Politicians and Pakistan: we get what we deserve

It’s been a week since the most gruesome public tragedy in independent India. Amid the cacophony all around us two entities have received the maximum amount of collective condemnation: Pakistan and Politicians. Everyone seems to agree that politicians within and Pakistan without have ruined everything that is dear to us—politics, society, people, monuments, systems, institutions, conscience and all else that can be eroded and made dysfunctional. Interestingly both of them are out there, not within us. We seem to agree that all is right within us.

I beg to differ. Even children are taught that things happen on account of two kinds of causes: external and internal. Even if I am to admit that the two causes from outside have been correctly identified—and I do agree that they have been—I see absolutely no reflection on what happened to our internal defense mechanisms. I do not refer to the armed forces or police when I say defense. Rather it is to our own individual and collective vulnerabilities that I seek to address. Defeat, said Josephus Daniels centuries ago, never comes to a man until he admits it. And I sense a severe helplessness and desperation in the collective outpourings in the print and electronic media during the past week. Even the highlighting of tales of individual glory and sacrifices of individual soldiers and policemen cannot adequately camouflage the larger reality of our collective failure.

Righteous indignation won’t do, neither would all sorts of suggestions about preventive measures from non-experts of all hues. It is obvious that something fundamental has gone seriously wrong. Only a much more thoroughgoing multidisciplinary investigation will bring out the truth, not snap judgements based on instant ‘leaks’. Yes, many of us, both persons in positions of responsibility and common people, have made fatal mistakes. But what will blaming Pakistan and politicians achieve? Pakistani state is clearly incapable of reining in the ‘terrorists’ and our politicians will remain the same unless some of ‘us’ choose to forsake the comforts of middle class life and careers and take to active politics, like the few honest and sincere politicians who still offer hope and promise.

We suffer from cowardice, a mortal fear to lose whatever little we have. This fear of parting company with our little everythings will always pull us back from joining public life. Our best and the brightest will always go to the most secure and rewarding of careers, following a very rigorous academic preparation and training from institutions that tests their intellectual and mental abilities to the limits. Now when they work so hard, they will obviously seek the highest compensation in terms of good life and money, especially considering that that often put in 16-17 hours of professional labor every single working day. I have absolutely no issues when they demand safety for their life and property but I wonder whether they could spare some thought for the second rung minds entrusted with that very job. In other words, those who are entrusted with protecting our life and property are not, as a whole, the most suitable for the job and two, the most talented or suitable candidates do not opt for these jobs because they don’t pay. A friend forwarded me a sms last night comparing the Rs. 5 crores state award to a shooter when he won an Olympic gold with the measly five lakh to those shooters who laid down their lives to save others’. It is not a question of belittling the stellar contribution of Bindra, but one of our lopsided priorities. The state needs to know which job involves the maximum risk and needs to allocate compensation accordingly.

As for ordinary Indians, we have our heart at the right place but are always afraid that greater forces will fail us no matter how hard we try. I propose to illustrate this point with a personal anecdote. It happened shortly after I came to Delhi nearly three and a half years ago. I was still getting used to the ways of Delhi, where things happen in, well, strange, ways and success and failure is measured in ways that I have been still learning.

I live in one of the most secure corners of New Delhi, walled off from the din, blessed with abundant greens all around and fortified by the non stop patrolling of a few hundreds of private securitymen. Yet this is the place where it happened. During one June evening, as I was reading something in one of the library reading rooms, I thought I heard a muffled cry from a female voice. From the sound it appeared to come from the other end of the reading room. Now this reading room is large enough to contain nearly 100 or more readers and the sound must have been loud enough to travel to the back benches where I had been seating. When it came for the second time, I lifted my head but found everyone in the room perfectly at ease. I deduced the sound had been coming from outside and asked a few people sitting near me whether they heard it too. They said they did and advised me keep quiet and get back to reading.

But I failed to keep myself unmoved when I heard it the third time and rushed out of the l.ibrary, following the direction of the sound. It was completely dark but I found my way to the raised concrete slabs along the narrow passage between the canteen and some of the schools, to the point just beyond the outer wall of the reading room. I saw a girl whimpering before a boy who looked visibly angry.

I will not relate the details of the story on principle except what I did, that too in bare outlines. I did enough that evening to bring the matter to a peaceful conclusion for the time being. But the boy, who looked tall and muscular, came from outside and threatened me with dire consequences, somehow managed to insert within me a deep fear and insecurity from then on. I was new to the city, knew very few people except from my center, had a family back home and so on and so forth. You know the usual middle class existential worries.

It’s been three years, I know a lot more people in the city today and did little to brighten the face of my family in the meanwhile, as they say in Bengali. Yet since then I have stayed away from affairs where I perceive my own physical well being may be under any threat. You see the irony is I have actually taught myself to overestimate the strength of my perceived threats, as a matter of course. It’s the same mentality that makes us turn the other way when we spot someone lying on the streets in a pool of blood. I recall an incident last month in Calcutta, where a man suffered a heart attack in a busy thoroughfare and the thousands passing by the road did not bother to take him to the nearest hospital. Yet we all tut-tuted so much when we read it in the morning papers. I don’t know what I would have done if I had been there. I too am afraid of the police interrogation but I guess I would have tried. I donno really and can not vouch with certainty.

Here is my point about our collective vulnerability. Why are we so bothered today about so many deaths? My answer is because we can blame Pakistan and politicians. When it is our turn to save lives, we look the other way round but when it is out turn to blame external agencies we are all too eager to apportion blame. All of us are Mumbaikars today, scream opinion makers. You know what that actually means? That we are not Mumbaikars otherwise.

I do not believe in god that strongly nor in retribution but I say we deserved this. We deserved this because we do not care. The adman-lyricist Prasoon Joshi said as much in his poem Is Baar Nahi (Not this time) and I cannot thank TimesNow enough for airing such a moving response. Joshi says it’s time to preserve our anger, allow it to smolder and continue to remind us just how much we have let go and not exhaust it all out through unconsidered, instant bursts of indignation.

Pakistan cannot change or it’ll not survive. Politicians will not change as we will continue to prevent ourselves from joining politics because we know it’s a dirty profession. Will we change? Will we stop blaming others for our own miseries? No body can guarantee that such attacks will not recur. But we can ensure that the attackers pay. I do not have the competence to suggest how. But I can suggest ways to learn to value others’ lives a bit more. If we see any one suffering on the road, let us at least learn to cancel that life changing meeting that our bosses and partners have most kindly scheduled for us and take him to the nearest hospital. This mentality alone will take us towards devising more effective strategies against terrorist attacks. In other words, I submit that we cannot devise effective counter terrorism measures until and unless we value every life lost as our own. The state will offer some compensation in monetary terms to the families of the slain and well it might. But will the state offer any compensation to the family of that man whom none of us bothered to take to the hospital? Point is, when we kill, we blissfully turn the other way and move on. When they (P & P) murder, we explode in collective condemnation. Let’s face facts-in India some lives are more valuable than others and some deaths are more regretted than others. Let’s not convulse with rage on the state and politicians anymore please. Let’s first learn to deserve. We desire far too much.

when will we ever learn?

One of the most intimate prose writers in Bangla I’ve ever read is Ritwik Kumar Ghatak, much better known to the world as a virtuoso filmmaker. An unrestrained genius who excelled in everything that he took to, including reckless self destruction, Ghatak also wrote prodigiously, his prose coming straight from his heart, dripping with pains of an uncompromisingly idealist mind at sea against the searing, unscrupulous, struggles for animal survival that he always saw around him and that his sensitive and passionate intellect and heart found too much to bear. Yet never ever did he give up his faith on the innate goodness of humankind. Indeed, in most of his writings dwelling on common man and what he saw as the relentlessly escalating trend of human depravity in post independence, and post-partition India—all later compiled in a posthumous collection of essays, critiques and interviews called Chalacchitra, Manush ebong Aro Kichu—the concluding paragraph would invariably include an oft-repeated quotation from Tagore—Manusher upor biswas harano paap (it is a sin to altogether give up on the redeeming qualities of humankind). This morning, when yet again Mumbai is under siege of yet another bout of neurotic ‘terrorist’ attack, and at the last count more than 80 people have been officially declared dead and over 900 injured in random shootouts at various locations in the city, I silently pray more of us listened to sage advices like Ghatak’s.

What do mere numbers, considerable though they are, tell us? That too many people have died? I say it is this very reduction to statistics of so many human stories that so numbs us to their actual and potential significance. There is no greater indicator of spiritual capitulation than counting our losses, whether to plan retribution or devise more effective means of resistance. Indeed, about a hundred years ago a Bengal army doctor had written a booklet called ‘They calculate their gains and we count our losses’ wherein he argued that the Hindu population of India had been dwindling as against a corresponding rise in the Muslim population, his points couched in so called ‘scientific’ numbers which meant selective passages from the census statistics without bothering about the problems of enumeration. That booklet, incidentally, is understood to be one of the key texts of Hindu communalism in Bengal. Frankly, numbers by themselves do not offer a comprehensive explanation, closer enquiries at times digging out very different stories. We actually quote numbers when we have given up and try to estimate our losses, trying to wriggle out of an unpalatable situation with the least possible personal damage, resigning to the inevitable that nothing more can be done to improve the existing state of affairs, a point made brilliantly by Amitabh Ghosh in Shadow Lines in a different context. We have been hearing about accidents and terrorist attacks since past so many years but have they stopped? If today it is Mumbai, yesterday it was Delhi and Jaipur and the day before it was Hyderabad and Mumbai again. The spiral of mindless violence has been around since time immemorial and will not disappear unless we do something qualitative about the way we respond to these dastardly acts.

Much has been said about the changing nature of terrorist violence in India in recent years. Their patterns have been studied ad nauseum, and far too many methodological solutions prescribed. Modern violence has been shown as characterized by a distance between the perpetrators and the victims and in India the analysts have been speaking about the homegrown and educated terrorists, people like you and me who precisely for these reasons are so difficult to pin down.

