to hold a small prayer for Thackeray; the procession halted briefly for this, and a quick service was held on the pavement near the vehicle carrying the body.
At Matunga, a predominantly South Indian neighbourhood, similar scenes repeated themselves. Sikhs, who had kept their gurdwaras open to all for food and shelter, joined the procession at some places. There were slogans in Hindi of “Balasaheb amar rahe”. North Indians and Biharis were there in that crowd too.
It wasn’t just the Marathi manoos who turned out for Thackeray’s funeral. That crowd of a million was also a crowd of Mumbaikars.

The entire procession was peaceful. It was Mumbai’s syncretic culture that shone through in the end.

Balasaheb, Bombay and Mumbai

Bal Thackeray’s influence on Mumbai is not easy to comprehend. How did a man his colleagues at the Free Press Journal in the early 1950s knew as “mild-mannered and meek” come to be the tiger whose fear stalked Mumbai in life, and indeed, even in death?
Old timers who’ve known him down the years can offer some clues to why. P.K. Ravidranath, a former colleague of Thackeray’s who knew him as a cartoonist in 1952, and through the years after, says, “He was the one who gave the Maharashtrian an identity of his own in his own capital city”.
Mumbai came to be capital of Maharashtra only by and by. It started life during the Raj as a British city, capital of Bombay Presidency, which included the present states of Gujarat and Maharashtra, parts of Karnataka, and Sindh in Pakistan. The city then was truly cosmopolitan, and its leading lights other than the British were mainly Parsis, though it produced illustrious exceptions like MA Jinnah and BR Ambedkar.
When linguistic states were formed after independence, Bombay was not intended to be a part of Maharashtra by then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. He wanted it to be a union territory like Chandigarh. It took years of agitations by the Samyukta Maharashtra movement to reverse that.
The identity of the city, therefore, was a mixed and contested one. There was a sizeable Gujarati population, a Sindhi population, a Tamil population, and people from along the Konkan coast down to Udupi, Mangalore and Kerala, among others. People from the hinterlands of Mumbai who migrated to the city often found themselves at the lower end of the social ladder, battling for jobs with migrants from elsewhere. They did not always fare well.
Thackeray the cartoonist created a character out of these people. While his senior RK Laxman created the Common Man in his cartoons, Thackeray created the Marathi manoos as an identity in Bombay politics. It was this demographic that he then came to represent.
Back in the 1950s and 60s, Bombay was an industrial city, with textile mills dominating. The politics of the city was a contest between the Congress and the communists. Workers’ union leaders were powers to reckon with; even in 1982, Datta Samant, who led the textile unions with their lakhs of workers, could easily bring the city to a halt, and did.
Bal Thackeray won his following, some say with tacit support from the ruling Congress in the early days, from among the same people who might otherwise have become communists. The creation of a political space based on his ‘sons of the soil’ slogan was the singular political achievement of Thackeray, and explains in some part why many among the Maharashtrian masses see him as a demigod of sorts.
It is because he championed their cause. He empowered them and gave them dignity; they may have remained poor, but they were no longer powerless. They had to be given respect, even if it was only out of fear. Denigrating them as ‘ghatis’ was no longer free of consequences.
In his person, and by creating a larger-than-life image, Thackeray also came to symbolize the collective power and pride of these masses. He is therefore an icon in the purest sense of the word.
His politics has been fractious, divisive, and often bloody, and his legacy in the shape of a changed identity for Bombay, which he renamed Mumbai, is unpalatable to many. But it is small surprise that Mumbai held its breath when Thackeray had trouble breathing. The lives of this man and the metropolis were that closely entwined.

Why Mumbai shut down over Thackeray rumors

It was a dull, grey morning that broke over Mumbai on Thursday; the city was wrapped in a post-Diwali haze. A silence and stillness at odds with the festivities of Diwali had descended. A city that never sleeps seemed to not have woken up. And all it took was a rumour.

Shopkeepers, taxi drivers, office goers, clung to their phones asking each other if Balasaheb Thackeray, the chief of the Shiv Sena, had indeed died. In Bandra East, the suburb where Thackeray’s house is located, crowds had started gathering the previous night; now they swelled. Shops across most parts of the city remained shut. Taxis and autos were few.

