Notes on a Presidential Visit

Don’t you think the excitement over Obama’s latest India visit was a bit overdone, that it was hyped and, to some extent, naïve?

Of course, the visit was important and means a lot for not just US and India but a number of other nations as well. Business deals were agreed on, political commitments spelled and mutual niceties exchanged. All that was very prim and propah, all as it should be.

Yet, Obama is, well, just that, a man after all. All the media coverage about the most powerful man in the world landing, the most powerful man in the world shaking a leg, his oh so powerful wife shaking her booty, the ever so powerful couple paying respect to old Gandhi at his memorial…power, power, power. Yes, we all get it, America’s powerful, the American president’s powerful and can bully one and all. Still, that’s that and there is a line.

Not that the Americans themselves crossed it much this time. They had to bring in all their armoury to defend their powerful man, though technically I don’t see why they couldn’t trust him to the security which our own State accords its holy cows. He’d come here after all and he hadn’t really landed in Dantewada; shoot-outs happen, but I’m sure the Indian State had taken all precautions to ensure all were out and out of bounds. Powerful as he is, he could’ve trusted our capability of keeping our big-shots from harm. As for his car being this and that proof, his guard being so and so geared, his…well, if a man’s clever and really sets his heart on murder, not even the Americans can stop him. Certainly not an armada stationed not far off the coast for purposes just in case. Yes, Obama’s an important man and crucial for a lot of things a lot of places, but I really don’t see why his blokes had to send so much ammunition, much less an entire fleet, to keep him one piece. Surely our own Sardarji’s gear would’ve done?

But then, the very fact of Obama being important, powerful. I don’t quite know if they also do it so much where he comes from, but all the shrill rhetoric about the powerful man doing this and that smacked full-on of a feudal servitude that continues to characterise urban Indian discourse. Obama, the mighty god from across the seas, descends upon our shores in his mighty flying machine and goes about our roads in another, equally might wonder on wheels. Everything about Obama is grand, spectacular, epic: he’s the American President, America’s the most powerful state. We bow to thee, great American Obama!

Great American Obama. No, it’s not meant personally and I do think he’s a decent enough man, but really, most powerful man? Most powerful nation? Seriously? Was it just our media which went bonkers as usual or do the Americans too seriously believe their President’s the most powerful in the world? If they do, have they really given him the constitutional authority to be so? Is there really some console hidden in that room from which their President can play Rudra a la the nukes, no questions asked? I’m not ready to believe the Americans trust their President so much as to give him the power to arbitrate war and peace all on his own. If they have, as all the oh-so-powerful rhetoric – unwittingly? – implies, then so much so for their love of freedom and democracy: what is their President then but a tyrant, a big, powerful bully whose writ is law.

Great and American undoubtedly, but not Great American. Yet, that precisely is what our engagement with him seemed to imply. Thank heavens for the frigidity of foreign offices in general, for the way everybody else gushed one would’ve thought the gods themselves had walked the earth. Obama’s wife dances with Mumbai kids: oh, she’s so pretty, so nice, so fashionable! Obama gives a speech in Parliament: oh, he’s so witty, so astute, such a statesman! Yes, all of that is undeniably true: the missus is nice and fashionable, the mister an astute statesman; but the way we did it implied such condescension, that it was such a favour which the Obamas bestowed upon us all by being nice and human.

Of course, as a nation we don’t expect the mighty to descend to such lows: we expect favours to be coated with red tape and rarefy power to Meruvian heights – something of the sort is always expected and people like me ought to be immune to it. Still, one can’t but be irritated at repeated displays of such awe and fawning in front of foreigners. Think about it, was giving that rock such a big thing? Obama donates a piece of marble from some under-construction memorial for Martin Luther King and the keepers of Rajghat erupt in joy and pride. A piece of marble? Yes, personal choice, perfectly valid; valid too the privilege of such choice to a head of state. But seriously, twas just a rock: along with being President, Obama is also just another man.

