THE BIHAR EARTHQUAKE

THE  BIHAR  EARTHQUAKE

There has been an earthquake in Bihar.  All the seismologic instruments failed to forecast or even register the high magnitude quake as it occurred when the earth shook in disapproval of the despicable attempts to rip wide open ancient fault lines in Indian society. In that giant tremor some Colossuses fell from the high pedestals they had mounted, their feet of clay caving in with the upheaval.

What does one make of this? Commentators have been profuse in their explanations, their post facto vision as always being 20/20. Few gave credit to the farsightedness of Nitish Kumar who turned his back on hate politics well before Modi strutted across the All-India horizon. On hearing of the anointment of Narendra Modi as potential Prime Minister he had distanced himself more than two years ago from the BJP and started on that lonely long journey that culminated in the grand victory.

In an old film, Kalpana by the dancer Uday Shankar, a song stereotypes India’s regions with colourful adjectives;

veera panchanadi vasi,  -  valiant people of the five rivers

ganga jamuna ke buddhi vikasi, -the intellectually mature of Ganga and Jamuna

banga desh ke kala prakashi,  - the artistically developed of Bengal

karmakushala dakshina adivasi – the diligent people of the South

#Bihar, the land that gave the world the Buddha, has vindicated that old description of the riparian lands with an intelligent assertion of the primacy of social justice and dignity. They have rejected the insidious overtures to consolidate on religious identities; they have dismissed the overwhelming pleas to conform by voting for a party because it rules in Delhi; they have seen through the duplicity of lies and misinformation about caste and reservations; they have refuted the domination of power and money; they brought the proudly proclaimed ‘largest political party of the world’ to its knees.

Surprises do not end there. In an unusual flash of brilliance we have the aspiring Rahul say that truth prevailed, reiterating that the national motto of Satyameva Jayate has been proved once again.

Yet another natural phenomenon seems to be playing out here. Evolution through the occasional mutation starts by producing monsters.  The rest of the species when faced with abnormal deviants unite in a mahagathbandhan, a grand alliance, to pounce upon such monsters and destroy them until a hardier mutant evolves and proves fit enough to survive. This generation is being privileged to the witnessing of such an evolution.

THE GATHERING STORM

THE  GATHERING  STORM

Writers of India have united in protests and over a hundred writers and thinkers have marched on the streets of Delhi.  What they have demanded is the obviation of any intimidation of free artistic formulation and an unchained freedom for the artist. Murder is not a response to the penning of #dissent or expression of a differing opinion.

We should be pleased with this spontaneous reaction of an otherwise passive community like artists who prefer to have their opinions expressed through their talents in artistic reflection. Taking to the streets is alien to their nature and being compelled to do this speaks of the provocation that has driven them to this pass. When aggregated across the various languages writers and their fans do form a substantial constituency.  To the politicians who seek mass followings of any kind (even of the multitudes of devotees of God-men and Babas) this must seem a considerable challenge. They can ignore it only at their peril and so they try to meet it in the only way they know – the way of the street - organising a counter challenge of wiling collaborators in public and the not so cleverly concealed intimidation in private.

Now we have a gaggle of scientists from various laboratories including the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research protesting the imposition of policy by ideologues with no great achievements in science upon their Institutions.  This is also of a piece with the long drawn protest of students of The Film and Television Institute of India who contest the appointment of a pedestrian film actor to the high position of Director of the Institute. Again we find practitioners of the visual arts and performing arts taking part in the protests.  Today a clutch of filmmakers have also returned the very prestigious awards.  Protests have also filtered down to students who were being ridden roughshod on the non-NET scholarships and who marched against the UGC.

What do these disparate groups have in common?  Why have they called it a ‘collective onslaught on reason’? The ‘perverse consistency’ of the BJP would make it respond uniformly to all of these with a single answer stating that they are all Modi-haters. An otherwise sober Finance Minister has now called them  "rabid anti-BJP elements." Unable to distinguish shades of gray and accustomed to only the black and white of obsequiousness or hate they have to lump all varieties of opposition into one corral and then proceed to attack them more with emotion than with reason curiously labelling it as #intolerance..

But the protestors must see hope in the recent past.  Language, Literature, Art, and the very many other soft arts and sciences have an overwhelming power beyond their silent strength.   It was the Bengali language and its promoters that crystallised the birth of Bangladesh; it was language and the denial of status to Tamil that gave rise to the deadly LTTE and a prolonged crisis in Sri Lanka; it was the fraternity of lawyers that toppled the military dictator Musharraf in Pakistan. What will take place in India when the various trickles of dissent and discontent growing across this vast land combine to form a mighty overpowering wave?   That will be the gathering storm against which the gossamer umbrella of the Parivar will be no protection.

