I do believe.....

Two events.

2012-01-13T21:22:00.000-08:00

The first was a sit up comedy show 'Make chai not war' by three ABCDs - America born confused Desis at Rabindra Bharati a week ago. Kind of like the Peter Russel show. Lots of laugh but not much substance really. The third guy Usman Azhar had something good to say, specially to the young. He used a traditional eastern metaphor - we are all in cages and we take the cage to be the real thing and forget ourselves. He was good. I was there with friends Giri and Rekha after a hectic drive through the rush traffic. Later, relaxing over dinner at their place, the usual chat and the day ended.

The second was on Sunday at Taramati Baradari - a dance performance by Astad Deboo and his troupe of young boys from the Balak Trust set up my Meera Nair. These boys were runaways from home, picked up by the NGO workers and trained into creative performers, now globe trotters. This was probably the best dance performance I have seen in Hyderabad. The show was called 'Interpreting Tagore' and it was a revised version of what Deboo conceived several years ago and is now performing since Nov 2009. There were four pieces with readings of Tagore poems in translation. Astad himself, now obviously a fairly aged man, danced as the main performer. The dances had nothing to do with Tagore's dance dramas, except the spirit of seeking creative ingenuity in modern forms. Deboo's dances are modern western dances in form with an Eastern flavour. In the piece 'Devi' four masked and blood-red tongued 'Kali's come from the middle of the audience on to the stage and are part of the choreography. The last piece 'awakening' was a Darvesh swirl dance by Astad himself to a Jazz piano recital. Great stuff.

But, of course, twice Astad had to stop the performance becuase of camera flashes. Of course, there was the usual commentaries from behind my seat that began before the show started and never ended. What began as 'see that lady, she is the keep of that man over there' grew into a free interpretation of 'iterpreting Tagore'. The guy next to me was nice enough to have taken seriously my request to not let his camera light bug me. But then could you stop a few citizens of the great Indian civilisation talking on the cell phone in the middle of the performance! How dare you even think of such a thing!

Yet, it was good. I was very happy to have put myself together for a lone scooter ride of about 15 kms each way. Even the ride was worth it - the light chill of breeze blowing by the Deccan rocks of the outer ring road, it felt good.

Modernity, Nation-state and questions from a talk

2011-12-25T04:14:00.000-08:00

Listened to Akeel Bilgrami live for the first time on Friday night.
It was good to listen to a renowned philosopher talking what seemed like my tongue. Formally the talk was on clash of civilizations, but he commented on notions of Nation-state and Nationalism among other things. An interesting point he made is that the modern Nation-state came into being with the ruling classes creating a feeling among populace that included hatred for an enemy within. And to him, Gandhi rejected this kind of Nation building while Savarkar owned it. And in India Savarkar won the battle against Gandhi.
I asked him at the end why Savarkar, the modernist, could not go Lala Hardayal way. Lala Hardayal became a theoretician for the radical inclusive Nationalism. I could have asked him on Subhash also. Subhash took help from the Nazis, but his Nationalism did not require hatred for an enemy within.

Is a pathological situation over and beyond the modernity project not necessary for one to become a Savarkar or a Hitler? After all, modernity has an inbuilt avant-garde-ism as we can see the strongest critique of modernity coming from within modernity, namely by Marx.
European modernity has ways of rectifying its weaknesses, as can be seen in the human rights charters of UN and later of European Union.

The talk made me think a lot about my scattered ideas on Nationalism, on Gandhi and related issues. May be some day I will get enough time to work on these.

The ink spreads

2011-11-21T21:45:00.000-08:00

Ishrat

1
Ishrat!
The arteries of the highway spat fire in early dark morning
What were you up to pagli!

You must have come out
knowing that love will be pouring out there for you
Our hearts, millions of us will be beating for you
you will drown in a flood of love
Go to sleep
Now go to sleep pagli!

2
I wait for the heat to subside
There will come rains
Winds will blow

Fingers will move
My mind will move

I wait
my pain will be inscribed on papers
stories will get written

We will dream
You will live, Ishrat!

The heat works for the Government.

3
Many ways walk together
Ways carry stories
Stories carry miseries
a nervous system of miseries
a milky way of miseries
flowing forever

How do I live with so much pain?
blank sheets flying
the ink spreads
where are the words? Ishrat re!

- translated from original in Hindi

Different youth

2011-11-06T04:21:00.000-08:00

When I was young, we were a angry lot. Nothing different from today really. I see angry youth everywhere. The difference is that living in a campus that provides a highly specialised education to young people of socially privileged background, I mostly see youth angry for reasons different from the ones that youth elsewhere have or the ones that we had to be angry about.

