Wanted: A New Idea of India

 I am aware that hundreds, if not thousands, of my betters - philosophers, public intellectuals and general blowhards - have said volumes on "The Idea of India". However, as an ordinary Indian, in this 75th year of our independence, I feel encouraged to add my two bit. 

Imagination and ideas are central to human society. Humanity has progressed from being bands of powerless apes in the animal world to unchallenged rulers of all that survey mainly because of its unique ability to co-operate flexibly as groups of thousands, millions and even hundreds of millions.

This ability of humans to launch and sustain world-changing projects stems from a core human functionality - the ability to imagine an entity - an idea - that is little to do with physical reality and nurture and strengthen it as an integral part of the collective consciousness.

In this realm of core ideas that drive human civilization are the notions of God, Religion, Nation and Money.

At the subsequent level, every nation is bound together by an idea. 

The US, for example, achieved greatness based on its self-image of rugged individualism and meritocracy framed in a federal democracy. An idea that attracted the best worldwide, priming a virtuous cycle.

However, over the last decade or two, this idea of the US has begun to fade, resulting in a decline from being the world's hyper-economic, military and cultural power. 

The US needs to reinvent itself, and at the core of this reinvention will be forming a new idea that redefines its self-image.

Thus the defining idea, while being the engine that drives its society and its place in the world, cannot be static - it has to evolve with time.

Currently, politics mire the debate on the idea of India. At one end of the spectrum is the idea of India forged in the Independence struggle, Gandhian ideals and the trauma of the partition. An idea of India as a unique society that values pacifism and eschews materialism and consumerism. A simple living and high thinking paradigm contrast the West's power-seeking "greed is good" paradigm.

The idea of India as an ancient civilization is at the opposite end of the spectrum. Once a superpower that went through a passing phase of subjugation. Now beginning the reemerge as a powerful and rightful leader of the world.

To my mind, both the above ideas are anachronistic in that both are rooted in the past. Because, to young India, in a world of rapid change, even the past decade, let alone the past century or past millenniums are irrelevant.

India as a society needs to evolve and nurture an idea of itself that can power its future. 

This idea needs to be rooted in its potential, not its past. 

At the same time, this idea needs to be rooted in reality and not just a rhetorical shift from extolling a glorious future instead of a glorious past.

Furthermore, this idea should position India uniquely and not just as a me-too in the polity of nations. 

A nation of 1.3 billion people - nearly 18% of the world population- cannot but have an idea of its future without evoking world leadership in some area of human endeavour. We cannot be a nation perennially looking to catch up with others, 

India is a young country with a median age of 28.43 in 2020. However, the media age is growing at an annual rate of 2.15%; thus, by 2040, the median age will be above 40. 

It is today's young who should define the new idea of India. Therefore, this new idea of India has to be aspirational - an aspiration of leading the world in a focused set of essential areas.

Given the structure of the modern world, this shortlist of essential areas must come from the domains of science & technology or public welfare (health, education and social justice).

To my mind, global leadership in a chosen set of critical science & technology fields can yield the resources that, if appropriately husbanded, can impact public welfare.

However, a Government committee or even a set of bigwigs will not choose this new idea for India.

The new idea of India will need to bubble up from the grassroots and percolate through Indian society before it takes hold. But, for that to happen, the nature of public discourse and debate must change.

Today's public discourse in India is both toxic and petty. The politicians bicker, and the media megaphones the bickering. 

I believe that a handful of charismatic and articulate young Indians aided by a set of powerful mass and digital media can seed a new idea that galvanizes India. But unfortunately, these seeders cannot come from the political class though they would readily find the media platforms. That well is too poisoned. Political voices today start from a heavy trust deficit and are guaranteed vocal opposition from the get-go.

Perhaps somebody needs to "seed" the seeders, a "Star Chamber" of well-resourced well-wishers who will carefully identify them and give them the media platforms. 

To sum up, a debate around the idea of India cannot assume that it is an idée fixe. 

An idea of India should be the roadmap to the future and not just a relic of the past. 

A bunch of public intellectuals (let alone politicians) cannot decide on the idea of India. Instead, it is a powerful, evolving emanation from the grassroots that animates the entire society.

Moreover, such an animating idea of India is not just a nice thing to have but instead a critical ingredient for a vibrant, on-the-move nation. And the only role for the elite and the powerful is to provide the ecosystem to empower such emergence and get out of the way.

