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.

eating humble pie

Most of us who say they eat to live are liars. If it had been true, we would not have had so many reteurants dotting the cityscape. We eat ambience, we eat decor and we even eat status and exclusivity. In sum, we eat experience and those who can't afford to take their brood to one of those happening eateries faithfully featured in the page three supplements, nibble away into those appetizing glimpses.

Civilization has dressed the simple physical activity of consuming food into such an inscrutable enigma of arrival. You may not be going to the biyebari of yout pistuto bhai but make it a point to drop in at the wedding reception of your brither-in-law's business partner's brother, simply because it is being held at the ballroom of the Taj. Then there is much networking to do over the drink that you may not consume but carry with you nonetheless as you hop along the length and breadth of the gathering, flying kissess at all and sundry, showing off your new Dolce lether bag or Hermes three peice.

One of the uses of lotus laves, a biology text book for an obscure Bengali medium school about a couple of decades ago claimed, is to function as plates on which to serve food. Banana leaves, of course are much more common as biodegradable plates. Have you ever ever wondered what woulf happen to the hapless cows and other animals who survive on these green leaves. This food chain concept is a very imperialist formulation in that some componets within it, such as chicken for instance, could be routinely overproduced by artificial means, or farmed, as it were, and some others, such as little inscets, are cruelly insecticieded out of the city boundaries. In reality only those who serve the interest of the ruling power are allowed to reproduce themselves, and the rest forcefully escorted to extinction, in the name of a clearner, healthier world.

In this movie that you may like to see, their is this 35 year old man from the drought prone belts of Orissa who looks 60, for he has not had foor days and months, and survived probably on hope alone. Lest the late Nargis Dutt's beautiful soul decideds to charge me with selling India's poverty--she had even charged satyajit Ray--let me clarify that Orissa, for the record, is a part of India and I am making mo money selling this crap. You may of course go ahead and advise these hapless souls to eat protein supplements instad, just as Marie Antoniette had suggested to the Frenchmen who had come to her husband clamouring for bread. While the man above was a genuine victim of malnutrition, there are others who keep eating all sorts of delicacies and equally religiously force them out of their systems, and still look like thin ball pencils. Food, too, is a bit like the proverbial laddoo of Delhi-you lose weight when you don't have it and you die even when you have too much of it. It is no coincidence that the rate of anorexia and bulimia related comlications are increasing apace in India, precisely when the nation is euphoric about its GDP growth rate and near self suffciency level performance. If you try to tease out realtions between these disparate observations, it must be attributed to your perverse imaginations and nothing else. I am far too used to eat humble pie.

a staright line

That is my father. When he was around, newspapers and greeting card companies and websites did not tell me that there is this father's day business and all that . As I look back, there would have been very little that I had done even if I knew. Partly because I was too young and partly because I had not yet developed a perspective on him and went by the conventional yardsticks. QED he was to me this rather very moderately successful man who always bungled his way from one impending crises to another and occassionally, this too well read man who was sometimes hit by this crazy idea of trying to teach english to a ten year old boy, beginning right from the etymology of each and every word that came up. Well, almost every word that would come up for discussion or what is better described as inflictment of heveier doses of erudition on a soul than it could logically digest. There of course were other selves of this gentleman that I had experienced in course of the nearly twelve years that he had been with us, but it is only now or may be only after a substantial time has elapsed after his mortal disapperence, that these selves have opened themselves up to me with their full implications. In other words, the man has now left me free to imagine what he was like. Funny, how distance makes heart grow fonder in ways that one never manages to anticipate.

He meant stories to me, and travels isdide forests in an open jeep, and archaeological excavations within the Egyptian tombs and curses that reportedly haunted those intrepid excavators. He was particularly insistent that I wear north star shoes when I grow up. I think he bought me one a year before he left us, and later my mother bought me another one, but then new brands took charge of the middle class aspirations and I began to fancy addidases and nikes and went on to get them for myself. Starngely it never occuerd to me that my parents never wore shoes that cost even one fifth of those of mine. Parents, let me tell you, are a most strange sort of people. They willingly suffer lossess themselves to bring a tinge of a smile on the faces of their children. I have not yet reached that level of self denial and so I dread becoming a parent.