I admit both these points are valid. While in the recent past there has been a considerable surge in the number of explosives operated from a distance, the pictures that I see this morning in the newspapers convince me that the terrorists operating in Mumbai now look pretty much like me and my kind, the middle class Indian youth with an university degree and in that sense not very unfit to do well in today’s world where knowledge is ostensibly capital.

This worries me profusely. It is of course naïve to prejudge the profile of a terrorist and since 9/11 seven years ago the world is no longer unfamiliar with the educated terrorist.
But I want to make a broader point. Is it at all possible to see what is it that these people want? They obviously do not want a better life for themselves or else they would not do things that will take them straight to the gallows or torture chamber when caught. They are then obviously striving for a greater cause. If so it is important to try to investigate the nature of this cause, and this can be done by opening a channel of communication with these groups. But this is a rather romantic and childish option because most of these groups operate in shadowy fashion hardly ever making demands possible enough to be conceded by sovereign nation states. It is difficult not to come to the conclusion that their only objective is to murder innocents and terrorize the rest.

It is this trend that alarms me even more. I suspect there are many youngstars who take to terror just for the fun of it, the thrill of bringing the world to their knees for their proverbial 15 seconds of notoriety, in this age of instant TV appearances and Youtube postings. I will try to illustrate the point with reference to three movie characters. Let’s begin with Hrithik Rosahn’s character in Dhoom 2. He is not a criminal by forces of circumstances but by choice. He loves to take challenges and break through the toughest of security systems as a kind of mental and physical exercise, not unlike the way we study harder to do better in exams and then to get a job and so on. It is a life for him, the one in which he finds his intellectual and spiritual fulfillment, and he brushes aside questions of ethics or morality as completely irrelevant, until of course the last reel when he chooses to redeem himself. I am not here concerned with the way the story ends but with the mentality with which the character operates—this approach to crime as an art, as clearing of obstacles through years of meticulous preparation and research, considering all sides of the problem and pursuing excellence through crime. I mean apart from his objectives, there is absolutely no difference between his outlook and that of his nemesis, the police officer who finally catches up with him, both a mix of very good and very bad, very soft and very tough and so on. But when it comes to pursuing excellence in their respective crafts, there is very little to choose from.

Then there is the Joker in the Dark Knight. Again Batman is beset by doubts and rather thick shades of gray have crept within his character. But more importantly, for the Riddler the lives of so many people—recall the climax—and indeed of even the whole world depended on the correct solution of his riddle. Now lives are clearly cheaper than riddles here, lives of people who do not ever get to know what hit them before theirs are snuffed out in a battle between crazier, mightier characters locked within the delusion of their own grandeur.

Let’s not forget the little thief in the forthcoming laugh riot Way lucky, lucky way, where too you have a small town boy effortlessly flicking away people’s motorbikes and cellphones and credit cards and even calling them up later and owning up the crime. He too loves playing cat and mouse with the police, who mercifully finally catches up with him.

To say nothing about

Bunty aur Bubli and Catch me if you can, where the same story repeats itself though in these cases I did find some causal backgrounds, that is, some sketchy reasons as to why these characters take to crime the way they eventually do. But in all these movies I also find a determined challenger who tracks them down without ultimately terminating them. In fact, all these characters eventually are absorbed within the fold, the mainstream making accommodation for their extraordinary talents in one way or the other for greater common good.

They are movies and they can only focus on individual stories and their resolutions. But they are more real than reality at another level and as such I appreciate this approach that tries to talk to these delinquents. Essentially I think that these marauders who reduced Mumbai to a nightmare within a single night represent a collective neurosis which has festered for far too long. The symptoms have been visible all along but we have all been busy in our individual pursuits and never lent an ear to the grievances of these highly creative and talented people, letting them waste their energies on these mindless massacres.

It is our collective closure that forced these youngstars to try to sublimate their dormant rage on innocent citizens. They had been long trying to tell us something but we, busy with fortifying our own individual prospects, have not had any time or space to lend them a ear. Not only that, we have selectively glorified mass murders when it furthered our own causes, blinding ourselves to the prospect that the same violence that charred someone else’s family today will return to haunt our own tomorrow.

I propose what these movies show at an individual level we all try to do at a larger plane. Let’s keep our eyes and ears open and try to silently listen to what people and things around us are trying to convey to us. Let us first admit that we have closed ourselves to certain voices. Why else are we so surprised today, as if this is something beyond our imagination? There must be a lot of things we have not factored in, much that may have appeared seriously innocuous at first sight.

I, for instance, kept wondering the whole morning how the very front of the Tajmahal Hotel where I had so much fun on a rainy morning only four months ago could also be witnessing so much bloodshed last night. How could very same CST that hosts so many passengers on their way back and forth from the city of dreams be so easily converted to a mass graveyard? Which human being in his right senses would shoot so many people so indiscriminately? What is the method behind this madness?

I am sure the most accurate of analyses will only find a partial answer for it will try to seek it beyond our own volition. However, just how long will we continue to point at them? I do not refer to any ethnic or religious collective when I say them but to a general tendency to seek explanation elsewhere, beyond our own reach. The moment we begin working on such a premise, we voluntarily concede our incapability to actually resist such mindless violence. The moment we abdicate our own responsibility, we necessarily point fingers to factors that will always remain beyond our control, for they reside outside our own configurations of perception and imagination. It is a conundrum that will never be resolved and we will continue to pursue it, hoping against hope for a clue that might turn up by chance to take us some further distance.

But by then the perceived outside factors too will have crossed some more distance and our relative estrangement will change very little. My point is not that we give up searching for outside factors altogether, but that we focus more on what we ourselves can do. For instance, the police and common citizens can talk to each other more regularly; they can, for instance, try and believe each other a little more. It is no news that the beat policemen in our country work under miserable conditions. What’s wrong if I just invite him for a cup of tea when he is on his nightly patrols?

As citizens we probably need to move beyond our common sensical and academic stereotypes of who is a good man and who is not. I remember an interview with a senior monk of a divine order fifteen years ago who rejected me admission in one of their colleges because he thought I might become a ringleader leading other, more quiet and god fearing students astray. I wish he was true, wish I could really influence people enough to stop prejudging and dismissing future potentials of wide eyed teenagers after only a five minute interview where the teenager spoke what he thought was truth, i.e. admission that he regularly watched Hindi movies and participated in addas.

Not that it caused me very great personal or professional damage, but I cannot forget the incident for my life because it has taught me not to judge people by appearance alone, that first impression need not really be the last impression. I do not claim that I judge people correctly, but I try not to judge people wrongly. To be absolutely truthful, I too must have dismissed many potential talents equally instantly and I am no holier than the Swamiji (I recall his name and am sure I'll meet him someday to thank him) who predicted my future in 5 minutes.

We all have our set parameters of judgements and we seldom care to go beyond them, for if we do, we risk our own ideas of right and wrong. We acquire them over long years of observation and experience and we are better off dismissing experiences challenging those parameters as exceptional or else they threaten to shatter our own sense of well being. True but what if our very sense of being is itself threatened?

I confess I do not have any answer when it comes to those who ruthlessly murder innocents only for the sake of it—and I have said their number is growing—but for addressing those who kill because they seek to achieve their utopia on earth, I reiterate we can do better by broadening our receptive capacities.

Nightscape

All through the nightscape
Garbed in a printed cape,
Fun wrestled with unknown
Thoughts of times bygone.

Diamonds in the dark,
Stars reducing the stark,
Darkness twinkling so bright,
Keeps you staring in delight

Towards the little bittle,
That rhythms in rhymes,
I gawk amazed for a while
While the wind chimes.

The moist leaves of grass,
As I walked barefoot,
Reminded me of time that was
Innocent; when I could scoot

Deep into the night all alone,
And get lost in the horizon,
With nothing much to call my own,
Except a will to keep marching on.

Gut wrenching in sensuous wonder
Making faces at the moon
I recall with pleasure today
Days I could whistle in tune

With the night’s that’s again here with me
Whispering delights in my ears,
Still shining with soft cosy cheers
Only my eyes fail to see.

thank you sir

A chance remark that one of my professors made a couple of months ago about my intellectual location has been making me think very seriously. Many others who know me slightly better personally have spoken along similar lines before and since. But I have been observing my words and actions more closely during these couple of months, partly because I was not expecting the comment from the professor since we have not interacted very regularly, except for occasional academic exchanges. The incident made me alive to two crucial realizations. One, either people who I don’t know too well observe me too carefully or that my words and actions leave too many telltale signs. The later is more likely to be true for the simple reason that I have no special power or authority to impact people’s lives for them to keep track of my conducts very seriously. Put more crudely, I appear to be rather careless about my public profile, either overestimating my intelligence or underestimating others’. The second point relates to what he actually said and on that let me wonder a bit today. Both have very serious implications, for me as well as for friends, floaters and foes who I keep coming across as a person and as a professional.

On this lovely early autumn morning the other day I had gone to the market complex to pick something up and so presumably had the professor too. He was heading back actually when I entered. After the usual exchange of pleasantries, he wondered whether I had been part of a ‘relay’ hunger strike that had then been in motion, challenging the administration to rectify certain alleged anomalies in this years’ admission process. He said he had seen my first name in some of the posters but was wondering whether I might indeed be the person. Explaining the reason he said he thought I am too much of a classical liberal to take sides, that I always see both sides of the arguments. For that he did compliment me mildly while, more importantly, at the same time cautioning that I’ll have a very rough ride in future precisely for that reason.

