Mosquitoes and Civilisation

The fact that there are mosquitoes in this room is a sign of a deep rooted civilisational malaise. It’s an absolute blot on humanity, a disgrace on our entire civilisational effort, a matter of deep shame for all of mankind that there are mosquitoes in this room.

Or perhaps it’s not a disgrace on our science, on our technological might which can atomise whole worlds, but a comment on existence itself. That there are mosquitoes in the same world as there are humans is a reminder not just of the ultimate animality of our species but also a strong comment on the undeniable animality of our civilisation.

Yes, the animality of our civilisation. After all, progressive civilisation as we’ve come to know it is based essentially and inextricably on unsustainable exploitation of resources and peoples. We are humans and have laptops and the internet not simply because one bloke long back had the ingenuity to tame lightning and direct it with wires but also because we have the mechanisms, tangible and intangible, to dig up mounds of soil to make miniscule little chips and blow up mountains and rocks to make slender, fine wires. All of that digging and blowing – and that is just a very, very general understatement of all that goes into laptops and the internet – is achieved at the expense of a variety of ideas and organisms, human and otherwise. To be civilised is to be fashionably brutish.

Of course, there is no one way of being civilised. Progressive, liberal, growth oriented civilisation is what we know the most and live through, but civilisation can be various states of being and relativity, various diverse modes and degrees of exploitation and engagement with ideas and objects and their respective interactions with each other. Yet, over the past hundred years or so our civilisations have been tending towards a singular, modular civilisation, towards a more or less composite, set way of engaging with alterities and otherness and of conceiving the self in relation to itself and to these alterities exterior to it.

The fact that despite jaalis there’re still mosquitoes in this room is indicative of the coming to age of this homogenising, super-civilisation. A civilisation which directs the gaze inwards, which gives agency but sequesters it to leave much of experience outside the pale of action: we are citizens of more or less democratic communities which engender notions of free will, free press and free speech, but democracy and freedom themselves are temporal subjectivities prone to subtle domestications.

It is these domestications which, ultimately, allow macchars a free reign in the troposphere. Contemporary politics gives us the freedom to romance, the access to schooling and the choice to gainful employment, but it increasingly presents all of these in such pleasant provisos as limit their exercise for progressively transparent, equitable modes of socio-economic engagement. Market logic dictates that focus should be the self and selfhood the primary, even exclusive, domain of action – what lies outside is the responsibility of the state, the communal, the increasingly atomised yet faceless collective.

The politics of mosquito repellent merchandise is an exemplary instance of such invisible yet potent diversification. The macchar-chaap coil and machine, the mosquito repellent cream, the fly zapper, all these are symbols of a larger, global impulse towards the barricading of interiors, of the polarisation of home and world in ways which put all possible premium on the former and relegate all possible responsibility towards the latter to the ethereal yet ever strengthening arm of the state. We can control only what goes on in our own little homes and so we have jaalis on our windows and subscribe eagerly to even stronger chemical combinations to kill those who invade our domestic castles. The state does its bit in conducting fumigation once in a while, disseminating information against mosquito breeding and conducting investigations on actions taken by citizens in their homes and so the responsibility of the opens is comfortably devolved onto agencies and factors outside individual control. Whether that responsibility is undertaken to the fullest and whether such a delegation of powers allows any significant scope to the public individual is, then, a matter of and for more or less self-limiting academic debate.

Be that as it may, one can’t deny that in its entirety individual control is a happy impossibility. Still, the very fact that individual agency needs, increasingly, to find legitimate outlet through institutionalised effort is reflective of the ways in which the private is obfuscating the public even as the public is restricting the private. As long as our civilisations move towards this ideal of civilisation, individual agency and endeavour will continue finding gainful realisation in the private and macchars, for all that our achievements and economies are worth, will continue finding safe haven in our homes.

Some commemorative verses in memory of festive times

Of –rash and the chicks I sing,
That fugitive from Rajputana,
Enemy to tofu and soya, she
Who journeyed from far and over
The many ribbed backs of
Fast moving engines of massed steel
And found home in the land of victory.
She, a victim to the great wrath
Of the enthroned gods, who
From her land and ancient hearth
To undying lands of the free did
Journey, to found amongst the free
A temple sacred of Love and Joy,
An abode of great happiness, mocking
Those above in their splendour and glory.


Was it this, Muse, that roused the jealous
Pride of the gods? Did her feasts pale
The ambrosial gatherings of those
Arbitrators of our fate? Twas great Hera,
Mother, divine keeper of bridal vows,
Who first voiced the general dissatisfaction.
“Look, husband”, said she to the mighty
Thunderer, “how the mortals sport,
See how they live and love and feast!
They carry on without a thought to us
And what is rightfully ours, for we
Being eternal, eternal joy too must be
Ours, not the keep of these
Uncertain playthings of Time!”


It was you, brazen Mars, who spoke next,
Complaining of too great a peace,
Lusting for blood, battle in your eyes,
You spoke next. “Love or not,
Feasts or not, the gods must
Have their sport! Mortals may
Sport, aye, but so must we,
And, making them our sports,
Play with their dust! Hades has too long
Been empty, sinners live too much,
To war, then, to war!”


The Cytherean then suddenly rose,
Tall and stately was she, her hair
Long and kept up with a golden brooch,
A gift by her skilful husband, the
Lame One, she rose, her bosom
Heaving with dismay at her brother’s
Sharp words and so addressed the
Gathered gods: “Must we be
Vindictive, as of old? Must we
Grudge the unfortunate their fickle
Joys? These that we speak of
Are favoured by me, my particular
Friends, their house my special favourite.
Many are the times that I have
Joined in their sports, infused their love
With greater vigour. Let us not
Grieve over mortal joy, when eternity is
Ours, and so eternal delight!”