Then there was the solitary swimming session. Since my father never looked athletic and even had what may be described as a rather ungainly gait, I had formed this impression that even dozens of boxes of those energy drinks that you see advertized on TV these days could not induce him to get into teaching me swimming or cycling. Imagine my horror on the day he suddenly suggested we go swimming. There was a surfeit of ponds and other waterbodies in the village where I grew up-- we eventually went to one right behind our house--but the very idea of my reticent and unathletic father jumping on to the water and actually swimming to and fro made me more than slightly suspicious. My grandparents and my mother were actually concerened that he might fall sick and so forth. Baba for once cocked a snook at the naysayers and off we went to the pond. For the next hour or so , we had great fun, I shouting my heart out, and he trying to teach me the right techniques of swimming. I had learnt to swim by then but nothing except freestyle came to me. He, on the othere hand hand, appeared good with backstrokes and even breaststrokes. I hade failed to sense then, but realize now that this side of his personality had died by then. It must have been a flicker that he had carefully preserved for me to see, knowing full well perhaps that he might not have been able to stage an encore. The more I keep thinking about that solitary hour of swimming between us, I begin to see the truth in the saying that sometimes even an hour spent in absolute joy may provide you enough succour for a lifetime. Let me not get into the various debates about the measurement of time. They have been bothering me for quite sometime. In any case, I believe it is possible that some memories actually become brighter and more fulfilling with time. Therefore, it's obverse--that some memories continue to hurt more intensively as time passes--is also something that is difficult to rule out. I just hope I am proved wrong in the second instance. If Baba was around, we could possibly be talking as equals today. He does not know but I have read a book or two since then. But we never ever eneterd in to a chat on books. He obviously knew what I had been reading, but neither have I found his collection of books at home--which I am convinced was impressive--nor have I heard my mother recalling my father reading a book. I suspect his tryst with books had been cut short by some massive tragedy about which I would never know. That my granparents soon followed the apple of their eye on their way out of this planet has not helped the cause greatly. Looking back, that day on the pond taught me something very critical. It is very painful to have to tolerate the reality that you have forgotten something that you once knew-how to swim against the tide and still enjoy yourself. I do not recall my father enjoying himself, except during that one hour on the water. He would always draw very deep breaths and it appeared as if he wanted to talk but he never did. Had he done so, we could have had many debating sessions. He would never know how well my brother speaks, and how ably he has trained himself to do well in life. Imagine a chop-muri session with me and my father hammering away with our abstruse philospohical takes on life and my brother punctuating us with one of those devastating one liners of his, and my mother worrying about some new major crisis likely ro befall her family. Just that it will never happen. My brother-who has absolutely no memories of Baba-and I are convinced that he had it in him to make it very big in life. But we will never know what stopped him. Dream he had in plenty and I know for a fact that he never lacked in persistence. Someday of course I'll get to ask him but that will take a while yet. He must know that I could do with some more debating sessions, and those swimming sessions and long walks and private words before we went to sleep. And my brother deserved to know him. Let me gawkily translate my last words to him, from a popular Bengali song that readily comes to mind: had you chosen to stay up/a few more nights/ you could see all the stars shining sharp/ the moon delights/ with its chortle and twitter /but you cannot anymore lend an ear.

His name, translated literally, meant straight, and also simple. I have seen no starighter or simpler man, and I do not believe that nice guys always finish second but he did. I just wish that he transfers some of his gentility to me and withdraws some of his lazyness and lack of killer instinct that I seem to have inherited more than I deserved. But what the heck, he's bequeathed me all his dreams. So what if I have not made it to the Indian Police Service, as he would have prefered? I would ceratinly criscross forsts on open jeeps and visit the pharaoh's tombs and exorcise all those demons. But most of all i'll miss that one hour of swimming together. Someday maybe.....