Outsiders to the city wondered what was going on. Why should the natural death of an old man of 86 lead to fears of rioting?

The short answer is that the man is a demigod to multitudes in this city. They would congregate in thousands to mourn him when he dies, and grief might turn to anger at the slightest provocation. It has been known to happen before.

When the Kannada film star Raj Kumar died in Bengaluru in 2006, of a heart attack at the age of 77, there were riots. Eight people including a policeman were killed, at least 20 vehicles were burnt, and damages ran to crores of rupees.

Thackeray is more of an icon in Mumbai than Raj Kumar was in Bengaluru. He has been a colossal presence in the city for the past 50 years. Not that any Mumbaikar would need a survey to tell him this, but, love him or hate him, he is the biggest icon of Mumbai. This was borne out by a survey conducted by Tehelka magazine and TNS in 2007. Mumbaikars voted Thackeray as “The biggest icon of Mumbai”. Amitabh Bachchan, the biggest superstar Bollywood has ever seen, came second. Sachin Tendulkar was third. Shah Rukh Khan made a very distant fourth.

Thackeray also made the top three in the list of most hated figures in Mumbai; he was third behind gangsters Dawood Ibrahim and Arun Gawli.

He has always been a strongly polarizing figure. His position as most loved and much hated means he arouses strong passions. It would therefore surprise only the politically naive or the ideologically blinded if Mumbai grinds to a halt, with sporadic incidents of violence, when Thackeray passes away.

His followers have a history of violence, and they have in the past rioted when one of their leaders died. This was in 2001; Anand Dighe, the most powerful Sena chieftain in Thane, wound up in a hospital with a broken leg following a road accident. He died the next day from a heart attack. He was 50. His followers, who suspected medical error because they couldn’t imagine their leader dying from a broken leg, ransacked the hospital and burnt it down.

In Mr Thackeray’s case, such an outcome is less likely, because his followers know of his old age and ill health. However, don’t expect business as usual for at least two days of his passing, whenever that happens. Cities don’t let go of icons easily.

Chittagong, my 1 min review

Chittagong is a true story of a real revolution. It is the tale of a few unlikely warriors who took up arms against the British empire in the town of Chittagong, now in Bangladesh - and actually freed it for one April day in 1930.
They were around 50 boys between 12 and 14 years of age, led by a schoolteacher named Surya Sen they called Masterda. Two girls, Preetilata

 and Kalpana, became part of their cause. There were perhaps five grown men in their fight.
These people raided the armoury in Chittagong, took it over, captured the telegraph office, and disrupted rail communications. They were surrounded by a British Gurkha army battalion but managed to fight them off until they were outgunned with machine guns.
There is obviously enough drama in this story. In Chittagong, the film, it has been told in a documentary fashion. Used as we are to highly stylised, dramatised, action sequences, it becomes odd and unrealistic to see action sequences without superheroes. There is no Salman ‘Tiger’ Khan here, no Batman or Spiderman. It’s just these very regular boys and a few scrawny Bengali men. They may be heroes, but they don't look it.
Manoj Bajpai, who plays Masterda, is understated, perhaps too much so, like most of the cast, including Nawazuddin Siddiqui.
The striking thing about the film is how matter of fact life and death is.
The pacing of the narrative in the first half is too rapid to allow moods to build. In the second half, events take on a dramatic tension that comes through in spite of the undramatic storytelling. The narrative, told through the eyes of a 14 year old boy who was part of this, is circular and ends on a purely documentary note.
I wish director Bedabrata Pain had made it either a quieter, slower film...or a louder, more exciting one. A little more of Zatoichi or Kill Bill might have built mood and atmosphere more effectively.
We aren’t used to our heroes and heroines biting their cyanide capsules, or taking their bullets, and dying without murmur. We are from what Soren Kierkegaard, mourning the death of rebellion, prematurely or presciently lamented in The Present Age.