Regardless, what irks most of all is the development rhetoric. “India is not rising”, quips Obama, “India has risen”. I’m sorry, but I refuse to subscribe to this rising-risen rhetoric: it presupposes a universality, an underlying consensus on a host of notions on developed and developing, advanced and backward. Western economic models make much of the world down and out, but then these models are quite essentially the result of systems of labour which got consolidated by exploiting the rest of the world in the first place. Applying parameters premised on these models to judge a whole people is co-opting them further into those very systems. When Obama says India has arrived, he puts India on a pedestal created historically and sustained still on exploitation and discrimination. One might excuse him for doing so – I’m sure he thinks twas very nice of him – but the sight of people all over India erupting for joy is, to say the least, as distastefully childish as can be: agreed as urban Indian bourgeoisies we’re as much American as Indian, but still, we don’t really need an Obama to tell us whether we’ve ‘arrived’ or not, do we?

Apparently not. Countless activists can cry themselves hoarse about environmental damage, economic disparity, communal tension, sexual harassment, caste violence and so on. But India’s rising nonetheless. At what cost? The lives of millions of voiceless Indians. Being an industrial and military ‘superpower’ a la the American way seems the only goal to work to; why humanity cannot survive peacefully otherwise is a matter not worth consideration…

Barack Obama’s a sensible, intelligent man. His visiting India was a nice enough gesture. Yet, all said and done, it was just a gesture: it merited a nuanced response, not the hysteria which it provoked in so many quarters.

On cleaning a toilet

“Nahi, nahi, chinta ki kya baat hai? Main kar dunga, koi pareshani nahi hogi…”

Cleaning a toilet is one of the most liberating experiences ever. It’s a dirty job, yes, but nonetheless an ordeal out of which one emerges cleaner in more than one sense.

Obviously, my Dadi doesn’t share these sentiments. Cleaning toilets is for the low caste: achuts, Dalits and SCs. Even if not, even then it’s for the maidservants or, at the very least, for the sarkari jamadar – not, certainly not, for her dear pampered grandson.

Yet, there was no one else to do it and so the lot fell on these shoulders. Why not too? What is in cleaning a toilet?

Something poignant as I see it.

Disgusting and filthy, yes, but poignant still, reflective of the unacknowledged labour of numberless multitudes who worked behind scenes to make those scenes what they are, presentable thus – does not history rest on the shoulders of those who lived and died in poop, pee and puke? A historic act? Certainly…

“Arre kahan phas gaye beta! Rehne do, ek haath maar ke hi aa jao...pote se aisa kaam karvana parh raha hai…”

“Mein theek hun Dadi.”

“Theek toh tum ho hi, par bas ab nibta ke aa jao. Aao aur nahao…”

But history still isn’t without the stigma of pollution, ne? What, what but a string of fables commonly agreed upon? History, indeed; the weight of history rather, imagined as much as real – more imagined perhaps than real. To clean a toilet? Pollution, inescapable pollution! Caste redeems, yes, but then such a caste too! An outcast caste, half here and half there: still, history weighs us down.

“Dadi, mann mein ek khayal aaya hai, kuch vachan dimaag mein ghum rahe hain.”

“Kaise vachan? Kam hua? Jaldi aao bhai!”

“Haan, haan…par sochiye, Gandhiji ne bhi toh aisa hi kuch kaha, kiya tha! Vaishnav jan toh ten ere kahiye, peer parai jaani re…”

Vaishnav Jan, Harijan. Harijan? Really? We who have the leisure to think, to consider our position in a wider order and the forces which bind that order, we make ourselves Harijans. Who else out of his/her own volition would be so? Still, in doing so, in such fashioning, one is that, one is so: peer parai jaani re…shit unites, shit holds what naught else can: everything said and done, we all carry shit within ourselves…

“Uhm!”

“Kya hua?”

“Honthon se chu lo toh, mera geet amar kar do: ek boond andar se chapak kar mere honthon ko chum gayi.”

“Hair ram, yeh larka! Bas ho gaya, aa jao! Hai ram!”

Whatever it might be, a job well done does give satisfaction. A toilet restored to its showroom shine does lighten the heart, bring a tune to the lips. Thank goodness for Harpic and the like too, for along with something noble cleaning the toilet is now also a sacred chore, a contributor to health and hygiene and the GDP in totality.

“Haan, kaam toh accha hi kiya hai tumne. Shahbash! Nahi, nahi, mujhe mat chuhiyo abhi! Ja naha ke aa, phir, phir!”

