A Secularist's Rant

And what about us? With all the powers-that-be around us busy getting offended or capitulating to those who did, where do we stand? The fans. The lit lovers. The people who actually took the trouble and made the effort to go all the way to Jaipur to get a chance to meet our idol in person?

Now I'm offended. There! Suck on that! I really wanted to meet Salman Rushdie. I really like his work. Who had the right to stop me from doing that? Let's forget the fabricated death threats connived to keep Rushdie out of the country, the battle over freedom of speech, the offending of the sentiments of random Muslim groups, even the politicization of the whole bloody affair. Let's for a moment, for just a teeny tiny second, focus on ME! The Reader. Because we were the civilians there, caught in the cross-fire. We were the ones who suffered too but were mostly cast aside with the crowd. I wanted to meet an author I have admired for years. I was disappointed because of the entire drama unfolding over these events. And I am angry. May I even go so far as to say, Offended.

With all the fuss being made about religious sentiments being offended, I have to ask: What about the offending of secular or even literary sentiment? Why are these not given equal priority? I feel disappointed, enraged, offended as a reader. Who's answerable to me? The minute you mention a god, what elevates the status of your arguments? Tolerance? Respect? Who the f*** respected MY desire to meet a great writer?!!! Where was the respect for my literary and secular sensibilities?!

I am tempted to imagine what would have happened had Rushdie come quietly into the country. Come like the thousands of human beings travelling to and fro from the country everyday. He didn't need a visa. He didn't need anybody's permission. Perhaps the enraged clerics of the Darul Uloom Deoband would never even have been aware of his visit. Would it have hurt them? Would it have made the Muslims of our country any less Muslim? Would it have posed any threat to the secular fabric of our country if a single man had flown in to Jaipur, attended a literary festival, spoken to a certain gathering of people about (predominantly) LITERARY ISSUES and then flown out? Would it have been so hard? Certain members of the populace might have been made very happy. I, for one, would have realized a life-long dream of being able to meet Mr. Rushdie in person; maybe even get a picture taken with him. The people who claimed offence at his visit would, in all probability not even have KNOWN, much less CARED!!!! Do you see the irony here?

It's not just censorship, it's the frustration. What if I read Salman Rushdie? Even if I read the Satanic Verses (which I have). It didn't change my opinion of Islam or the Prophet. Ask a Muslim person who's read (as in FULLY READ, not just extracted paragraphs taken out of context) the Verses. Seriously, what are you afraid of? A lot of people read Rushdie for PLEASURE!!! Maybe because he writes well! It's not all political spiel and not even intended as such! I feel like hammering such common sense ideas into the heads of ultra-fundamentalist Muslim clerics. Yes, I agree, Muslims have been ill-treated in India. They continue to fare poorly on the socio-economic register. But hopefully it may be realized this wasn't exactly Rushdie's fault! This is not even insecurity or paranoia. It's plain RIDICULUOUS!

I challenge: If even one of the people who protested against Salman Rushdie coming to attend and speak at the Jaipur Literary Festival can logically (not religiously!) explain why he shouldn't have been allowed to do so, I swear I'll retract everything I've just said here.

On Political Awakening in Sheep-Ville

A man holds a country to ransom. And the country cheers him on with ever-increasing enthusiasm. It only happens in India. Or more specifically, in Sheep-ville.

Sheep-ville—the geographical/demographical location in time and space that comes into being when the populace loses the capacity and/or inclination to think for itself and lets itself be swept away on the wave of “popular opinion”. Which, of course, unbeknownst to this populace, is being very carefully and strategically moulded by a section of vested interests.

Recipe for Fascism:

Come to Sheep-ville; take up a sensitive issue; promise a panacea for it; call the hyperactive media for live coverage; prepare rabble-rousing spiel; pull off a few dramatic antics; wait for an impotent government to inevitably panic, and then proceed to lay down your own law. And that too in the world’s largest democracy.

People love a demagogue. But they have lost the love of critical thought. Why bother? It’s only one out of the two that provides the sensationalist entertainment that is the craving of the day. Down the other road lies the effort of deep thought, genuine research into the current issue and the growing fear of the implications of what has been proposed. The chilling realization that an elderly, rather harmless looking man, is actually on his way to creating a system of totalitarian domination. And behind him are a gang of long-standing “social activists” who, perhaps being tired of having championed causes away from the limelight, are waiting for their moment to emerge triumphant and gloating. Like vultures. Finally! But all behind the front of a harmless-looking, elderly man. So who are you going to trust now?

And he comes armed with a weapon of great historical import. Satyagraha; which he has now converted ever so deftly into blackmail. He has targeted a scandal-riddled government, one that has bathed itself multiple times over in public money, but has been ineffective in curbing the inflation of necessaries; one that only on occasion comes out in great fanfare with a welfare scheme, only for it to fall flat on it’s well-intentioned nose; one whose ranks are filled with aging, babbling, impotent leaders or junior league puppets, all of whom regularly fail to inspire a people’s confidence in it’s ability command the complex fields that are national/international politics.

