Sunday 18 January 2015

Part of a email conversation on scientific temper

A part of a email conversation of the Google group Highschoolscience:

1. If I understand Hardy correctly, he is saying that 'there is nothing non-scientific about belief in God'. I do not agree with it. Science as an episteme has no notion, concept, observable, idea, hypothesis or theory called God. This does not mean that practising scientists may not be believers. Of course, till the middle of 20th century, most leading scientists were believers. This also does not mean that science negates the existence of God. The idea of God has nothing to do with science and vice versa. It is an irrelevant question in science.
Obviously the notion of God being what it is, it has occupied the mind of every thinking person, and scientists are no exception. So there are many expositions on science and God. I do not accept them. I am talking about the science I know, that I have learned and that I practise to some extent. Others may have different science(s).

2. Panchu mentioned spirituality as a necessity.

In my article for the newspaper (written in limited space and hence, with limited number of words):

I have mentioned that the masses believe in God. Everything else in religious lifestyle, the rituals or the 'books' and 'kathaas', exists because God exists in their belief-systems. For the ordinary person, all humans are equal in the eyes of God. I speculated that the box office success of the film 'PK' points to this.

I have mentioned that one person's rationality does not mean hurting someone else's sense of believing (one could also read an implied meaning that one's own rationality in some actions or inferences does not mean hurting their own sense of believing, if they do so occasionally).

I speculated that those who explain away conflicts based on religious differences as a matter of faith are wrong. I also mentioned that such commentators have made confusing statements occasionally.

I also speculated that the mention of 'scientific temper' in the constitution of India hurts the vested interests that exploit faith and wish to build a lumpen-society (I am using 'lumpen' with the  commonly perceived meaning, albeit incorrect :  'goonda').

And, Captain Bodas's reading of that junk paper and the science congress allowing him to read it, have contributed to the making of such a lumpen-society, which has been picking up speed since the eighties, and is right now going on at an intense build-speed in North India.
And I have also stated the point about science and technology that Anita mentioned in her mail (about S n T not evolving in parallel necessarily), though not with the examples she cites.

Oh yes, I also speculated that most scientists in India lack scientific temper. That most of them are unable to explain scientific ideas in their own languages  is an indication. This may also mean that their knowledge in science is poor.

Wednesday 23 July 2014

comments on creativity, language and human existence

Some comments on creativity, language and human existence in a dialogue with a friend over email:


Q. Context, language is fine, but material conditions determine our language. Will you quibble here?

My response: I have always believed that art is not created in vacuum. Yes, there is an individual creative element and it is also true that unlike scientific observations, most sophisticated creative expressions are not reproducible, but there is a 'desh-kaal' (space-time) context of creativity. Whether it is entirely a product of material conditions, is difficult to ascertain, but I think it is not a worthwhile debate to get into, certainly not for the artist or the poet. Let the scientists worry about it.
It is now believed that the origin of all languages spoken by humans is a unique primitive source, but diversification must have been aided and perhaps made possible due to diverse material conditions.
To say that there is a unique origin does not mean that there is something called 'mother' of all languages (And with all linguists going for my neck, I would still not agree that Sanskrit is the 'mother' of most Indian languages).
Having said that, material conditions or otherwise, experience and emotion inscribed in a language are precious characteristics of human existence. They may evolve naturally, but imposing from outside is asking for a definite disaster.  Much of the apparent breakdown of social norms in our society may very well be related to how English has been arrogantly pushed down the throats of ordinary people. I say this without any scientific understanding, it is a gut feeling and I will not argue if one questions such formulations. But I have this intense feeling that imposition, rather than incorporation by natural assimilation, of English, has done an enormous damage to our lives.

Thursday 22 May 2014

intellectual khichdi of the great Indian soil


Dear All,
I am feeling disturbed by an article titled 'How Modi defeated liberalslike me'  by Prof Shiv Viswanathan, published in 'The Hindu' today. I have jotted down a few thoughts in response to his article. I will often refer to the author as Shiv with apologies to those who mind it. Shiv is a prominent personality of our times. I am aware that I do not have the scholarship in social sciences that he possesses. I am trying to articulate some serious problems I find in his article.

