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.