Conscience and Consciousness

 Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 's definition of Conscience:

1) the part of your mind that tells you whether your actions are right or wrong 

• To have a clear/guilty Conscience (= to feel that you have done right/wrong)
• This is a matter of individual Conscience (= everyone must make their own judgment about it)
• He won't let it trouble his Conscience.

2) a guilty feeling about something you have done or failed to do

• She was seized by a sudden pang of Conscience.
• I have a terrible Conscience about it.

3) the fact of behaving in a way that you feel is right even though this may cause problems

• freedom of Conscience (= the freedom to do what you believe to be right)
• Emilia is the voice of Conscience in the play.

OED's definition of Consciousness

1) the state of being able to use your senses and mental powers to understand what is happening

• I can't remember anymore—I must have lost Consciousness.
• She did not regain Consciousness and died the next day.

2) the state of being aware of something

• Synonym awareness
• his Consciousness of the challenge facing him
• class-consciousness (= Consciousness of different classes in society)

3) the ideas and opinions of a person or group

• her newly developed political Consciousness
• issues affecting the popular Consciousness of the time

While OED does its lexigraphic job well, to my mind, the difference between the two words - Conscience and Consciousness - goes much deeper. 

Conscience is the result of the inventions of God, sin, heaven and hell.

Philosophers of the Kantian school elevated Conscience beyond the myth/s of God/s to the plane of ethics and evolution. Thus, in the realm of philosophy, Conscience is the touchstone that enables us, humans, to strive to be good and evolve.

On the other hand, Consciousness transcends the realm of concepts, an undeniable part of reality that today is at the frontiers of modern philosophy and science.

It is undeniable that a baby is born with Consciousness but does it have a conscience? Is Conscience a result of nurture leading thus to the conclusion that good and evil are relative concepts and not absolutes? 

The major religions of the book - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - strive to develop in their followers a conscience structured around a monotheistic God and concepts of good and evil, sin, heaven and hell.

In contrast, the so-called pagan religions - from the early Roman, Greek and Nordic civilizations -built around elaborate myths of a pantheon of Godly beings engaged in a larger-than-life never-ending play of Consciousness. As a result, Conscience and its commandments on good or evil, sin and the admission rules to heaven and hell were absent. 

As practised today by hundreds of millions, Hinduism also has a rich panoply of divine beings. The difference is that the pagan religions of the early Roman, Greek and Nordic civilizations have faded away, while Hinduism still stands as one of the world's major religions. It is so because Hinduism is probably unique in having two distinct but connected modes. Quite aside from the colourful pageantry of the three million or so Gods stands the magnificence of the Vedas. At their essence, in their Shruti stream, the Vedas elevate every individual Consciousness to Godhead: a canonical assertion that consists of revelation and unquestionable, unchanging truth. On the other hand, with its notion of good and evil and social mores, Conscience is presented in its Smriti stream as supplemental and changeable with the times. 

It seems to be an inversion of what the texts of other major religions do. 

The holy grail that many socio-political commentators pursue is to pin down the idea of modern India. Instead, I think they would do well to examine the duality that allows Indians to practice personal spirituality that hankers after eternal truths while living in a social and public space that teems with self-serving strife and endless chaos. 

India is a two-sided coin - its Consciousness on one side forever separate from the other - its Conscience. The difference is that in other great civilizations, the coin has melted, and the two sides have leached into one other.

A Letter from Mother Earth

Dear Humans,

Nature is both generous and cruel.

I should know. 

I have endured a fiery birth and aeons of barren solitude.

I have had fecund periods when my lands and seas have teemed with the joy of life. 

I have a deep attachment to the life I nurture, but I know that I will outlive all the species that are born to me.

Better-equipped ones will supplant some. Others will go extinct as catastrophe strikes. I had a particular attachment to the dinosaurs but could only watch mutely as the meteor hit.

I am deeply attached to you too. I love your ingenuity and your boundless imagination.

You have invented civilization, language, art, science and even God! Your possibilities are immense. You dream of being immortal as a race even as you steadily increase the span of each individual life.

However, going by experience, I would be sceptical of your species achieving immortality as long as I am your only home. Sooner or later, disaster will strike, and this home will no longer be yours. So your only shot at immortality is if you become a space-faring race and make multiple planets across the galaxy your home. And if you exist long enough here, you have the potential to do so.

I write to you to express dismay at what you have done over the past 150 years or so. I have had countless species come and go, but none have committed suicide. But to my dismay, you are pretty close to doing so. 

In polluting my air, soil and water at a reckless pace, you are not harming me but yourselves. I measure time in terms of epochs, and the change you have wrought on my body is but a passing sickness. But, on the other hand, you measure time in decades and centuries, and if you don't wake up soon, your time with me is measured.