To put it mildly, it stopped me on my tracks right there and then and been haunting me ever since. Within a few seconds, he summed up a central trait of my character that I had known all along but refused to digest for what it is. If you wanted to insert that willing suspension of disbelief stereotype anywhere, I say this is the place. Indeed, I have never felt comfortable in a debate for I always find some merit in my opponents’ arguments but then feel pressing it beyond a point leads to impasse and orthodoxy. The truth is slightly more complicated. Deep down I think I would very much like to press my point through but somehow do not and then feel bad about it.

Over the years, I have discovered, believing in your points beyond all reasonable limits has nothing to do with logic or analysis. It is rather a matter or choice and conviction, that is faith. Faith, I have seen, actually moves mountains. If you don’t believe me, please read about a gentleman called Dasrath Manjhi. In brief, he spent half a lifetime singlehandedly cutting a tunnel through a mountain to make a road from his remote village to the nearest hospital. Earlier, his people had to endure a half day long journey circumambulating the mountain to reach the hospital which they now make it about three hours. Manjhi’s wife could not survive such a long journey to the hospital and that got the unassuming man undertake what has been literally a Himalyan task and successfully complete it too. Words fail me when I think of characters of this sort. I only admire in silence. But then I am also fascinated by just how much can be accomplished if one actually persists with one’s simple, basic beliefs.

Now faith of this magnitude calls for an absolute devotion to the cause and shutting out the rest of the world before you. But then my heart sinks at the mere thought of sacrificing my daily dose of neat certitudes. At another, more serious, level I find it very frustrating to see many people enduring a very difficult life in anticipation of a better future that never comes. My mother is not a Dasrath Manjhi but I have not seen anyone believing more in god and destiny and in working silently and sincerely. Yet I have not seen anyone suffering so much in life, in pretty much every phase of it. I have read and thought on this issue occasionally—this thing of ordinary people choosing to repose so much faith over god, over destiny, over science, and over many other institutional instruments of order.

Then I reflect on an observation by the Mother, of the Aurobindo ashram, Pondichery. I had read it at least twenty years ago and it is one of the rare lines that again has remained with me ever since. She said that to start with we must have a simple mind and those who nurture too many dilemmas always continue to suffer from indecision. This is the core point about being tempted to see merit in both sides of the fence—you stand undecided. But I think the real problem is a reluctance to face difficulties. Faith necessarily makes you partisan but it also empowers you to ensure hardship, and to nurture hope for a better future, even beyond the faithfuls’ lifetime. But when one moves from considering all sides of the problem to taking a stand, one has to travel through a loss. This loss involves making the choice that one is never going to get the things that taking the opposite stand could have ensured. I presume I have always had a problem negotiating this road.

That, however, leads us to a fascinating aporia. On the one hand, if you choose to believe in a cause, god or anything of your choice, you are willingly committing yourself to suffering all sorts of hardships until your faith is realized in the way you want it to be. But this option offers you the delusion, or solace, of spiritual rootedless, in a larger sense. On the other hand, if you do not choose to believe and continue to question, like I have done all my life and still do, generally speaking, you cannot afford the comforting embrace of naïve faith in a greater cause and continue to suffer from a paralyzing uncertainty. Unless you question, faith will lead to orthodoxy, whether scientific or spiritual, and will snuff out all dissent for good. Orthodoxy, in its turn, will lead to stagnation. And unless you believe, questioning will only lead to anarchy or chaos, and will only destabilize instead of contributing anything positive towards a better, happier and more constructive future. I guess all of us who can think face this fascinating aporia all the time and work out our own individual solutions which is nothing but striking a negotiable balance between the two. I am, of course, still working out mine. The beauty of the problem lies in the fact that even as it offers so many solutions, it still somehow always remains a problem that never ceases to stir our imagination. I mean here you have a problem that has so many solutions and yet is never solved for good. Amazing isn’t it?

One way I now try to negotiate this aporia is through the position that problems themselves defy a comprehensive solution because they don’t have an external existence, beyond what we ourselves do and are. Problems are essentially within us, not in our surroundings, entirely independent of our contribution. They can’t probably be spoken of in abstraction, if we are indeed looking for a solution for no solution, correspondingly, can be found beyond our own perception of the problem. And when we accept this much, we have little else to do except to try to get back to striking this balance to which I referred above. Since this is more or less within our reach, I suppose the aporia no longer remains so much more daunting. Sounds fairly empowering to me really and I think it’s all that I want to say today. I owe this insight to many friends and well wishers but I must acknowledge fondly that chance encounter with prof J. Thank you prof. J, you’ll never know how great a favor it has been.

Postscript- To those of you who find this too obscure or are wondering where you have heard all this before, please go to the second paragraph in page 56 of Catch 22. Nobody can make this point better than Yosarian aka Joseph Heller and I am making absolutely no claim to originality. But Yosarian finally made it, didn't he? So too will we all. For sure.

tomorrow always comes

Things happen. People who may be doing the same thing everyday for as long as you can remember suddenly take to doing very different things. Signposts disappear, and they leave a vacuum. Things that apperaed absolutely ceratin yesterday no longer remain as predictable anymore. More importantly, you no longer remain the same person--you chop, you change. Sometimes these internal adjustments harmonize with the external mutations and then people call you mature and happy and successful. More importantly, most of us learn to enact such a harmonization with time, often with varying degree of success, if only to keep repeatig to ourselves that we are not so different after all. Deep inside, we all know what we are inside is neither completely in tune with what we appear to be outside, nor would it ever be. May be like political economy, there is an economy of personality projection too, one that deals with learning to make optimum use of limited supply of this personality harmonization.

Well, even for a renegade Bengali like me quoting a bit of Tagore often comes as a great rescue in moments when I struggle for words. In one of his most popular--and prfound--songs he spoke of--and to-- God as finitely infinite. This is a challenge we all are socialized to undertake-to harmonize the finite with the infinite in a vein attempt to mimic the almighty, whoever or whatever s/he is. We are all a bit like the Khuro in Sukumar Ray's Khuror Kol--we keep running after the impossible because it looks very tempting. To be sure, this is how we keep excelling ourselves and keep raising the bar. Someday, we are tarined to believe, the final frontier will be crossed-we would know all that is knowable and do all that is doable. But you see the fun is that the distance between Khuro's Kol-with its sackful of mouthwatering delicacies--and his reach will always remain constant. Yes, Khuro does ceratinly manage to cover in one and a half hour the distnce he would otherwise have covered in no less than five hours, but is he any closer to the Monda-Mithai than when he started off?

That, my friend, is what life is all about. You set out to do something with great vigor, having already been trained hard to imagine the goal as eminently achievable when you start. You run hard and pass many milestones on the way. You reach destinations no one has reached before, you do things no one has done before. People look at you as a pioneer and keep gawking at your audacity and so on. But more often than not you realize this is not what you had set out to do. Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans, said Lenon. From my own experience, I would add that both good and bad things happen to you when you least expect them. When you think you have made fullproof arrangements for something and that nothing would anymore go wrong, you discover the Murphy's law as well. Mercifully though, good tidings too come precisely on moments you think you have done your best and that nothing more can be done to save the situation.

So what is it about Khuro's escapades that is so ennobling? That if we stop worrying about precise outsomes, we are all in some way or the other breaking new grounds. So what if this is not the ground that I had set out to break? May be I am making it easy for someone somewhere. May be someone somewhere is doing things that'll make things easy for me. May be we are all engaged in a gigantic cooperartive enterprise without our direct knowledge. The feeling does probably lighten our burdens of personal failure a wee bit. Funny isn't it? I mean if you begin to see things this way, things and signposts that appear to disappear before you might just be making a grand appearence in someone else's life. Now that is seriously funny because then somebody else somewhere might be losing his milesstones so that you discover yours all over again. But are they the ones that had disappeared to start with? I don't know. I'm just relieved that today is only a passing phase and tomorrow I'll have new milestones to look forward to. Yeah, Khuro and his Kol make a hell lot of sense to me. And promise.

N.B.-Please read all the 'we's as I. I have no right to impose my premises and my conclusions on anyone else. The shameless humbug that I am, I always use I when talking about good things and 'we's when writing about failures and inadequacies, as if I do all the right things and others mess up my good works. As a matter of fact it is more often the other way round and I jolly well accept it.

'Murder' in the temple

My birthplace has been burning for the past couple of days and all I can do is fiddle with the computer 2000 miles away. Okay the Nero simile is not exactly applicable in my case but this sort or helplessness I have not felt very often in my life. My birthplace and I share a very awkward relationship. We do not love each other, but we cannot ignore each other either. It has made and shaped several aspects of my personality because I have spent the first 22 years of my life there. Quirks of life and profession have ensured that I will probably never live there permanently but as they say it is impossible to take that little place out of my system, no matter wherever I go or whatever I do. Clumsily translating a cult expression of (now Kabir) Suman, I too can claim that it has seen all my firsts. To this day, I remember all its nooks and corners, and my long solitary walks across its lengths and breaths. No matter how much it changes, it will never be alien to me.

It is not a particularly distinguished place, with none of its sons and daughters having made it horribly big. Its two modest claims to fame are its resident goddess and a rather eccentric character that appears in several science fiction stories of Satyajit Ray. The second is decidedly a condescending reference for I am quite certain that Ray chose to house this literally prophetic character there because his funny name rhymes with the name of this place. I am a great admirer of Ray like all Bengalis but I have not found a single topographical reference to this place in any of the stories where this character is featured. His place of residence is always perfunctorily announced in two words,( ……te thaken) as if to suggest that the strange name of the place had anything to do with his unusual gifts. In effect, he is estranged and treated as an abnormality, in contrast to his hero professor Shanku. This is an old literary device dating back to the nineteenth century English literature which shaped the worldviews of almost all major Bengal renaissance figures including Ray. In terms of absolute spatial distance, it is not more than 20 kilometers from those localities in South Calcutta where Ray spent his life but I am pretty sure he has never been there in person. But for its funny name that lends itself easily to caricature by the sophisticated south Calcutta sensibility, this place had no role to play in the stories. Digressions apart, I am only suggesting that the place has never been particularly distinguished for anything, except for such occasional snide references.