Faithless Strife, great enemy of gods
And women alike, saw a chance
To avenge an earlier slight, and
Aiming to divide the council,
Spoke thus: “You speak well,
O well-chosen consort of the Deity
Of our universe. Mortals must mortal be
And when they do presume upon
Us and ours, must hard lessons be taught.
Hear her, Conqueror, and grant us this wish,
That the free be enslaved, and slavish
Passions and yet more deeper, darker
Turmoils ensnare them!”


Great Chaos followed this, the council
Broke up divided, gods stood opposed
And all spoke in a general melee
Till their Supreme Father,
Wielder of Lightening, silenced
Them thus. “Peace, gods, peace!
Let silence reign here, let there be
Peace amongst us! Hear me now,
And hear me well. I instruct my son,
Great Dionysus, to breathe the spirit
Of Maenads amongst these mortal.
Let them sport, let them dine, but
Let madness reign, let Hades spew
Agave’s shameful ghost, and
Strife inspire –rash to a deeper shame.
Daughter, fair mother of impish
Cupid, you must not protest,
This is my will and I will not be thwarted!”


As he spoke the skies darkened, thunder split
The clouds asunder and fear came into the
Hearts of the assembled gods All nodded assent
And Dionysus, chosen for this task, was
First to leave the brazen portals of
Hoary Olympus. He was followed
Closely by Strife, greedy of mischief.
They appeared amongst their midst,
Unknown to all, and did as were bid.
Soon, where gentle love and feasting
Reigned, came in Dissatisfaction.
The stars hid in shame and Moon,
Aphrodite’s close ally, drew a
Curtain of clouds across her
Teary vision. But Strife, when aroused,
Knows no check and soon noble
-rash was an image of that mad
Theban mother. Whirling and chanting,
Her dark hair tearing the night,
Her eyes ablaze with a fury of delight,
She tore into her own precious chicks,
Broke them part by part, her hands
Bloodied and ate of the gore.


Thrice did her sea-born mistress
Send her warning, thrice did the
Winds, Aeolus’ special charge,
Attempt the accursed handful
From her bloody hands, but
The Fates’ will would be done.
She brushed aside all warning,
Driven to deeper shame in her madness
Till, sated, she dropped in her frenzy.


Who shall say what happened then,
Muse? How will I describe –rash’s shame
When rosy Aurora touched her cheeks
Into consciousness? How sing of her
Pain, the great pain, the turmoil
Which held her gripped in a vice?
Aid me, divine power, and you Apollo,
Unparalleled patron of song, give me
Skill to accomplish this unprecedented
Task, so greater glory be yours!


She woke, op’ed her eyes, and thought
The world before her. O, mighty mistake,
Grievous error! She lay in bed,
Thinking of her strange revels,
Pleased still of her feast, Memory
Deigning her happy thoughts
Before the pangs of reality would strike.
So she lay, remembering, and when
The Sun’s great chariot was halfway through
Its daily course, determined to arouse
Her company. But lo! Here she stands,
And, standing, is doubled in pain!
She sit, stands, sits, a very
Symplegades of trouble torments her
Soul, great waves of distress crashing
Over her earthly frame, her noble body
Sweaty, reeling in sickness and despairing
Of relief, to the skies so she prays.


“O, is it for this that you mighty gods
Shape us mortals, to so see us bent in
Shame? Do we forget you or your
Share of honour, dignity, respect
That you mock us thus, send us such
Plagues to torment the innermost
Secret recesses of our fragile frames?
How, O how have I erred, how
Offended you deities, for these
Tribulations, these tumults are your
Sending, I know it, they are your doing
For some fault, some mistake in me.
On this knee do I supplicate you,
O mighty ruler of destiny, ease
My pain, alleviate my suffering,
Give me release!”


Hearing this, the Thunderer was appeased,
He heard half her plea, and the rest willing air,
Decreed “Let her be free.
Let air and matter combine,
Let conches blow, let matter flow,
And as a fast flowing mountain stream
On the slopes of sacred Ida
Sweeps away accumulated mud from the banks,
Let her too regain purity, peace,
A hollow emptiness – let her be free!”


Lo! Divine signal, behold! No sooner
Than the Omnipotent’s words escaped
His lips, no sooner than the Sisters spun
To his command that on earth a mighty
Revolution occurred. Thrice the ground
Shook, thrice did the sea its bounds forsake,
Thrice thunder rule in sky and then,
As all came to a close, up rushed –rash
To her sacred closet, downed her robes
Of black and blue, and upon the hole to
Hades deep did discharge her unpleasant keep.

On Chaddi Shopping

Buying chaddis is quite the tour de force in layers of gender and class hegemonies. When you buy a chaddi, you’re not just buying a piece of supportive garment: you’re buying into a host of intricate, well nigh seamless hegemonies.

This is painfully apparent from even a cursory consideration of the sort of advertising chaddi manufactures usually bombard their hapless consumers with. Going by the models on chaddi boxes and billboards, one would think only persons sculpted in certain very limited and limiting ways are entitled to underclothes. I don’t see many people objecting to this extremely insensitive piece of very-in-your-face public discourse: it’s almost as if you have to exercise and be ‘in shape’ in that particularly fetishised way globalising urban aesthetics demand to be entitled to something as simple and commonplace as a chaddi.

But then, what is simple and commonplace? The air we breathe is commonplace enough, but not so simple that just a slight shift in its parameters cannot easily wipe humanity out of the commonplace. Chaddis are commonplace, everybody seems to have them, but I suppose a percentage survey will reveal that much of humanity still lacks access to them, leave alone good and useful types of them. Of course, what is good and useful when it comes to chaddis is also open to contestation: ay, the very idea that chaddis are good and useful too is open to debate, but assuming that they are, the probable proposition that much of our kind is forced to survival sans them combined with the fact that those who are are exposed to such propaganda as inculcates a sense of doubt and insufficiency regarding their suitability to them is enough for one to question not just the praxis of chaddi advertising, as this article is doing, but the very idea of chaddi itself.