So, do I hear young friends unhappy about not implementing the constitutionally mandatory provisions of opportunities reserved for less privileged - No, not here. Are they unhappy about the gender ratio in the campus that remains skewed forever, nope. Are they concerned that there is no effort in moving towards a fair share of minority population in campus - no Sir! Or that there are majority biased rituals in official functions ignoring others, no. What are they angry about - they are upset that they have been asked to park motor-vehicles 500 m away from their dorms. And these are young people many of who keep dreaming of going to Western countries some day, where parking at large distances away from residential or office quarters is common. To be fair, there are more reasons, but nothing qualitatively different from the parking issue.

Someone posted on the FB a link to a movie on Calcutta (now Kolkata) made by Louis Malle that shows the student movement of 1968. Not that everything the young people wanted then was correctly formulated. Different times, and we who came to college in the seventies were also different. There were few campuses like ours then. Now there are many more accommodating the slightly larger middle class youth compared to then. Today there are young people in many areas of the country talking about real issues confronting this country. Issues like what Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze have indicated in their latest article in the Outlook magazine - a rising India with a proportion of underweight children population like in no other country of the world. There are events bringing young people to streets across the country - academic bigotry of removing reputed works from syllabi like the one by Ramanujan talking of multiple stories of Ramayana removed from postgraduate studies in Delhi university, or ongoing struggle by Irom Sharmila in Manipur against the presence of armed forces in the state and so on.

Well, I live with youth more concerned about things like right to drive bikes without wearing helmet and often on the wrong side of the road. Different youth, definitely.

I remain immature

2011-10-25T06:03:00.000-07:00

Things have changed over the years. Look back, and you see that laws are enacted, structures are designed to protect the less privileged. And yet, I look around and I find the world remains an arena of hostile formations, and most of intellectual wherewithal we keep piling up is directed against the marginalized. It comes in the garb of working for a better future and yet it is pathetically flawed.

How do we decide when to take sides and with whom? With time, as we get better in understanding identities and the politics of identities, we develop a mind engrossed in polemic, a tongue equipped with quick-wit responses and even when parochial to the core, we pretend to be fair and secular.

And no one can beat the proverbial Brahmin in this art of pretense. The parochial mind will argue in its defense that suppressing identities is the worst kind of violence and hence a casteless society is not in the interest of the non-Brahmin castes. As if someone had sought such an advice from the expert. Yes, the fellow traveler is on the wrong side, but you must empathize and find why they are refusing to correct their mistakes. In the mean time, forget all the damage done to you. And the adviser is a rebel, born of higher privileges, but has been through the red flag and what not.

And with the most exclusive social formation deciding on what should be our values, call it human values. How can a group mostly consisting of members from privileged sections claim to know what human values are?

Sometimes I wonder if the idea, the concept, of subaltern is subverted and usurped by the privileged. The approach of the liberal intellectual has somehow always seemed to be one of deception rather than of a purpose that it claims to have. Thirty years ago, with my immature vocabulary, I wrote in anger against the liberals. A friend, a true liberal, read it and with great sympathy praised the article. And today I remain equally immature not finding appropriate words to comprehend the liberals, the revivalists, the identity theoreticians, constituting the privileged. Somehow I feel great comfort in being with the less cultivated.

This should be good.

2011-10-13T09:14:00.000-07:00

Funny, posting a blog after years.
Well, as I mentioned in the previous posts, I have been writing in Hindi with decreasing frequency but more or less regularly. Why I am so unwilling to write in English? Some friends might argue that I write better in English than in Hindi. I mean, I am poor in both, may be marginally better in English than in Hindi.
I guess there is a resentment about English that I carry from my childhood. I, like most lower middle class kids in India, spent half my childhood learning English, a language alien to us all, and yet one that we cannot do anything about - its just there like so many things unfair in this universe. Those who write in English from our generally non-English world are either not part of us or of course, there is a large bunch of idiots, who think they can write in English. What do I mean that some amongst us writing in English are not part of us? Any one who knows anything about languages, knows that every word comes with a world, a world-view, an entire universe of its own. So when you listen to a beautiful ghazal and translate it for an English speaking person, oh man, it just sounds so stupid! So all these guys who are supposed to be great writers are actually part of a world view that cannot be possibly ours. So we have a whole bunch of neoliberal Indians taking over contemporary social sciences, I do not understand how really, but a world full of sense and nonsense, if not entirely bullshit! The other issue is that they are not honest. They should tell the world about the quality of literature that exists in Indian languages, instead they have the attitude that writing in English is what people should pay attention to - the fact is that writing in Indian English is nowhere close to writing in Indian languages in quality. Let us not talk about quantity,
Anyway, today coming back from Necklace road to Lingampally by train, I read a piece by Amitav Ghosh and I kind of got convinced that writing in English may not be that bad after all. Well, I am not that bad really, I have read some Indian English - of course, all that is not Indian I have only read in English. In fact, I have read Amitav Ghosh before, not always greatly satisfying, but I have read it nonetheless. I read two of his novels. Today I read his piece on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and it made a lot of sense to me. Those fateful days I was in Princeton and I remember the hypocrisy and the bigotry I saw in Indian community there, while all the time being worried about what my father would have gone through had he not died nearly a year ago. I remember running, strangely, from one dormitory to other, to see the same sight on TV channels, of a Sikh man being burnt alive by the rioting mobs.
India has not changed much. In fact, the reason I was at Necklace Road today was to participate in a vigil protesting the attack on my friend Prashant Bhushan yesterday by some goons claiming to belong to some outfit called 'Ram Sene'. Some sick individuals, who have no respect for democratic values.
Coming back on the train and reading Amitav Ghosh, prompted me to write this.
Hopefully, I will continue writing in English. Sometimes, it does seem odd that I cannot communicate to those amongst my students, who cannot read Hindi. This should be good.

