THE DAY INDEPENDENCE DAWNED

Times of India front page on that first Independence Day

Glancing back several decades ago. 

HIROSHIMA DAY

It took place seventy-one years ago. They dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima this day – the 6^th of August. The devastation and other effects are vividly portrayed in the Peace Memorial at Hiroshima.

My visit to the Peace Memorial at Hiroshima had a powerful effect on me and I wrote this piece that sleepless night.

NEW CLEAR

chandrashekhar  sastry

It was to be my first visit to Japan and I was excited.  I would be able to meet up with an old friend Zuenkosan who, many years ago, studied Tagore in the Shantiniketan University.  She used to amaze me with Bengali haiku sung in the style of Tagore’s music.  I remembered her delicate face more like a fragile flower, her carefully done coiffure, the jet black hair shining in the sun, the small paces with which she ran up to the Arts Block and the stately pirouette when she turned. 

On a hot June afternoon we marched with thousands of demonstrators.  We sang with thousands of demonstrators; we sang of our dread of Strontium 18, its insidious effects routed through milk and the threat to our children of the future.  We sang against the tests in Pokhran; we sang against the callous calculations by the eggheads computing the megadeaths to be produced by that infernal flash of hellfire and by its radiation.  We sang of Life, of men and women marching together; we sang that we shall overcome.

We were young and joyous and we had an inexhaustible faith in a future free of the threat of nuclear weapons.  We were sure we could make that future happen.  We were in love with Life. We danced in joy, in celebration of the meaning of Life; we would negate the Bomb and its colossal killings for it was the mindless expression of tired and tyrannical old men who have not loved and who know not the meaning of Life. 

Whenever I thought of Zuenko I remembered our long march.

~

I had some business in Hiroshima. The porcelain faced people, the staccato language, fairy-tale surroundings and novel mannerisms, sometimes gauche, often graceful had me conveyed into a different world.  On the Sunday, Zuenkosan offered to take me around Hiroshima.  The skeleton building directly below the bomb that exploded in the sky, inexplicably spared destruction though every other structure had been razed, the stream where thousands had gathered seeking relief, on to manicured greens, characteristically landscaped clumps of trees, patches of flowerbeds and elegantly planned gravel footpaths; we were approaching a slight knoll.

“A memorial to the very young soldiers.”

“The Kamikaze?”

“Yes, have you heard of them?”

   I nodded.  Schoolchildren trained to fly bombs with wings grafted on in a cruel symbiosis to produce homing missiles.  Did this bring about a karmic retribution?  I quickly dismissed the banal thought.  A huge bronze bell, gifted by India, had Sanskrit inscriptions and a little further, set in a slightly depressed arena, the Peace Memorial building stood elevated on stilts.  Zuenkosan would not enter.  I was to be guided by a taped commentary.

   Nothing could have prepared me for this experience.  Half-tone blowups in compelling compositions screening an awesome range of destruction and brutally raw vignettes of corporeal suffering.  I moved mechanically, too hurt for expression.  Among the viewers no private whisper, no ‘look at this’ nudge, no pointing finger, no gasp of surprise.  Misshapen bottles, giant beams grotesquely twisted like straw, molten stone, an oversized black fingernail grown like a sprouting bean, radiation charred clothing, all the debris that an unearthly, hellish, indiscriminate fury had in a moment’s unleashing inflicted on Hiroshima.  Statistics, numbers affected then and numbers continuing to be affected long after that infernal lightning flashed overhead.

Out onto a verandah, released from that prison of memories that mankind should never erase, I found in a visitor’s book:

“Why?~

“Never again”

“I feel so ashamed.”

A litany of sorrow, anger and contrition.  I understood why Zuenkosan had stayed back.

She was strolling below as I came down and silently joined her in her aimless ambling.  The beauty of the surroundings appeared more intense; the falling leaf, the waving flower atop a tall stem, blue sky and billowing clouds, the smell of mown grass, the caress of a warm sun and a child’s tinkling laughter.  Slowly the present forced itself on me but it was a good half-hour before I could speak.

~

Zuenkosan had called me home for dinner.  The taxi I hailed was given the slip with her address written in Japanese.  It sailed through the city passing several streets with the cherry blossom abloom.  Zuenko had always studied, admiringly, the Shantiniketan flowers; the hibiscus, the lotus in the pond, the fragrant jasmine and shephali. When I reached her house, I was captivated by a beautiful creeper with purple flowers on the trellis. She opened the door and smiled a welcome.  It was the first time I was seeing her in a silk kimono. She looked statuesque.