The flood of returned awards

Prestigous  awards are milestones in an artist's life and one does not lightly decide on returning what one has laboriously earned. Notwithstanding such returning of awards the honour and prestige that the recipient has garnered does not get diminished and in fact seems to get enhanced. The returning of a once conferred award signifies a growing discontent that erupts into an act of withdrawal or relinquishment as Gopalkrishna Gandhi writes when reminding us that Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi both returned their awards after the massacre at Jallianwalla Bagh. 

The target of disillusionment seems to be government authorities, Central and State arising from the fact that the Sahitya Academies are institutions supported solely by the state. Rulers have always supported the arts and patronage from Kings has yielded now to patronage from elected governments. With the rise of giant corporations in the modern industrialized world one finds an expression of corporate social responsibility in corporate supported foundations  encouraging 

artists with awards that carry substantial purses and coveted for the enormous prestige that accompanies them. 

Here then is a wonderful opportunity for enlightened Indian corporates to enter the vacuum being created and produce bodies like the Man Booker foundation and the Pulitzer foundation, instituting independent juries of learned persons to select men and women of distinction in the various forms of arts.With such actions can they overcome the tag of Philistinism and ensure that unfettered creativity in the arts will always prevail. I only know of the Hindu Literary Award from the Hindu Group of publications that is seeming to be the exception that proves the rule. 

Severe forms of literary criticism

Severe forms of literary criticism

We have been seeing so many forms of literary criticism from the carefully contented positions to the downright vulgar in what Ananya Vajpeyi calls the rectionary present. That is how she says "marginalisation is effected through new forms of bahishkara which extend from the  language of insult and injury  including online trolling and online abuse, to intimidation, physical and sexual violence, and ultimately assassination and genocide."

Rushdie had many decades ago called the assassination of writers as the most severe form of literary criticism.

Now you know why I had to write this story.

Click on link below :-

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1D2lb2yS0cAzIrnQvrBCk89ItQL60O_cEHrddGBpdqfg/edit#heading=h.vp7vv7rwagf

The Ban on Beef

Last evening the t v anchors had a ball.  The sensational ‘breaking news’ of a man lynched for the alleged transgression of the ban on #beef was playing on all channels. Thus popped up another facet of the increasing vigilantism being brought to the fore by what a Social Scientist has called the pseudo-religiosity of the dominant power in Indian politics today.

I could not help delving deep into my memory to recollect having read that outstanding book Science and Society in Ancient India by that doyen of Indic studies and ancient Indian philosophies, Debi Prasad Chattopadhyay.

Today early in the morning I spent a good part of an hour searching through my disorganised library till I found the book.  Notwithstanding the feasting on its leaves by bookworms I was able to find some interesting quotations from the Charaka Samhita dealing with the uses of meat and particularly the flesh of the cow in healing as practiced by the ancient physicians.  Throughout the night I had been disturbed by the contradictory thought that the prohibition of sacrifice of the revered animal had finally ended up in the human sacrifice reported.

Some excerpts from the original Sanskrit text quoted in the book are below:

What then are the specific qualities of the cow’s flesh?

Atreya answers: “The flesh of the cow is beneficial for those suffering from loss of flesh due to disorders caused by excess of vayu, rhinitis, irregular fever ... ...and also in cases of excessive appetite resulting from hard work.

And then it goes on to say:

Since persons suffering from consumption are badly in need of adding flesh to their bodies and since the physicians think that the cow’s flesh is ... ... promotive of flesh and plumpness, they freely recommend it for the consumptive patients, along with a number of alternatives to it... ...

Here I must add that gem of an observation to be found in the morning’s newspaper, by a learned Minister of the Government of India who says,

“ ... ...Sanskrit is the voice of India’s soul and wisdom. Sanskrit literature is a great repository of knowledge.” 

We would do well to remember that the Charaka Samhita is part of that great repository.

Questions profound and inane

Abdul Kalam has passed away.  What I remember most about him is his poignant question asking what we are leaving behind for our children – for posterity. Will it be just a collection of temples, mosques and churches?

The profound nature of the question has been lost on us and nowhere could I find that superb rhetoric quoted in any of the obituaries and other writings on his demise.

In striking contrast we have also had that amusingly lovely question from a person classified as an intellectual by an admiring NDTV.  “Have the institutions (in particular IISc. and the Indian Institute of Technology) over the past 60-plus years contributed to making our society and the world a better place?”

Could the same question be asked of Einstein and other Nobel Prize winners?   The furtherance of human knowledge makes contributions that cannot be estimated or even understood by a merchant class that considers the production of wealth as the greatest contribution to ‘making our society and the world a better place’.  As if in an ironic reply to that absurd question we have a country, acknowledged in Europe and all over the world for the production of contributions to ‘making our society and the world a better place’, conferring its highest civilian award to a professor at the Indian Institute of Science.