This is precisely why I have been terribly disturbed by the way it has been hogging so much media attention last couple of days. All publicity is certainly not good publicity and murder and mayhem is definitely not a great way to burst into public consciousness. I do not know in detail about the actual course of events and I do not have access to Bengali news channels. But from my hourly conversations to my family and friends I have gathered some fragments that I must put on record. And I want to make a few general points about the inept handling of the problem by the local and district administration. This lapse is especially glaring because we now have a young cabinet minister from our place, who had been a very upright and honest man when I used to know him many years ago during his occasional attempts to entice young school students to party training courses.

Now there is this ritual observed every year on the Ekadoshi during the Debipokkho in the temple of our resident goddess which is but a local version of the omnipresent Bengali goddess Chandi. Every para where Durga pujo is held brings forth a range of offerings to the temple to perform a special pujo ceremony which culminates with the ritual sacrifice of a goat. Probably this is some sort of a passage money or customs duty you pay to the resident goddess for daring to ignore her for four days. Historically speaking, such practices probably owe their origin to the medieval accommodation that saw successful insertion of the local ‘tribal’ deities within the Brahmanic pantheon in the form of the great Bengali mother goddess and her local deputies such as our resident goddess. One of my professors wrote a whole book on this process that he called Religious Process. But since he is a very busy man, I can supply you people with expert knowledge on the question when you invite me for a paid lecture.

Each of these passage money ceremonies lasts typically for half an hour or so and their anthropological details form part of the paid lecture. One point that needs to be made, however, is that the Drummers (Dhakis) of the respective para pujo committees often break into impromptu competitions with each other in the temple hall while these offerings are made. Poor souls from poorer places, they try their best to play to the gallery and attract generous donations from the assembled crowd. The crowd too keeps rewarding these chaps with currency notes of small to medium denominations. When the drums reach a crescendo it is indeed a bit of an entrancing moment. The sound of drums still rings in my years as I write this although it must have been more than a decade since I last heard these Dhakis. With twenty or so Dhakis playing in tandem in a medium sized hall and dancing and moving around in a circle, going back and forth in a rhythmic motion, it is not that difficult to break into dancing ourselves and I too always found myself literally dancing to their beats as did everyone else present there.

During such a moment of exhilaration, one of the onlookers reportedly threw a coin or two of appreciation towards a particular Dhaki who then stooped to collect them. Probably then this Dhaki had a collision with someone standing nearby and he fell to the ground. This in turn sent the chaps to whose para he belonged into a fit of rage and they went for this chap who caused the collision as it were. Obviously then the boys from the para of which this bystander is a resident sprung into action and the minor collision soon relapsed into a full scale street fight. Within a few moments the temple was turned into a battlefield as the warring sides went for the jugular. The narrative is not very clear from this point onwards. A stampede must have ensued and many would have run for their lives through the three gates of the temple. This stampede must have wounded some people seriously but I have heard of no such incident. This is, to borrow the pet phrase of another popular Ray character, ‘highly suspicious’ and so here I give up the pretense of trying to reconstruct a linear narrative.

Events moved in quick succession from this point. Some of the chaps now reportedly snatched the keys of the three exit gates and locked them for good. These guys reportedly do not hold any Durga pujo ceremony in their para and so logically should not have been in the temple. This is actually a complicated issue. Contrary to the popular belief that caste is not much of an irritant in Bengal, it is very alive in and characterizes the spatial distribution of our village. In effect, each para roughly signifies the concentration of a particular caste, although these days it is not so obvious. But beneath the surface the identities are fairly robust as are the propensity to take to certain professions. It so happens that the chaps who happened to have snatched the keys belonged to Dulepara, a concentration of the low Dule caste. Most of them are abysmally poor and consequently do not hesitate to take to petty crimes. I do not mean that others are squeaky clean—they just hide behind masks of sophistication—but it’s just that for a range of socio economic reasons these chaps are often a little more reckless with law. The local politicians cynically exploit their vulnerability, using them to carry out petty crimes of vendetta. In exchange, they also protect them from police and so on and so forth. Frankly though, the demand that only people from those paras with valid pujo license be allowed entry into the temple is utter crap and totally unenforceable.

By now a youngstar called Pradip from Karuripara, largely a concentration of petty traders and shopkeepers, was unfortunately cornered by four or five or more chaps from Dule para. They allegedly hit him on the head several times with a large clay tub, the kind on which you grow cactus on your terrace garden. They must have picked it up from inside the temple premises because I remember there are several of such tubs there, housing creepers, money plants and other such decorative saplings. There were other boys from Karuri para who too were critically injured in the skirmish and quickly rushed to hospital where they continue to battle for life. Unfortunately, it was Pradip, whose name literally means lamp, who faded out while on his way to hospital. I wonder how not a single soul from Dule para is reported injured. The chaps from Karuri para were certainly taken by surprise but not so weak that they could not land a single blow. It is not clear how or when the locks were opened or how the chaps escaped. Apparently there are several eye witnesses to this act of attempted murder although charges of anything more than culpable homicide not amounting to murder will be hard to sustain in a court of law for several reasons. First, it certainly was not a premeditated act and second, if it can be established that the miscreants did it under influence of some kind of an intoxicant—which given the pujo revelry is not an impossibility—the case will indeed become very weak. But I am jumping the gun.

The fact remains that nearly 48 hours after the incident, not a single culprit has been nabbed despite eye witnesses having named several of the suspects. In retribution—which I condemn just as strongly as the alleged murder—the youth of Karuri para and other paras have gone on rampage, burning buses and damaging properties in and around the village. Under the impression that some in the body that administers the temple were hand in glove with the culprits—because they could so easily lock the gates—they have also reduced to ashes some factories and shops that these guys or their relatives and neighbors own. I am deeply disturbed by this neat alliance of all the upper and middle caste paras and their easy dubbing of the Dules as the habitual criminals but for more on this question you’ll have to wait for the paid lecture.

The main arterial road remains blocked and police has completely sealed off the locality. There is much debate over whether article 144 has been imposed but an hour ago a friend said it was not required. Some paramilitary forces have been deployed to bring the situation under control and the body of Pradip was reportedly cremated this evening under police protection amid a 3000 strong crowd conducting a silent protest march demanding the arrest of the culprits. The local crematorium has been a favorite haunt of mine—I became an expert in performing funerals by the time I was eleven and a half—for many years and I can tell you that even at the best of times it cannot accommodate more than two hundred people. I mean it is one of those small burning ghats typical of medium sized villages of yore, although the newly erected temple on its premises has now added a bit of gloss on its rather mundane appearance.

My mother has already prohibited my brother’s external movements and for once he does not seem to mind it, for today at any rate. They said even the cable connections were suspended until this evening and the mobile connections remained irregular at best. But more importantly, two things completely beat me.

This minister from our place has reportedly been missing from the scene. I would have thought the he would drop everything else and rush to the spot, taking charge of the situation and trying to restore calm, besides doing everything under his command to apprehend the culprits, especially after they had been explicitly named. On the contrary, he has not even once spoken to the press nor seen to do anything substantive during the last day and a half. Unconfirmed rumors suggest that he has been negotiating a compensation package for Pradip’s family so that they prevail upon the agitators to withdraw their struggle. A very practical move no doubt, one which will certainly hoist him up by a few notches in the party pecking order. The money too will certainly be useful to the family for Pradip worked as a humble car driver. But I wonder whether he would have done the same if the slain belonged to his own extended family. Frankly, this is definitely not the Kurta Pajama clad whole timer who used to travel in a bicycle and had time for inquisitive school students. I hear these days he only travels in closed ambassadors and people only get to see his ambassador passing twice a day. I also wonder why so many TV channels that had been camping there decided to spare him an interrogation. Very strange, isn’t it? Last heard, he was seen walking next to the dead body in the crematorium. He was reportedly also instrumental in a quick disposal of the body which the Karuri para youth had threatened not to cremate until the culprits were nabbed. His senior colleague Subhas Charabarty, the hero of the Balak Brahmachari (the copyright holder of the Ram Narayan Ram chant) dead body rescue episode would have been pleased.

At this point I find myself smoothly veering towards a particular subject position and need to ask a few hard questions. Do we have a Dule para version of events? Just how credible is the charge that those chaps started the brawl almost unprovoked? What right did the Karuripara (and others) crowd have to (systematically) destroy others’ properties subsequently? In fact, the retribution appears to be more organized and methodical than the alleged murder in that the targets of violence were chosen with some discretion. Anyone with the slightest familiarity to legal provisions would agree that planned violence attracts more stringent penalties than spontaneous brutality. I have personally known some of the Dule para chaps for many years and I know they have a volatile temper at the best of times. But quite a few of them I remember as extremely talented footballers who could never make it big because they had to get down to supporting their families. I know quite a few of them are addicted to country liquor and soft drugs and probably also participate in petty crimes. I have played football with them and even now get to meet some of them when I visit home. I have always enjoyed the rawness of their company and found their bluntness a very refreshing departure from the sophisticated pretense and opportunism of some of our local intellectuals and leaders of society. These are mostly hollow men with almost zero originality who inherit their worldviews from their inward-looking milieu and always refuse to call a spade a spade. In a cultural sense, they are the petit bourgeoise—unable to compete with those above for lack of caliber and guts, they are in mortally afraid to be associated with those below. Now that almost the whole of Dule para has been reportedly torched, who is going to ensure the rehabilitation of those poor families who had nothing to do with the attempted murder? Are not these acts of rage going to breed many more criminals?

The police has not exactly covered itself with distinction. Not only have they comprehensively failed to pick up even a single suspect, they have arrested a number of youngstars who obviously had little to do with the crime. If it is a tactical measure to douse the violence, it has clearly not worked. More importantly, is it credible that the police does not know anything at all about the possible hideouts of people who had already had some petty crime records? But of course, it is always easy to blame the police and the administration in a bid to shift the focus from our own abysmal conducts.