It will be clear to all discerning individuals – if, i.e., there are any individuals – that the mores of chaddi marketing are woven deep into the fabric of global and globalising geopolitical considerations. Chaddis are extended parts of the state apparatus that subsumes rebellious figures into tight-fitting, straitjacketed outlines. A visit to a hosiery shop will establish as much: the panoptical vision of the establishment achieves an inverted power dialectics in which the customer is being looked upon, assessed by an unending elasticity of ideologies. For in this case, the gaze, in looking, is not as much as looking on as looking in, looking on to look in in a way that negates its selfhood – that more or less solid sense of being with which we usually perceive the world – for a naturalised, standardised vision generated much too forcibly by a pre-designed, top-heavy volition of being. In that remarkable sense, it is not my eyes which look: I look, but through the eyes of the chaddi manufacturer in quite the same way s/he wants me to look.

Of course, one does accomplish the task, one does pick and choose, but that still doesn’t negate the functionality of these defining forces. For the choices one makes are as often dictated by availability as by feasibility and in making the feasible available only the sadly happy illusion of consumerism is strengthened. Shopping for chaddis is a simple task of knowing and judging, but what the basis of that knowledge and the parameters of that judgment are are considerations too often overlooked in the strapping desire to fit in.

Some missives to Indian Men, being suggestions based on observation

Dear Sirs,

There is, of course, nothing fixed and permanent in this world and so whatever we take as being so is but an arbitration of our betters – or simply, of those with more the influence to do so. Still, matters being what they are and ways being affixed to the world, ‘tis necessary to provide a few directions as to habits to be refrained from:

• Please scratch your privates in private only. We know you feel fully at ease both in and out and would rather not have your freedom to have a ball with your vitals upon any occasion be curtailed, but the action in all its multitudinous forms being not a bit distasteful to some other minor portions of the populace, you are humbly beseeched to have a care and carefully tend to this most beloved of your cares not in human company.

• Please leave the cleansing of your visible bodily orifices to less demanding times of the day. Every man is a jung bahadur in his own way, but to continually be cleaning your nose and ears and plucking them clean of excess hair in the busy thoroughfares of life is not fully conducive towards making you an amenable companion.

• Please exercise some greater control on your bladder. The nation is infinitely grateful to you for the fertilising offices performed by the free-flowing catharsis of your humours and would anoint you the crowning glory of creation for these magnanimous services discharged copiously were it not for the slight matter of odour. Noses being noses, to have whole street corners dedicated to such greening impetus is too great a burthen to be conscionably borne by lesser, pettier mortals.  

• Please rest gaseous matters till a room adequate for discharge be readily available. The world is always regaled by your adeptness in achieving catharsis in as sundry ways as are humanly possible, but in such odoriferous expositions of your humanity you can endeavour to be as humane as possible and leave humanity to its humane business sans smells and sounds descending from your person. 

• Please display a bit less artistry in spitting your paan. No culture is equal to ours in dispositions artistic and refined and though you in conformity with our long standing tradition of perfection in both form and content have striven to leave marks immortals on all possible walls, it could do well do direct such longings into convenient bins, basins or, if none of these should be forthcoming, much less visible corners of walls and staircases. 

It is with an overwhelming sense of your greatness as a force sublime, a move of the world at large, a shaper of matters inner and domestic, that these humble suggestions are meekly offered to your munificent selves for kind perusal. Hoping that they are as all should and that offence, if caused, shall be readily forgiven for want of experience in dealings of the sort,

Rest of the Population

On Rakhi

The simplest of decisions can be so difficult to execute.

Take rakhi for instance. I’ve been saying it for quite some time now, but this year I firmly decided to stop observing rakhi. A simple decision, one would think, involving no one but me and the sisters concerned. Just a matter of personal choice, of talking it out and being done with it.

If only.

A paternal outburst was expected, but that ‘twould come a full blown storm was the least of my expectations. Bitter accusations and criminations apart though, the incident proved interesting by throwing in sharp relief some of the many values and behavioural patterns which we tend to take for granted and which provide a comforting cushion to everyday existence – that, and the validity of our, or at least mine, questioning of them.

But first things first. Why did I want to stop observing rakhi? Well, simply because I think it’s an antiquated ritual which has lost its symbolic value in the present scenario. Of course, when I say the present scenario I mean my own milieu, the narrow circle I move in and not the world at large. Also, when I talk of the symbolic value of rakhi, I take the meaning understood and inculcated in most of us urban bourgeoisies – that rakhi, as a pan-cultural symbol common not just to the Hindu religion, is an observation and assertion of a brother’s duties to his sisters, to love and protect her from all harm.

Which is what’s problematic. Protect her from all harm? Of course, it’s not written anywhere, but that’s what’s implied, and being so includes almost everything possible, from bees to boyfriends, rats to rapists. I always say I’m a sorry excuse of a mard and that I manage to keep myself alive is enough without being specifically tasked with the protection of any female as a particular duty. If it’s bad, it’s bad for me as well as for the sisters and so it’s unfair to expect me to be a saviour of any sort for anybody. Got enough to fend for myself without bothering being ever-so-old-fashionedly chivalrous.

Sounds valid? That’s what I thought. It’s nice to put an end to these patriarchal, paternalistic rituals, isn’t it? As feminists of some sort of the other that’s what we ought to do too, I suppose. Put an end to patriarchal, paternalistic, phallocentric modes of being.

For what? Ay, for what? For what and what for?