Highest German Civilian Award for IISc Professor says a headline in today’s paper.

THE END  OF  AUTO DA FE`

“Auto Da Fé, what's an Auto Da Fé?

It's what you oughtn't to do but you do anyway!"

Torquemada tells his monks when describing the Inquisition which involved a public humiliation before burning at the stake.

At the time of the Inquisition condemned heretics would be asked to do a public penance with a procession of the guilty and a reading of their sentence in a public square.  And in the middle of the last century we have seen books being burned publicly and as if in accompaniment a poet  lamented, “Where they burn books, they will end up burning people”.  That was a prophecy that was tragically fulfilled during the Holocaust a few years later. Literally the term auto da fe means an act of faith and one continues through the centuries to be frightened by such acts of faith thrust by the pious upon transgressors.

We have seen books being banned and books being burnt.  We have also seen the withdrawal and pulping of books that purportedly cause offence to people or their beliefs.  And in an act of self-flagellation we have recently seen an author proclaim his death as a writer and forswear the writing of fiction.

Now comes the digital age.  Books are now not just in print on paper.  Books are literally in the air and all over the world. Now burning books will not do and men of faith will have to invent a correspondingly modern method of destruction.  We have reached the end of Auto Da fe.

Inhuman sacrifices

Some of us would have experienced the ignominy of having to cover up one lie by concocting  many lies told serially, each of which may have to be similar covered up leading to a compounding that stretches to an infinity of lies.  But did we expect that to cover up one crime (perhaps lesser than murder) many murders have to be done serially. Yet that seems to be happening not only in the attempts to cover up of sexual molestation by a Godman but even in the attempts to bury the truth about huge amounts of money made by subverting the systems for the selection of prospective candidates to be groomed as professionals in medicine or in the other services as servants of the government.  Where will such a rot in our society lead us to?  An infinity of murders?

Are these then human sacrifices that have to be made in what seems futile attempt to exorcise those demons that have taken hold of us?   As a well know journalist said on T V with the country being run by criminals what do we really expect?  Yet most of us want a decent respectable set of people to govern us without these shenanigans that murkily disfigure the governance of the land.  Or is it that we have after all only got an administration that we deserve.

NaMo and the NRI

NaMo and the NRI

Sagarika Ghose in a blog in the Times of India recalls the loudly cheering NRI crowds applauding the first Indian leader who seemed to understand why they walked away from the motherland and who seemed to empathise with them, applying a soothing salve on the perpetual guilt that sits on them for their migration. “... the NRI feels understood by Modi” she says.

Namo has dug into the readily aroused long distance nationalism of a community that has often felt insecure and increasingly with the incipient racism that has been recently raising its head in America, witness the recent riots in Baltimore.  Not to be left behind the liberal western democracies of France and Germany in Europe find such seeds germinating amongst them and scattered incidents in distant Australia point to the wide spread of the malaise. Ultra nationalist parties have been emerging in all these countries.

The NRI’s definition of identity in ethnicity and in religion finds a thunderous resonance to NaMo’s glib exhortations to Make in India and to the Bharat Mata ki Jai slogans.  They must lend their skills and lend from their not inconsiderable vaults to build the New India that they have dreamily imagined, an India that mirrors the societies they live in.  Free enterprise, an open society free of government fetters, no wasteful public spending a Swachha Bharat with successful gated communities and the unsightly poverty duly camouflaged or remanded into ghettoes.  A populace that might be lured into a permanent reversal of their earlier migration. 

NaMo has followed the growing ranks of Godmen who so cleverly play upon the NRI’s spiritual loneliness to reap enormous dividends.  The trail usually leads to the countries which have sizeable NRI populations ready to support a good cause in the interests of spreading the religiosity that has slowly slipped out of their ken.  The foot print of these Gurus in the Gulf and middle east countries with large Indian working class populations is considerably less and their harvest in them correspondingly low. Namo has yet to visit these countries and play his tune in them; he knows the response may not be as favourable.

Tomorrow is International Yoga Day.

What a big do about such a relatively simple thing.  We had a politician say that it was only for the idle rich who need to move their butt a bit and that the hardworking masses do not need any such calisthenics or contortions to keep fit.

 Many opinions and also a spoof in today's Times of India by Chidananda Rajghata about the 21st century evolutionary variants of the Asanas,

This makes it irresistible and I urge you to read my tongue in cheek contribution to  the International Yoga Day

https://docs.google.com/…/1JYmbnt93GnE3g0h_eG5zSCpWEN…/edit…

You are sure to enjoy it and then forward it to all your friends so that it goes viral - whatever that might mean