For me the larger question here is one of rage. It is a bit like those cars where you can switch from 0 to 150 km/hour speed in a matter of seconds. If so many people can get so angry within such a short span of time, is it really possible for the administration to handle the situation without conceding some innocent lives? What is it that engineers so much of rage within so many of us so instantly? What is so fundamentally wrong with us that we cannot even sit on our pent up emotions for a little while more? What is this huge emptiness within us that leads us to lose all control over our conscious actions? What is it that frustrates us all to such an intolerable degree on certain moments? Mind you it is only this pent up rage that brings together the aggressors and the victims in this particular episode. Actually I am no longer so sure about the distinction between the aggressors and the victims here. If you have followed my somewhat disjointed narrative, you’d also see that the only sentiment I have about this entire episode is one of incomprehension. This is a kind of incomprehension that is not dispelled by more ‘facts’. On the contrary it is, to borrow the title of a recent collection of essays on caste, ‘the blindness of insight’. It is a painful realization that no matter how much I brag about familiarity with my birthplace, there are aspects of it which have always remained beyond my comprehension and will probably always remain so. It is a pity that some surprises are never pleasant. It is ultimately having to confess that I did not know the brute that had always stayed hidden within my own self. I am enraged at my own helplessness but I am glad that I wrote it out.

Key book on memory

There are so many but at the moment none comes to mind really. If my memory was so good, I would not be writing this blog anyway. For those of you who did not know, I started this one because I had forgotten the password to my previous blog eccentricscribbler. Ah well, so what then is this key book memory thing all about? Simple. These are two stories, and my life and yours are peppered with such stories everyday. The only difference is that I suddenly realized (I too have a brain that sometimes works) they are telling me something about the way my memory works. Then I had a second brainwave (that makes it two in a day!) to share it with you, and ask if you too have come across such stories in your everyday life. You see I live with the constant fear that I had gone bonkers many years ago (and my neighbors knew it by the time I was barely seven or eight, and schoolmates roughly around the same time, but more on that some other day) and an occasional reassurance or two from you sane souls might just go some way in persuading me that I may not have altogether crossed the Rubicon yet. For those who love and swear by their Hindu/Indian/native/Bengali culture and civilization more than I do—as someone who hardly understands what these terms mean—I am willing to replace Rubicon with Laxmanrekha, but let’s not get stuck there please.

It happened a couple of days ago, at around 2130 in the evening. The day, incidentally, had begun on an ominous note. I woke up to discover that for some reason or the other there was to be no water supply in the locality where I live in a tenement for which I pay Rs. 10 every month as rent. No, your eyesight is alright, you read it correctly. Now please don’t ask more questions or raise your eyebrows and read on. To preempt all your queries, let me tell you that I have the good fortune to be accommodated in a place where people talk about revolution like you talk about money and/or sex and/or god and/or family and/or friends, and in effect manage to successfully threaten the authorities to perpetuate McDonald’s happy price menu for everything they need, until they accumulate enough academic credentials to fly over to McDonald’s own country and keep returning to this famished land for lecture trips every winter. In case you want to know how different I am from this crowd, I have no clue except that I perhaps don’t mind admitting that I am a bit of a coward and as such don’t mind a revolution if it does not devour me, my family or people I care for. So, we were about to begin to lament the taps running dry on this inauspicious morning.

But I am decidedly not one to sacrifice my personal comforts just because many in my neighborhood can’t afford them. I called up a senior who stays close by and he assured that he had enough water for me to drop by for a bath. Good that he did or else I would have made him forego his own bath and call his friends and contacts till I had my way. Whistling, I jogged off to his place with my shorts on and with my clothes for the day neatly folded in a fashionable recycled paper bag (which I flicked from a famous friend whose name I drop all the time), so as not to have to return to my goddamned unwatered place till water supply resumes later in the evening (revolutionaries ensure that it is usually restored within the same day, whether the rest of India dies of famine or not-I love revolution!). Bathing done, I carried on with the daily erosion of my sins. In case you did not know what this phrase means, ask any of your Bengali friends. This has to do with salvation, getting rid of the cycle of rebirths and all those noble concepts.

With the day’s work done, I returned, whistling as usual, to my room at around 2130. And then the penny dropped. I had no clue where I left the room keys. I had been to at least four places during the day, and the farthest of them was about 20 kms away from where I stay. The pity was the second and the third furthest places were pretty close to the furthest one. Second, my roommate, who stays out four days in a week anyway, was nowhere to be seen. Third, I had no intention to admit to my neighbors and friends that I had once again lost my keys, especially because it happens every second month or so and this time it was not even a month. I mean I let you guys laugh at me all the time anyway and you could do with one occasion less.

I at once decided to call this senior of mine who lives close by and is used to bailing me out of all sorts of troubles. Problem was at that particular moment he had been hosting a friend who does not get along too well with me, because I had once hopped on to an autorickshaw he had hired, without asking for his permission, among other profound differences of opinion. He is a gem of a person actually and has taught me much in life, including manners, so please don’t read too much into this incident. We talk and all that but make sure we make an appointment before we do so. Since neither this friend and I enjoy unannounced company of each other anymore, my senior advised that I come an hour or so later. Fortified with a place to spend the night, I now boldly called my roommate and informed him that I was going to break the lock the next morning and pay for a new lock. He rather loved the prospect of a new lock for the room as long as I paid for it.

With some time to spare now, I merrily went into a cybercafe and lost myself into mailing and chatting with the few friends who are still around, largely the ones who still don’t insist on prior appointments but politely ask me to call later if and when they are busy. After about an hour I set off towards the senior’s place, the fashionable recycled paper bag still in my hand. It was then that I had a casual look at the contents of the bag again and the epiphany struck me. Hadn’t I squeezed in that damned shorts of mine in this very bag after I had my bath and put on the ‘formal’ clothes in the morning? And isn’t this the same shorts with two pockets that I had on when I had been locking the room in the morning? Could it then be that I had kept the keys in the left short pocket (that’s what I do everyday) and forgotten to transfer it into the left trouser pocket (that is also what I do everyday), possibly because the surrounding where I usually perform this ritual was slightly different that day? Obviously you can work out by now that I had no more reason to trouble my senior that night.

The day after passed by uneventfully in that I managed not to assault this senior’s tolerance with a fresh personal calamity or displayed no noticeable callousness to the rest of the world, but I am not so sure really because neither the senior nor the world is writing this post.

But yesterday I did it again. This time it was in the afternoon, just after the unsuspecting senior had sponsored a sumptuous lunch and I substantially lightened his purse in gratitude. Then I went to the local railway counter with him where he bought some tickets and was about to pay a thousand rupees more than the fare before the lady in the counter kindly informed him that Indian railways could well survive without his generosity thank you very much. But I must have already subconsciously decided to try the generosity of the Indian Railways staff a bit more and gleefully left a library book and a few photocopied portions of it right in front of the ticket counter. Then I forgot all about it and both this senior and I blissfully devoted ourselves to enjoying a very good lecture on account keeping practices during the Mughal times. In fact, we reported to the venue well ahead of time and I utilized the time by promptly getting into a chat with a friend who normally sleeps during that time but was incidentally awake yesterday and kind enough to bear with my intrusion.

Midway through this wonderful lecture I had a most noble inclination to take some notes. And that was the first time I actually realized that I was not carrying those papers, and now you know why ignorance is called bliss. I visualized the range of possible consequences at once. For one, the library fellows would summarily banish that friend of mine in whose name the book was issued (for your kind information, my own library card disappeared nearly a year ago and my relation with books is too distant for me to worry about getting a duplicate; this book I took out for yet another friend who studies regularly) out of this university. Second, I had not enough money at that moment to purchase it from the market to save the library member friend from what looked like certain academic exile. Third, I had to think of a fresh excuse to persuade the friend whom I had promised to get the book to postpone the delivery by a few more days. I have always had this remarkable naïve faith in myself that if I survived the present catastrophe, I’d somehow repair all the damages I have caused to everyone all my life. Perhaps this is what is called the grandeur of delusion.

But as usual, almost instinctively, I ran, without bothering at all about how a roomful of attentive scholars would react to some madcap scooting across the room while the lecture was on, to this senior who had been sitting across the room. He most kindly made sense of my desperate ramblings (mercifully I still had the sense to speak in whispers) and advised me to immediately return to the canteen where we had lunch. But something within my mind suggested that I rush to the last place visited, which was the Railways ticket counter. I think it is because it was closer to the place where we were then—all my life I have detested having to run long distance and excelled in taking short cuts. Most unfortunately though, the lady at the counter dashed all my hopes of immediate redemption, promptly denying any knowledge of any book or papers having been left there. With my shoulder drooping, I had no choice left but to run long distance, whether I liked it or not.

In about another couple of seconds, I heard the same lady calling me back. I was so convinced by now that I had been hearing strange voices that I chose not to turn around. But then the voice repeated itself and it sounded as if a hundred of my all time favorite songs were playing in the background. Yet another close shave and the lady effectively saved me more blushes than you and I can count together in a day. There lay the lost properties, safely preserved on a table within their office, waiting to surrender themselves to my loving embrace once again.