Aiyya, my 1 min review

The first half hour left me cringing and thinking aiyya, why did I come here, and aiyyo, when will this end...but the film and its band of quirky characters gradually grew on me. Rani Mukherjee is cute in her role of Meenaxi, an ordinary girl with a tendency to escape into her own mental, filmy wonderland. The handsome and fragrant (!) Prithviraj enters her real and fantasy worlds 

and all is soon chaos.
The references to Alice in Wonderland make this a layered narrative, more sophisticated than it appears at first. The film is entertaining with its over the top songs and dances, but in the end it is the quieter moments and scenes that work better for the most part. The only exception is towards the climax of the film, where one sharp descent into madness is dark and edgy.
The ending is too pat, the beginning too abrupt, but somewhere in the middle there's a film that aficionados of cheap desi cinema, like me, would enjoy.

***

The militant liberals, walking talking oxymorons

In our networked world, there are fashions that grip a majority of people of a certain class and background everywhere around the world at certain times. It could be an item of clothing, or a gadget, or even a worldview such as “Left liberalism”, which is the prevailing intellectual fashion among cultural elites.

I admire both Leftist politics and liberalism, but the militancy of some “liberals” makes me wonder whether for them it just another ‘cool’ accessory, like the clothes and gadgets.
The intolerance of liberals is a paradox I’ve been unable to fathom. If Left liberalism becomes a religion and is practised with similarly fundamentalist attitudes then it becomes a parody of itself. It ceases to be liberalism and turns into an intolerant faith.
To practitioners of this faith, anyone who questions anything they say or do is an enemy who must either be silenced or converted. This was the attitude of the man who wanted the fistfight with the philosopher.
I’ve experienced milder versions of this myself on some occasions. Sometimes, I’ve noticed that in the course of debating a point, the avowed liberal lets slip animosity towards the courts, democratic procedures, and any processes or institutions that contradict their views. On the question of the Bus Rapid Transport system in South Delhi, for example, plenty of liberals railed against the courts for admitting the Public Interest Litigation suit against it. They also questioned the utility of having a technical body conduct a study to ascertain how well the BRT is working. They were willing to attack important processes and institutions that they otherwise cheer for, because the results were not to their liking.
To me, this is worrying. 
Like fundamentalists, these individuals cannot bear to have their certainties questioned. Their world is very simple, black and white. Their views are predictable.
This is the secular equivalent of the religious attitude. In that, you believe something because it is the word of God. There is no altering of views once you’ve accepted a faith; that would be apostasy. You might consider those who don’t believe in the same gods and books as you do to be infidels. Your beliefs would not be subject to tests of reason. Anyone questioning your beliefs would be met with vehemence, or even violence.
This is the attitude I see in militant “Left liberals”.

A few days ago, I was at a friend’s place for a birthday party. We were having a philosophical discussion when one of the participants became agitated. He challenged another, a philosophy teacher who had dared to politely disagree with him, to a fistfight. It was ironical, considering the intolerant man was espousing the more liberal view. 

There is no doubt that many who take strong Left liberal positions are intelligent people with their hearts in the right place. They tend to be young men and women educated in fine colleges, from relatively wealthy backgrounds, and eager to help those less fortunate than themselves. All this is admirable, but somehow some of them end up mirroring the attitudes of the fundamentalists they so detest.

In this worldview, all corporations and their employees are evil; the police are always lying; the government is mostly bad; and politicians are abominable. Rebels, including Maoists and other terrorists, are mostly misunderstood good guys, but Baba Ramdev is not. The Right is always wrong, the Left is always right. Rich people, excluding their family members, are rapacious capitalists. Development is awful, but progress is wonderful. However everyone should have electricity. And what’s the meaning of this grid collapse? We need the Internet, the Mac and the iPhone or Blackberry, and sorry, we need our ACs, too. But power plants and dams are damnable; just don’t tell me where my electricity comes from. Air travel is evil but we can’t walk to London or New York, so it’s okay. Everything organic is good, too bad it’s so expensive. Don’t tell me Apple is a corporation, it’s only a fruit. And so on.

Such a worldview betrays confusion and a failure to grasp complexity. It captures elements of the truth, but it is highly reductive, like this characterisation of the militant liberal. However I may ponder about the reductive nature of my own characterisation, but militant liberals (an oxymoron if ever there was one) seem to harbour no doubts about theirs.