The article begins with a reference to the pooja performed by Narendra Modi at the Kashi Vishwanath temple followed by an aarti performed along the Ganga river. Shiv observes, 'As the event was relayed on TV, people messaged requesting that the event be shown in full, without commentary. Others claimed that this was the first time such a ritual was shown openly.' It is quite true that it was the first time Modi's performance at the Ganga was shown openly. But does anyone seriously think that such rituals are not shown openly on public media in this country? That National leaders have been performing religious rituals in public is not even a matter of debate. From Rajendra Prasad's pujas to Sonia Gandhi's visits to religious places, it is a common knowledge that religion, whether for private or public use, is an overwhelming presence in the lives of political personalities in India. Why is it that Prof Viswanathan makes such an issue of it then? One gets a glimpse of the possible reasons in the next sentence claiming that with Mr. Modi around, the message claimed “We don’t need to be ashamed of our religion. This could not have happened earlier.”

Who is ashamed of which religion? Was Modi merely practising a religious ritual? If so, a good question to ask is how many times before that day did he come to the Dashashwamedh ghat to do this act; after all, he is 63+ years old, a person with a lot of power and easy mobility, certainly it would have occurred to him some time earlier too that there is a necessary act to be performed according to his religion.

No, it was not a religious act. One could argue that every religious act is a political act. In this case it was a purely political act devoid of any religiosity. The message was not what Prof Viswanathan reads, the message is, “Behold, the Hindu dictator cometh.” The word 'Hindu' here is not a religious term (to begin with there is no religion called the Hindu religion).

Ironically, in another article published in 'The Hindu' a little more than a month ago, Shiv had written, 'Varanasi breaks the Bharat-India, Muslim-Hindu divide that Mr. Modi seeks to enforce.' Read that again, ' the Bharat-India, Muslim-Hindu divide that Mr. Modi seeks to enforce'. After Modi winning, he is saying 'We don’t need to be ashamed of our religion'. Interesting.

In the second para, the article hits the Bull's eye in quoting a friend, “You English speaking secularists have been utterly coercive, making the majority feel ashamed of what was natural.” That there is something pathological in the Englishwallahs in this country is felt by many of us. I pointed out a few aspects of this in a recent article titled 'फासीवादी उभार का भाषाई पहलू' published in Jansatta. In a poem titled 'टोनी मॉरिसन इंग्लिशवालों के खिलाफ लिखती है', published in the literary journal 'बनास जन', I expressed the irony differently. While the scholarship in my opinions does not even come close to that of the author I am reacting to, nonetheless I, another desi bugger around, have my take on it. The 'natural' as understood by Prof Viswanathan is very different from how I understand it.

Then Shiv moves on to describe the paranoi of leftists about ' positing a period of McCarthyism in India'. He may be quite right if we remind ourselves that only 31% of the voters have given BJP 'the majority'. This is not like an entire Nation has succumbed to authoritarianism. Not even a third of it. Given that not everyone comes to vote, perhaps not even a fifth of it. Indeed there is no need to be paranoid. But are we not aware of what happened when the last time BJP was in power with even less support than today? Is it unfair that some of us are getting paranoid remembering how the books were rewritten? Today we are 'some Leftists', what were we before Modi won, when we shared with Shiv the fear from 'the Muslim-Hindu divide that Mr. Modi seeks to enforce'? An interesting chapter in the NCERT History text book is written by my friend Prof Anil Sethi, on multiple narratives about partition of India in 1947. It is a widely lauded work – is it wrong to fear that this chapter is likely to be removed because it attempts to show the South Asians across the borders as equal vicitims of the hatred that flared?

As he says, indeed 'both Right and Left have appealed to the state to determine what was correct history'. Is he suggesting that the books being downloaded are written as the Left's version of the correct history? Interesting.