Well, so what is the big deal really? What is there to write home about an irresponsible chap tying himself up in knots of temporary amnesia all the time, and having had the luck, by chance, to actually get back the lost goods? Nothing much except two points may be. First, the extent of how unnerved we actually get on losing a given thing is perhaps directly proportionate to the perceived rarity of the things we lose. For instance, I suspect that the fact that I had already made arrangements for my night stay must have reduced my anxiety to a large extent. That in turn may have enabled my mind to actually go back to the events immediately leading to the loss, calmly and dispassionately. Once it did so, it could add up the missing pieces of the puzzle, slowly and steadily, culminating in me becoming able to eventually locate it. QED, the anxiety and panic directly emanating from the magnitude of the loss—and the absence of a possible replacement—actually retard the process of recovery. It is, mind you, not the enormity of the loss alone but also the perceived enormity of the loss that contributes to this immediate panic and anxiety. Paradoxically thus it actually helps to forget about the loss for a short while and busy yourself into other pursuits, for your memory to return to its normal functioning. Now of course I don’t know how far that is possible unless you are actually assured of a replacement, as I obviously was. Greater men and women than I can perhaps do that too and I myself know a few of them. I mean there are many greater men and women around anyway, but they usually avoid my company. If you are such a great man or woman, please stay away from me because I may well run after you tomorrow with some stupid problem or another.

Second, to be assuerd that you have a support system around even if you are not able to recover the losses actually arms you with a redoubled vigor to go rededicate yourself to the search all over again. For instance, I did not actually follow the exact instructions of my senior in the second instance, but I think his calm advice at a difficult moment helped me process the reorganization of my own memory with much more confidence and that did the trick. I mean he appeared unfazed and seemed to believe that the sky had not exactly fallen on my head. Moreover, he had enough confidence in me that I could yet try and regain the lost stuff on my own while I myself was not so sure at that moment.

I think that is the key book not only on my memory but on my entire life. All my life I have been losing valuables, material, emotional, personal and professional and then turning to friends and seniors and juniors and teachers for direction in panic and anxiety. And they have had faith on me, and continue to tell me that I can do it and somehow many things have come back. I wonder what I would do without so many kind souls around me. I don’t know how to thank all these people or whether thanking them would not be belittling their contributions to my life. May their tribe flourish. Or else I would not survive. Thanks for patiently listening to a story you already knew.

Where have all the poster boys gone?

I was coming back from a friend of a friend's place yesterday night. It was almost midnight and while my friend was almost alseep, I had been ogling out of the window to get a peek of what Delhi looks like so late at night. There were of course the usual brightly lit skycrapers and even more brightly lit hoardings and banners from within which smiling girls informed that Delhi has been dressing up for me. You see it was quite late and I am offering you a fairly literal translation. But frankly, it did make me squirm a bit for a momemt or two. I had no idea whether Delhi had been naked all this while or whether it was my gaze that exposed its nakedness. Lest I run riot with more such literal translations, let me just conclude that Delhi's nightscape defies easy, literal translations. But what about the poster boys? I saw a few of them yesterday night passing by in a three wheeler carrying a whole bunch of large hoardings. They'll have them erected at various strategic corners of the city before you and I wake up in the morning. Which means I saw some invisible men!

Those of you who know your english know your poster boys too. They remain forever young and never cease to smile at you from the morning newspapers or from your bedroom walls. Or from the roadside banners and hoardings. Ever gave a thought who ercets those gigantic banners and hoardings, leave alone the innumerable posters pasted on the walls around you? I am not talking about ad hoc posters or banners like those before or during an election, which some of your or my politically-charged friends might be designing or even pasting. I am talking mostly about those large hoardings or insertions in a busstop, the ones from which you have a smiling Amir Khan selling Titan watches or those reality show contestants begging for your votes.

Have you ever noticed that you have not seen too many of those being erected during the day? Do you know any one yourself who does that sort of work? You may be familiar with many professions which poor men and women take to for a living but how many professions do you know of which are so invisible? There is a reason of course. Putting up such huge hoardings requires workmen climbing up impossible heights. Given that the frames of such hoardings are almost always dangerously close to the side of the road, it is seriously risky to have men climbing up so high during peak traffic hours. But tell me just how safe is it to have men climbing up so high in the first place, whether during peak hours or lean hours? Night in and night out? Unless, of course, they are lifted by escalators. Now, if you go by the number of large banners and hoardings in the city, you'd clearly see it is not possible to lift each and every hoarding-fixer and still meet the deadlines set by your clients. Better still, go ask any advertising agency executive whether s/he even knows the guys who actually put up these hoardings. I remember this little controversy last month over destitute children peddling magazines at traffic junctions. An executive of one of the publication houses actually admitted that they had no control over who actually sells the magazines to the retail customer and that it is entirely decided by contractors hired by the sales and distribution department. I suspect the story would be no different with the advertising agencies and their banners.

I also suspect this invisibility of ceratin professions--occupations really--is an integral aspect of growing urbanization. These are the occupations that are populated by poor and entirely dispensible men, women and children, the ones who fall through the cracks of our projects of modernity. These occupations involve too high risks and too little returns for us to understake. Your or my children frankly would have no need to stand at traffic junctions in the sweltering heat and humidity of july and try to push sale a copy of a Marie Claire to indignant car-travellers. Just as you or I are unlikely--in my case as of now--to venture out in the middle of the night and climb up those rickety, rusty 19th century iron frames and then hang those sleek 21st century hoardings over them. I cannot resist the temptation to use this incongruity as a metaphor for our modernity and urbane poise. I have a feeling we too are resorting to wearing very expensive and spectacular clothes to hide our sketetal inners as far as possible. Unless those wiry poster boys (and girls) too are included within our vision (pun intended) of 'development' and 'progress', the body of our modernity will continue to lack in flesh.

Bushes everywhere?

George Bush will walk into the sunset in a few months but many of us pious souls will continue to speak his language. One of those imitable Bushisms is this with us or against us rhetoric. Let's see how many of us liberal, patriotic sons and daughters of India who populate the media and chatteretti parrot this with/against twitter. Take what's happening in Singur these days and how it is filtered to you through your morning newspapers and evening tele-debates.

If the Tatas/nano stay in West Bengal, the state will reportedly turn into an industrial heaven. I wonder why the very people who reduced it to a wasteland are so keen today to turn it into an eden. Let's forget these quibbles and ask a few simple questions.

Why did the Tatas not acquire the lands from the title holders themselves? Why did the state government have to step in and hand over the land virtually free to the group? On what basis was Singur chosen over other places in West Bengal? Why, for instance, did they not choose to take over some place in say Purulia or Bankura or Burdwan? Why was it hidden from the world that a handsome portions of the lands taken over were extyremely fertile agricultural tracts? More importantly, why were these very fertile tracts dubbed fallow and entirely useless to agriculture?

The answers to these questions, even if they were to come today, would not make much of a difference anymore. Given that the car is likely to debut in a couple of months, it is obvious that the factory has been built and is operating more or less at its optimal capacity. The acquired lands are likely to become useless for agriculture anyway, even if they were to be returned today and Tatas were to quit Bengal with their 1500 crore investment and so on.

Now the media and the middle class is up in arms against the agitation demanding restoration of a portion of lands to its rightful owners. There are indeed many problems with the agitation being led by Mamata Banerjee. For instance, she has no clue as to how to secure some compensation for bargadars who has no tiltes but who depended on these lands for livelihood. But that is not what irks the media and many of us. We think she is merely impeding West Bengal's industrial redemption. Whether we have enough roads to drive lakhs of nanos is not for us to worry about. Whether something can be done to improve our public transport system is for cities like Indore to worry about. We are only wooried about how to show our face to the world if Tatas quit singur and nobody else invests into any industrial projects in West Bengal. An editorial in the journal that calls itself a friend of the Bengali intellect (Bangalir Mononer Songi) dismisses those who have other things to say as idealists fond of an agricultural life and all that. Please note the pejorative turn of the phrase agricultural. Let me illustrate this point with a cricketing term, since all of us are born cricket experts. When you do not approve of a batsman's technique--and Bengalis make a fetish of technique--and yet see that he's hitting sixes after sixes, you tell the chap sitting next to you that the felllow's technique is ,after all, agricultural. Those who practice agriculture are by defintion backward people and those who support agriculturists who refuse to accept whatever compensation is doled out to them have, by implication, an agriculturalist (read backward/superstitious/stupid) bent of mind.

Excellent. Capital. But tell me why would someone cling on to a strip of infertile land if she is being offered a better life? Would she refuse a price that is commensurate with the appreciatiation of her land after the factory becomes fully functional? So either these people are downright stupids or they are being hoodwinked. How many of us would finally muster the courage to look beyond the oracle of this intellect-friendly journal? The question is with whose intellect is it so pally? It's not a moot question, it's a mute question too.

In practical terms what is feasible now? If the Tata logic that the 400 acre lands in dispute are absolutely crucial for their pricing policy is true, then the prospect does not look very bright. To start with though, can the entire layout plan of the factory be made public? An RTI on the question may be. On the face of it the entire 900 acre is necessary but very knowledgeable sources say quite a lot of it is not. Let us not get into the question of the new trend in global capital to just retain control over lands so that an artificial scarcity follows. I am sure you all follow the logic. Now that is only a speculation (pun intended) at the moment. Is it possible to objectively determine the truth on this question? Wish some activist judges had an idea.

Finally, it all boils down to the question of an acceptable compensation. Whether we support big industrial projects on on ethical and environmental questions are good questions but irrelevant at the moment. Just as irrelevant is the Tata threat of pullout simply because no sane businessman would sink so much money. He has not come to Bengal because he loves it but because Bengal has offered him opportunities that he could not get elsewhere. The Tatas may be making Indcas and Indigos but they don't sell them to Indians for free. And if you go back in History, they've had a perfectly loyal career-loyal to the British rule that is. Even TISCO, such an integral part of the nationalist myth had received unqualified blessings from no less a person than Lord Curzon. This is attested by the best known-and most respected- historian of that period. Let's face it-capital loves nobody but its own continuous reproduction.