You have realized the danger, but you are yet to wake up to it as a species. As a result, for all your intelligence, or perhaps because of it, you have a remarkable capacity to delude yourself.

Your scientists have built careers theorizing about climate change. Your engineers have come up with solutions in the realm of fantasy. Your politicians regularly hold talkfests.

But life goes on as usual. For all the talk about mitigation and adoption, little has changed. You act as if you are the only species to inhabit me.No thought for the countless others who do you no harm. No consideration even for your future generations. Your species still consumes like there is no tomorrow. And soon enough, if you continue to do so, there will be none.

You do not have the time to develop remarkable new technologies to ward off the impending disaster. You have no time to become a space-faring species.

You can do all that in the future if you act now with what you have in hand. Starting now, your lifestyles and the organization of your societies will need a paradigmatic change. The more developed a nation and culture, the greater the change and deeper the pain it will experience. That goes against the grain of the realpolitik of your civilization, but you have no choice.

I write to you because I love you and see the potential in you to be the enduring symbol of my fecundity and my ambassadors to the universe at large. If you will yourself to extinction, I will be very disappointed. However, my disappointment will fade as my world goes on, and you become only a distant memory. However, I would rather that I become a distant memory with your species than your species become a distant memory with me. You can do that. You need only to give yourself enough time.

Love

Mother Earth.

The 3 Types of 4K Lives

Through ten years of being a blogger searching for an audience, I have discovered that if the objective is to get significant readers on platforms like Medium, what works are listicles as clickbait and not my usual attempts. Attempts that are prone to be classified as stabs at reflective writing that usually turns, in the words of a wise friend, "somewhat digressive".

To my mind, however, when it comes to worthwhile writing that creates a body of durable work, listicles might as well rhyme with "pesticles" - a portmanteau of a word signifying a pair of phantom testicles with a pesky itch that never quits.

But then the consumer is king, and I have decided, for just this once, to give it a go, and so here is my attempt at what may be called a listicle.

Everyone wants a 4K TV but do they realize that they, most likely, already have a 4K life? The issue is that they may have a different class of 4K life than the boss in the corner office. A difference akin to that between a 4k cheap, Chinese-branded dumb 4K TV to an Android-driven, shiny new, no-bezel, smart 4K Sony (which, by the way, is also China made but certainly not cheap).

After some research (mainly asking myself probing questions while scratching my "pesticles"), I uncovered 3 types of 4K lives in India. There are many more, of course: some global and some specific to a particular society. I look forward to them being discovered by the countless many who this post will undoubtedly inspire.

Unlike Ekta Kapoor, who misused the letter K for little rhyme or reason, you will discover that my use of the letter, in the subsequent paragraph, is more than justified. Arre bhai, I am writing about 4K lives, am I not? 

So here goes.

The Kitsch Klass: Klout, Korruption and Kink

These are the maharajas of excess and bad taste. Their hunting grounds are mainly the worlds of politics and business. They live in expensive monstrosities that can floor you with their ugliness. They gild their interiors and exteriors to hide the rot beneath. And their inferiority complex runs deep, and as it percolates upwards, it becomes a strut of crass behaviour and kooky escapades.

The Khattering Klass: Kocktails, Klub and Kulture

These are representatives of the timeless epithet coined by Spirow Agnew, the much-maligned VP of the equally maligned Richard Nixon: "the nattering nabobs of negativity." In India, while they live off the fat of the land, they let no opportunity to reveal immense dissatisfaction with the state of affairs. They are the self-appointed custodians of the idea of India but ask them to pray, define the concept into words, and all they can do is mumble into their whiskey. A worthy from the current ruling class, who shall remain unidentified, identified them with the venerable watering-hole in Delhi - the Khan Market. That, sir, is a naturally occurring "K" - quite satisfying, I must say. Will the psychosis that this Klass currently suffer be coming to an end once the current dispensation bites, which sooner or later it must, the dust (in other words, mere desh ki mitti.)? Unlikely I would say. They would just go back to cribbing about the heat and, yes, the dust.

The Kommon Klass: Krumpled, Konked and Konfused

What can one say about this class? It is challenging to be flippant about them. They are by far the majority and live lives of deprivations. While the strong arm of the state-controlled by the other classes keeps them in check, they also carry part of the blame for perpetuating the status quo. Many confuse karmic law as a call to inaction and acceptance of fate, while in essence, it is the very opposite. Others fall prey form cultural and religious tribalism, fuelled by vested interests, that blame their conditions on the "other" - the other religion, the other caste, the other nationality, the other kind of skin. It is hard to be flippant about them because they put on no airs. They are a force of nature made prisoner by the pretensions of the more affluent, more powerful classes.