In this specific case, given my narrow, urban, predominantly kayasth bourgeoisie circle, none of that bit about rakhi meaning protection is valid. Nobody expects brothers to protect sisters from harm in that bhaiya mere mode of the 70s; in particular, nobody expects me to bother much. It’s just a ritual shorn completely of its meaning, a collective habit which is just observed. Of course, it’s all very nice and proper to argue that even if the ritual’s meaning is not evoked its symbolism still stands and that to be enmeshed within that too is a sign of ideological indoctrination so that it’s still our responsibility to resist and change, but then, well, even that’s a bit facile, hmm?

How? Well, first and foremost, not only can the ritual not be taken in a particular way, but its symbolism too can change. There isn’t anything particular which can fix a meaning to something in any inherent manner, is there? If rakhi can mean paternalistic protection, it can also be just another bahana for meeting.

Which is what it’s taken as for the most. True, brotherly obligations are still part of the world we live in, but then those values are not in the least thrust upon us as writ in stone to-dos. As family one has certain obligations – and indeed, obligations which, given proper indoctrination, needn’t appear so – towards caring for and feeling, to varying, subjectively determined degrees, responsible for the welfare and well-being of family members and the brother-sister dynamic, if not exaggerated back into the 70s of Hindi cinema, is a legitimate part of them. That scratching the surface does indeed propel quite a few of us back there is also true, yes, but so is the fact that in quite a few cases it doesn’t. Besides, while it’s alright to argue in isolation that families are patriarchal and their idiom and basis phallocentric, one can’t but concede that with a little give and take, with a little adjustment – indoctrination and assimilation if you will – there’s nothing too bad about them. What, indeed, would we do without them? Do we have any alternatives to families? Not families as we know them, families as they have been, but families, groups of humans clustered together with a certain commonality of birth and relation – can we exist without being together?

We can. Not in the same way of course, but then not with the same, or even similar, basis. Humanity can be organised in a zillion other ways I suppose, but then all of those would be conscious efforts, would be structures systematically thought out and rationalised. We can have, with a supreme, well nigh impossible effort, a society structured on the basis of equality and justice – and equality and justice as some of us who bother about them today understand them – but then, well, is that even desirable?

Seriously, is a just and equal society even desirable? I’m all for comparatively just and comparatively equitable, but wholly so? A society where legality and the rhetoric of rationality would keep in check all truant desires, negate the possibility of violence and discrimination by intricate mechanisms of checks and balances and create, enforce, a sense of equality is just way too Orwellian for my comfort. Personal relations and subjectivity would, in such a world, be subsumed under the larger need for objectively defined equality. Men and women would be equal, yes, but what then all those gamut of passions and desires which make inter-sexual dynamics what they are today would no longer be valid. Just as it wouldn’t do to expect your female partner to cook your food (if you were a male i.e.), it would also not do to abuse someone just because they cheated on you. Truths tend to be ossified, but in a social setup guided wholly by rationally determined codes and legality that sort of ossification, backed by appropriate indoctrination, would be complete.

Which, even if it were not for an overwhelming taint of absolutism, would be stifling boring.

Wouldn’t it? I mean, who would want to live a life wholly determined by received notions of rationally acceptable behaviour? To be correct all the time, to always give a damn and never, ever be wrong, who would possibly want that? Of course we need safeguards to make sure we don’t all run amok, but isn’t doing that every now and then part of being human as we know it? Who would want to completely change that, to deny themselves the privilege, even if rare, of not caring – or pretending not to and doing all possible bosh in the guise? To not do as one is expected to but deliberately go against, to feel that sheer, perverse joy of going against and do so knowing, after all, that even though it’s not justified completely it is, given certain received circumcisions, understandable, even pardonable. All said and done, there might be an essence to things – that there needn’t be one, that for all our rationality we needn’t be so all the time, that we may let go and accept, critique that acceptance, nuance it, but let go, let be.

To think of rakhi just as a patriarchal custom and so condemn it is, then, to be naive in a way that that curious creature, the campus feminist, is. Yes, it is patriarchal and heavily consumeristic as a festival, but even as it is, to argue against it just on those grounds, grounds based on the logic of rationality and semantics, is to further deprive our lives of those moments of sparkling irrationality, unthinking-ness if I may, which the larger social framework of post-enlightenment global capital has already made suspect. In many ways one is and must be thankful for that, for the life we live is quite literally a creation of these ideas and ideals; but even so one cannot but be wary of the banishment of irrationality, of craziness and insanity, from life. The world, perhaps, is not half as crazy as it used to be a hundred or so years ago and one must be glad that it’s not, but if it were to wholly be not so – and regardless of the way, good or bad (again, these as understood by most today) – it would be not half as nice a place to live as it is now. Rakhi, as a ritual without meaning, a symbol sans its symbolism, is just one instance of the insanity we are intent on proving obsolete: it might be nice to prove it so and push it out of consciousness, but then whether it’ll be worth the effort is, and will be, open to continual contention.

Which is why, I suppose, it’s so difficult to execute the simplest of decisions.

*

Of course that bloke off Har-ki-paudi was right – in just this one instance, that this would materialise. This, then, to him.

An Invitation

Considering the demographics of this City

and

of this, its University,

it is felt necessary

to

make reparations

and thus

ensure a degree of equity

in

participation and representation

of those

denied their rights

and

claims to welfare

by

the ov’rwehleming tide

of

migration, outlandry and factionalism.

It is deemed fit, then, to

announce

the creation of

The All Delhi University Non-Punjabi, Non-Baniya, Non-Bengali, Delhi Male Students’ Welfare Association

(ADUDMSWA)

Our agenda shall be to guarantee

equitable representation of our community

in spheres academic, administrative and sportive.

We shall work to secure

those natural rights

denied to us

by

ov’rbearing oppression of the dominant.

Those part of the elect may join:

to liberty, equity, fraternity!

On Being Made a Mama

It’s oddly exciting being made a mama. My sister recently did me the honour. I am now a mama.