But here’s something that people of Sheep-ville perhaps failed to consider: The impotent and ineffective government that he’s targeting just happens to be representative of them. It just so happens that THIS is the government THEY elected to power TWICE!! The last time being only about 2 years ago!

If B represents A, but C targets B, how is it that C can be said not to be targetting A as well?

It’s a matter of principle. I believe even Gandhi would have agreed.

Another point of beauty about this whole hood-winking scheme is how the bone of contention is hidden in the form of a legal document. A law. Now, in this fair country of ours, ignorance of the law is no defence before a court of law. Yet how many of our fair citizens actually do know the law? Probably not many apart from those who make a living off it. And even that is questionable! Most people go through life on the principles of common sense hoping we don’t put a foot wrong and get hauled up before the intimidating Court because they aren’t going to listen if you tell them you didn’t know. It’s a fairly safe bet that if you brandish a law, people in this town aren’t going to bother reading it.Because the Law is SCARY!!! You can’t understand the Law unless you have a degree that says you can. So the best thing to do, under the circumstances, is to listen to those who claim they can, flash a degree that apparently says they can. Or those whom you trust, i.e. The Media. Another something to chew on: What if these very people depend on YOU for the survival of their interests and so aren’t really going to say much beyond what you want to hear? And what is it that you want to hear? Things you already know. The government is evil! The government is corrupt! The government extorts the taxpayer’s money and leaves them in the lurch anyway! But them? They truly represent YOU! “Civil Society”! Of which you’re a proud member! They have a magic solution! We shall make corruption Vanish! How? By creating an institution with the power to control the government! But wasn’t this the government elected by the people to represent them? Nonsense! WE represent you now! And ONLY WE have the power to make your lives better! And what’s the guarantee they won’t turn out to be as irresponsible as the government itself? ENRRRR! Wrong question. Therefore, no answer.

The people of Sheep-ville are the eternal victims. It’s quite tragic actually. In chunauti, it’s always a choice between the devil and the deep sea. Nobody ever really represents them. Everyone is a slave to their own vested interests. You’d have thought they’d have learnt to treat such claims with the adequate amount of scepticism by now. But hope springs eternal. Always on the lookout for the next superhero. But every superhero must have power. And power corrupts. Ergo. Logic is mathematical, however, emotion is not.

And so we return to our original scene. A man holds a democracy to ransom. A democracy which will not realize what it’s lost until it is suffering the consequences of the fine print it failed to read... Oops.

God bless Sheep-ville.

TINA

Dear TINA,

You have left me with no alternative (if you'll pardon the puns), except this feeling of helplessness. All we could do was watch whatever was handed out to us. Cynicism had led us to curse you, dear TINA, you who has been there for the past thirty years, right alongside the Left Front government, their bosom pal, whom they strove to preserve. We never realized your presence when we were growing up. Not that we registered any political presence at that time to speak of. But now that we have seen what you imply, our frustration is growing. What do we do? Your presence so effectively erases the ultimate solution a democracy has to its problems. But then again, it seems we have slipped from our position as a democracy. In that case, TINA, your presence has been justified and we were fools not to recognize the threat you pose now, earlier. 

Hope had been lost when we first recognized your face for an inevitability, TINA. But hope is now returning. There are other ways other than the obvious way. We shall find them. For now the time has finally come when people have been too deeply betrayted to be comforted by their apathy anymore and they have thrown down their blankets of endless, cynical, hedging talk and decided enough is enough. Anger is pure and primal. And for us, it spells the re-incarnation of hope. Even in your face, oh TINA.  We don't need the paltry excuses for opposition that you give us to chew on. As far as we are concerned, we are the only opposition this government truly has to fear. There are intelligent courses of action, and we shall take them now. No escapist withdrawal into the arms of polite debate or the mindless tantrum of a bandh shall suffice, for we chafe for action. Your lover has spilt blood on the ground, TINA, and we have smelt it. 

Your love affair is over, TINA and the Left Front. There is a force called civil society which you never had to encounter before, but which has mustered its forces now. And yes, there is a force behind the talk, or atleast, there is a force NOW. And NOW is what matters, is it not TINA? For in anywhen, in any now, you can be deposed. And we are about to make sure that happens......somehow.

TINA, TINA, you bitch, I'm through. 

Another childhood idyll falls

This time it was the old favourite storybook series: Malory Towers. 