His statement 'With the advent of the Right, there is now a feeling that history will become another revolving door regime where the official and statist masquerade as the truth', is again right on the Bull's eye. But then he attempts to give his own explanation of 'why Left liberals failed to understand this election' by suggesting that there are anxieties that the middle class suffers from and that is what Mr. Modi understood 'more acutely than the intellectuals'. Consider this juxtaposed to his 50 days before the victory dictum '... Muslim-Hindu divide that Mr. Modi seeks to enforce'. No issues with the words, except that we need to explore the nature of 'anxieties'. Shiv seemed to share the understanding of these anxieties with the 'Left' earlier. Not now. Today, the Left is a 'club, snobbish about secularism, treating religion not as a way of life but as a superstition'. This is like going back to debates from 50 years ago – 'Marx called it the opium of the masses' versus 'no, he said it was the agony of the oppressed'. The least I can say is that for the first time I am thoroughly disappointed at such simplistic verbosity from a master that I have held in high esteem for long.

And after this, OMG, he blasts the Left for being the demon 'that tried to inject the idea of the scientific temper into the constitutions as if it would create immunity against religious fears and superstitions'.

Very interestingly, near the end of the article, Shiv calls Dalai Lama his 'favourite scientist'. Obviously, there is a contradiction. Or perhaps, 'the scientist' is one free of the evil called 'the scientific temper' which in his words, overemphasises secularism, creates 'an empty domain, a coercive milieu where ordinary people practising religion were seen as lesser orders of being'. It will be childish to claim that the idea of science does not come with a package of value judgments and power relations, but the suggestion that science creates that domain and the coercion referred to by Shiv, more than other social institutions like the stratifications based on caste, gender, etc., which are intricately related to and are reinforced by the institution of religion, is again very disappointing.

Then Shiv continues his tirade against secularism, a word lost in the quagmire of the intellectual khichdi of the great Indian soil. It is an 'invidious weapon'. Shiv tells us 'The regime used to placate minorities electorally, violating the majoritarian sense of fairness'. Pray, what are the placations? Oh yes, there is the old Shah Bano case, then we have the personal law, article 370 for Kashmiris, but presumably those are not the issues that Shiv is pointing out (though, these are the ones that Sangh parivar wants its supporters to be angry about), he is talking about the electoral placations. Now, even Shiv would agree that much of the Hindutva thought has to do with Brahmanical hegemony, to quote a 'Left' idiom, and if so what about the caste based reservations violating the sense of fairness of – no, not a majority, but a dominant minority! Electoral politics compels candidates to seek support by hook or by crook. There is a large scale corruption in the whole process. Money, liquor, drugs, violence, everything goes. Then there is casteism and communalism. The question is what are the bottomlines that must not be crossed. The Sangh ideology has successfully penetrated large sections of OBCs and Dalits, specially in North India, with what – by giving them a false majoritarian identity and then instilling in them the anger against the violation of their sense of fairness about relations between the so-called religious communities, the Hindus and the Muslims. Pray, is it wrong to care for the minorities? What are the principles in this regard in our great tradition, some features of which Shiv elaborates in his article? If it is not wrong to worry about minorities, and keeping in mind facts on the miserable condition of minorities as detailed for instance, by the Sachhar committee, then why is a great scholar so perturbed that some parties claim to be caring for the minorities? Interesting. In any case, is it not irresponsible to add to the rant of electoral placations without mentioning the details? Instead of contributing to false notions like minorities are given undue privileges, we should be concerned that the minorities in this country are insecure and it is this which makes them vulnerable to exploitation, electorally or otherwise. We should be concerned that the minorities still live with a low quality of life and poor educational standards and the progressive voices from within them have no power.

Shiv's interpretation that 'The majority felt coerced by secular correctness which they saw either as empty or meaningless' is one way of looking at it. The other is that the existential angst that continued suffering from poverty and exploitation causes in any human being, makes most of us vulnerable to the idea of a modern Nation-state linked with a majoritarian way of life that necessarily looks for an enemy within, Jews in Germany, Hindus in Bangaldesh or Pakistan and Muslims in India. It is this insecurity that Modi and the Sangh were able to consolidate. It has nothing to do with 'the cosmic way religion impregnated the everydayness of their lives'. No, the majority has no such fear of coercion by the 'secular correctness', they are hardly even touched by it. On the contrary, the basic human urge of love and altruism is constantly challenged by the bigotry all around cultivated by the Sangh Parivar and their cohorts.