Let's forsake our righteous posture for a moment and start trying to work out decent compensation packages for the victims. This is going to be an arduous process and reasonably compromises will have to be made by all parties. Whether we like it or not, the factory will go ahead. But if we cannot lend our voice to the cause of securing a just compensation package for those who has nothing to fall back upon once their land is gone, tomorrow it is going to be you and me. For your own sake stay alert whenever such with us/against us debates begin to take over public space. Please come forward to complicate the picture or it will not take you long to become a picture yourself. Stop asking for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

Janmashtami as I understand it

I am no philosopher but know better than assuming that a term means the same thing to everyone who hears of it. For me, and I suspect to many similarly confused souls, something, anything, means little more than the series of associations it brings to my mind. Each and every referent, such as Janmashtami, perhaps makes sense in two ways. The more sophisticated minds can quickly grasp the essential, abstract values underlying this annual celebration of the birth of lord Krishna, who stand for many things in Hindu religion, philosophy, statecraft and diplomacy. They can, for instance, understand the celebration of love, of growing up in an inhospitable atmosphere, of having to overcome almost insurmountable hardships before graduating to becoming a darling of the masses, and so on, all encompassed in the early life of this many splendored deity, who ,incidentally, is black in skin color.

I do not so easily follow these complexities. How is it possible, I wonder, to have so many ways to celebrate the same universal values like love, forbearance, resourcefulness and so on? In other words, if all of us can readily understand these qualities, why do we need so many different occasions and styles to reaffirm them? In extension, I wonder, if it is possible to suggest that there is more to the forms of such celebrations than meets the eye? Can’t the ways such celebrations are observed reveal to us some more humble, more intimate, and therefore more illuminating, local and micro-level realities?

This leads me to bring on the ways Janmashtami made sense to me when I was younger and the only way it still does. This indeed may be a second way of things making sense to the less intelligent, and the less gifted members of the multitude, who somehow always fail to see the deeper values behind such communitarian celebrations. More specifically for me Janmashtami meant precisely two things. First, this was the day the potters ceremonially cut the bamboo pieces, that in turn went into the making of the skeleton of the Durga idol that we worshipped so devoutly, and with so much pomp, in our para, during the autumn months of September and October.

The actual puja lasted no more than four days, and community feasts perhaps two more days, but preparations would start well in advance. And Janmashtami officially marked the beginning of these preparations. The bamboos would subsequently be pruned and sliced into the right shapes; these would in turn be tied with ropes to each other in various angles and joints, so that finally they looked like a skeletal structure of the goddess, her four children and her combatant, Mahisasura the demon who emerged out of a buffalo. Let me not fill the pages with minute descriptions of the stages through which these isolated bamboo pieces were transformed, over the next month and a half, into the composite structure of the goddess, her children and her tormentor, all crafted to perfection and decked with the loveliest and most colorful of dresses and ornaments. Suffice it to say that going to the chandimandap and gaping at these potters work, bit by bit, and actually be witness to so much visual beauty emerge out of such ordinary material ingredients, was a such a wonder to my young mind that nothing else seemed to matter, not even pending studies, hunger or repeated calls from my mother to come home to eat and be a good boy. Those potters, who only did their work and got paid for it, were magicians to me. They could effortlessly do what I could not even imagine myself being able to do, ever. I just could not take my eyes off their wizardry. It is this admiration of excellence, this unadulterated sense of wonder at watching someone else excelling at his craft and not feeling bad at all, that I so sorely miss today, within my own self as well as in so many around you and me. I no longer feel so very happy when someone else does well, however hard I try. Why must someone else doing well make me feel inadequate, even though I try to overcome such pettiness all the time? I don’t know but let me only promise to myself this Janmashtami that I will try harder and talk more to that chronologically younger, more wonderstruck self of mine.

The second thing that my Janmashtami meant to me is a much looked-forward-to lunch invitation. There was this family in the para who observed some sort of a puja on that day and called all the children over for lunch. The deity they worshipped was called Gopal, a miniature bronze idol of a crawling Krishna, with a peacock feather tied to his head with a cute blue bandana. They probably reasoned that feeding children who had not yet crossed the age of ten or so would earn them some divine blessing and so some twenty or thirty children would be called over for a vegetarian lunch that used to be a fairly elaborate spread. I do not recall the individual dishes so many years later, but Khichuri, a number of fried vegetables, some sort of a cabbage curry, papad, tomato-chutney, and some payas were invariably served.

I always avoided the brinjals, largely because I found the seeds creepy. I feasted on potato and the Khichuri and coveted the papad. By the time they came up to the cabbage curry, I would have had my stomach filled choc-a-bloc and almost always left the chutney and the payas alone. There were a couple of years when I made bold to gobble the couple of pantuas that they had made available. But that does not appear to be a regular feature. Probably someone from the family had made some unexpected gains and decided to thank their Gopal by feeding local children some pantuas.

It hurt me profoundly when I got to know for the first time that they had not called me over. It did not occur to me that they no longer thought I was a kid. After all, I had just stopped being a kid, and it is usually the elders who feed you who decide when you are no longer a kid. I don’t remember now but I must have felt very sad when I saw some of my contemporaries telling me in the morning of the feast that they would attend it in the afternoon. Admittedly, there was no uniformity in the selection of kids, for many of those who continued to be invited were elder to me in age.

There were so many other anomalies in the function that I discovered later. To be invited over, you had not only to be a kid, you had also to belong to a middle class family like them. Many poorer, ‘lower caste’ boys with whom we used to play cricket—and who always had to volunteer when the ball would dive into a pond or get lost into bushes—were never called over as a matter of course. There are so many other things about the way we grew up, things that appeared so obvious and normal then, that I find very strange today.

Like how people decide who is closer to you and who is not. There was this aunt who was a distant cousin of my father. She was married to one of the most famous doctors in Calcutta. During the pujas, she would gift some dress or the other to all the children in the house. Ours was a moderately large place and there were some seven or eight of us growing up together. Most of ‘us’ were children of her ‘own’ brothers, only I being fairly distant in terms of ‘blood’ relation. If a boy of my age would get a baby suit bought from ,say, a famous kids’ store in Calcutta, I’d always receive one that appeared to have been picked up from a local shop. And when she decided that I had grown up, I stopped receiving her puja gifts altogether.

Today, these things appear very normal and reasonable but back then it looked like someone had been sidelining me for no fault of mine. Today I suppose I understand that a rich man throws about gifts to display his status and that he would positively discriminate between the kids of his rich friends/relatives and the kids of his poor friends/relatives. I still do not entirely understand why it is done but know enough that it is some sort of an investment. The ranking is based on an estimate of future returns. In other words, when she gave me a cheap t-shirt, she was reasoning that my family would be of little use to hers in future anyway. By still giving me the thing she had actually been making a speculative investment in case someone in my family achieved some renown later. But by the time I grew in size, the price of clothes grew prohibitive enough for her to continue to make such speculative investments where the hopes of returns were abysmally low.

This is how we all continue to rank our friends and relatives, however much we protest our desire not to do so. We all throw up our hands in despair and say that our situations have forced us to be petty. The truth is we are all petty anyways. But hey, what if we were to make some investment on an underdog? Just how many more years will I continue to blame everyone else for my own mistakes? Let’s try cheering for the underdogs. I just can’t handle this hierachization of human relations but also can’t help but accept that it makes some sense. Janmashtami for me is thus all about struggling to refuse to believe that I have grown up.

Confessions of a confused Indian

It may be considered anti-nationalist not to appear self-congratulatory today. After all, it’s just one day since our great nation has secured its first individual gold medal in the Olympic games. A hundred years’ shame finally wiped out, screamed one headline. Never did a single medal matter so much to so many people, pontificated another. If Debkanta Baruah had been alive today, he would certainly have had to rephrase his immortal line Indira is India into Abhinav is India today. Suddenly it appears that it is one of those moments that Nehru evocatively described as those that come but rarely in history. One of those moments that would supposedly rewrite India’s sporting history forever and propel it right into the pinnacle of sporting achievements every time its athletes now take the field. A kind of Roger Banister moment, so to speak, when an exceptional individual finally manages, by dint of his own determination and hard word, to finally break through a mental barrier and then the insurmountable suddenly becomes very achievable for everyone.

When we would be made to study industrial revolution in our undergraduate days, the phrase that our teacher used for this kind of developments is take off. It meant a moment when you no longer had to walk or run or perhaps drive a horse-carriage to cover a certain distance as a matter of course for lack of faster options but had broken off the technological barriers to take flights as you wished. You could therefore cover much more distance within a much smaller period of time and begin to perform with ease tasks that till yesterday appeared impossible miracles. This phrase, of course, was deployed metaphorically, for the Wright brothers were still a few years away from their ‘take off’ moment, as it were. Our teacher would quote W.W.Rostow, the revered historian who probably coined the phrase and tell us how one fine morning the Enligh scientists came up with this steam engine thing and then they sat astride it and then beat up the whole wide world into submission-Pax Britanica. To be fair to him though, he also took us back to a lot of other things, including Weber’s protestant ethic and cultivation of turnips and enclosure movements and so much more. The problem was that when we had to write our answers, we were nonetheless supposed to focus on that ‘take off’ moment between 1860 and 1880 as the most decisive factor behind the emergence of the modern world, as it were. Or else, we were to remain second-class students, like I will always. I so sorely wish I could take my graduate tests once again, now that I have learnt how to please examiners and compromise my integrity just to move up in life, whatever that means. Sometimes I keep wondering whether the undergraduate students of history in India today are encouraged to move beyond the ‘take off’ version of things and my guess is that they are not. I suspect the same fare is dished out to all of us today in the name of celebrating uncritically what clearly remains the exclusive achievement of one outstanding individual.

In other words, I am not so sure if this is the ‘take off’ moment for Indian sports as a whole, or for the nation and its citizens, as is being claimed by many, including the mandarins in the media. By ‘sports’ I refer only to the non-cricket disciplines because everyone who is anyone seems to have already reached a consensus that the take off moment in cricket is already a quarter century old. I have things to say on that score too but if I do that in this very post, then I shall have no more enemy left to make. Here, I will first try to show why Bindra’s accomplishment is not going to radically change India’s sporting fortunes for the better, and then present two other, potentially equally promising, ‘take off’ moments the likes of which are accomplished by people like you and me and continue to happen everyday. I would then like to ask, naively if you please, whether such moments cannot be hailed as ‘take off’ moments only because they are not watched by millions of people and performed in a sporting spectacle staged with billions of dollars’ investment.