“Arre, toilet hi toh saaf kiya hai!”

“Haan, bas, toilet saaf kiya hai!”

Lines Composed upon Wazirabad Bridge

(to Lakshita; or the idea of her)

*

Tranquillity or not, recollecting emotion is no mean task. You sit back, relax and spend many ponderous hours mulling over what you saw and felt at such and such place and so and so time. Every few minutes you think you’ve got it and you jump up in excitement and then just as soon you feel a sharp pang of disappointment when a mean little devil in your head rakes up doubt and whispers this wasn’t really it, you’ve missed something, that you’ve lost what it was for good…

It happens so many times too! Of course, for day to day commonplaces you don’t mind it happening, and you pass over such everyday trivia eagerly without a care. But for those things or events or just, well, moments, for these, for those for which you feel a special pang, not being able to recollect them perfectly well can be pretty irritating – irritating as it can be beautiful, both at the same time.

Really! I mean, you think and think and get all the more irritated at the way it just eludes you try as much as you can, but then there is a certain quaintly quixotic charm in this game of cat and mouse, in trying to fix reality knowing full well you never really can fix it after it’s over and done with. Is it man’s will, aiming a la Mirandola and ye olde Humanists to reach out for perfection in thought, in achieving a unity of thought and action, all a harmonious, shining whole? Or is it just plain, ruddy perversity, this hankering after a few seconds, wasting hours for a few moments when there’s much else to do: duties to fulfil, tasks to complete, life to be made…

See how it goes! From one to the other the chain goes on and on and so by leaps and bounds transports you leagues from what you started with. Such if life, and such is the human mind!

Wazirabad. It enters the city there; not literally, no, not in the geographical sense of entering the city limits and coming under the jurisdiction of some of its multiple bodies. No, not like that; yet, in that sense, in sense of jurisdiction, control, this is where it first falls under our control, us as a city. That’s where the first of the many bridges and barrages which we have over it here is and so, in that sense, that’s where it enters the city.

Nothing special about that. Of course not: it’s just yet another bridge and barrage over the mighty river. Ha! Not even a might river; a nallah, rather, as many of us are wont to derisively call it most of the time, implicating in such ridicule our governance, the famed bodies, in the twin conspiracy of corruption and pollution which has for long characterised any effort to restore it to any semblance of a living river. The Yamuna; not a river, a nallah: the Yamuna nallah.

Not a nallah then.

Mighty, mighty river! Crashing, pounding, taking all in its path – forward on to doom! The meek shall inherit the earth, and so the docile, staid, everyday nallah rises up in froth and fury to submerge man and his kind, to take down whatever comes in its path, threaten his arrogance with heavy blows, rot and decay! Chastise him with a heavy, heavy hand, a resounding slap against the vanity of his dreams…

It’s such a pity it didn’t flood, that it didn’t really break down all those banks. It would’ve been spectacular had it, had it flooded that Village. Ha! That would’ve been divine retribution for the Abhiyaan, something to finally award their long, fruitless vigil for nature and man. Not that death is pretty, nor that loss of property or of a lifetime’s hard work desirable. But rather it would’ve broken into our monuments than the lowly hovels, rather it would’ve reclaimed its own there and not thus. The poor always suffer; is the river a capitalist too?

Pah! A river’s a river and that’s it! Not, of course, like an urn’s an urn, or a daffodil’s a daffodil and that’s it, but still, a river’s no more than just that, a dead, lifeless river!

Yet, what a river and what a sight!

Perhaps it’s inexperience. I’m sure it is. A nallah otherwise, just now in spate – what of that?

Yet, why not? Why not indeed? A narrow, two laned bridge laden with the filth of man, his wheels. In it’s centre, the river’s centre, the centre where the channel runs deep and eternal and where now the watery expanse flows the most disturbed, waves upon stormy, turbulent waves of muddy water. Mud of the hills, mud of life, the seed of all our joys and sorrows, this water and mud…small whirlpools, just along the tired pillars aching to give up, make way, the steel of the walls long drawn up in abject obeisance to the river’s will. The will of man? A grain of sand tossed in a stormy sea…

It shakes. The heavy weight of tired souls; hearts laden with dust and grief, with daily cares and joys – the bitter-sweet offices of life and love. It shakes to the core. The mighty sinews of mortar and steel, what might before mud and water? Round and round the muddy water, through the grill a force unknown beckoning, pulling in to its dark, suffocating, deathless womb. It shakes. So shakes man, shaken to the core, his core: a nallah in spate.