There had been a time, when I was twelve years old (i.e., not too young!) when I had had a heated debate with a literary critic about why she considered Enid Blyton politically incorrect, why she said women were misrepresented in her stories, because at that time, I still would not have taken a word against the author I had spent my childhood with. This time, as I read, I watched in mental horror as I myself critiqued her rigid sensibilities. Malory Towers, a haven to which all us youngsters had once wished and wished our parents would send us to, slowly dissolved in my opinion as a haven and became a structured prison! 

Not only is xenophobia more than painfully apparent in the characters of the two Mam'zelles, Dupont and Rougier, one being stringent and an ultra-prude while the other is gormless, but the conventionality and strict codes of conformation struck me as being even more painful! The girls themselves are snobbish, heirarchized and extremely exclusivist. For the first time in my life, I actually sympathized with Gwendolen Mary!! 

There seems to be a central core of exemplars in Darrell, Sally and Alicia. They decide who gets to fit in or not. Anyone who is different, is put down in a list for rectification. As if difference is necessarily a flaw! The talented girls all have weird quirks. Belinda and Irene, talented in art and music respectively, are scatterbrained, and often make fools out of themselves. Alicia, who was a little on the wild side, becomes acceptable in the later books, only after she has been tamed to the norms. Her wildness is only allowed to express itself in harmless tricks and jokes. The potential for her to become subversive is clipped, even before it has a chance to assert itself! Mavis, a girl who had an enchanting voice, was flawed with the sin of pride. Once she has been taught her place, she is willingly accepted, but her place is apparently well behind those of the main trio. Bill, a girl who loves horses, has her feminity disregarded. Since she is a good rider, obsessed with horses, comes from a family of 7 brothers, she is branded the archetypal tomboy without ever getting a say in the matter!  She isn't ever given a chance to grow into the woman she will eventually become, no space to discover her own identity for herself. In the fourth book, she is given a friend in the form of a girl named Clarissa, who, on account of becoming friends with the much marginalized Bill, is from the next book onwards, similarly side-tracked. Identity is a big problem in Blyton's school stories. All the girls seem to be bred towards a similar purpose. All the girls are white, and Christian. No representation of diversity. If one cannot fit in, one's edges MUST be trimmed until she can be forcefully made to fit inside a singular mould. The fact that in school, one makes choices regarding the sort of person she wishes to become doesn't appear of consequence to Blyton. In this respect, I believe she misses out on the point of school altogether! By the end, one gets bored. Through 7 years of school, all their education has done is to negate all notions and values of individuality. There is strength in community, not in singular purpose. The women are always denied the opportunity to assert their individual wills or personalities. Even academic excellence is not given precedent over social viability!

Gwen, according to me, is the most rebellious figure. In her continuous unwillingness to conform to the desired norms of womanhood and responsibility, no matter how negatively Blyton paints her, she stands out as the sole opposition to established authority. Because of this, I keep on cheering for her now! That there can be alternative human beings to Darrell Rivers can only be seen through Gwen!

People like my parents keep on stressing how evergreen a writer Enid Blyton was. In my opinion, creating a false idyll for children is ultimately disappointing. I don't know how I would have reacted to a socially conscious narrative between the ages of 5-12. In my currently enlightened state, I would like to believe socio-political awareness should start as early and as naturally as possible. But perhaps I would also be doing Enid Blyton wrong if I didn't consider her environment. Her era's prejudices seem extraordinarily blatant to us now, but maybe our own will seem just as blatant in times to come.

Schindler's List

Forgive the blasphemy, but just a coupla weeks back, I saw Steven Spielberg's classic, "Schindler's List" for the very first time. But in seeing it at this age and in my current circumstances, I think I pretty darn well ruined the film for myself.

Let me explain:

I don't know if it's plain some kinda immunization to death and destruction and mass murder or what, but for the first time, I felt a total lack of sympathy for the suffering of the hundreds of Jews. And as I realized this lack of sympathy, I simultaneously felt a sense of shock at myself. Spielberg's film is obviously meant to make the audience witness the horror of the death camps, the unthinking cruelty of the Germans, and against this backdrop, the charity of Schindler, who, as a businessman, is only capable of buying the Jews in order to keep them alive.

Well, in my opinion, all this highlighting of the suffering of the Jews is very fine and dandy, but was this any justification for what the Jews themselves have perpetrated in later years?? I am referring here to the seemingly unending conflict in Israel-Palestine. I felt a sense of anger in watching the film. The Jews themselves have spilt so much Arab blood, was that some sort of revenging themselves because of the massacres of the Jews down the ages? Having, as a community, faced so much violence, one would think they would be the first to want to avoid any more warfare in the name of faith, community, ethnicity, whatever.

I was talking about these conflicting emotions to some friends of mine later, and they also mentioned something very interesting. In the west, there is some kind of belief that this has been only genocide in world history. The suffering of the Jews has been glorified so much and the Holocaust heroicised(what's the right word here??!!!). What about all the other ethnic cleansings, genocides, mass murders in so many other nations world over since time immemorial?? Many of which western powers have themselves perpetrated or sponsored.