Actually, it’s oddly preposterous as well. I mean, me a mama? Of course, I knew it was in the offing these past nine months or so and I was looking forward to it as well, to the prospect of having after a long time a babe in the house, but the morn the news came, the morning the news was suddenly broken upon my unsuspecting, groggy self, it hit me like a tonne of happy bricks. It was expected, of course, but more, I suppose, as a distant possibility, as something that would happen but not so soon, not at least take you unawares and knock the innocence out of you in one fell stroke – or cut, as it was in her case.

Innocence, ay! For though I may not be particularly innocent as I am now, in form at least I could claim some amount of it as a young scion of the generation. I am, after all, one of the younger ones and in any case more in the past than any of us. Memories of that childhood are far from dead and in moments of ponderous solitude the mind’s eye wanders over many a scene of knickered and board game-ed joy. More than that, being young, being, as it were, one of the last in line, one feels a certain license to youth, to the abandon and mindlessness that are the undeniable preserves of youth and the youngest.

No more, no more! In one fell stroke – cut – all gone, all transferred to a wrinkly, animated blob of flesh and bones. At this tender age of fun and games, all the heavy weight of relations and responsibilities, all the onerous burden of acting up for a generation upon me, an uncle!

How, how does one act an uncle? What does it mean to be a mama? Is one supposed to alter one’s attitude to life, one’s behaviour, one’s self because there is now a generation beneath one for whom one is required to set worthy examples? How, too, to behave with the kid when it grows up? Should one be stern and noble and inspire a la Chesterfield visions of an austere and fulfilling life? Or should one open vistas for greater fun and debauchery, be the mama a niece would look up to when in mood for sin? One can’t treat a niece like younger, baby siblings – or can one? After all, like the rest, it is an animated blob of flesh and bones and just because it makes my greys look whiter still doesn’t make it any different per se.

An animated blob of flesh and bones. Not very charitable, I suppose. But it’s nameless as of now. What is one supposed to call it? Her? The Kid? Ku Di’s kid? Without a name, without the jimble-jamble of identities that a name affixes on one, is not one just an animated blob of flesh and bones? Language makes the niece? Or the niece makes language? A quaint baby too: post-colonially post-modern, yet destined to grow up a structuralist enmeshed in deep structures of kinship and good old bourgeois morality. Would a name really matter then? The future’s already laid out, a mish-mash of identities already bestowed: girl child, first born, baniya, Indian, bourgeois, woman...except for the calling, does a name really matter much then? Yet, one can’t but hope it’s something nice, something that would be good to consider and call, for though from the moment the fatal cut was made and thing extracted it has been getting normalised, being made a subject from an object, her from it, a name is a name: a marker, an identity.

An identity that cannot be denied. Oh, a mama – too soon, too soon! The sister can never really be forgiven for this, though hers being arranged the blame falls more on the jija for unmindful haste. Seriously, not even a year and one on the block already! What’s the hurry, one wonders, what in the world! To each their own, of course, but one does wonder why one wouldn’t want to be conjugal and kid free for a while...being as it is, the deed being done and consummated so soon, one would imagine there was some sort of need to prove virility in this off-hand, childish manner. Besides, it does seem too much of a patriarchal conspiracy of sorts, have the woman pregnant and burdened with kids as soon as she’s married and so effectively shut off means for self-determination for the next two decades or so.

Not, of course, that one thinks ‘twas effectively planned so, no – but one can’t but think. A sister pregnant and a generation thrust beneath one, all by a man more or less unknown. One wishes one had a bit more say in these matters. As if the cornucopia of relations and relationships wasn’t enough, to have this, to have you made older and responsible in form without as much as your consent! It is the last straw really, the last nail in the coffin of a childhood already dead and gone, an official confirmation if you will: arise, no longer child, by these wrinkly, sleepy blob, by the freshly cut womb of a sister, by the haste of a jija, a new-made mama!

*

(some time later) The importance of stating that everything that's written is not implied seriously being vehemently pointed, it is thus done so.

A Modest Appeal

To

The Prime Minister,

the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court,

the Ministers of Home, Law and Minority Affairs,

the Ladies and Gentlemen of the Parliament

and

other relevant Powers of this Mighty Potentate:

A Modest Appeal

for

the Preservation of the Rights

and

the Continuance of the Welfare

of

the Most Noble, Most Ancient, Most Remarkably Genteel

Kayasth Community.

It been established that reservation in public life is the only medium to ensure the free and fair existence of any tribe, sect, group or community in this free and fair land of ours; and it been further irrefutably proved by a series of demagogues, statesmen, their cronies and sundry other types of noble hanger-ons that all minority communities needs must be protected from victimisation, marginalisation and politicisation by unscrupulous elements within the overall not-so-scrupulous majority, allow me, most humbly, to present the most befitting and tragic case of the most deserving and wronged community in this community that we communally call India: the Kayasths.

The Kayasths, sirs, are no ordinary people: for long victim to the scorn and apathy of their fellow countrymen, the Kayasths’ story is one of alienation and grief. Like other castes and communities, we too were discriminated against on the basis of our occupation so that with time as we got more and more proficient in our hereditary employments, the cumulated scorn and jealousy of the masses ossified into a systematic, malicious, programmatic bias against our people and the offices they performed. Generation after generation was inculcated with certain prejudices adverse to our welfare as a social and sociable community and thus, in spite of all our efforts, we became victims to communal discrimination.

It is this bias, noble sirs, that I seek to redress through the powers vested in your august offices by the commonwealth at large. You hold with you the power to make or mar and in presenting the historical woes of this most victimised and most tragically ostracised community, I cannot but hope that your hearts and souls will be moved to pity and compassion and that you will at once set the wheels in motion towards granting our people reservation in public life – in government jobs, in the armed forces, in schools and colleges as both staff and students and in all other state sponsored enterprises. While doing so, missives to the private sector, to the captains of our shinning industry, on keeping the plight of our people in mind will be highly laudable.