Pinker and optimism

2007-05-28T09:19:00.000-07:00

Steven Pinker writes in 'The Decline of Violence' in response to the question 'WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT? WHY?'

...the most important and under appreciated trend in the history of our species: the decline of violence. Cruelty as popular entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, genocide for convenience, torture and mutilation as routine forms of punishment, execution for trivial crimes and misdemeanors, assassination as a means of political succession, pogroms as an outlet for frustration, and homicide as the major means of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. Yet today they are statistically rare in the West, less common elsewhere than they used to be, and widely condemned when they do occur.

...as far as I know, every systematic attempt to document the prevalence of violence over centuries and millennia (and, for that matter, the past fifty years), particularly in the West, has shown that the overall trend is downward (though of course with many zigzags). ...

Anyone who doubts this by pointing to residues of force in America (capital punishment in Texas, Abu Ghraib, sex slavery in immigrant groups, and so on) misses two key points. One is that statistically, the prevalence of these practices is almost certainly a tiny fraction of what it was in centuries past. The other is that these practices are, to varying degrees, hidden, illegal, condemned, or at the very least (as in the case of capital punishment) intensely controversial. In the past, they were no big deal. ...

What went right? No one knows, possibly because we have been asking the wrong question—"Why is there war?" instead of “Why is there peace?" There have been some suggestions, all unproven. Perhaps the gradual perfecting of a democratic Leviathan—"a common power to keep [men] in awe"—has removed the incentive to do it to them before they do it to us. Payne suggests that it’s because for many people, life has become longer and less awful—when pain, tragedy, and early death are expected features of one’s own life, one feels fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others. ...

My optimism lies in the hope that the decline of force over the centuries is a real phenomenon, that is the product of systematic forces that will continue to operate, and that we can identify those forces and perhaps concentrate and bottle them. "

Of the few responses posted on the edge.org site, this is one I really liked and at the same time it saddened me for much of the world cannot share this optimism with Pinker. Most people of the world remain deprived of basics in life and for them 'pain, tragedy, and early death are expected features of one’s own life, one feels fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others' holds very true.

more rains.

2007-05-27T11:26:00.000-07:00

rains rains and more rains.
Being inside suffocates me. I come out and breathe in quantites of fresh air, walk a bit and then get tired of the cold.
lonely street.
Right opposite Royal Fort garden. Green leaves.
What a privilege.

Spent a few hours yesterday with a young student from Italy who wants to spend time in India. Young man - listened to him talking continuously, full of dreams.

a privilege

2007-05-19T03:38:00.000-07:00

What do you do when you come from a place that was 42 degrees and land in a country where its rainy and cold. Work, and on the weekend just pray for a better next week. Thanks to remnants of the welfare state I could borrow some videos from the library and watch them in the cosy warmth of my room. In the last two weeks, I watched a Kurosawa – Drunken Angel, the classic Carnes – Les Enphants du Paradis, Caligula (re-viewing after 30 years and unfortunately a sanitizied version), Visconit – Ossessione, and a couple others.

Being alone is a privilege. Less worries for now. The Hindi-Hindu world remains quite disturbing. My Hindi blog mentioning the MSU Baroda incident brought some reactionary comments.

2007-05-07T05:50:00.000-07:00

Yes, finally. A blog in English.
I have been trying desperately to write regularly in Hindi but typing in Hindi is tiresome, I am not really used to it.
This is not my first attempt to write a blog in English. I have tried before, but gave up eventually mostly because I am a bit self conscious about writing in English. I never accepted it as a language native to me. The other reason is that there are few people writing in Indian languages, so it seems important to write in Hindi.

Anyway, this then another beginning.
Interesting that I begin this time after arriving in London - perhaps more because after a long time I have had a day of reprieve. From tomorrow work occupies my mind again.

For now, I just came back from a drizzle on a Southall street. Back from the library declared closed due to the bank holiday.