Humanity's Daughter

While the comments of the rapist as documented in “India’s Daughter” are appalling, even more appalling are the comments of the two lawyers who are representing the rapists. Does education really enlighten? Apparently not. Who is to say that in the corridors of power & pelf we do not have hundreds and thousands who under the veneer that education and/or affluence provides have views that are as ludicrous and appalling as these rapists and their lawyers. And I do not think this a particular Indian problem. It exists, I believe, in all societies because somehow power in human societies seems to flow, like water, to those of us who have baser instincts. Can anything change that? Perhaps we will have to wait for the evolution of a higher species than us humans. 

Schadenfreude and the Pursuit of Happiness

For an idiot I have had a good life!
In that thought is the recipe for happiness.
For one it cuts the ego to size.
The ego that, oh so frequently, says I deserve better. Perish that thought. Crush that snake before it raises its ugly head.
The other secret ingredient is the realisation of the utility of mostly looking down instead of mostly looking up.

Looking up results in not just a crick in the neck but could be the proximate cause for a fall that hurts much more than any crick.
Looking down gives you much more robust measures of the good life than looking up does.
Look around and down and you will get a good idea of what the average life is in this vale of tears. Ruing that you have not yet made it to the Beemer owing class? Taking a ride on a Mumbai local is your ticket to feeling happy about your rickety Honda City.
Looking up is mostly joyless. Long stretches of envy and jealousy with the occasional empty frisson of schadenfreude - that unique German word for an emotion that roughly translates to the pleasure derived from some other person's misfortune.

The second-rung heiress who feels a pang of happiness as she sees the reigning queen wipe a tear on the death of her favourite poodle will have to momentarily go back to the endless ennui of envy as the reigning casanova hugs the queen tight in apparent commiseration.
Once in a while when life does not feel so good to me and unhappiness is circling around the edges of my consciosuness, I find myself listening to the tuneful masters of pop psychology, Eagles singing Desperado. The song somehow takes me back to that comforting thought with which I began this post.
For an idiot I have had a good life!
Given below is the song and its lyrics.
Cheers!

Desperado, why don't you come to your senses?
You been out ridin' fences for so long now
Oh, you're a hard one
I know that you got your reasons
These things that are pleasin' you
Can hurt you somehow

Don't you draw the queen of diamonds, boy
She'll beat you if she's able
You know the queen of hearts is always your best bet

Now it seems to me, some fine things
Have been laid upon your table
But you only want the ones that you can't get

Desperado, oh, you ain't gettin' no younger
Your pain and your hunger, they're drivin' you home
And freedom, oh freedom well, that's just some people talkin'
Your prison is walking through this world all alone

Don't your feet get cold in the winter time?
The sky won't snow and the sun won't shine
It's hard to tell the night time from the day
You're losin' all your highs and lows
Ain't it funny how the feeling goes away?

Desperado, why don't you come to your senses?
Come down from your fences, open the gate
It may be rainin', but there's a rainbow above you 

                                 You better let somebody love you, before it's too late

Memes and the Emergence of Crips

Memes have been a favourite topic with me, evident from the fact that of the 151 of the published posts on this blog fully four have had memes as an integral part of the rumination.

For those of you inclined to take a deep dive into memes and how this blog has addressed them till date, links to the four posts are given below:

http://www.hardrainindia.com/2012/08/beyond-brand-meme.html

http://www.hardrainindia.com/2008/09/coming-of-emotion-age.htm

http://www.hardrainindia.com/2013/11/memes-and-coming-general-elections.html

http://www.hardrainindia.com/2014/05/modi-meme.html

Meme: (me~m) n biology an element of a culture or system of behaviour that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means esp. imitation (The New Oxford American Dictionary) 

Before the advent of modern communication and travel technology, memes strengthened existing cultural and behavioural modes within geographical/ tribal boundaries contributing largely to the development of a wide variety largely insular civilizations and became the driving force in the creation of nation states. 

In the past six or seven decades, modern communications and travel have allowed memes to carry far and wide much like modern epidemics, leading to the emergence of cultural and affinity groups that cut across geographical boundaries. The global youth culture that pervaded in the sixties right up to the nineties is a vibrant example. A side-effect of the emergence of such affinity groups was the emergence of global brands and a global grammar for advertising. 