me, money, relations

Songs that soothe shall stay incomple for some more time, for other ideas and concerns, ostensibly of more immediate, fundamental and intimate relevance, have taken me over since. It is necessary to record them here with some clarity, for until I do so, they do not appear to be inclined to release my autonomy of thinking and sinking, if you see what I mean. There is a way of doing things and i cannot always be bypassing the straight and the narrow only because it is narrow. Typically, one has to begin with a narrative account of events that implels one to think or rethink one's ideas about life, philosophy and one's philosophy of life. Then one proceeds to flesh out such thoughts or queries so far as one has been able to understand, and articulate them, if not resolve them altogether, so that others, more comptetent perhaps, can pick up the threads someday and approach those questions from a different angle and ,inshallah, offer a more acceptable resolution. I am deeply grateful to blogspot for alloting me this space for free. Now I can not only inflict myself on others, but also hope that others will come round and pull me out of my horns of dilemma. Obviously, since they cannot pull me by the hand or by the scruff of my neck for strategic reasons, they will pull me by my legs and I am resigned to that fate. Has been working on my stretching last few months, years perhaps, real hard. Still remain in one piece, so hey folks I am game for all that. Fell free to pull me up.

When one gets down to narrating events, one runs a very genuine risk of losing oneself in the maze of events and their multiple possible interpretations so much that one often refuses to venture beyond the immediacy of a given event and medidate thoughtfully on the general significance of such events on one's understanding of people and interpersonal and even social and professionals relations. Having convinced myself that each individual is a complete entity in herself/himself, I had been for the past many years paying only inadequate attention to the collective identities of men and women. I need not be that harsh on me perhaps but broadly that does some up my personal belief over the years. That means that I have been focussing so far, disproportionately, to the individual selves of each and every human being I came across, saw, heard of, read about and so on. In turn, I got caught up in devising very 'individual' responses to each of these characters; so much so that I had probably forgotten that the world is a society made up of men and women and not a spatial expanse where essentially distinct individuals live out their physical existence. Too much of Richard Bach at teenage or two many of bollywood movies when mom was away at office, struggling to feed her two kids all alone? I don't know, I just became, over the years a self obsessed gragarious loner. I wanted everyone to meet me on my terms, convinced that I am meeting them on their terms, without ever bothering to ask them the question. I needed that shell of ceratainly to survive those years and I am very grateful to those books and movies; they nursed me when none was around, or frothcoming, or too scared or disgusted to have to spend time with an enfant terrible. I sought out comapny, not many liked my appearence or demeanour or behaviour but the books and movies never turned me away. They gave me all my dreams. In a very real sense they took over the task my father had left incomplete, those chats on the bed during half-awake nights about stars and forests and adventures and English literature and promises of hitting the road together some day. A great man who did nothing great in life except bequeathing me his dreams. Those dreams used to haunt me like millstones on my neck till very recently, and I had on sveral occassions burst out in anger and despair but he was never around for a chat. And he will never be, till I actually leave this world. Cruel, wasn't he? Till recently, I had thought and said publicly that he had been irreseponsible. Today, I say, just as publicly, that I regret having said that because that was a lie. He has passed on to me the very best he had ever had-a heart to dream big and a brother (his son, that is) who just cannot be bettered, in any way whatsoever. I intend to write a post entitled superior sibling down the line, but let me not digress any further today.

Just to bring you back to the core issue, I had been telling that I had not paid, till very recently, adequate attention to the social existence of individuals, as ,for instance, brother, son, sister, niece, school alumni and so forth. These may all appear very obvious but between them they socialize an individual in ceratain ways, frrame his/her personality in fairly identifiable patterns, as individuals who nonetheless belong to a given collectivity on a given moment. The largest (and also the loosest) such collectivity is perhaps brought into being by what is known as the time-spirit (zeitgeist?) but the relations outlined above are readymade everyday examples of the point. I had been, very crudely speaking, living in denial of these basic factors in practice, although intellectually I had all along been aware of their 'reality' only too well. I had been engaging with my problems as academic concerns; that is why they had always appeared important to others but never dear. That is a fairly good summary of my character as well. I had always appeared intelligent to people but had never had close friends really. I had wanted them on my terms, and they chose to maintain safe distance, too proud either to hurt me or to hurt themselves. But things have been brighter lately. We keep cursing each other's stupidity and false vanity at least once a week these days. Jolly good fellas all.