I must, most highly revered sirs, iterate once more the urgency of this task. We suffer under the weight of long standing historical prejudice and require immediate remedial measures to alleviate somewhat the strain of our great sorrow. As democratically appointed representatives of a secular welfare state, it is your sacred duty to administer justice to the wronged and so, in such cases where the wrong stretch past millennia, it becomes all the more necessary to let no moment pass in idleness when the mute cries of a long oppressed and victimised people call out for equity and freedom. Be rest assured, noble sirs, that we shall not hesitate in breaking the bonds of restraint and joining all our other victimised compatriots in cathartically vandalising state and private property and in general making life hell should our just and reasonable demands not be redressed with a suitable and befitting scheme.

Hoping that all I have said here will find favour with your noble eminences and that the most befitting case of our most unjustly wronged community find the redressal it seeks so deservedly,

Your most faithful servant,

A Conscientious Kayasth.

On visiting the Mughal Garden

A visit to the Mughal Garden is instructive in very many ways. There is, first of all, the…but wait. What is the Mughal Garden?

Well, for the uninitiated, the Mughal Garden is, um, a garden in India’s Rashtrapati’s Presidential Estate. It’s Mughal not because the Mughals built it, of course not, but because it’s structured on the archetype of the gardens they used to. Why? Well, first, because those gardens them Mughals built were really pretty and exquisite, just the place you’d want in your blooming big estate and second because, well, the British being British, they couldn’t resist the charm of incorporating something of their predecessors in Hindustan into their own topos of power and so they built a garden to suit English tastes in the Mughal style. You know, just like the empire’s here to stay, the sun never sets and so on? Well, exactly like that: the Mughals thought they were here to stay, but oh no, we are going to stay and look, we can even build better and bigger than them, so a hearty hurrah to us and the crown!

Ah well, didn’t exactly turn out that way and in less than two decades of its being built the British were out and, well, let’s say, the Indians were in, but that being that, back now to the Garden. More properly, a visit to the Garden. Instructive, in very many ways. Here’s how.

First, if you visit on a Sunday, you can put yourself off for a dumb mutt. No, seriously, I think Sunday’s the worst possible day to go to the place. The entrance is from Gate 35 of the Presidential Estate and the line extended half a kilometre or so to Gate 38 on one side and around four hundred metres up North Avenue on the other. This for starters, for a hundred metres or so from the gate the drive in had been enclosed and barricaded with stalls for depositing your stuff on one side and narrow aisles for entrance on the other. Announcements repeatedly asked visitors to deposit all their belongings before stepping up to the entrance and extolled every now and then so and so from such and such unheard of town from this and that part of the subcontinent to please, please come in through the metal detectors because their family had been frantically waiting for them the past half an hour and now they were all getting hysterical.

Yes, quite the mela. We’re all quite capable of that, anywhere, anytime.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing against melas and crowds – I mean, isn’t the exotic Indian experience all about that? No, no, I’m all for them and stuff of this sort, oh yes I am. However, sometimes, it’s just that it gets a wee bit too much, and some places perhaps are meant to be without the milling, maddening crowd.

The Mughal Garden is such a one.

Oh yes, very bad; very, very bad. But one really can’t help it. Democracy’s so bad for beauty.

Think about it. How many monuments or cultural artefacts adjudged beautiful or worth preservation have been the result of fair and equitable systems of labour and economic production? I, well, I for one can’t really think of any right now, not as much because democracies all around haven’t erected monuments to their glory but because there really hasn’t been a system of labour and blah-blah-blah which has been really, seriously fair to all possible stakeholders. I suppose it’s a bit like that old dialectic our sociologists and cultural critics so used to love, of there always being someone who gets the hard end of a bargain, of beauty being so not because of itself but because of it’s polar extreme, ugliness, which makes a comparison possible. Those who enjoy are beautiful, those who labour ugly…

And it there, in that garden, it was pretty ugly.

Not, of course, that there was no enjoyment, no, but whatever there was was of that closely supervised, guarded type which allots you only as much time for a glimpse or so after which you needs must move on because logistics demand so. The crowd management was pretty good, but a crowd it was nonetheless and for the life of me I can’t imagine how one enjoys a garden in, as a crowd.

Aren’t gardens supposed to be taken in? Aren’t you supposed to stand there, sit, look in the distance, admire the myriad hues of spring, ruminate on the might of the fallen empire, walk barefoot on the lush green grass and run your hand through the water channels?

Not if you’re common citizenry of India.

No siree, if you’re common citizenry of India, you needs must stay off the grass, keep walking, never stop and sit, not cross any barricade and never ever touch as much as half a tiny rose petal. No, I don’t blame anyone, I seriously don’t; these measures are necessary, they’re just what I would’ve done if I had a big, beautiful garden and allowed visitors in the time of the year when it was the loveliest. The management, I say, was very competent and Madam’s Men deserve all possible accolades.

But what, I wonder, of Madam herself? It is her garden after all – or at least hers as long as the other Madam wills it so; to what good use, I wonder, does she put it to?

Certainly not to have sherbets and then make out, I suppose. I mean, the website says she has her At Homes a certain number of times a year in the front lawn and I suppose she goes out for a walk with hubby dear every now and then, but, with all due respect to age, you can’t really imagine a wizened old dear like our Rashtrapati making merry in the garden. Leave aside making merry, you can’t imagine her with her pallu down. Very prim and propah, I agree, and very Rashtrapati like too I believe, but not, well, not what you’d imagine the owner of a blooming big house with a blooming big garden to be like.

Come to think of it, not only is democracy not good for beauty, it’s also not good for glamour.