Then Shiv gets back to what his scholarship is known for – the rediscovery of our religions and our sciences. But is it sufficient to say that ' Indian religions were perpetually dialogic' forgetting that in practice, they also reinforced with brutality the institutions that dehumanised large sections of society? While there are many good things about the dialogue of medical systems in our tradition, can we forget why the 'Guptasharmas' had to be 'gupta' (secret)? Indeed we are not like some of the European countries, where religion is just a small part of one's life, but that does not mean that the religion that we live with is all spiritual and uplifting. Any one waking up in the morning anywhere in India can see this, and hear this, from the loud blast, by the poor quality audio loudspeakers installed on varieties of places of worship, that destroys the morning serenity. It can be safely asserted that religion has mostly an oppressive presence in our lives, specially in the lives of the marginalised. That the 'Left' in this country has hardly been a champion of the separation of church and state is well-known; any one can dig up the numerous news items on CPIM ministers inaugurating Puja mandaps in West Bengal. What are we talking about? The bogey of 'Left' that exists only in the rhetoric of academic campuses? My God, from Shiv's article, one would think that we just got rid of the Stalin era from India!

Shiv's emphasis on ' Christianity that was continuously at odds with science' is presumably meant to remind us that secularism is a western idea. True, but is the idea of a modern Nation-state identified with Hindutva an Indian idea? Was Hitler, the source of inspiration for the Sanghis, an Indian?

It is true that some of us find it difficult to accept that practising scientists often mix their religious beliefs with there professional life activities. But to suggest that this has any impact on the larger societal dynamics is absurd. To start with, there are hardly any atheists among Indian scientists and by and large all scientific bodies are extremely conservative. Go to any National conference and see how much time the scientists spend talking about Modi and the Gujarat development.

I thought I write poetry, but I do not understand what Shiv means by 'There is a sense of snobbery and poetry'! And the illiteracy he mentions that 'religion, especially Christianity shaped the cosmologies of science' is not quite fitting. More than anyone else, he knows that the prevalence of flow of knowledge, that eventually became science, across cultures, was quite common and much wider in the last two millennia than the extent scholars believed it to be in the last century. Besides, if he is insisting on minding the distinction between Christianity and our religions, which anyway were not much different form pagan religions elsewhere in the world, then why should we worry about Indian scientists' being unaware of how Christianity shaped the cosmologies of science!

Shiv's attempt to portray secularism as the demon that the poor middle-classes were waiting to be overthrown, is utter nonsense. What kind of lie is this that ' The activism of Hindutva groups was treated as sinister but the fundamentalism of other religions was often treated as benign and as a minoritarian privilege.'? The words speak of a sinister design. The fact is that there is a Narendra Modi in each of us. There is a communal orientation of our minds, that is vulnerable to exploitation. Modi and the Sanghis were able to consolidate this with most of the 31% of voters - the rest of the work was done by the ten thousand crores of capital poured in to buy the media. With as overwhelming a majority in population, that the political entity called 'Hindu' has‌ in India, it is only natural that Hindutva will be more noticed here, just like the fundamentalism in Islam is more noticed by liberals in Pakistan and Bangldesh or Iran.

It is very interesting that Shiv refers to the incidents of Ganesha statues drinking milk. I was at that time the convener of a science forum in Chandigarh. Responding to a lot of pressure from friends, I sent a letter to the press (it was published as a letter to the editor in 'The Tribune'). It had three itemised statements. I pointed out that the idea of a religious idol drinking milk is in not a subject of scientific investigation. For whatever we do following a scientific method will not be acceptable in the domain of faith. We requested those indulging in feeding milk to Lord Ganesha that they should try not to waste milk and remember that their faith will be noticed even if they use a spoon of milk with some water. We asked people to be concerned about children and patients in hospitals who need milk. Notice how different it was from the cynic reaction that Shiv points out in his article. Here I am, a believer in science and secularism. Interesting.

It is sad that today intellectuals like Shiv are equating opposing Modi with science and modernity. In a way, they are doing a great service to science. After all, much of what Modi used to say before 2002 will not be erased. His reference to Muslims inevitably used to be in derogatory and often threatening terms – 'Ham paanch hamaare pachees' was a rant we do not forget. After he became the chief minister, he was careful, but not without a loose end every once in a while. There is enough evidence available, that surely Shiv cannot be oblivious of. If science gives us the courage to resist such bigotry, good for us and good for science.
- Laltu

Tuesday 13 May 2014

we have no clothes on

A poet friend on FB has asked -

'If 2002 hadn't happened, would Modi still be the PM-in-waiting? Did undue emphasis on 2002 help his becoming PM a self-fulfilling prophecy?'