The event yes. Let me limit myself to just one. During the last few days, I had been helping a friend of mine, a gallery owner himself, to finalize some kind of an agreement with another gallery owner elsewhere, who is not persoanally known to me but happens to be a friend of a very close friend of mine. This very close friend of mine, incidenatlly, brings all four of us together--two businessmen and an amateur hack- in the transaction concerend. This gallery owner friend of mine had been clear from the very beginning that this particular transaction, and indeed all human transcations, both personal and professional, must be based fundamentally on trust. Contract enforcement, the economics students will tell you and I lift straight from Koushik Basu, remains structurally poor in a society that cannot boast of too many of its citizens taking to trust as a virtue in itself. For the view of a former CEO of a multinational corporation on the question , see this colum by Gurcharan Das where he saketches out an interesting policy. He says when one is dealing with a starnger, the first move should be based completely on trust, to be renewed on the basis of reciprocation from the other party. This sounds good to me, but Basu makes more sense when he suggests that we try to inclucate these traits not as invidual or group characteristics but as virtues valauable in themselves. We do not have to judge ourselves or others out of the dialogue but could be talking between us all the time.

Who was it who wrote this couplet 'Guftgu zari rehae'? Faiz Ahmad faiz? Sorry it beats me at the moment but do please find out for yourself. It is important all the time that we agree to disgree, and then have a cup of coffee or a goblet of cognac together down at the coffee shop, and bid each other good night, only to wake up the next morning and enmesh each other with reason, logic, figures and abstraction. Or just plain sentiment, or affection. The dialogue must go on. The road, or the journey, often turns out to be more instructive than the destination per se. Walk along we all must, even when we are walking on tightropes.

Oh the event; so this friend of mine wanted me to respectfully word his sentiments, which I did to the best (or worst) of my capability. You would agree it is not easy to reflect trust on deeds, even on the so called trust deeds, which this one was ceratinly not. The 'task' out of the way--no, before all this actually began really-- the fellow asks me to quote a price. I said I could not quote a price not because he was a friend but because I have never done that kind of stuff before and will never do it again for anyone else as far as I can see today. We argued for about 10 minutes and I hear the fellow will pay me some money anyway and beyond a point I could just not argue with people who choose third class people to do third class jobs and then pay them for doing it so incomptenetly. Is the guy trying to convert some black money into white or what? Then so be it, for such processes provide very welcome avenues of gainful employment to poor reserch scholars turned useless hacks. So much for the event and let's now turn back to ramblings again.

I did not know this guy till a few months back but during these few months, he has chosen to trust me, thought I could be of any use some day and treated me with some dignity, respect and grace, all dispensed very cordially. It may be true that he had been investing in me perhaps and that he is a very shrewed judge of character and knew that I am soft on sentiments and emotion. I do not care two hoots really, and I wish all businessmen learn to make such shrewd investments. Long and intimate relationships are not bulit by looking to exploit the other party's weaknesses but by making him secure about his weakness, by assuring him that you do not wish to take advantage of his weakness but together you want to build a unit where each of you try to complement the other's atrengths and vigorously work towards improving your respective weaknesses. Creative synergy is what they call it in the mamagerial lingo, and I call it, and so does this businessman friend of mine, being there for each other through thick and thin. Simple stuff really; wish I paid more attention to my mother's admonitions in those early years. Now that my Mercus Aurelius (the book, that is) had been taken away from me by the quirks of fate, I must start noting down my own list of people and places to whom I owe a lot and things that I have been thinking about. Money, as I had been driving at, just cannot buy me realtions but relations did, does, and will help me survive an overdose of money or lack thereof. You won't believe at times I end up making pretty handsome amounts of money, more than some of my gainfully employed friends and collegues, as it were. Professioanalism means delivering an assignment on time and with the best quality standards, nothing more and nothing less. It does not have to tarnslate into 20 hour days and impossible targets and stressed out families and a 7 day mauritious trip in a hurry once a year like a ritual enactment of family bonding and so forth. For those who came late, profession is making a living preaching and doing exctly what you believe in. If you do not agree with me by virtue of what you think is your better sense and experience of professionalism. go check any standard english to english distionary worth its publication. I promise to tender a public apology in my next blog if you get me on the wrong foot on that count.