My parents,while watching this film, kept on going "tch tch, eeesh" and constantly shuddering during scenes of brutality. They kept on re-iterating what a cinematic classic this was. All this time, I felt infuriated, helpless and more and more angry. I couldn't divorce the Holocaust from my own experiences of history. I mean,since I was born, Israel-Palestine has always been a zone of seemingly perpetual conflict. And I am now twenty. The Gulf is still uneasy. I'm sure one cannot blame the entire Jewish community for the Israel-Palestine situation, but isn't the western world demonizing the entire Muslim and Asian community because of terrorism??

At the end of "Schindler's List", I got up feeling extremely disgusted and nauseous and realized I had probably ruined my reception of the film. But I couldn't help it! What are you supposed to feel at the end of a battle of such conflicting emotions? How do you react to the murder of a community which you know will turn out to be cruel, heartless warmongers themselves?!!! For the first time in my life, I didn't know what to feel.

A Little Matter

There are many little things we can do to save the Earth. Here's a reflection on saving paper that occurred to me in an auto today.

My parents are academicians. There are lots of empty notebooks lying around in the house courtesy the conferences they have to attend. I have always tried to use them as an alternative to buying new notebooks for college. It's a great way of saving paper. But this is only in college. Think about school.

In school, we used to have prescribed khatas which were the only brand we could use. These khatas generally used virgin paper, and a lot of it at that! (does anyone remember metropolitan khatas?). We could never use any other form or brand of notebooks. Isn't this a colossal waste? There are quite a few notebook brands available nowadays that make the khatas out of recycled paper. Or even for kids in situations like mine, who already have tons of khatas lying unused around the house; wouldn't it be great if they were encouraged to use the resources they have instead of using up additional unnecessary resources? And in school we needed a LOT of paper!! And then there were tuitions. I mean, a khata is a khata. Does it really matter what brand or colour it is? These are one of those unnecessarily trivial and useless rules schools still steadfastly adhere to. Instead of incorporating subjects like EVS to spread the message of conservation, teaching kids little conservation tactics like these, I think, would work better.

Ribbons of the World Untie!!

I have lots of ribbons.
Red- In support of people with HIV/AIDS and also in support of the spread of correct information regarding HIV/AIDS

Purple- Against Child Sexual Abuse

Blue- To Save our Planet

White- For World Peace

Black- Against Racial Discrimination.

I could have lots more ribbons for all the evils in the world today, if there are enough colours to go around.
What a lot of problems we have in our world.

Baby Booze

A/N: The following is not meant to be read by anyone who knows my parents!

It's all very fine to make a classy face,

And claim that you know wine,

But you're going to botch,

Tasting Scotch,

Unless you make yourself supine.

Distraction never caused no harm,

To the appreciation of the beery barm,

And many a tale,

Will go well with ale,

But Whisky, would lose it's charm!

When you're well fed,

Wash it down with mulled mead;

Or with a quart

Of the finest old port,

But take Whisky alone instead.

The old vodka and ginny,

Might make excellent Martinis,

And brandy go well with cake,

But I'll insist to a fault,

With good single malt,

You can never make a mistake!

A pirate and his rum

Are faithful old chums,

But Whisky makes a finicky choice.

Only those who have class,

And a tall soda glass,

Are privileged to hear it's voice!

Don't drink in a crowd, when you're down and depressed,

Whisky's to be had when you're free of all stress!

'Coz when things look bleak,

That you won't last the week,

The old booze'll just worsen your mess.

Mix it with soda, or put it on ice

Whisky is not your everyday vice!

Nor meant for macho swiggin'!

Sit back, if you please,

Be perfectly at ease,

Until you're ready to begin.

Croon to your liquor, as if to a lover,

Come to a deep understanding.

Then go for the dip,

And take the first sip,

Than wait!...don't be demanding!

Burning, burning, wait for the fire,

Of this celestial brew,

It'll singe your throat with an acrid warmth,

Once that first mouthful is through.

Go ahead, get drunk if you want,

I'll admit it's hard to resist.

Speaking for myself, I'm far more pleasant,

When I'm perfectly pissed!

Mind you! I'm no dipso! I'm just appreciating,

An example of manufactured art,

Besides, Scotch is best when had with discretion,

I've maintained that right from the start!!

So let's raise a toast,

And ardently propose,

This the finest of blends.

With a "Weis Heil!" then a "Hic!..."

Next morning you'll be sick,

But believe it was worth it in the end!

High in the hills,

Where the amber distills,

Closer to the heavenly guys.

If they take an afternoon off,

And nip down for a quaff,

I wouldn't be at all surprised.