It also lead to the emergence of transnational diaspora identities with major geo-political consequences. Being Muslim or being Jewish became powerful memes with global implications largely due to the epidemiological implications of modern technology.

The past decades have been marked by not one but two major discontinuities on how people interact with each other. 

One is that the power of mass media as a broadcaster of ideas and "news" is being transferred to the individual. 21st century technology gives the individual instantaneous and almost free access to broadcast or target-cast (with increasing ability to define targets)  information and emotion rich communication at very low production costs, limited only by the individual's cognitive and creative abilities (this blog is an example).              

The second discontinuity is in the dramatic reduction of attention spans. The reasons behind this reduction are manifold. One of them could be the unchecked proliferation of messages and media that impinge on and seek attention from the individual. The other is perhaps an increase in the cognitive and emotional bandwidth that allows faster absorption of incoming communication.

A result of the above discontinuities has been the transfer of the power of memes into smaller entities called crips.  

Crips is originally the name given, in the late sixties, to African-American gangs in Los Angeles. However it was the sub-culture of jazz musicians in Chicago that gave it the context in which it has gained currency as an idea driving cultural assimilation in the today's world. For jazz musicians crips are momentary, very brief interludes of music which a jazz musician plays around with in the process of improvisation that is the soul of jazz.

In the world of ideas while memes were fully formed, metaphorically akin to say a fully formed jazz composition, crepes are "idea strands" much like strands of DNA that can latch on to other collections of strands around a base structure to form an complete DNA helix. A crip is imminently suited for transmission/ absorption/ re-transmission by the typical low-attention span, digitally empowered, young citizen from the privileged classes of the  modern world. 

An example of a crip that propagated a decade or so ago was the phrase "whatever". It was a crip which in some cases attached itself to a DNA that defined a linguistic sub-culture while on the other hand was part of a cult of indifference if not outright rejection of the mores of fashion trends. So at one extreme this particular crip became part of a linguistic fashion and at the other extreme it attached itself to a sub-culture formed around the rejection of fashion.

Crips are abundant and multiplying in the modern world allowing an individual to define a cultural profile all her own. She can be a part of a unique cultural tribe of a few and even one with access to powerful communication tools, that were just a decade ago were available only to mass media, to express and sustain her culture. 

This is deep-set change that is destroying decades if not centuries old more of whole swathes of society and business. 

It's effect on the worlds of marketing and advertising are profound and are still in the process of playing out even as the traditional practitioners deny the need for any seminal change.

I can already see one more post on crips and their effect on the world of brands. 

Looks like crips will be fertile ground for this blog to sow over the coming months.

                 

Our Vedic Future

God knows we Indians have a chequered past. An immediate past that we need to overcome and a distant past that we can justifiably be proud of.

It is my belief that the misery of our recent past, our colonisation and our inability, over the past 60 odd years to make our independence work to give large masses of our people a better life, is because we have failed to use the greatness of our distant past, as a lesson and a lever to help us build a great future for ourselves and the world.

Our Vedic past needs no feverish projections of mythical scientific achievements to establish its greatness. The greatness of our Vedic past lies in ideas that are as potent today as they were for millenniums stretching back into pre-history.

Consider the power of this idea, as articulated in the words of Swami Vivekananda, “The Vedanta recognises no sin it only recognises error. And the greatest error, says the Vedanta is to say that you are weak, that you are a sinner, a miserable creature, and that you have no power and you cannot do this and that”.

As a wonderful inspiring assertion of human possibility how different and from the fear-instilling restrictions of quotidian religion. How can you believe in God if you don’t believe in yourself?

Isn’t the above viewpoint not a guidepost to great achievements -  breakthrough science, world-altering social revolutions? Not achievements in the distant past but achievements of an urgent future that draws closer by the day?

The above is just one of the many ideas of  timeless utility and inspiration that the Vedas offer us.

So why do we need Vedic airplanes to get high on the glories of our past? Why don’t we instead ride on persistent hard work guided by these precious Vedic insights and prescriptions to a golden future.

Our future can be and should be both our homage and our goodbye to our distant and recent past.

Look to this day,

for it is life, the very breath of life.

In its brief course lie

all the realities of your existence;

the bliss of growth,

the glory of action,

the splendor of beauty.