So there! My first attempt at a clickbait! Let's see how many bite.

I do realize though that I did regress back to the mean in the last paragraph. Just like the dog's tail, straight under constraint but finally bent and wagging!

Remembering My Very Own 9/11

 I was in New York that fateful morning. A callow 45-year-old flush with the success of a mid-size five-year-old advertising agency, investing in our very own dot-com at what turned out to be the fag-end of the dot-com boom. It was an e-learning start-up, twenty years ahead of the Byju's of the world. We were in New York as the first leg of a coast-to-coast tour to potential customers of the e-learning engine we had developed. I was also looking forward to exploring tie-ups with a couple of Madison Avenue ad agencies whose bosses I knew. The founder of the e-learning set-up and I were staying in an upper Westside apartment of an excitable Bengali-American investor banker. The e-learning company contracted the banker and two other US-based Indians - a lawyer and a Silicon Valley techie - as business development partners for the US market.

The previous day, we met with a couple of dot-coms as potential white-label customers. Then, on the 12th, we met in Boston with the professor in charge of e-learning initiatives at Harvard. 

I had scheduled a breakfast meeting with one of the two advertising agency bosses on the morning of the 11th. 

The office was a few miles uptown from the World Trade Center. A half-hour or so into the meeting, Charlie's secretary interrupted the meeting, saying Charlie's daughter was on the line saying it was an emergency - a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers. Charlie didn't seem very perturbed. He told the secretary he would return his daughter's call later. Charlie explained to me that a mini plane had crashed into the tower piloted by a novice who probably had got his license due to connections a few years ago. He lamented America's rich-can-get-away-wth-anything culture and feared, being a staunch Democrat, that things would only get worse under Bush Jr.

We wrapped the meeting in 10 more minutes. As I took the elevator down from the 45th floor, I had no idea anything was amiss. However, as I hit the street, I saw a large crowd in front of a storefront transfixed by images on a large TV set in its display window.

I joined them and felt the first rumblings in my world, a seismic change that would reverberate over the next few years and shake up my world beyond recognition.

The next few days were a fuzzy mix of TV talking heads, the excitable Bengali's rantings suggesting that the US should immediately nuke Afghanistan and the lawyer's Trumpesque (in retrospect) conspiracy theories. I knew that not only was this business trip doomed, but we probably had made the wrong choice of business development partners.

I should have also realized that 9/11 would accelerate the fading out of the dot-com boom but, sadly, I didn't. So we returned home but continued investing in the e-learning venture, whose viability was entirely dependent on the US market as, those days, the Indian market for Internet-based ventures was extremely shallow.

A few more years and a few crores later, the e-learning venture went bust, with a critical reason being that we needed to recognize the end of the dot-com era in the US. The loss of capital combined with a scandal-driven bust of one of its key clients led to the nine-year-old until-then-successful ad agency going bust,

I resurrected a new life out of the ashes but never again joined the ranks of hot-shot successes. After a few years of painful readjustment, I found my angle of repose—the satisfaction of rewarding work without the accoutrements of fame or wild success, an interior quiet that gives me a broader perspective of the world. 

9/11 shook my world, too. But after the first traumatic decade, the second one has been, personally for me, a decade of finding balance and peace.

Can we say the same for the world? The financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent decade of recovery and growth is a perspective that implies that. 

If the world can contain the scourge of social media and inequality-driven tribalism, perhaps a third even greater decade fuelled by a revolution in biosciences and AI is to follow. Personally, as I look forward to going from being 65 years old to 75 years oldish, I look forward to my mind being AI-assisted and my body holding up well thanks to the coming miracles of cutting-edge bioscience.

The Pandemic Within: An Existentialist Point-of-View

Even before the pandemic hit, many bemoaned the increasing amount of time the world spends glued to screens. Then the year of Zoom, FaceTime, Teams and Meet hit us. Our work and social life moved to the screen, and human interactions became largely restricted to the disembodied exchange of words emanating from little boxes on screens. I write about this in the past sense as many of my blog readers, fortified by vaccines, have begun to step out and interact. However, the experience is still relevant. Findings are that the Delta-fueled resurgence of infections over the past few months is not just a pandemic of the unvaccinated but also of breakthrough infections and of the vaccinated being potentially potent carriers of the virus. The result is that many of us are scurrying back to those little boxes on our screens.