Well, at least in India. We have a thing for ji-huzoori and as a result tend to ritualise almost everything into codified institutions. It’s alright mostly, but you feel it the most when it comes to pleasure. A well maintained and landscaped garden’s your bit of the earth, your version of jannat. If we are to have national symbols, then let them be impressive: for a house as big and a garden as beautiful, we need a figure who would complement them both. Not youth necessarily, no, but then also not genial grand-dames, or erratic, eccentric rocket scientists, or bespectacled diplomats…these are, were, all good folk in themselves and undoubtedly did good to their office, but then that was it. Whatever intelligence, cunning, wit and malice they had hardly came out, the President’s office being sacrosanct in a way in which even monarchies are not today. All said and done, India’s more a throned republic than a true blue democracy.

Not that I have too many problems with that, not here at least; but then if we are to be so and not what we profess ourselves to be, then we could at least make sure our figureheads look worthy to wear a crown. It doesn’t have to be someone with a particular build and colour, just anybody who’d look impressive walking down the steps of the world’s largest presidential manor, who’d inspire a certain awe taking the salute from one of the world’s only surviving mounted regiment, who’d hush audiences into attentive silence, not by the dint of his/her office but by his/her mere presence…

Ah well, ah well, well, well…democracy! We all owe much to it; I owe the ability to say this to it. Ingratitude? Somewhat, yes. Can’t really help it, can one? When you have symbols pregnant with a certain unsaid but pervasive sense of power, you cannot but be so. Humanity, I suppose, craves a light to follow…yet, uneasy the head that wears a crown. So, I believe, the rituals which balm the constant prick of thorns, the institutions which temper awe from and for the mob…a beautiful garden, after all, is not just a bit of land done up nicely to please. Not just, for to please though it is, it is also to remind, to reassert hierarchies and power, to put in mind the might of the gardener to and for whom we are all bound.

That, I suppose, is what this one was ultimately all about.

On bonfires and the Quran

Notes on secularism and will
 

*

I don’t quite see why burning the Quran should be a problem.

I mean, of course, I can see how in the sense people made it out as: it’s not a particularly sensitive thing to do and none too sensible as well, displaying as it does a lack of tact and understanding which may be expected of all clear thinking, inclusive people. I can also see how it might’ve been a particularly inflammatory act given the volatile condition of the Islamic community the world over and everybody else’s relation to it. I can see all of that, yes, and understand it perfectly well.

What I don’t see is why this should be a problem.

After all, the Quran’s just a book. Of great value to billions around the globe, to Musalmans as well as others interested. But all things said and done, to other people, to atheists like me, just another book: of great cultural import, yes, but quite really another book on the shelf.

Also, by that very logic, by being a document of such great significance, something not likely to be diminished in importance by having a few of its countless copies burned – or shredded, or destroyed in any other manner. Islam’s not going to suffer even if thousands of the Quran are burned; I’m sure they make them at a much greater rate than they’re able to destroy them and so there’s not really going to be a paucity of them anytime soon. In any case, I’m sure this wasn’t quite the objection which so many other people had to the idea.

No, if I’m not wrong, what many people’s and States’ problem was that such an act would prove inflammatory and invite backlash in very many sundry ways from the Islamic community. The rhetoric, of course, was a bit different and couched quite often in what our comrades on the other side call the secularist jargon of the liberal democratic setup, of such a move being unacceptable within the secular ethos of modern society, but the import seems to be much the same all over: burning the Quran is dangerous, the mullahs might just burn some more things over.

Which is what my problem with it is.

First of all, it’s just stereotyping the Musalmans way too much as an overtly religious and touchy people bound to flare up at the slightest slight. Agreed, stereotypes are more or less based on factuality, but then to assume that burning the Quran would rock the heart of very Musalman is to force the point beyond belief. I mean, surely the Musalmans have better things to do that forth and fume and work themselves up to fury over a bunch of folk burning the text they venerate. Wouldn’t a majority of them be more concerned about making a living and fulfilling their needs and being tolerably good men and women? How does it really matter if a few of Qurans are burned? Allah’s word is going to remain just the same, a few paperbacks less or more!

That, and that burning things like the Quran might actually help. After all, good man Jones did have a point: the world’s not half as nice as it might’ve been because the Musalmans have very nicely bombed and gunned it up. Sitting there in the backwaters of Florida, there’s little the good Pastor can do anything about it – as little, perhaps, as any of us, us being everyday people more into food and love and exs than theology and restoring Eden on earth. He must’ve felt frustrated – and he has reason enough to – and so planned to do the only thing which could’ve taken his frustration out: burn the book which the Musalmans like the most. Splendidly cathartic idea as I see it: take the Quran, think it up as all of Islam rolled within its pages and then burn it away to glory! Wouldn’t he have felt good after it? Purged, as the word goes.

Is it right then to raise such a hullaballoo over a lone old man and some other friends burning a book which they consider emblematic of all the trouble in the world – and that, specially, when just another symbol, a mosque, was been concretised next to the site of which they most probably consider the greatest blow to their own idea of themselves as a nation by the self same community?

I think not.

I think Jones and Co. have as much a right to burn the Quran – or any other book for that matter – as anybody who buys a book, doesn’t like it and then proceeds to burn it in his/her own backyard. It’s juvenile of course: burning books doesn’t solve anything –indeed, if all of us started burning books as response to the various crises which beset us there wouldn’t be much literature left in any case – and it only adds on to pollution and creates an unnecessary fire hazard. Yet, it is undeniably cathartic and can help people channel their frustration to harmless little bonfires.

It’s only in the public eye, then, that such an act acquires greater weight than it merits. There’s only as much importance to a symbol as one attaches to it and given the paranoia against Islam, it’s but natural so much should’ve been attached to one small flare-up on the margins. Yet, that still doesn’t take away from the inexorable fact that a symbol’s a symbol and attaching too much importance to it unnecessarily and thus blowing things out of proportion only makes that same thing, that symbol, bigger than itself, an entity on its own. If this little would-be bonfire cum blackmail threatened became an international crisis of sorts with heads of various states and religious bodies expressing regret, then it’s more a reflection of the culpability of the general public in allowing itself to be misguided by a zealous media than of the addition of any new dimension to the problem at hand or, for that matter, its solution.