Abhinav Bindra is a very special man. He had been an exceptional student, reportedly the best head boy his school has ever had. He topped the entrance test of Doon School, where too he must have done very well. He would have gone on to excel in academics but for his single minded devotion to shooting. He dotes on his parents, as witness the small Hindi couplet he wrote immediately after his victory where he described the road that he has taken to reach the summit today as paved with the blessings of his parents. He has overcome a very major injury and an unfortunate technical impediment that effectively preempted his medal hopes in the last Olympic. He was mocked as a spent force when he pulled himself out of the Asian Games two years ago. He spent the couple of months or so in Germany, undergoing a training regime befitting perhaps the army commandoes, so as to prevail over his mental stresses. He had prepared, as he told a sports journalist a year ago, to hit the bull’s eye even on a day when the conditions might not be conducive and he might not get the right ‘feel’, because occasions like an Olympic competition do not come everyday. As the journalist evocatively wrote, befitting the spirit of the business daily in which the interview was published, Bindra had invested his four years for a singular couple of hours. Anyone who fails to doff his hat in admiration for such a character is either plain jealous or decidedly out of his mind.

Acknowledging and even admiring Bindra’s greatness is not the same as mindlessly appropriating his moment of glory to the service of repeatedly asserting India’s moment of arrival on the world stage. On the eve of the 61st anniversary of our political freedom, it is a matter of supreme irony if we continue to proclaim our dependence on the approval of the ‘hyperreal’ west for our own sporting glory. It is a matter of some happiness that an Indian national has won an individual Olympic gold medal, because it is a multilateral sporting event with a rich history and tradition and it does foster some amount of international harmony. Frankly though India’s success as a nation need not be measured by the number of gold medals its Olympic contingent brings back. Just as India as a whole did not become more beautiful after its ladies started winning one beauty pageant after another in mid and late nineties, and India need not have launched a visceral wave of loud protests when an Indian actress was supposedly racially abused on a reality TV show in Britain. The Taj Mahal did not need some millions of sms from ‘Indians’ all over the world—what an oxymoronic phrase—to show the world that it is one of the seven
wonders of the world. In fact, the more we respond to such categories, without even once pausing to actually wonder what such a tag means, the more powerfully we proclaim our dependence on them up there in the west, who set the terms of the discourse for us, always. The prestige and honor of a sixty year old nation—although I am not clear what this phrase means—that also boasts of a 5000 year old civilization—yet another blinder here—just cannot be so fragile that it has to take offence at the drop of a hat or has to flex its muscles every time one of its citizens wins a beauty pageant or a sporting contest.

What makes Bindra’s golden show an ‘Indian’ victory? If it is the fact that he carries an Indian passport, and lives in a place within the territorial borders of the Indian nation state, there is nothing to argue against. Both these statements of facts are as true and empirically irrefutable as the fact that hundreds of thousands of men and women living within the same territorial limits do not get enough to make a living. By the same logic, if one individual’s stellar show in a multilateral sporting arena is an indicator of India’s success, then so many individuals’ struggle to survive is a much more forceful index of its failure. Second, to what extent can we attribute Bindra’s success to the sporting infrastructure made available by the Indian state? Reports have quoted officials running the ‘best’ shooting range in India as acknowledging that he seldom visited the facility. The same officials incidentally also admitted that the so called best shooting range in India has not undergone any upgradation since 1982, which was before Bindra was even born. He normally practiced in a range with state of the art facilities at his own farmhouse in Chandigarh, built exclusively for him by his father who is a reasonably wealthy businessman now planning to gift his son a 200 crore 5 star hotel in Dehradun. As we saw earlier, he spent the couple of months before the Olympics in Germany for special tenacity training, the cost of which was borne entirely by his family. Even otherwise, the cost of his training, that works out to be about a crore a year, is borne entirely by his family.

Thus it transpires that Bindra represents a minuscule minority of Indians who can afford the very best training in the world, something that the state has failed miserably to provide to the average Indian. This is, however, not to undermine his remarkable gifts as an individual, nor to imply that prosperity alone breeds a champion. I rather wish to highlight the structural or for that matter infrastructural deficiencies in the way sports are run in this country. At the same time I refuse to accept that individuals with same physical and attitudinal gifts like Bindra are not available in India. However harsh it may sound, in some sports it helps to be born in a rich household, although it is not a fault of Bindra that he was born in one. He was plain lucky and he must thank his parents, which the lovely man that he is he has promptly done. Before someone rushes for my shirt collar, I challenge them to scoop out another Bindra from the bylanes of Chandni chowk or the slums of Mumbai and I promise I’ll be the happiest man ever who got beaten in public. However much the government and everyone else now try to outdo each other in felicitating Bindra with monetary rewards, the fact that he has won this gold medal not because of but despite the system is out there in broad daylight for all of us to see. Therefore, I refuse to celebrate this moment of euphoria as a moment of national glory but choose to mourn it as a moment of national opportunism. We as a nation have failed to deliver and we want everyone to keep quiet about it. Such moments of rare individual accomplishments are great fodder for both the state and the media who will now play it up to no end and refuse to take and ask hard questions. More importantly, these selective celebrations push to the background remarkable achievements of ordinary individuals like your friend x or your dhobi y, two of which I propose to highlight for you. I have not taken any labor to unearth them. They are out there for all of us to see, if only we care to look out. The two that I am going to relate now are very much there in today’s newspapers but while you’ll continue to hear about Bindra marvel for years to come, never again will you get to hear about these ordinary Indians who keep performing extraordinary feats right before your and my eyes, all the time.

Usha Tanwar, mother of an armyman, who died yesterday at 67, donated six of her organs, giving new life to six different individuals. Let me correct myself here and bring in the family too. It’s her son who actually took the decision when doctors had declared that she was already brain dead. Her 5 year old granddaughter who had been born with a defective heart valve has been one of the recipients, along with an unnamed 54 year old war veteran with a damaged kidney. Tanwar did occasionally talk about donating her organs but had not formally made the pledge. Her son and other family members deserve kudos for going ahead with the decision nonetheless, and not sentimentally insisting on a hindu cremation and worrying about divine merit and all that rubbish. Now how many of us would be inspired by her example and come forward to donate our organs after our death? Very few, if not absolutely none. Similarly, very few, too few, among us would actually be able to do a Bindra. My point ,therefore, is let us also celebrate Tanwar and her family, for they too have managed to effectively overcome an enormously powerful mental barrier. Why don’t we think of some sort of incentive for organ donors so that more of them find it worthwhile to come forward and help medical research and treatment? Can we, for instance, promise the family free treatment for life in a superspeciality hospital, for say 20 years? I know we shall never take such a step, because taking our family to Beijing will certainly get us much more publicity.

But the trustees of a trust that has decided to train first generation educated tribals for BPO jobs in the interiors of rural Gujrat must have been different. When I say ‘tribals’ I mean men and women who otherwise struggle to make ends meet, but with the promise of a better dawn, do not mind undertaking 25 kilometer journeys back and forth everyday, some with their husbands and some others after cooking and dispatching their husbands and children to their respective schools and workplaces. Some of then are actually wearing T shirts and trousers for the first time in their whole life and yet most of them have been safely cruising towards the completion of the course, and hundreds more have registered for the next batch. I recall a speaker, a university professor, in a seminar a year ago, lamenting about some inherent cultural reservations of the poor and tribals for which they reportedly refuse to avail of assistance from government and well meaning organizations. He may have faced some such experience himself, for I knew he was genuinely concerned and certainly not lying but I am not sure if his observations can be generalized and I wish he reads today’s newspaper. No I am not going to take it to him, I am not that sort of a chap.

To return to where I began, I do not really know which of these three events that took place yesterday, broadly speaking, is the fittest to be designated as a good enough—or rather the best—‘take off’ moment. I am plain confused as to which of these will change India like never before, and in another day or two, send me or you up over the moon, or remove hunger from this land for ever. Frankly, I suffer from no delusion about the level of my IQ and all sorts of help are welcome. Let me meanwhile leave you with this funny reaction of people when they suddenly saw the Indian contingent going wild with celebration on hearing that Bindra had won gold. Fully grown men and women, a report said, were seen singing and dancing rapturously in the middle of the stadium, and athletes and officials from other countries were staring at them with utter bemusement. How would they know, went ahead the breathless reporter, how this single piece gold matter so much to so many people back in India? In this I am sorry to confess that I am not one of these so many people and would rather side with those bemused foreigners. That said, my saying sorry probably also means that I am actually utterly confused. But I am happy that I am.

Postscript: A day after I released the post, newspaper reports suggest that our government as well as Lakshmi Mittal's sports trust had spent huge amounts behind Bindra's personal staff and training in Germany. His father, predicatably, felt no need to give the quote-famished journos the figure that he might have parted with. He clearly had no business claiming credit for his son's success because he did not need to. Even if we accept the government shelled out a fortune to Bindra after 2006 when he became the world champion, it does nothing to alter my core point that the system did not produce the champion that he is today. I am glad that I am not part of this mad race to fete him, unlike the state governments of states to which he does not belong. This reminds me of the Kerala government felicitatiing or offering some cash reward to Robin Utthappa after India won the T20 world cup last year ostensibly because his mother belonged to the state. Pity Bindra's mother does not belong to Bihar so they will have to think of some other, more ingenuous excuse. Let the credit-claimers continue to try to outdo each other and let us learn to accept hard facts. Bindra is a great champion but he remains outstanding, in all senses of the word.