For yesterday is only a dream,

and tomorrow is but a vision.

But today, well lived,

makes every yesterday a dream of happiness,

and every tomorrow

a vision of hope.

Look well, therefore, to this day.

(Ancient Sanskrit) 

Friends

There is enough said about the importance of family in our lives.
But don't you think friends play an important role too?
Coming to think of it, the existence, extent and depth of friendship in a society is an important indicator of the depth of its civilization.
Thinkers like Aristotle, Cicero and Montaigne have considered friendship as the pre-eminent human institution.
The need for friendship is atavistic. There are many who can live without marriage but there are very few who can be happy without friends. While the absence of justice and honor in our life can rankle but the absence of friendship is to be without the one thing that can salve all other absences.
Lovers face each other but friends stand side by side. So much of deep friendship is about thinking through important stuff together. What job to take? Whom to marry?.
Friends bring out better versions of ourselves. Haven't you noticed how unguarded and fluid we feel when you are around your friends? Wittier and smarter even?
Friendship is about forming a self-improving mutual admiration society of two. Very unlike Facebook which is mainly the mindless, mutual preening of a horde.
Friendship seems to be on the wane in modern times at least in the developed Western world. In the US in 1985 the General Society Survey found that people tended to have three really close friends. By 2004 a Duke University and University of Arizona Survey found that it had dwindled down to two. Something to do with the pace and stresses of modern life? The Frankenstein of proliferating media and entertainment consumption? The mass delusion engendered by an increasing number of Facebook friends, names on our mailing list and contacts on our smart phones?
For many of us who live in Belonger type societies like India might still not acutely suffer from a lack of close friends but in our dash towards achievement and prosperity we would do well to remember that life is a very ugly place not to have a best friend.

“Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. "Pooh?" he whispered.
"Yes, Piglet?"
"Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's hand. "I just wanted to be sure of you.” ― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh 

              

A Practical Man

The eminent 20th century philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein used to cite an anecdote to illustrate the gap between reality and our powers of observation and expression:
An old lady walked up to Mr. Wittgenstein after a lecture to ask him whether he believed that the Earth actually went around the Sun. "I certainly do" Mr. Wittgenstein said " It has been proven by science Madam". "Well" the old lady sniffed "It certainly looks as if the Sun goes around the Earth". " Well Madam" replied Ludwig, "tell me what, in your thinking, should it look like if it is the Earth which is actually going around the Sun?". The old lady walked away in a huff, determined to tell her bridge club about the obnoxious Mr. Wittgenstein.
For the past three months the chatterati in India have endlessly perambulated around essentially one topic:
Is Modi the real deal or is he just the latest carpetbagger to enter the ancient nest of quintessential carpetbaggers that is Delhi?

I cannot pretend to know the truth. And when I once-in-a-while listen to the chatter on TV and at the odd cocktail party I, quietly to myself, recall Wittgenstein's anecdote on perception and observation. Those living in glass houses see only a reflection of themselves.

So is Mr. Modi the real deal? Like I said I do not know. Only time will tell.

But one aspect of him I think I have begun to grasp. Above all he is a practical man.

Only a thoroughly practical man could have given the speech that he gave on the 15th of August. No invocation of the greatness of India. No grandiose schemes. No heavy panting of ideology or idolatry.
Just an agenda setting of stuff that you and me can do: discipline our sons and value or daughters, keep not just our homes but our neighbourhood clean and rise a little bit above our self-interest.

Stuff that our primary school civic sense lessons should have taught us but alas! evidently didn't. It might seem a steep climb from being a nation striving to meet standards of basic civic sense to becoming a nation of world-beaters.

But to the super- practical entity that I think Mr. Modi is, the curve that results from learning to be  a nation of clean cities, towns and villages is steep enough to take us to greater heights. It is the smallest wheel is a geared arrangement that will set the bigger wheel moving.

Think of Modi as a practical man and his politics also falls into place. A superbly practical man will play superbly practical politics, in other words realpolitik. No pussy footing around niceties and reputation.
T
here was one other Prime Minister we had who was. I think, on par with Mr. Modi on being a practical person: Mrs. Indira Gandhi. But she carried the baggage of Fabian, socialist ideology she inherited from her father - an ideology, that like any other ideology, came in her way of being practical in managing the nation's affairs. However her practicality was in full force when it came to her politics. The realpolitik that Mrs. Gandhi played was world class by any standards.