The progressive attitude is one that allows for abundant doubt. Science, which powers progress, is based on doubt, just as religion rests on faith. In the scientific method, every theory is provisional, and subject to constant measuring and testing. The laws emerge by inductive reasoning from experimentation. The conclusion is arrived at after the experiment, not before. You change the theory if experimental results disprove it. The theory could be about how the universe came into being or Bus Rapid Transport.

On squeezed middle, occupy and bunga bunga

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

There’s a new study out in the latest issue of the journal Nature that says people are overconfident because it has evolutionary benefits. The study’s authors have stated, with confidence, that in the evolutionary scheme of things, in all competitive 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 confidently state that a study can prove anything. I’ve read studies that ‘prove’ that moderate drinking is good and bad, that vegetarianism is good and bad, that this food or that food makes us fat, or doesn’t, and so on.
Why, there are even studies that say human beings are responsible for global warming, and others that confidently say this is all hot air!
It seems to me that a lot of researchers are having a lot of fun proving everything and their opposites. I hope someone will fund me to study this hypothesis.
There may be something to this overconfidence study, though.
The key point in favour of overconfidence is that it propels people to attempt feats they would otherwise give up on even before starting. It makes people attempt the barely possible, and even the impossible. In many instances they perish in the attempt. In some, they succeed, and thereby make history.
The grandest stories of human achievement and endeavor are made of such stuff. If the adventurers and explorers of yore had not given in to overconfidence, they wouldn’t have pointed their rickety wooden ships at the open and uncharted seas, and set sail, guided by instinct and the stars.
That they did worked to their favour, and arguably, to ours.
A similar spirit, buoyed with a faith in divine powers, inspired and enabled our ancestors to build the great structures they did. It seems incredible to imagine that the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids, and all the great cathedrals of Europe were built before machines as we know them had been invented. They were all made with human and animal labour, and the most basic tools.

Today we have so much by way of technology, but nowhere in the world do we see marvels of architecture like the ones of old. In India, especially, we only see variations of ugliness and mediocrity.

A part of the failing is because of lack of vision and imagination. A part is due to lack of the kind of royal purses that enabled those ventures. And a part is probably due to lack of that spirit of overconfidence, and an erosion of faith.
Anyone who so much as suggested building a new Taj Mahal in today’s day and age would be laughed at as mad, find NGOs campaigning against them for wastage of money, and wake up to find the Income Tax and CBI at their doors.
We live in practical times. Our thoughts are of taxes and hikes, not earth and heaven.
Even practical people, however, tend to suffer from a particular delusion that affects the majority of humankind.
It is well known that most people think they are right all the time. Psychologists have been noting this for years. They even have a word for it. It’s called ‘overestimation’.
Overestimation applies especially to beliefs. We all tend to believe that our views and values are the most correct, or the theories we subscribe to, the best.
This is where overconfidence can start to go seriously wrong. It’s one thing to build a Taj Mahal or set sail upon an unknown sea. It’s another to embark upon a witch hunt.
The people who wanted to burn Galileo Galilei at the stake (he was let off but spent his remaining life in house arrest) were probably good folks with firm conviction. They truly believed the earth was the centre of the universe, and decided that Galileo, who said the sun was the centre, was a heretic. Galileo made his own position worse by supporting his fellow scientist Nicholas Copernicus’ view that the earth moves around the sun.
In the event, it turned out that the folks who had such confidence in their beliefs - the same people who built the magnificent cathedrals and palaces of Florence, and supported artists from Michelangelo down - were wrong. 
And so it goes. Even today, most of the troubles in the world are on account of people’s certainty that they are right.
The worst examples 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 of conduct and fought for it in his own way.
His problem was that he believed only his way was right, and every other way was wrong. He was prepared to kill or die for it.
That didn’t do the world, or him, much good.
There may be great value in confidence and overconfidence, but there is at least equal merit in doubt.

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

The scientific way has brought us far. It has made life much, much better for most of humankind. It has literally brought us from darkness into light.
Yet there are unintended consequences.
The scientific worldview has diminished faith. A consequence of this is that it has diminished nearly all human endeavor to the utilitarian.
Our natural reflex now is to reduce all activity to accounts of profit and loss. We only do things for comfort and material gain.
And so we are left with a world that has all the beauty and grandeur of a balance sheet.

9/11: The long shadow in South Asia

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.