Of course, all that is well known in any case: the so-called general public usually gets misguided by the media, while so-called commentators sweat to expose this same. That isn’t the concern here. What to me is important right now is that while rightly condemning Jones’ plans, nobody on the public scene bothered to qualify their concern by acknowledging the difference between the extremist and everyday Musalman and that while condemning the plans nobody seemed to take cognizance of Jones’ right to a bonfire and, more importantly, to either propose a pro-active, holistic approach towards the alleviation of those conditions which first suggested a bonfire to a Jones and a plane crash to an Osama or at least initiate a sincere, all-party revaluation of existing strategies for the same.

Like good man Jones, I too have no real idea on how to go about doing this and while a part of me does idly itch for that tempting matchbox and those two hardbounds taking up space on my shelf, I cannot but desist. Not just because they cost good money and I wouldn’t want my mother to know I’ve been up to mischief again, but also because the way forward lies inescapably in – in spite of as well as along with bonfires – accepting various things, symbols, abstractions, peoples as they are and not in forging unity through fire and steel. If we are to be truly secular – and this is what I understand secular as, as accepting religion(s) though not necessarily conforming to it(them) – then one of the steps forward we need to take is this, to simultaneously release both publicly and privately peoples out of stereotypes and work towards negating the violent and violence inducing conditions which create those negative, negating stereotypes in the first place.

Which, to put it differently, is to say that we need to be able to come up to a situation where we would first be able to accept a bonfire of this sort as an expression of dissent and disapproval and then handle it without burning up anything else in the process.

On the Right to Education

The Government of India finally granted all Indians the right to be educated early this year. How charming! After sixty or so years of being so, the Indian people can finally demand to be educated: how perfectly charming!

What the heck are they going to do with it though?

Get educated, of course! Move on, move up in life; improve themselves by partaking of the fruit of knowledge and thus be part of India, India shining. Realise finally through learning, through the accumulated wisdom of ages institutionalised and discipline and hard work upheld the great middle class dream: roti-kapra-makaan finally in their jholi.

Or add on to the teeming ranks of the unemployed and underemployed educated.

What else? Employment opportunities have steadily increased in India, but not at such a rate as would keep pace with our population growth. If more of the people who’re born every day get greater access to education and manage to inch up towards matriculation and graduation do not at the same time get access to employment, leave alone fruitful employment, then one of the primary purposes of creating those opportunities would be defeated. Without employment that’d fulfil aspirations and enable those in whom these are generated to live the lifestyle which is held before them, education will only, as it continually has, become a contributor to social dissatisfaction and unrest, the first stepping stone to discontent with the way things are presently.

Of course, not to say that efforts are not being made to increase these, opportunities for employment i.e.: they are, and the expansion of industry in particularly the tertiary sector embodies this as nothing else; in the primary and secondary sector too industry is daily expanding and making more employment available. Yet, while the former caters largely to the urban and urbanising middle class and can offer on a scale of any size employment mostly in low to middle level jobs with few chances of promotion and fulfilment to all, the latter is, owing to increased mechanisation, actually taking away employment from hordes of the unskilled while creating a few jobs for the technically trained. With population growth showing no signs of stabilising and technological innovations changing the way we take to our environment and harness the resources therein, employment opportunities, at least in India, will not be able to keep pace with the demand for the same by the increasing numbers of low to medium level educated job seekers.

Education – education of any sort – in this case will not be able to ameliorate the situation. We train men and women to join the workforce; we train them professionally most of all, as experts in this field or that and expect them to add on to the economy’s growth as producers, processors or planners. We also train men and women as trainers, trainers not just of expertise but, more importantly, as educators, as trainers of the basics which would go on to necessitate training, professional or otherwise. Finally, educating people and then not having suitable jobs to employ them in incapacitates them for employment which they would’ve found otherwise: the great dream is to move up, move out from the hinterland to glittering urbanscapes and the chances of a farmer or farm hand’s college educated child voluntarily coming back to the family trade are rare.

The only way out in that case seems to be to not educate the masses. If we don’t want a social revolution of sorts add on to our miseries, then the best way to keep the status quo would be to do just that: not bring education to all.

Of course, there is another way: we, the so-called, supposed people, could all make a collective effort and channel development and economic growth more towards happiness and joy, towards containment rather than the attainment of particular GDP growth rates. We could innovate and create models of growth specific to our own socio-cultural environment and milieu, development which would not hanker for industry and technology just for their own sake; development which would recognise in entirety communality, the rights of people over resources not solely as private property but also as a common whole; development which would at least try to address the consumeristic market and defuse the inflation in demand brought about by it. We could do all this and much more, and so could we make work positively towards checking population growth and industrial development and affect a balance between these and with providing fulfilling employment in other sectors.

We could. Would we?

Much easier, I think, to promise the people education, to dangle before them shiny dreams and lull them on. Easier, I think, to give them some training, some learning, some knowledge: a hotchpotch, create a work force neither here nor there, leave it thus and then punish its deviance as betrayal.

Fulfilment is a birth right, something which cannot be dictated on by a State; education, certainly not higher, technical training, is not necessarily a prerequisite to it – even if it were to be couched so, then, again, it is a birth right, something whose bestowal by a State reeks only of a callous indifference which treats the interests of the State and of the people, the so-called masses at large, as separate and parallel. If we are to consider education as a right towards fulfilment, then we need to look beyond the myth of study as improvement and press for a holistic approach towards making it so.

The right will we quite wrong otherwise.