Fine and Dandi

Some parochial flavor at last! I had been thinking of putting up something India-centric for a while now and yesterday's Hindu article was a godsend for my cynical pen to start moving again. I wonder if the Open Page guys are going to indulge me , because this is a bit stronger than the usual platitudes. Here it is then, "Dandi is redundant"

Dandi is redundant

It is no great feat of the imagination to conjure up an image of the Mahatma sitting at his rickety charkha, spinning slowly, determinedly, a vision of India as a macrocosm of a self-sustained village community. It would be equally facile though, judging by current political events, for one to imagine him spinning in his grave at the continual defilement of his legacy by his very own political progeny – the Congress.

The AICC headquarters informs us that the Congress, to commemorate the 75^th anniversary of the historic Dandi March, seeks to ‘re-enact’ it for a period of 26 days, beginning March 12. The ostensible purpose is to apprise the younger generation of the “great legacy the country has inherited from the Father of the Nation”.

The Salt March, as it is usually called, is one of the finest examples ever, of the power of symbols. Gandhi’s determined rebellion against the perceived injustice of the British administration galvanized millions of heretofore apathetic Indians to join the ranks of the ‘Civil Disobedience Movement’. The march to Dandi was a call to arms for a people long inured to suffering iniquities uncomplainingly. Concomitantly, it acted as a rite of passage for M K Gandhi, allowing him the psychological leverage to become the undisputed arbiter of the direction of the freedom struggle for more than a decade.

The Salt March was a deliberate attempt to subvert the power of the administration, an orchestrated act of anarchistic demagoguery. While unqualifiedly a stroke of political genius in its own context, one ponders over the possible significance of a ‘re-enactment’ of the same 75 years hence, by none but the ruling party. Why should a democratic, civilized, and developing nation want to relive anti-establishment activities?

The Dandi incident was one of the barely half-dozen occasions in Gandhi’s political career where he welcomed the Press. His intention, en route to the Gujarat coast, was quite simply, publicity for the statement of his resolve to persist with the freedom struggle. And yet, even though his scheme was incredibly successful in vitalizing the masses, he did not resort to publicity stunts like this one save as a last resort. And, more importantly, he would carry through each and every one of his public resolves irrespective of physical, mental or political cost.

It is perfectly acceptable for cultural heroes to be glorified. Gandhi, in this respect, probably deserves an exceedingly higher pedestal than the usual assortment of skilled murderers and raconteurs that populate the Hall of Fame of popular perception. It is therefore, understandable, in the typical Indian hagiographical context, for the nation to pay homage to the great man on the anniversary of his achievement.

But then, how much of the soul of the march to Dandi does the Congress hope to encapsulate for the benefit of the younger generation? Can they, or anyone else for that matter, even dream of empathizing with the fervor of dedication that those earnest followers of Gandhi felt as they walked alongside his frail form? What is it that they hope to ‘re-enact’? The physical aspect of the march – the 241 miles from Sabarmati to Dandi? Paula Radcliffe would probably do it better.

How do you celebrate the occasion of one frail, loincloth-garbed ascetic’s gesture of revolt against the might of the British Empire? Well, if you are the Congress, you start by forming an organizing committee with patrons-in-chief and patrons-of-programme and chairmen and vice-chairmen running around primping for the cameras. For a month’s duration, you spend money on pomp and splendor that might have come in very handy indeed for the starving poor in AP or the tsunami-hit destitutes in TN.

One may choose, alternatively, to be incensed or baffled by the cavalier use that the Congress makes of its rich legacy of upright statesmanship and homogeneously nationalistic ideation. It has, thanks to the internal collapse of the Indian far Right, been able to rid itself of its minority-appeasement policy but is now in danger of drifting back to the old days of toadyism to the ‘dynasty’. The megalomanic charisma of Indira is yet to wear off the senior cadres and insofar as the rejuvenation of the party is concerned, the sooner it is past, the better.

Which is why it is painful to find the leading lights of the Congress indulging in anachronistic jingoism at a time when India, both as a society and an economy, is preparing to take wing as a power to contend with. It would be a far grander gesture of political maturity should the Congress from this embarrassing prospect.

It is almost excruciatingly clichéd to point out that Indian politics, for uniquely indigenous reasons, is extremely corrupt and decadent. It is also palpable that political stunts like Advani’s Rath Yatra affect large, extremely gullible segments of the voting population. To ask our worthy representatives to refrain from manipulating the populace for electoral gains is akin to praying for snowflakes in Hell.