Here is my response -

  There can never be an 'undue' emphasis on killings motivated by hatred - any emphasis is less than desired.  As a poet, you should understand this.

Modi is  the PM-in-waiting for a single reason. The entire South Asia has remained a primitive civilisation. There is hardly any one who is not communally oriented. When we say 'undue' emphasis on 1984 or 2002 or any hatred motivated killing small or big, it is a deep rooted insensitivity to the 'wo log' that shows. When the majority communalism is consolidated, it grows into a behemoth, as we have seen at times in Pakistan and Bangladesh and are witnessing in the rise of the Sangh parivar today.

Modi has been able to consolidate the communal nature of our thinking and the hypocritical pretence of development (does it take more than a few seconds of moving fingers on the keyboard to find out the facts on social and human development indices instead of falling into obvious fallacy of 'I have seen the roads in Gujarat'? Social development is not measured by a Nizam or an Ambani's wealth, it is measured by economic and development data that deal with millions) has worked well to cover our insensitivity.

It is because we have remained not sufficiently sensitive to atrocities by the powerful - be it Hitler, Stalin, the American imperialists, or their seemingly smaller equivalents in Indian history, that such atrocities occur again. Ironically, we claim to be the most tolerant and spiritually advanced civilisation on earth and yet in practice, we are blind to the rise of forces that are so hateful. It is not Modi the person, it is the power behind him, the parivar, whose members will not hesitate to indulge in violence of all kinds - physical or verbal, that is the issue. Like the Germans today, someday future generations in South Asia will wonder what really went wrong with their forefathers. It is not for nothing that a small incident in Mujaffarnagar grows into a full fledged riot. I have been told by editors that their colleagues spend a lot of time deleting the vulgar comments that come in response. Women  writing against Modi and the sangh are sent comments like 'f..ing bitch' and 'muslim cocksucker'. All this is routine affair. Can anyone with minimal sensitivity remain impervious to this? The typical bajrangi is not just on the road out there; when we forget how Ishrat was killed, that for the first time in the history of India, a minister in Modi's cabinet was almost awarded with capital punishment for leading crowds to rape and burn innocent women and children, that senior police officers of his state are either in jail for wrongdoings like murdering innocents or there are other officers protesting the Government's communal high-handedness meeting incessant wrath of the state, when we forget all this, we really are identifying with the Bajrangis like those hooligans in Mangalore beating up young people for simply doing what young people do, partying and romancing.

So that is what it is. Modi is there because we have found ways to express our communalism in a manner that is blatant and naked, except that unlike what happened to the proverbial king, there is no innocent child on the street to point out that we have no clothes on.

Tuesday 8 April 2014

The minority vote bank myth

A younger colleague got worked up after reading yet another article on how Congress has for the last 67 years exploited the Muslim vote bank. The writer of the article is a Muslim (Shahid Siddiqui) and an ex-editor of Nai Duniya. Normally, I would provide the link, but I find the article so bad that I will not do it.

Here is how I responded to my colleague:

Dear ...,

This guy is from MP and probably bought over by RSS.
It is not true that for 67 years, the game is going on. It is only in the last 30 years that a Muslim vote back has taken shape. Immediately after independence, the rightists were not non-entities, but many of them were in the Congress. Others who were distributed in formations like the Swatantra parties were non-entities and the fight was between Congress and socialists of all hue (communists, Lohiaites).

Incidentally, the idea of a Muslim vote bank can make sense in UP, Bihar or Kerala - it is absurd to think of it in the National context - after all, they are no more than 18% of total population. Does it require much thinking?

The reality is the other way around. BJP survives on the Hindu vote bank. Too bad for them that the majority has had other interests.

Congress also willy-nilly played into Hindu vote bank - there are many instances of this - indecision on Babri mosque/temple beginning 1949, the Punjab politics in the eighties, etc. Nehru was less concerned with going to temples, but Indira made it a rule that she visited certain Hindu temples regularly. This was done not just because she was a believer. She married a Parsi (an atheist actually) against family wishes. She visited temples to cater to the Hindu psyche.