             
                     
      

Macaulay's Children

The chaps who have give us TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) also left us the legacy of Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Lord Macaulay's lasting effect on  Indian society is captured in this extract from his infamous "Minute on Indian Education": 

 "We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population,"  

Can there be a more chilling elucidation of deep colonization?

There is a small and prosperous class of Indians who continue to benefit from Macaulay's vision. There is a Hindi phrase that is rife in India's heartland about such people: "Angrez to chale gaye. Aulad chodd gaye".

The polite translation is "The English left a long ago but left there children behind"" but the translation misses the true color and invective inherent in the Hindi phrase.

As I write this post I am acutely aware that I belong to the tribe of Macaulay's Children. People who owe their station in life partly due to their fluency and proficiency in English. 

My father's English too was good but his deepest expression was in his mother tongue Hindi which he was very good at. He was a private poet and his poetry was in Hindi.

My Hindi alas! is poor. I was schooled in the South where they had long ago decided that when it came to foreign languages they much preferred English to Hindi.
I am still ribbed by my uncles about a letter in Hindi that I, at the age of twenty five, wrote to my grandfather. A few weeks ago I asked my uncle to pull it out of his collection and read it again. Just to check. It was not just bad, it was deeply embarrassing. 

As I grow older and  perhaps wiser, I realize that in gaining all the advantages of English being the language I think in, I have lost immensely.

I had lost the ability to communicate at the deepest level. The ability to communicate to the gestalt around me and perhaps the gestalt within me. Simply put my communication channel is now confined to  a sliver of the society around me and I am condemned forever to seek literary and cultural stimulation in ethos that are in essence alien to my deepest nature.

If I could write in Hindi than perhaps I would be a good writer and go well beyond the stilted efforts that you dear reader, giving in to sporadic bouts of generosity, tolerate. If could write in Hindi than perhaps the books that have been rattling inside my brain and my computer (I am at work on two works of fiction that I have not been able to bring to any sort of satisfactory conclusion for years now) would have found expression driven by a deeper communion with the milieu I live in.
But then again, as far as my writing goes, it might be a case of "naach na jaane angaan tedha" that is "those who can't dance blame the dance floor" or to capture the essence of the saying in the somewhat more straightforward idiom of English "excuses are the last refuge of  mediocrity". Or as my friends in Bollywood would pithily put "Pappu can't dance saala".
Enough said about me.
 Do I have anything to say about the current hullabaloo about the deep set bias in the selection process for the civil services  for not just the language of English but the world view that an education in English entails? Now that is a deep one. Such indoctrination was the intent behind Macaulay's edict and  now six generation later the indoctrination still retains its potency.
I believe there are no shortcuts to producing antidote to such indoctrination. It takes time and an even deeper phenomenon.
Many of us who got into the IITs in the seventies were Macaulay's children. We deprived many a budding genius just through the fact that the Joint Entrance Exam for the IITs those days included a test of English. However despite this test in English there were geniuses who was not schooled in English but who got through because of their immense superiority when it came to maths and physics, the other two JEE subjects and the ability to quickly learn what was needed to past muster in English. And I can wager a substantial sum of money that in the decades of the sixties, seventies and the eighties most IITians who went on to make substantial hardcore contribution in the fields of science and technology were these geniuses who overcame the English handicap and nearly all of Macaulay's children went on to figuratively speaking "sell soap" laying waste our sterling education in science and technology.
A couple of decades ago English was dropped from the JEE. That has brought it it's own set of problems. Now the corridors at IIT are haunted not just by Macaulay's children but also by coaching class superstars whose ability to slog at the coaching classes falls well short of any originality of thought and action.
However the genius still get in and it is still the genius that makes true use of the education. And here to, as in all walks of life, the production and nurture of one genius is enough to justify the existence of thousands of cookie cutter carpetbaggers.
And if real merit finds its way to the IITs than I am sure it finds it way to the IIMs and the civil services.
I believe that the true antidote to any form of indoctrination and injustice is, as it has been through the ages, merit. Real, pure merit. The rest is just one form of injustice and indoctrination replacing another.