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.

a democratic transformation

This is just one of those things you see passing by that makes you pause and think through very many fundamental questions. You are a fence sitter and never really understood political ideologies simply or clearly enough to take sides, leave alone take to the streets to mobilze. QED, you are a coward who lacks courage of conviction to forsake the cosy certainties of life for the sake of youe beliefs. Make no mistake about it, you are very bright, incisive, intelligent and all that-just that you are not confident enough to ask honest, starightforward questions. You get easily intimidated by people who shout hoarse in the name of defending the interests of the downtrodden and in the process lift themselves up way above your reach. You may not necessarily believe that whoever shouts the loudest or cries the most dramatically is telling the truth, but you are unable to convince the starngers and even people you know that you too could be telling something important. You have so far failed to convince the people you have spoken to that you too could be making sense, even though you speak and write in English and was born an upper caste male. They say people with that sort of background are the real villains, and they are just not ready to listen to your reasoned persuations. People only remember you went to an 'elite' college and for all practical purposes to a fairly 'elite' university. They do not want to recall that you spent the first twelve acdemic years of your life in vernacular medium school in an average muffusil town. Perhaps you too have enjoyed that willing suspension of past, perhaps that suppression has helped you break more easily into the charmed circle of opinion makers and all that. QED, you are an opportunist rascal who masquerades his cowerdice with smooth talking and pretentious writing. You are doing well and all that but continue to struggle to live with these painful truths.

One fine morning you are going to one of those famous libraries and archives in the nation's capital, which had in its earlier incarnations housed the Chief of the Army Staff during the raj and later our first Prime Minister. You get down from the bus and there you see a posse of policemen on the other side of the road. They are all armed with wooden shields and lathis but are standing abslolutely meekly, only as some sort of a human cordon, around a handful of dhoti kurta clad, tuft-headed, slogan shouting, poster wielding ,males. What strikes you the most is the absolutely supplicant postures of these enforcers of the law of the land. You have a most important arterial road of the capital blocked by only a handful of self proclaimed representaives of the majority community and these police constables and inspectors were behaving as if they wanted to ensure a safe passage for these minuscule protesters, and not for the general office going public who have to work for a living for a change.

Now that is not all. Just behinf the policemen, again almost in a cordon of sorts stood a string of phoptographers from the print and electronic media, again almost supine in their keenness to transform this band of a handful characters into great, fervent servants and protectors of the majority religuious community of the country, when later in the day they'll air these bytes on national print and televeision. All these makes you seethe in anger and disgust at the trivilisation of democracy; you are reminded of the translation theory of some of the post-modernists. What, you begin to wonder, is democracy exactly? And you get just two answers. Let me rephrease it really. Democracy or democratic debates in India has become just two things. Both are clearly a creation of the media. Democracy in India, in other words, has almost reduced itself to becoming a hostage to the attention of the media.

There are two levels of this media driven charade. One takes place within the studio and the other outside its premises. The one inside the studio usaually has four or five professional politicians representing the major political parties in the country. These would be the most telegenic and articulate people, usually those who speaks impecceable English or Hindi, and can sound very well informed and articulate. Since such men are very rare in Indian public life, this collection is fairly repeatitive and in any case, most of what they say is pretty superficial and to be fair to them, it is not just possible to come up with detailed fundemanetal or even analytical points in such small time. Then there would be a generalist anchor who despite his/her lack of command over the details of the issue would necessarily ask provocative questions and try to evoke either a black and white answer or a provocative quote, for others to respond violently and for the spectators to sms with fervour. Finally, some sort of a yes/no/can't say questions is framed and the audience is asked to send sms and express their their opinion thereby. A thousand or two sms arrive and lo and behold, the anchor glibly announces that India has decided one way or the other. That's how India decides these days, thanks to those innumerable 24 hour news channels and their mad rush to stay ahead of each other in 'breaking' news and opinions. The operative word here is breaking.

The other avatar is what in older times used to be called people on the street in protest. You know Gandhi's hartals and popular mobilizations, stuff in which people came in thousnads and lakhs and millions. These days such mobilizations do happen but they are not the ones that the media has time or initiative to write or telecast about. For they may happen in faraway corners of the land, going where may be slightly risky for the dainty darlings or suited smart alecs of the media. More importantly such protesters might not have an articulate speakers among them, someone who has been to the 'appropriate' schools or colleges. So these remain persona non garata for our mediamen, except a few intrepeid souls who frankly are exceptions. Please come back to this blog once again. I have things to add. Meanwhile, feel free to speak about your own politics.

business ethics, my style

Early in the morning, about ten days ago,
Was just back from the jog, and had a hunch;
I must uncoil the rather inert and silly bunch
of the tiny grey cells and lift the embargo,

Over the sane functioning of my brains;
and readily take over the reins
of my going nowhere life and dashed living
that required some taking and some giving.

To paper over the cracks I ordered for
some four newspapers and augour,
what I hoped would be a new lease of
life to my fast gerying capacity to digest facts
and conduct my life with greter tacts.

A gentleman in his mid forties, all prim
and proper and punctual and grim,

faithfully began delivering them at
every morning seven thirty flat.

No miss, no fuss, all pure business,
mechanical in conduct, calm under duress;
a hint of smile on his face when meet
and the compulsory word or two to greet;

pretty much all that you want,
in a 'dependable' man and chant
your gods to grant you as your friends,
and then stop worrying about changing trends.

But the romantic stupid that I am,
I started thinking deeply about the question;

and the young boy kept knocking at random,
asking me if I would not try him ever again.

This boy, barely in his teens, had met me only an
hour later I engaged the efficient businessman,
said he had missed me earlier on,

because he was already gone-

slighly before I got back
from the greenish track.

He was all two bright eyes that
looked only to the future...

With naive hope and the confidence of faith
that remeinded me my own days of fun
freewheeling dreams and careless gait.
I'll come at 7, said he with hope and
you'd get a half hour more to stand
and stare at the papers and think
more deeply before you blink,
when talkinng to your learned friends
and foes and those that receommends.

I was none too impressed with his
rather wishful sales pitch; like this
I reasoned, one does not forego surities
no matter how poorly one begins.

A couple of weeks went by like this
and I was asking myself what wish
I wanted me to pursue for good,
Safe success or an walk on the wood?

What is my role if the good gent
upped his profit by two percent,
by adding one more client like me
who could be just about anybody?

He's arrived anyway, and would still do well
without me on his client list that's good anyway,
but the beginner for me looked like an angel,
who might need help to live for another day.

After a good week of such soul searching,
I made bold to turn overarching,
and called the good gent to chuck me off
from his list of morning- seekers,
and been waitng ever since to doff
my thnking hat before my sneakers,
or get the youngstar to take care
of my info-dopes, and kick me upstiar.