This blog has been way too long for your consumption as well as for my production. I have made two points. Men and women are social creatures and as such respond often more positively to interpersonal, and not intellectual gestures. Intellectual gestures threten them while interpersonal gestures make them feel more secure about themselves. From that I proceeded to argue that it is more important to develop a few close realtions in life than making pots of money at the cost of acute loneliness and megalomania, although I myself love good life and know exactly what components of a good life I cannot live without. More importantly, relations do not run on sentiments alone, they call for being there for each other when the occassion demands, even though the other party might not even formally ask you to be there. That is called empathy, a virtue I had been looking to find within myself for the past many years, but only now appear to have sensed some bits of it somewhere within me, still very scattered, still very stubbornly elusive but no longer as hidebound. I have been feeling bullish on life all this morning, notwithstanding the fact that I have worked the whole night yesterday. I am feeling good about a lot of things, and generous about many more, and feel ready to let go still others. I thank you all for being around these last few days. You would never know just what a great help you all had been.

songs that soothe

Cliches sometimes drive the point home pretty effectively to a fairly large number of people who are not as bright as you are. As do paradoxes, paradoxically. Songs, really moving ones, actually move stones and tone deaf philistines like yours truly. Especially when there are moments which cannot be shared with anyone else in the universe, moments when monumental edifices fall aprt like a pack of cards. The principles and faiths with around which you you build your entire identities turn out ultimately to be fundamentally inadequate and to paraphrase Yeats, you no longer feel at ease anymore. Grounds beneath your feet shake violently and you do not quite realize whither you are headed. You lose, as it were, a sense of proportion and are at your most vulnerable, so much so that you run the risk of being buried for ever under the rubble. You must make sure that you do turn into the Rajiv Gandhian Banyan tree, one that, when it falls, also bring down a host of smaller creatures. You must, in other words, ensure that the collateral damages remain the minimum possible. That, however, is often easier said than done and mightier souls than yours truly have failed in the enterprise. It is some encouragement though that lighter souls than yours truly have emerged victorious as well. How does one do it then?

No one knows for sure how to survive an earthquake but some invariably do. There is no general method perhaps and each devises his or her own servival strategy if only because the sheer magnitude of the shock affords its victims very little chance of actually coming together and working out a common defense mechanism. Like the golden hour in an accident, the first few minutes, hours, days and months are of capital significance. Decisions demand to be made on the spot and instinct and tenacity often prove to be greater allies in this struggle that pure intellect and reasoning. Not that these things are so very different from each other after all. Long pracitices based on intellect and reasoning may in the long run turn into instinctive reactions; practice does breed mecahnisation but mechanisation need not necesarily be devoid of any reason or logic at all. It is only when we push mechanisation to its extremes that it tends to begin to give a short shrift to tender human relations and sentiments. This is akin to Tagore's dreary desert sands of dead habits evetually shallowing, irreverseibly, the clear stream of reason.

Lyrical though the sentiments may appear to the uninitiated, let's not make any song song or dance about them. Instead, let each of us play a game and try to recall a few songs the staris of which literally wake you up from a deep sleep and make you laugh or cry or perhaps laugh and cry in turn; or just make you feel great in some way or the other, cathartic perhaps but deeply moving nonetheless. There are sevaral such ditties that immediately comes to my mind. Elsewhere I have introduced myself as tone deaf and see no reason to change the description as far as my comprehension of the grammer of music goes, whether eastern classical or western, or pop or hip hop or bhatiyaali or bhawaiya or tappa or jhumur. But I normally trust my ears and go for the tonality and cadence of a particular composition, whether vocal or instrumental and I am glad to report their does occur some kind of a connect somewhere. It could be between my present state of mind and though and the sentiments expressed through the lyrics of the composition. It might as well be the general drift of the composition, reminding me of some moments of my life or my people's life, not entirely unlike what happened to the poet when he had been forced to stop on his tracks by the haunting melodies of a solitary reaper, somewhere on the hills of Scotland, and kept guessing in vein about the content or the inspiration behind the composition. Romanticism is a most noble sentiment, a very uplifting and inspring one but it does not yield most productively to reasoned analysis or crictical dissection.

