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.