How, then, do we convince our leaders that, with all due respect to the Father of the Nation, we, his descendants, need to move on?

Portrait of a non-artist as an old man

Hi all. don't have time for the cheery introductions. This is a short story I wrote for a contest by the British Council. In an hour's time I'll be in Anna Salai, listening to a reading of the same, and I hope I win, although it isn't very spectacular, so far as literary merit goes. Anyway, here it is

Into each life…

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day, U__ S______ decided, as he ponderously rearranged the window curtains. He closed his eyes, turned around, then opened them again. “You are a foolish old man”, he muttered to himself reprovingly.

He looked at the cushions in disarray on the sofa. He looked at the children’s trinkets obscuring his Air Force awards on the walnut mantelpiece. He looked at the life-sized stuffed toy orangutan, who returned his stare with enamel-polished eyes.

He was an old man, older for being surrounded by youth. “You are old,” Ishaan’s Spiderman remarked from the settee. “You are old,” Medha’s colorful little sandals caroled from under the sofa.

“What nonsense”, he shook his head, “ Grandchildren are a gift from God. I am not unhappy. I am perfectly alright.” He made his way to the bedroom. His son’s Pink Floyd CDs nodded gravely from their racks, “We understand and sympathize.”

“Would that the fates were to be kind enough to allow me a cup of tea”, he said as he entered the room. The old woman looked up from her book. Her voice was always gentle, reproachful.

“Darling, must you be so sarcastic all the time?”

“Oh! Very well, you need not bother.”

“No, no. It is just that the way you say it, it…”

Oh! Of course, it is always my fault.”

The old woman was already out of the room, moving in her assured, helpless manner. The conversation hindered the movements of neither. “It is a ritual almost”, thought the old man as he carefully placed various portions of his anatomy on the bed in order.

“Why does Grandfather act so grumpy with Grandmother?” the grandchildren would often wonder. “He is so cheerful with everybody else.” The old man looked at Ishaan’s dinosaur book lying, dog-eared on the play-bucket. “Are two Loch Ness monsters better than one?” he thought.

“I smile at my son’s guests till my jaws ache. And I laugh at the children’s antics when nobody else bothers. And every smile is a thread for my shroud; every laugh is a spar in my pyre. I am happy because nobody cares if I am unhappy.” He turned his face into the pillow.

“Let me be angry a little, Lata,” he whispered, “Because it proves I am still alive.”

“You are talking to yourself again” broke in the old woman, “ Here is your tea.”

“And about time.” said the old man gruffly.

A weak thing, he thought as he sipped, for a throat inured to cantonment whisky for so long. “But then, everything about me is weak, now.”

“I am getting worried about Guddu and Smita. They will be on the way home now. And it is raining like anything”, she said.

“Who asked them to go to Fatehpur anyway?”

What asininity, what irresponsibility, he thought. To go off on a vacation just like that. With all the bills to be paid… And the children, poor dears, missing a week of school. And heaven knows how healthy the food is in that little slum. And to go and leave us here, alone, on the Diwali weekend… “No, not that of course. The bills, the bills…”

N____ could never understand what the ‘bills’ were. As an adolescent, he could only perceive them to possess all the undesirable characteristics of Hanuman’s tail. You could never be rid of them. At least, Grandfather never could. He would either be fretting about a bill, or worrying about an installment due; or calculating income tax deductions on his pension.

“Callow youngster”, the old man would say. “Where would youth be were it not to depend on age to sustain the inglorious process of Life? Ah! How frivolous is youth.”

And so he thought still, the indomitable old man, sitting in his bedroom, in a three-bedroom flat in an E___ D____ settlement, sitting in the murky light cast by the copper-colored sky of a chilly, rainy, November morning.

“Suniye, I think we should call Baby today. The poor dear! With all that work in their nursing home, she probably can’t get time to call.”

The old man thought of turning his face to answer, then decided against it. His right shoulder ached. Rheumatism is but a euphemism, he grimaced.

“If she is too busy to call, won’t she be too busy to talk? Do you want to waste her time?”

The old woman sighed and returned to her reading.

At least, she still has her reading and her religion, he thought. Slowly, he had begun picking up her habits. “What a stupid suggestion…” he reprimanded himself, “…the silly old woman.”

