The Unknown Known or Bringing the Poles Apart

In 2002 Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush Jr. era US Secretary of Defence, in a Defence Department briefing brought, to borrow a Bushism, "brought the poles apart". He juxtaposed the "Known" with the "Unknown" to explain his engagement strategy in Iraq. While some supporters of Rumsfeld justified it is a brilliant distillation of a complex issue, to most others it was a distillation of the simple truth into a clumsy lie. As is clear from the accompanying Known-Unknown matrix, as rather clumsily drawn by me, it is clear that I am no admirer of the man (what makes the use of this device by Rumsfeld more egregious is that he borrowed it from the phrase "the unknown unknown" first used by Keats, the Great Romantic poet).
Strangely Rumsfeld in his exposition of the known and the unknown left out the fourth quadrant - Unknown Known. Could it be that the man could not count the number of quadrants in a 2x2 matrix? Unsurprising as that would be, it is more likely that his subconscious prodded him not to go there. His subconscious must have known what was unknown to him. That he was defending the indefensible. The Known Unknown, so to speak.
Beyond the ridiculousness of Rumsfeld, the Unknown Known, to my mind, is a sublime distillation of a core assertion of the Vedas: "Everyone of us knows everything there is to be known". In essence we know but the veils of the world makes self-knowledge the "unknown known".
"Bringing the poles apart" or splitting opposites into a self-referential is a nice way to reflect on dualities. Good and bad, Ugly and and Beautiful. Big and Small. For example the Small Big Man is the puffed up ego and meanness of the big I while the Big Small Man is the endearing humility and generosity of the small i.

               
    PS: Unlike Rumsfeld who publicly claimed that he does not read his own memos (in response to a question about the infamous one he wrote about torture of war prisoners) I do read my own posts. After reading this one I decide to google "Unknown Known" and was pleasantly surprised to find that a well-known documentary filmmaker, Errol Morris, has mad a documentary on Rumsfeld which is slated for release on April 2nd this year. Guess what he has chosen to call the documentary? Yes - "The Unknown Known"!. Errol's interview with Los Angeles Times about his encounters with Rumsfeld makes delightful reading. That is if you, like me, are an unfan fan of Rumsfield.         

Fear

I had a colleague, during one of my many corporate stints (all of them all too brief, I am afraid, so to speak), whose favourite opening gambit while delivering his considered view was " My fear is....".The guy, despite being highly intelligent, very hard working and being a loyal soldier, has had one of those "thus far and no further' kind of careers.

Is fear something to be afraid of? Far from it. I once worked in a factory that had hired a Japanese quality control consultant. He told me a fundamental principle of the famed Japanese approach to quality. "Think of every defect as a gem because it is  a precious opportunity in the quest for the perfect" he said.

Fear is also an opportunity provided, of course, you are not afraid of it!

My colleague who was afraid all the time - afraid that an idea was too radical, afraid that the client would reject the plan, afraid, afraid afraid - stopped at being afraid instead of seizing each moment when his sphincter muscle tightened as a moment of incipient insight and competitive advantage.

When TS Elliot wrote in his poem "The Waste Land" about showing "fear in a handful of dust" he was implying that fear is a chimera beyond which lies the truth. It is quite revealing that the quatrain that follows this assertion is among the most beautiful and lyrical that Elliot has written:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,	20
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,	25
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.	30
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;	35
They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,	40
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Öd’ und leer das Meer.

From the sublime heights of Elliot let me climb down to earth. "Dar Ke Aage Jeet Ha" (beyond fear is opportunity). Gulp! Because as this intrepid copywriter implied, fear can be conquered as long as you had this variety of fizzy drink at hand. Obviously the man (or was it a woman?) did not fear reducing the sublime to the trite. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolfe? Who indeed?

  

                