It is true that now Muslims are wooed by parties, but earlier Congress was not the only party they voted for and wherever they did it, it was for a variety of reasons. The Bihari and other Hindi speaking Muslims in Kolkata voted for Congress in the sixties and even seventies because they identified with leaders in the states they came from. This changed as the left culture took roots. Muslims started voting for left from late seventies onwards until the TMC took them away in the last ten years.

So, Shahid Siddiqui's analysis is biased and incorrect. There are many such self-proclaimed experts, who are prejudiced one way or other and they keep mis-informing people.

The real nature of democracy and electoral politics became apparent to parties only in the last thirties. There is not just a Muslim vote bank, there is the caste bank, the gender bank. Parties work on these equations very carefully because of electoral compulsions and that is all that one should see in it.

Sunday 5 January 2014

A literature festival and a call for a postnational South Asia



[A final version of this is published as 'Talking Literature' in EPW, 28 Dec 2013, p.142)

For years now, many of us including this writer have written opinion articles pleading for a federation or a EU like structure in South Asia with open borders across India and Pakistan. It was nice to be reinforced on these lines being in the audience for the Hri Research Institute for Southasian Research and Exchange, a unit of the Kathmandu-based Himal Sothasian magazine, session on trans-National writings across South Asia in Bangalore Literature Festival (BLF). The session hosted Kanak Dixit, editor of Himal, Babar Ayaz and Mira Hashmi from Pakistan, Farrah Ghuznavi from Bangladaesh and Ashok Ferry from Sri Lanka. There were other sessions hosting writers from the different countries of South Asia, including one with Nighat Gandhi, who claims a multi-National identity.

To be honest, I have always wondered why the lit-fests are not called the city-English-lit-fests. Typically, these have a couple of sessions in what is now called 'Bhasha' (BLF was pleasantly better than the typical with several sessions on Kannada poetry, literaure and also other languages like Tulu, etc.) and otherwise mostly it is a show by the Englishwallahs for the Englishwallahs, the ones with the burden of looking modern and yet carrying the remnant provincial feudal values on their shoulders and living under the illusion that just because they share the English language with so many others across the globe, they have a global character. But then being only marginally away from them, I go to these melas and end up finding something or other that makes me feel good. The HRI session conducted by Laxmi Murthy was one such thing. Kanak started with referring to the post-national South Asia (Shivam Vij recently wrote an article on the idea at http://www.thefridaytimes.com/beta3/tft/article.php?issue=20130927&page=9d, wondering if it should be called pre-nationalism), and he strongly argued that we need to look beyond the lived half-century of Nationalism in South Asia. The session was mostly on writing, focussing more on the increasing set of names from the non-India parts of South Asia, as Laxmi put it. Then as usual there was some talk about writing in Bhasha and about translations (Navanita Dev Sen from the audience pleaded for awards for translators). The day before, the well-known poets and critics Ashok Vajpeyi, K. Satchidanandan and others had nearly exhausted the Bhasha issue. I wondered if these were enough to take us to post-national South Asia scenario.

There is a measured silence in most discourses on development and politics in South Asia on the impact of military expenditure in subverting development efforts. In India, there are the usual arguments, with Pakistan and China around you, how can you cut down on defense. Similar arguments prevail in Pakistan and China. In a recent analysis, published in this magazine, of the National budget and military expenditure, Gautam Navlakha points out that 19% of the budget is spent on defense. This is, of course, what is revealed. There are expenses like maintaining the intelligence agencies, the production and maintenance of nuclear weapons and secret purchase deals of highly expensive modern conventional weaponry, etc., which are not subject to audit and are not revealed to public eyes. Compare that with the near 10% on education and similar amount on health-care. Is it really possible to have any meaningful development without diverting funds from the military? And without an educated aware people, is it possible to counter elements of jingoism? The answer to both these questions is no and hence 'post-National South Asia' remains an unfulfilled dream. The writers can only do their bit but the material realities of an insane world are far too overwhelming.