There had been a time when he would call her by name, defining the limits of their relationship and her influence on his identity. Now, “I am getting soft in the head”, he was content to emulate her, hearing himself address her, “Sunti hain…” with but a slight jar of the ego.

Suniye – literally ‘listen’; representative of the ancient tradition of Indian womanhood of not referring to husbands by name, symbolic of the acceptance of a man’s supremacy over her own identity.

“Why do I say that?” thought the old man, lying beside the old woman under her reading light. He thought of the little flutter of the stomach that preceded addressing his children and grandchildren – the fear of the understanding, sympathetic smile, the terror of the supercilious, condescending glance.

And he turned over in bed to face her, whom he would not name, she who would not name him, and listened to the incessant patter of the rain. There they lay, two Rumpelstiltskins, and in the uncertain light, it would not be a feat of imagination to regard their gray, amorphous silhouettes to be one.

He was half-asleep when she had another one of her coughing fits. The old man moved nothing but his eyelids to watch her scrabble, wheezing, in her little blue bag for the inhaler. She found it and the old man rolled over in bed to face the door.

“I am not angry. Why should I be angry?” he thought. “ I am not angry at my entirely loveable son-in-law, whom I greatly admire and respect as an individual and who gives us all these medicines for free with that insolent, virtuous smirk on his face.”

“I am a feeble old man with an oversized ego,” he thought. He rose impatiently and stepped out of the bedroom, rubbing his shoulder gingerly.

“The air feels cold on my bones,” he muttered as he trudged across the dining room. He stopped and scratched his side. Then he went across to the mantelpiece to pick up his reading glasses.

He looked at the denture bowl and the two translucent mandibles suspended in liquid. “If all of me was as easy to replace, who would replace whom? I am no longer here. I don’t know…” he blinked, “I am rambling.”

He made his way across the drawing room to the door of the balcony. “This shall be my cave,” he had announced to all and sundry when the masons and window-workers had finished insulating it from the elements. The old man had moved in, replete with religious books and icons and mementoes from the past.

Now, he entered his cave again. “I am a restless sanyasi, though” he grumbled. The love of life ran strong in him still, carrying him through a career in the Air Force and three heart attacks to the age of 76. He still loved life, though there was nothing left in life that he loved.

Sitting cross-legged, even on an upraised divan was an imposition on his arthritic knees. But the feat was silently accomplished. He picked up a book at random, flipped through the pages, then abandoned this pursuit and looked out of the window.

This rain was a prisoner of war, pouring down resignedly on the concrete walkways of the apartment’s compound, marching to the obscurity of the sewers under guard of the ruthlessly efficient drainage system.

He sat there, the old man, as anachronistic and incongruous in the second floor flat’s window, as the cold November rain that beat down upon it on the other side.

“What is this piece of paper doing in my hand?” the old man mused. He looked at the children’s little play-field beside the car-park that was trying hard not to look like a pond. “I am a silly old sentimental fool,” the old man told himself as he started folding the paper.

“If arthritis is not the herald of rigor mortis, the world does not make sense,” he thought as his fingers protested against the unaccustomed exercise. But then he stopped thinking as he concentrated on the intricate task at hand.

“They go to origami classes enough. Where are all the little children with their paper boats?” he wondered. No matter, his would be the first.

He bent over as he contrived to pull the paper out into a recognizable hull, then subsided into repose as some of the paper came apart in his right hand. The old man sat there, watching the puddle in the play-field rise in tiny plops to meet the rain. He labored up and walked back into the house.

He walked back to the bedroom and painstakingly worked his stiff body into a jersey and shoes. The old woman, stirring from her light doze asked, “What is it, darling? Has the rain stopped?” Then she drew herself up against the bedstead.

The old man walked out of the room and the old woman followed him. He went out of the front door. She locked it behind him and went to the kitchen to set some water on boil. Then she went to the bathroom and switched the geyser on. She laid out the old man’s woolen dressing gown and socks.

The old man stood beside the puddle, rain dripping off his still abundant, snow-white hair. The little paper boat, bobbing slightly askew in the water, struggled to survive the spear thrusts of the rain. There he stood, a sinking old man watching his little boat sink, as the rain beat down on both, steady as the ticking of a clock.