I found myself unable to talk about the Peace Memorial but said how moved I was by the experience.  She gave a wise nod but made no comment. I had removed shoes and sat effortlessly on the tatami mat. A small photo album had photographs from Shantiniketan. Some of them had me in the picture.  After a little bustle between the kitchen and the room, she too sat down.  The tempura she served was simply exquisite.  The light batter teasingly veiled the bare-flesh pink of the prawn.  It gently imploded in the mouth thrusting forth the succulent prawn even as it crisply receded in the background. The sake` with its keen rinse cleansed the taste buds, arousing them in anticipation of another morsel. 

Shabu Shabu was a more sophisticated affair. Seaweed was steeped in a bowl over a flame, little pieces of vegetable and fish, even thinly sliced Kobe beef laid out. A variety of sauces was found in little porcelain bowls, besides the mandatory horseradish and the soya.  We spoke of food, of her studies in India and of my visit to Japan.  At the end of the meal, the bowl of seaweed into which the morsels of food had been dipped and cooked, served as a drink.  It ummarized the whole meal, little flavours of each portion coming up for review.

~

Zuenkosan knew that I had visited the huge factory on the other side of the hill, which produced airplanes and armaments during the war. 

“No more planes and armaments,” she said, “The treaty forbids Japan.” I mentioned that the factory now specialised in machine tools. 

“It hardly matters,” she went on, “Our Forces for Self Defence are very strong and we can deal with the neighbouring countries quite easily.”  Her eyes had narrowed and her thin lips had firmed. 

“We have all the knowledge and the technology necessary to produce missiles and to produce nuclear weapons,” she said, clearly, firmly and, I thought, stubbornly.

“I am sure you have,” I acknowledged.

I thanked her after the meal, immeasurably sad at her remarks.  Her reactions to my mention of the large factory on the other side of the hill were so puzzling.   She was very different from the Zuenko who studied in Shantiniketan.  I was glad she went into the kitchen to make coffee, as I sat musing. It pleased me that she remembered my distaste for green tea. The coffee was strong and the aroma lavishly elegant and refined.  At my first sip the tender old feelings flooded my mind. 

“Zuenko,” I said,“Life is many-splendoured and love is a beautiful emotion.   Do not let the wash of hatred or vengeance sour them.” I stretched out and held her hand.  “Do you remember we marched in Calcutta a few years ago against the Indian government’s atomic bombs?” 

She turned to me; her eyes were misty.  She was sipping coffee, eyes fixed on me.

“Don’t look back and feel bitter.  Don’t look ahead and feel fear.”  I knew it sounded hackneyed. She was placing the cup down and I saw her hand trembling. I arose to say goodbye, adding: 

“I will not accept, my dear, that we have failed.  Together, we have to produce another Buddha, another Prince of Peace.”

As I raised her hand to my lips in farewell, I heard her whisper, “Don’t go yet.”

I was silent for a while. “Yes, Zuenko, ‘We shall overcome’ was not idle prophesy. See, it is happening.”

Her eyes met mine and she smiled as she daintily recited an extempore haiku in Bengali:

She marched out of step.

His hand waved fingers twitching

She fell in step again

This and many other moving pieces, some of them prize winning, can be had  in my new book LONG AND SHORT TALES. Go to >>>        http://imojo.in/7e984q

An Atheist's Chair

An Atheist’s Chair

Atheists have always been at the receiving end. We had Salman Rushdie speaking of atheists too having sensibilities that are being offended even though they do not take such offence to murderous extents. Atheists have not asked for the banning of treatises that are offensive to them. Atheists do not seek to proselytise and convert believers to a rational non-belief. In fact they are woefully short of atheist evangelists if such a term can be used. Closer home we have had the outstanding lyricist and poet, Javed Akhtar, in a  T V  discussion that was discussing widespread religious evangelism on television channels, bemoan the fact that only atheists do not have a t v channel to propagate their disbeliefs.

    

      Apart from the better known Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World there is little learned discussion of Atheism as a mode of thought. Sagan preferred to search the heavens for extra terrestrial intelligence rather than for God and the angels. There are plenty of sites on the Internet propagating and defending atheist concepts but they seem hardly learned enough to be taken seriously. Ridiculing theism is not sufficient argument to reduce it to the absurdity of its conclusions.  Reductio ad absurdum is a Euclidean construct more suited to the certainties of Geometry.