So the writers told us about realities that are common to the entire subcontinent. Kanak Dixit asked for 'the courage to critique one's own state and ... to have empathy for the other states'. Farah Ghuznavi, while talking of difficulties in publishing a book in the USA, mentioned the family as the only social service agency available to deal with mental health patients. The context was about the pressures from publishers to change her writing – one publisher wanted her to talk about mental health services in villages in her novel, and she refused because none exist, and the publisher then refused to publish her book. Babar Ayaz's book 'What is wrong with Pakistan' was released during the HRI session, and talking of the defects of the Nation-state Pakistan and the terrorism in and beyond Pakistan, he also mentioned the Hindutva and the Sinhalese chauvinism. Laxmi Murthy rightly asked when will we write a book titled 'What is wrong with India'. Mira Hashmi, in words full of wit and humour talked of the love for Hindi cinema. There was a lot of cinema talk in the fest including the presence of the great Gulzar himself.

To meaningfully talk of a post-National South Asia, we need to raise our voices against expenses in South Asia on external and internal security heads. Our arguments are simple. The territorial disputes have to be resolved by negotaitions. We can use the international bodies, the United Nations and the international courts and agree to come to terms. Once settled, with GPS and what not, there could be a permanent open border surface trade between India and China all the ensuing benefits. Perhaps the situation with Pakistan is more difficult. And yet, there are multiple solutions, if only there is a desire to seek them. For instance, consider a twenty-five year moratorium on arms in Kashmir followed by a referendum for a free Kashmir. In the mean time, a UN peace-keeping force can monitor the situation. Perhaps with open borders the Kashmiris will agree to live the way they are today, a part in India and a part in Pakistan. Perhaps they will seek a unification of the severed body and independence. In any case, with open borders like acoss the several countries in EU, it hardly matters how the administration is managed. Living within a 'National' paradgm, this will never make sense. But then how do we counter the jingoism, the 'Kashmir hamara avichhinn ang hai' rant! One way to do that is to demand significantly higher levels of investment in quality education and a far greater emphasis in education on theory of knowledge acquisition, and the ability to distinguish prejudiced beliefs from justified true beliefs. Granted that education per se is no guarantee that jingoism will disappear but education is certainly a requirement. Not sufficient but a necessary condition. Where will the money for such investments come from? There is no alternative to reclaiming what is lost to militarism. An often asked question is 'does China spend any less on military?' No, they spend more, but that is for the Chinese people to fight against. And is there any reason to doubt that there are as many pacifists in China as anywhere else on the planet! Besides, the human development indices for China are more than a few decades away for us to catch up with.

Back to the question of English, I wonder what would be the probability of Babar Ayaz turning up here if his book was written in a Pakistani zubaan? Very little, really. Such is the nature of these fests. Living in times when translations sell in no less numbers than the original, it is a shame that there are so few translations available. Aiyaz Sahib was very happy to learn from me that for more than my life time, transliterated versions in Devnagari of the likes of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Firaq Gorakhpuri have been available for us to read. It was nice to see that in spite of speaking in fluent Hindustani, Gulzar probably drew the largest audience. But then it is not literature alone, but much more the cinema connection that brings people to him.

Shabnam Virmani and her co-performer Vipul of the Kabir project fame ended the festival and that indeed was a gala event. A soulful evening in the open space of that otherwise far from literary Crowne Plaza warmed up the Deccan chill.


Friday 17 May 2013

comment on article on Shahbag


The confusion about left and its position on religious communities aside, what should be clear is that in spite of a clear pro-liberation sentiment in Bengal, the mainstream political parties have passively, if not actively, encouraged the islamists by allowing the anti-Shahbag rallies uncontested. A clear statement from them asserting that democratic, just, trials of war criminals must be pursued and that Shahbag sans the demand for capital punishment, represents a legitimate sentiment, would not have hurt any electoral prospects. In this sense, Biman Bose's pro-Shahbag statement should be welcome. What the general reticence towards speaking against the islamists has done is that it has strengthened both them as well the Hindutwa forces. 

Anyone claiming to have grown up in Bengal for a number of years, getting educated there, and claiming to have not much information or knowledge about the Bangladesh liberation war and the war crimes, is obviously lying. One does not have to accept lies in taking up the cause for the minorities. Such an attitude does more harm to the minorities than good.