Yet, what of it? A week, two at the most and the walls come down: the plains re-appear, the devotees with their plastics come back, the squatters, humbled yet again for no fault of their own, try yet again to piece together the shadow of a life. Spirit? A great city’s spirit, to continue as if nothing happened, as if twas naught but just another blip on the nation’s, the economy’s heart? Very few casualties, just a few displaced – the circle of life? Games people play…

Wazirabad. The nallah enters here. Soon there’ll be a bigger, grander bridge in its place, a bridge to make the city proud, a monument to its power and glory. The nallah flows on…

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.

-

In Memoriam, Us

*

“It’s nice, you know, it’s nice…”


“What?”


“You know, this…I mean, it just struck me we’re doing the Western consumeristic mumbo-jumbo, you know, and encouraging market capitalism, but still, it’s nice, this, this mall-hopping thing…”


“Uhn?”


“Yeah! It’s being together!”

*

“Oooh, oooh, oooooh! I want them, I want them, I want them!”


“What, where, how!”


“Those boots! See them, the big, black ones? I sooo want them!”


“But didn’t you already buy a pair before the Freshers’? Though they were sandals, but still, I don’t think your Pappa will be too happy about it…”


“True…but I want them so much! And, and I want the sandals too and those wedges!”


“Isn’t that a bit too much?”


“It is…but I sooo want to buy something!”


“Hmm…so buy one na.”


“But I dunna have money na! I’ll have to take it out and then…”


“Haan, who bhi hai…well, I can chip in! You have some, I’ll put in what I have and then you can buy at least one. Sounds good?”


“Good!”

*

“I think the wedges look super-duper cool on me!”


“Sure do, darl!”


“Yayie! Yayie, yayie, yayie! Me is happy!”


“Hehehe! So am I. What next now?”


“Do you wanna go to the bookstore?”


“Ah, well, no, I don’t think so…”


“Let’s just go and see, hmm? It’ll be nice, let’s go!”


“Okay, okay…”

*

“Am I mistaken or are we really in a bookstore?”


“We are. Why?”


“Well, what’s with all these CDs and accessories and stuff then?”


“Ah well, they cash in on everything, don’t they?”


“Yeah, and I can’t also find the book which Poppy was talking about. I think it was this…”


“Um, darling?”


“Yeah?”


“It’s really quite visible when you bend down like this.”


“Oh, um, yeah…thanks!”

*

“Oh god, there’re so many of them! Look at that entire pile, so friggin’ many of them!”


“Yes, isn’t it surprising? Almost as if there was a fever on with everybody wanting to write and be all so my-story-best-story about it.”


“Yeah, and most of it is bull!”


“Well, it at least makes you feel glad there’re people like V to champion literature’s hold on literature!”


“Oh, don’t be mean!”


“No, seriously, I think all of us have a noble duty towards literature; nay, not just to literature, but to culture, to humanity, to save it from the fell hands of scurvy hacks who do demean the beauty of art…”


“Anubhav?”


“Yeah?”


“Shut up.”

*

“Looks like it’s going to rain and rain very hard.”


“Hmmm…”


“What hmm? Jaldi karke finish this nahi toh we’ll get drenched with all the stuff!”


“Yes, Ma’am! We’ll do chattu-pana and go back and then come, right?”


“Yeah, I think so.”


“Hmm…”


“Hmm…today was nice, wasn’t it?”


“Lovely. Very, very good in fact!”


“Hmm…and the bookstore was nice too!”


“Yes, I think we should do more stuff like that, y’know, check out bookstores more often. It’s so much fun with you!”


“So is buying shoes with you! I like my wedges, I so like them!”


“Hehe! Yeah…we should do this sort of thing more, in spite of the capitalist claptrap.”


“Totally should!”


“Hmm…chalo, ho gayi khatam. Baarish bhi shuru ho gayi. Chalain?”


“Ji, chaliye.”

Yeh chiraag bujh rahe hain,

Mere saath jalte jalte…