The old woman went to the balcony and looked out of the window. She saw the valiant little paper boat in the throes of its watery demise. She saw the old man stumping stolidly out of sight. The old woman watched both, one after the other, afraid to lose sight of either. Then she fixed her eyes on his form as he trudged slowly out of sight. The old woman waited patiently, eyes fixed in the distance.

(1780 words)

…Some rain must fall

Making a stair way to heaven

Hi all. A combination of vacations and circumstances colluded to keep me from posting anything new for the last two months, i'm afraid. This is to make amends for the same. The nice thing about this article is that I wrote it in an end-semester exam. The bad thing is that the lack of polish is extremely palpable. Anyway, here it is for all it is worth,

There’s a lady who’s sure
All that glitters is gold
And she’s buying
A stairway to heaven

The concept of divinity and a Supreme Entity is fairly recent, dating back not more than 3000 years. The monotheistic Semitic religions were preceded, however, by a vast evolutionary span of religious practice, originating from the Animism of Chalcolithic cultures. The origin of God, thus, lies in the awe of Nature, the might of the mastodon, the fury of the hurricane, the raging sea, the tempestuous lightning.

And when she gets there, she knows
If the stores are all closed
With a word she can get
What she came for

But awe was soon replaced by respect, and respect gradually assumed anthropomorphic connotations. Thereby, primitive cultures, established elaborate rituals to commune with non-corporeal entities and entreat them to do their bidding. It is known that Neanderthal man possessed a very firmly entrenched and intense religion of this type as far back as the early Neolithic period. The time period when Cro-Magnon adopted these practices cannot be stated definitively.

There’s a sign on the wall
But she wants to be sure
‘cause you know sometimes
Words have two meanings

This was followed by the establishment of a separate priestly class, for the purpose of propitiating, on rigid ritualistic lines, the forces of Nature, now anthropomorphized as gods. The worship of gods was too important a task, it was now held, to be left to amateurs.

In a tree by the brook
There’s a song-bird that sings
Sometimes all of our thoughts
Are misgiven (sic)

It was now that, owing to various economic and political factors, the priestly class attempted to increase its influence on society. This was primarily accomplished by repeated reiterations of human incompetence and insignificance before the all-powerful majesty of the Being that was then born – God.

There’s a feeling I get
When I look to the west
And my spirit is crying
For leaving

At this stage, Semitic religion made itself apparent, insistence on elaborate rituals being its link to the past, monotheism the pennant of its novelty. The key new element in proto-Judaism was the concept of the Adamite fall from Grace and the consequent theological distaste for affairs of the corporeal realm.

In my thoughts I have seen
Rings of smoke through the trees
And the voices of those
Who stand looking.

This was followed by a period of turmoil in western civilization. The outmoded Greek pantheon, accompanied by Roman innovations, was fighting a losing battle against Father Time to retain its faithful. Apollo, Dionysus et al would brook no divided allegiance from their devotees. For the first time in recorded history, the State actively involved itself in favoring and persecuting religious creeds. The stage was set for a world-historical event.

If there’s a bustle in your hedge-row
Don’t be alarmed now
It’s just a spring clean
For the May queen

The advent of Christianity sealed the victory of monotheism and hence, God, over the vast pantheon of Greek, Nordic, Egyptian and Hindu lore. Christianity, with its simple message of universal love and brotherhood, its powerful symbology and most importantly, its cohesive political vitality, stormed all bastions of ‘heathen’ thought and beliefs.

Yes, there are two paths
You can go by, but in the long run
There’s still time to change
The road you’re on

There remained but one modification to be made. The somewhat abstruse concept of the sacrifice of Christ, and the consequent Salvation of mankind was substituted by the concept of a totally anthropomorphic just Providence, requiring model behavior in daily life and perfect submission to the will of the one God – Allah. This was the seal of Semitic religion; this was the end of the evolutionary road for the anthropomorphic Semitic God. This was the inception of Islam.

And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our souls
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold

And so we wind up to the modern Semitic milieu, walking down a lonely narrow road, encroached upon by an incredibly materialistic culture. And it is palpable to most that life is naught but strife and that the human spirit needs a beacon to guide it onwards. That beacon, for want of a better description is the 20th century God.

And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last
When all is one and one is all
To be a rock and not to roll

The future, it is being claimed, belongs to pantheism. Judging by the popularity of Zen and Vedanta in non-Catholic communities in Europe and America, one would be obliged to concur. Is Vedanta the one true world religion of humanity? Time will tell.