tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-71067201546310007362024-02-20T10:29:04.003-08:00ModernāmaAseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.comBlogger48125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-26765510700912501392019-07-23T17:40:00.000-07:002019-07-23T17:43:06.072-07:00Gandhi, Tagore, Modernity<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: large;">Much is made nowadays of the differences between Tagore and Gandhi. It is true that they saw many aspects of the world — especially when it came to the place of politics and certain forms of mass nationalist protest — very differently. Yet, when it came to their view of human life, the fundamentals of their thinking were remarkably coincident. Here are some points on which Gandhi and Tagore thought alike.</span><br />
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<a href="https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/main-article/gandhi-tagore-modernity-748957.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/main-article/gandhi-tagore-modernity-748957.html</span></a></div>
Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-16773469226037662082019-04-29T01:42:00.001-07:002019-04-29T06:24:54.319-07:00गुरूजी रवीन्द्र शर्मा - एक स्मृति <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: large;">आज-कल साल बीतते साल कहाँ लगता है. हर साल, 'साल की उम्र' कम होती जा रही है. शायद इसी अनुभव को कुछ इतिहासकारों ने 'इतिहास के त्वरण' (acceleration of history) के नाम से पहचाना है. तकनीकी प्रक्रियाओं की रफ़्तार अब इतनी तीव्र हो चली है कि यह गतिशीलता स्वाभाविक है. यह तीव्रता जायज़ है अथ्वा नहीं इसका अंदाज़ इस बात से लगाया जा सकता है कि एक साल का अन्तराल पृथ्वी के सूर्य-देव की परिक्रमा से निर्धारित है. इसको मानव-जाति अपनी इच्छानुसार छोटा-बड़ा, तेज़-धीमा अगर करे तो शायद केवल मात्र अपनी कल्पना में ही. जब इतिहास करवट बदलेगा तो समय जायज़ा लेगा. उस घड़ी में शायद अब ज़्यादा देर नहीं.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: large;">ऐसी गुरूजी रवींद्र शर्मा की दृष्टि थी. लगता ही नहीं कि गुरूजी को गए ठीक एक साल गुज़र चूका है. आज ही का दिन था. हम माँ-पिताजी के संग बैंगकॉक हवाई अड्डे पर थे. (म्याँमार से लौट रहे थे. माँ की मनोकामना थी अपना जन्म-स्थान, रंगून देखने का.) हमारे मित्र विवेक का मेल था हैदराबाद से: "गुरूजी नहीं रहे." बुद्ध-पूर्णिमा के दिन वे महादेवी में समा गए.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: large;">कोई ३ वर्षों से कैंसर-ग्रस्त तो थे ही. मेरी उनसे आखिरी मुलाक़ात उनकी बेटी दिव्या की शादी में उनके गुज़रने के कोई ८ महीने पहले हुई थी. बहुत कमज़ोर हो गए थे. बोलने में तकलीफ़ थी. कैंसर ने गाला पकड़ लिया था. गुरूजी हमे दिल्ली में हर महीने २-३ बार तो फ़ोन किया ही करते थे. बातें हमारी लम्बी होती थीं. लेकिन हाल-हाल में ये कम हो गया था, और ज़्यादा देर बात भी नहीं कर पाते थे.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: large;">मेरी आदत बन चुकी थी कि गुरुजी से हर बार बात करने के बाद, अपनी मेज़ पर बैठ के सारी बातें याद कर के अपनी कॉपी में लिख लेते थे. ऐसी कई कॉपियाँ मेरे पास पड़ी हुई हैं. उन में से कुछ गुरूजी के चुनिंदे वाक यहाँ याद में पुनर्जीवित कर रहे हैं. साथ ही साथ कुछ उनसे जुड़े विचार भी प्रस्तुत हैं. ये रवीन्द्र शर्मा नाम के महासागर की मात्र एक तिर्छी झलक है.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: large;">गुरूजी भारत के मौखिक-कथावाचक परम्परा के एक अनोखे मिसाल हैं. जाति-पुराण और लोक-संस्कृति में पारंगत, गुरूजी आध्यात्मिक ज़रूर थे, लेकिन अपने पाण्डित्व को दुनिया के बौद्ध-बाज़ारों में प्रदर्शित करना उनके स्वभाव के बाहर था. रोज़ सुबह कलाश्रम के चबूतरे में रामायण अथ्वा महाभारत पढ़ा करते. सेमीनार और सम्मेलनों से भला उनका क्या लेना-देना? उनको 'बुद्धिजीवी' की श्रेणी में डालना अपनी ही नासमझी व्यक्त करना होगा. उनके साथ रह कर किसी को भी बुद्धिजीवी और दृष्टा का अन्तर समझ में आ सकता था. उनकी हर चीज़ की समझ उनकी महसूसियत में बसी हुई थी. उनका दिल उनकी आँख का काम भी करता था. सिर्फ अपनी समझ को पेश करने के लिए वो विचार और शब्दों का प्रयोग करते थे. वरना अपनी शरारती मुस्कान या फिर एक इशारे या अपनी आवाज़ की लय और उतार-चढ़ाव से ही अपनी बात कह डालते थे. आचरण और उच्चारण का समन्वय बारीक था गुरूजी की सरल ज़िन्दग़ी में। उनका व्यक्तित्व साधारण लोक-संस्कृति से प्रेरित था. भाषा सदा सरल थी. अहंकार जैसी चीज़ नहीं. और इन ही सारी चीज़ों में उनकी सहजता का रहस्य था.