Summer, Elections and Holi

As I laze around this Sunday morning, summer, elections and Holi are in the air. The early smells of summer give me two things. A bout of hay fever and a sense of possibilities. The hay fever is to do with a strain of pollen that summer releases in the air and the sense of possibility has its origin from those days from my childhood and youth when exams got over and the summer holidays stretched out before carrying a promise of renewal.
The lazy discovery of the new you in cousins you met after a gap of years and the revisiting of favourite books, music and haunts. There was also of course the allure of the completely new. The mysterious new girl who moved into the neighbourhood. The pile of new books in my father's study. The promise of a holiday to a new place.
These days the sense of possibilities I feel is part nostalgia, part the vicarious sensing of the onset of joy I can sense in the kids and the teenagers I run into and part the promise of renewal that awaits me only if I can let go my prejudices, regrets and resentments just as a child drops all the tensions and disappointments of the school year and leaps into the delights of summer holidays.
 For us adults, given the much greater freedom and control we have over our own lives, every new day should be a joyous leap into the delights of renewal and newness. At least that is the wistful promise that the onset of summer makes to me these days, soon to be forgotten in the endless remembering of the past that adulthood seems to be.
Elections are neigh. Checked the electoral rolls online and both Jyoti and I found our names missing. Spent a weekend filling in a spiffy form online and then standing in meatspace queues to re-submit it to clueless clerks in a musty tehsildar office.
 Once again the promise of the young and modern belied and denied by the drag of the old and rusted. Very much like the larger picture this election presents. Will another election go by where nothing much will change. Will the promise of a PM who is his own man and not a 'durbari' (courtier) and of an opposition that is an activist watchdog instead of being Delhi mandarins sniffing around the corridors of power and Parliament, be once again denied. Will the strongman is found to have feet of clay and the activists loses steam and sink into effete "chotta-peg jholawallah" and/or "drawing room socialists" existence?
 I am filled with a looming sense of disquiet when I have a feeling in the gut that it could very well happen. Think of it. Of every rupee we earn the Government claims 60 paise in the form of income tax, service tax, sales tax and excise duty. In fact the poorer you are the greater is the share of your income that the Govt. claims in terms of indirect taxes.
 So why do we the people make such bad choices when it comes to choosing who gets to spend the major part of our income? Or more realistically why do we have such only poor choices to begin with? Is it a collective failure of the imagination or just the same lethargy that persuades many of us to let our bodies run to seed. Baffling.
 Holi is the festival that signifies the conquering of the evil within us by the good that is us. For me Holi is not the rather raucous party where grown-ups give themselves the license to act as juveniles and the real juveniles, secretly peeved, try hard to out do the pretenders in bad behaviour.
The quintessential Holi moment for me is in the evening before when families and neighbours build a bonfire and gather around it to watch good triumph, once again, over evil. In a past Holi this moment inspired me to write a few lines of poesy which I posted on this blog.
 I revisit them in this post today in anticipation of this evening's bonfire.

Bonfire of the Vanities
I have smiled at shallow triumphs
 And long mourned the loss of what I did not own
I have dwelt long in the shadow of my desires
 I have constructed an ego built of my senses
 And with foolish bravado fought the chimera of misery
 I have looked for God in vain meditations
 And reserved action for the pursuit of Mammon
 I have sought love in the cravings of flesh
 When love was within and all around manifest
 I have played to weakness when strength beckoned
 And belittled myself to myself/
 Enough say I, enough this night
 This Holi night, as I go back millennia
 People hunched around an ancient hearth
 A primeval force, pure and cleansing
This bonfire of the vanities

The Duality of the Trinity

If in the beginning was the word, the number must not have been far behind. And it would stand to reason that this primordial number was one. Wouldn't it?

But it seems that schizophrenia was not far behind. The world split into, at least, three dimensions. And until the physicists find a way for us to visit those other dimensions that they posit exist, we are all stuck with three. So is the number three the primordial number? The "Om" of numbers, so to speak?

But it seems it has competition. Two. At the foundation of human thought is "presence" and "absence". Yes and no. Black and white. Male and female. Off and on. Anything in between the two poles of human thought falls between two stools into the grey goo. The good, bad and the ugly - Hollywood wisdom at it's pithy best.

So shall we dethrone the trinity and ensconce duality?

Or shall we while acknowledging the primacy of two in human thought, assert the primacy of the number three on the higher plane of human spirituality and philosophy.

Why not just abandon the dialectic, lean back, put on our 3D spectacles and meditate on the fact that two and three are actually commutable?

Working Hard. Regardless.

Young men work hard driven by ambition and lust for power and money. Older men rarely work hard and the reasons could be many. Satiation. Fatigue.

And rarely an angle of repose.

This weekend I found myself working very hard over the weekend on a proposal that has to be submitted tomorrow. We have, I think, created a work of high quality but not for one moment, while doing so, did the thought of success drive me.

In fact I am not quite sure the decision makers will even read our proposal fully. Very often we forget that when a society falls into the corruption trap it is not only through illegal transactions but through the devaluation of merit and the promotion of the lowest common denominator.

Be that as may be I enjoyed this stint of hard work much more than any of the many slogs I put in the grip of feverish dreams of success. Bhagwat Gita's advice to seek only hard work and not it's fruit would have perhaps found more adherence if it had equally forcefully stated that it is the only kind of hard work anyone would enjoy.

Thought I will put down these few words (fulfilling my promise of a post every Sunday) before I turn in a for a hard day's night.