Now we have Mr Louis Appignani, 83 and resident in Florida, endowing what is the America’s first academic chair “for the study of atheism, humanism and secular ethics. 

“I’m trying to eliminate discrimination against atheists. This is a step in that direction, to make atheism legitimate,” he said and successfully insisted on having the endowed chair with the word ‘atheism’ in the name. He wasn’t going to contribute unless it had the word atheism.

    

      Mr. Appignani rejected a last-minute proposal from a dean to name the chair as “philosophical naturalism.” As a via media, he and the university leaders worked out the title, broadening the scope by including humanism and secular ethics. The University is now searching through a committee of faculty members to conduct a search for a scholar to fill the position.

      One study projects that atheists comprise an estimated 2.01%, and non-religious a further 16% of the world population, indicating little preference for atheism in the world. Perhaps this study ignores, Albania, China, Korea and Russia which has no state religion and actively discourages all Faiths

    

       However a study among Americans says the younger people are even less religious than their elders with 35% of millennials saying they identify as atheist, agnostic or with no religion in particular. No wonder a Chair in a University for the study of Atheism is first found in the USA. Will it start teaching us to drive out the present dark age of irrationality and superstition?

 

The Many Shades of Yoga

The many shades of Yoga

With the International Yoga Day looming ahead we tried to read up on Yoga and found to our utter confusion that there were many shades of this thing called YOGA. There was Jnana Yoga implying intense meditation and an attainment of knowledge and wisdom; there was the physical Hatha Yoga to improve the suppleness and strength of one’s limbs; there was a Bhakthi Yoga to enable one to dissolve oneself in the divine and there was the  Karma Yoga of the selfless man who works for the well being of fellowmen. Besides, we also had lesser known variations such as  Kriya Yoga, Swara Yoga, Mantra Yoga etc. – and no less the modern American practices of hot yoga or yoga in a sauna.

Which of these many Yogas do we choose for the International Yoga Day? Just stretching our limbs in calisthenic poses and chanting OM hardly does justice to the ancient concept of yoga.

By grafting on to the contemporary postural yoga the vocal, loud utterance of OM, exemplifying the power of the word, and hence the mind, we are attempting to literally yoke mind and body into a union of physical and spiritual praxis.  

Swami Viekananda had rejected Hatha Yoga as it was very difficult, not quickly learned, and did not lead to much spiritual growth. For him Raja Yoga was the way and we can now make pretence with a pale imitation by pronouncing OM while practicing our postures.

Of all the extolled virtues of Yoga perhaps the most wondrous is the mind reading capability posited by some ancients and my story with the link given below may entertain. It is International with some Yoga thrown in.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WnAyrDF9S_7A8PC8STzu1cPFR-w47CbuWBhT3I7xxKA/edit

It’s my offering for The International Yoga Day of 21 June 2016. 

Commerce of Godmen

Commerce of Godmen

Spiritual entrepreneurs start with the peddling of intangibles by way of highfaluting sermons in florid flourishes of language, using arabesque turns of phrase and idiom. It is often accompanied by spectacular rituals that compel attention and the recycling of fossilised wisdom from old texts, all in exchange for the not so intangible collections from their followers ostensibly for the promotion of the Faith, the best Instrument to tackle the problems of the modern world. As Meera Nanda taunts in The God Market ‘...tradition is modernity and to go forward, Indians must face backward.’

Intoxicated by the unexpected success of these start-ups, the purveyors of supernatural and theological virtues first enter the fields of education and health care, both highly rewarding areas, and follow it up with obtaining grants of land from a benevolent government to aid their socially beneficent schemes. Exercising a business acumen that has been highly developed from the handling of large finances some eye real estate and parcel out land (against substantial donations) originally acquired for an Ashram, retailing it for the stay of devotees in the larger family defined by the ashram which is now lorded over by the New Age Guru.  Such is the usual trajectory of the Babas that a gullible population worships and deifies.

However, the ambitions of unbridled ascetics soar high and aspire to match the successes of the tycoons of commerce and industry. Diversification is the tool to use and the manufacture of fast moving consumer goods provides a potent answer. The constituency of devotees becomes a captive test market and in some cases acts as a distribution network greatly subsidising the costs of selling. Even the tasks of copywriters and advertisement managers become easy by using terms like Ayurveda, Patanjali, Science of the Ancients, Naturopathy, all of which tug at the emotions of a people not yet unburdened of tradition. The competition which starts by facing organised industry takes on a different fierceness when pitted between different ashrams. Brand loyalty is yoked to Guru loyalty.