Woh Manly Stuff

For all you care, you would probably agree that Mel Gibson had a jolly tough time in his search for what women want. This is a question that has been lately hogging much public space, the seriousness of the issue notwithstanding (or not standing). For instance, a section of the sunday magazine of a promiment national english daily that carries interview of major and minor celebrities always has a specific question addressed to its male interviewees-what would you do if you discovered that you have turned into a woman overnight? Let us not detain ourselves here with the details and diversities of their answers to the question. The point that must be noted ,however, is that suddenly everyone is keen to find out what women want, especially from those who are not women.
This is an important issue, a little like the bureaucrats who have never been to the villages deciding the nitty gritties of what ails Indian villages and prescribing suitable remedies. If this is indeed so, this is an innane exercise and would not take much time and space to establish its infertility. Paradoxically though the very fact that such exercies are exercising the minds of pandits and journalists and filmmakers is a powerful testimony of the productivity of their
(and our) poverty of thought and imagination. As far as can be made out, the Gibson movie, Subhash Ghai's inelegant Indian version of it and the questionnaire of the sunday magazine mentioned above can all be fairly dismissed as non-serious stuff. Herein lies the rub.

Because the whole thing is painfully true; women actually know fairly well what men want but frankly men have no clue about what women desire. Mars, venus and all that sounds impressive but offer no comprehensive solution. The quest of what women want must therefore be taken far more seriously. Is the stereotype that women run on emotions and shun logic true, for instance? Yes perhaps, but not the way we interpret. The right interpretation is yes, they have more emotional intelligence, the very thing that the management gurus rule would fuel corporate success tomorrrow. That means women know how to rally large groups around them better than men-nothing sways large gruops of people more than an emotional and emotive outburst of inspirational stuff. Men must learn to appear more vulnerable and learn to cry more eloquently, to cut a long story short. Money does not inspire those who have enough to live a good life and also those who are unlikely to accumulate enough to live a good life anytime soon. A Dream does. A dream that challenges them, no empowers them really, to run after an impossible dream. Don't forget that frail woman from Albania who landed in Calcutta half a century ago with nothing with her except compassion and built a multinational with a presence in 104 countryies in a matter of three or four decades. Compassion, and an impossible dream, then, is no less of a capital than hard cash. Women are impossible creatures-they are extremely logical and equally illogical at the same time. Deep down perhaps, they are logically illogical and talk men into believing that they are not logical.

As for long term planning and training, they are second to none. Each and every mother knows how to plan a CEO or an IIT-IIM graduate who would start making millions and billions after roughly half a century. The fathers supply the money-no even mothers do just as much-and the mothers implant the dream, grain by grain, into the heart and soul of their children and make sure that they eat, sleep and dream the dream so much that they make it come true.

Women are not handicapped, we men have doubly endowed them in trying to confine them within the domestic space. God has not been on our side either, she (and god is a woman for sure, or else she would not be so partial) has provided the capacity to give birth to babies. Frankly, women don't need men, but men are just helpless without women when it comes to making babies. Sperms may be banked, as it were, but wombs just can't, even if you rent one. Men , as far as I can make out, are faraid and supremely insecure-women have mastered the domestic and are now out to oust us from the public. We would not have minded, had we not been brought up on a false notion of cultivating pride on our capacity to earn bread for the family, and two, had we known how to run a house in the first place. Women, I admire you all and I would have to unfortunately live with the reality that I'd never be half as good as you already are. Fact is, even though we say movies like what women want are casual funny stuff, we have no other way to express our admiration for what you are. You know how awfully bad losers we men are.