Do most social interactions conducted through disembodied a disembodies exchange of words, ideas, and thoughts affect an individual's psyche? Pop psychology stresses the lack of body language, leaching some meaning out of such interactions. But is there a more profound hurt?

In his article titled "We're All Existentialists Now" in the August/ September 2021 issue of Philosophy Now, Greg Artus delves deeper.

Classical Western Philosophy, culminating in Descartes' "Cogito Ergo Sum.", would have us believe that our bodies play no essential part in exchanging ideas and feelings. And therefore, if communication is limited to disembodied words, it should, in essence, have no significant impact on our psyches.

However, mounting evidence from across the world tells us that this assertion is not valid. Instead, the pandemic has brought on an epidemic of mental disease and unease. Part of it is, of course, due to financial stress and the everyday fear that essential workers face. However, even with many of us whose circumstances preclude financial problems and allow for safe isolation at well-stocked, hi-speed Internet, gadget-strewn, OTT-powered homes, there is evidence of a Pandemic Within. 

What gives? 

Existentialism seems to answer why a lack of real-life social interactions can cause deep psychic hurt.

The German philosopher, Martin Heidegger in his 1917 book "Being and Time", stated that the fundamental existential condition of an individual is "Mittsein", which roughly translates as "Being-with-Others". His view was Others - other people - are present in or a given in every experience an individual has. As a result, for the individual, Others imbue the meaning in everything. Others, thus, constitute the very Being of the individual.

In his 1943 book "Being and Nothingness", Jean-Paul Sartre went beyond Heidegger's assertion that Others are essential parts of an individual's existence. Instead, Sarte posited that an individual needed validation of his existence, moment to moment, through encounters with particular, concrete, embodied Others. Sartre's term for such encounters is, roughly translated from the French, "Look of the Other". 

Sartre, in his telling, makes this "Look of the Other" judgemental evoking feeling of shame, guilt, pride and conflict. In essence, Sartre's view of existence is narrow - to exist is to exist in shame. 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French philosopher and contemporary of Sartre, widens the existentialist's view of existence. Merleau-Ponty, in his 1945 book "The Phenomenology of Perception", moves closer to Heidegger's notion of Mitsein than to Sartre's judgemental "Look of the Other". Merleau-Ponty rejects Sartre's notion of our perception arising singly from each physical encounter. Instead, an individual's perception assembles events in a shifting mosaic of foreground and background to form a view of the world that is complex, meaningful and transcendent. The meaning and the transcendence arises from the fact that when an individual encounters Others, they are not merely being observed or observing but engaging and pushing back on each other to shape each other's worlds and, in some moments, create a commonly perceived project. When two people dance well together, they create a third transcendent entity called "the dance"—this transcendence is true of rock bands, sports teams and even the thousands of fans cheering for their team.

The probability of such transcendence happening is severely limited in lives lived through screens. 

We have words and a view of facial expressions in a Zoom call, but we miss many other subtle cues integral to an embodied meeting. The hesitant pause, the thoughtful, contemplative look into the distance, the slumped shoulder, the synchrony of postures, the silent nod, the glare, the quiet aside- these missed cues prevent the on-screen meeting from becoming a transcendent entity of its own. As a result, the on-screen meeting does not develop a style, a rhythm or an atmosphere. And it ends up like so many Zoom meetings - a lifeless, unproductive, sometimes chaotic exchange of monologues.

The world of social media interactions is arider than online meetings. For example, WhatsApp exchanges usually amount to statement-judgement-statement, with most participants generally talking past each other.

The world of social media commentary is even more toxic. It is a bleaker realization of Sartre's already bleak view - instead of encounters that subject an individual to the judgemental "Look of the Other", it is now a trolling amorphous army of  Others that drive, not infrequently, individuals into depression and even suicide.

In conclusion, the lack of transcendence from physical interaction with work and social groups contributes to mental illness and distress. That is why the months of work-from-home and social distancing has produced an epidemic of despair even among those protected from financial woes or the exposure risks of essential work.

It is evident in a rush to group events at the slightest lull in the pandemic - rave parties, overflowing restaurants, roaring crowds at sports events and concerts. India did so in the first quarter of 2021. The US and UK are experiencing this phenomenon in the second quarter. Never mind the risk; we all seem to agree. After months of aridity, we need our fix of transcendence that only intense, embodied human social interactions can bring. So the Pandemic Within can get its jab of transcendence. So that the next wave of the pandemic will at least not put us in the IPU - the Intensive Psychiatric Unit.