If these spiritual enterprises, having co-opted the temporal without deviating from the spiritual, are to follow the well trodden path of modern industry, we may soon see black knights and white knights manoeuvering for control of the smaller corporations and even perhaps mergers and acquisitions. There are quite a few ashrams in decline and in need of resurrecting. Will the larger spiritual corporations come to their rescue?

As Gramsci said “The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned.” 

Men and Women Pray Together

Men and Women Pray Together

At last the Bombay High Court in a landmark judgment observed that it is the Fundamental Duty of the state to protect the Fundamental Rights of women. This was made in a verdict on a petition pleading for the entry of women into a temple which discriminated against their entry into specified areas. Interestingly and immediately some temples have taken to heart the recent advice of a Spiritual Guru advocating equidistance of both genders from sanctums and restricted the entry of both men and women to areas hitherto allowed to men only. 
There can be no better example of the superb art of living by cutting off the nose to spite the face. 
The High Court was hearing a public interest litigation challenging the prohibition on women’s entry to the shrine area at Shani Shingnapur temple in Ahmednagar district. The provisions of The Maharashtra Hindu Places of Public Worship (entry Authorisation) Act, 1956, would apply. The implementation of this law, which perhaps had been deliberately overlooked, would have a bearing on all the places where people are banned from entering temples on the basis of gender.

As it appears that the decision of a High Court of any state would be followed by all lower courts in the country, provided that a contrary judgement has not been passed by the High Court of that particular state where the lower court exercises jurisdiction, it would be interesting to see what would happen in the case of Sabarimala in Kerala (which is now before the Supreme Court) where  the Kerala government in its latest affidavit has said the prohibition of women is a matter of religion and it is duty-bound to “protect the right to practice the religion of these devotees”. Curiously enough, in a previous affidavit, it had supported a PIL seeking women’s entry in Sabarimala.

The Bombay High Court is waiting for a Supreme Court ruling on entry of women in the Kerala Sabairimala temple before deciding on the case of Haji Ali Dargah where women are not allowed entry and has kept a petition pending.

In this bewildering scenario would we have the industry of  ‘offended sentiments’ descend upon us if we enquire what the position of the temple and other shrine guardians would be if and when pious transgenders seek to pray at those shrines that exclude one gender.

KANHAIYA RE !

Kanhaiya  Re!

Breaking into a universe utterly bereft of ethics in politics we heard the voice of Kanhaiya exhorting his audience to free the nation of hunger, of poverty, of class, of caste and of capitalism among other inequalities.  The chant was for Azadi from the various deprivations and inequalities afflicting the nation, for freedom within the nation.  With the advent of television the source of connectedness is the televised speech and the print medium takes a back seat. Kanhaiya’s address at the JNU after his release was electric and in that one widely televised speech he stood in striking contrast to that other orator who won the BJP a stupendous electoral victory in 2014.

The Azadi chant was spontaneous, not the manufactured ‘Modi ! Modi !’ orchestrated like a number of Bhakts singing bhajans; no expressionless Modi masks but bright eyed young faces with a dream in their eyes; no rhetoric questioning begging for sycophantic answers, slily turning spectators into participants; no pejorative taunts but civilised disagreements with the opposition (not enemy); genuine applause not manufactured clapping - and replete with wit, sarcasm and humour, putting to shame our Members of Parliament. Kanhaiya will not need the aid of life imitating holograms for he will soon be having live replicas all over Universities in India.

       

        Why does Kanhaiya strike a chord in the hearts of his audience both live and televised?  He is the clever lad who turns Modi’s tweet on its head; the bright young man who reasons out his arguments and does not tug vainly on emotions; the boy who talks his jailer into understanding the meaning of Lal Salaam; the cheeky youth who deplores the Prime Minister merely talking his mind to the nation, not listening to it; he is the brave knight tilting at an overpoweringly mighty state. It seems utterly hopeless but we wish him to win.

        As I write this I read about the posters offering a bounty of 11 lac rupees on the head of Kanhaiya.  The posters have appeared all over Delhi and the redoubtable Delhi police are considering booking the authors for the defacing of public property! 

       

WATCH IT HERE     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jkQhAE-j8s