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: large;">तेलंगाना के आदिलाबाद में रहने वाले, गुरूजी उम्र भर अपने कलाश्रम में विराजमान रहे. न जाने कितनी लोक-कलाओं की वहाँ उनहोंने साधना की. सारे देश के न जाने कितने कारीगरों को उनके आश्रम में पनाह मिली. हज़ारों ने उनसे सीखा. साल-दर-साल तमाम लोगों का आवा-गमन रहा. लेकिन गुरूजी अपने ठिकाने पर क़ायम रहे.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: large;">इस पर हमने एक मर्तवा उनसे चर्चा की थी. "गुरूजी, आप इतने समय एक ही जगह रह कर 'बोर' नहीं हो जाते हैं?" "कैसे बोर होंगे, सामने वाले व्यक्ति तो बदलते रहते हैं न, और कई बार जाने-पहचाने व्यक्ति का कोई नया रूप देखने को भी मिलता है!" साथ ही साथ गुरूजी की समझ थी कि आधुनिकता के मोह ने मानव-जाति को अत्यन्त बेचैन बना दिया है. आज यहाँ, कल वहाँ, लोग भागम-भाग में ही अपना सारा जीवन व्यर्थ कर देते हैं.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>वे कहते, "इस गति से हमारी महसूस करने की और सोचने की शक्ति तेज़ी से कम होती जा रही है. हमारे हाथ-पैर और ज़ुबान जितनी तेज़ रफ़तार से चलेंगे, उतनी ही सीमित हमारे सोचने की शक्ति हो जायेगी." गाँधीजी ने हिन्द-स्वराज पुस्तक में भी कुछ ऐसी ही बात लिखी है.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: large;">गुरूजी की समझ थी कि आधुनिकता की बेचैनी और बेसब्री का कारण वैश्विक तकनीक के वर्चस्व में ढ़ूँड़ा जा सकता है. तेज़ से तेज़ मोटर-गाड़ियाँ, हवाई-जहाज़, मोबाइल फ़ोन और कम्प्यूटर जैसे अति-कुशल यंत्रों ने मानव समाज से उसका समय और उसकी आज़ादी छीन कर इन्सान को मात्र उपभोगता का पात्र सौंप दिया है. ये प्रक्रिया सदियों से चल रही है, और हाल के बाज़ारवाद ने इसकी गति अति-तीव्र कर दी है. समाज हाशिये पर है.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: large;">कुछ साल पहले मसूरी में एक बैठक में गुरूजी ने वही बात दोहराई जो उन्होंने हमसे फ़ोन पर कई बार कही: "तकनीक का पैमाना सही होना चाहिए. एक हद तक तो समाज तकनीक को संचालित कर लेता है. अगर तकनीक इस हद से आगे चली गयी तो फिर वो समाज को संचालित करेगी." इस महा-तत्त्व का<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>प्रमाण हमारे चारों-ओर है. गुरूजी की समझ थी कि जहाँ हमारी परम्परा बाहरी ज़िन्दगी की प्रक्रियाओं को सरल बनाने का प्रयास करती है (ताकि हम अन्दरूनी दुनिया में गेहराई में डूब सकें), आधुनिकता बाहरी जीवन को जटिल-दर-जटिल बनाये जाती है और कुछ समय बाद हमको अन्दरूनी खोखलेपन का एहसास होता है.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: large;">ऐसी दुनिया हमसे एक और कीमत वसूलती है. तकनीकी वर्चस्व से हमारा प्रकृति से रिश्ता धीरे-धीरे टूट जाता है. गुरूजी का प्रकृति-दर्शन गहन था. "बिना प्रकृति-दृष्टि के मानव समाज अंधा होता जाता है. प्राकृतिक रिश्तों का ज्ञान खो देता है<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>समाज. भेड़ डाँगर का 'मामा' लगता है. मगर शहर-शिक्षित लोगों को इन रिश्तों की क्या समझ!" आधुनिकता में पर्यावरण का संकट निश्चित है.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: large;">प्रकृति-दृष्टि से ही जुड़ी है गुरूजी की सौंदर्य-दृष्टि. उनका मानना था कि जो चीज़ नैसर्गिक नहीं है वो भला सुन्दर कैसे हो सकती। आधुनिकता की सबसे बड़ी खामी, उनकी नज़र में, उसकी कृत्रिमता है. असली को सुधारते-सुधारते<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>आधुनिक समाज नक़ली होते चले आएं हैं. और साथ ही बद-सूरत.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: large;">जब हम तीन वर्ष पूर्व माँ को आदिलाबाद ले गए थे कलाश्रम के कार्तिक-महोत्सव में, तो उनहोंने गौर फ़रमाया था कि "थके हालत में भी गुरूजी का अपनी धोती से पसीना पोंछना एक बारीकी अंदाज़ दर्शाता है!" गुरूजी हर मायने में देशज थे. बोल-चाल, चाल-ढाल, खान-पान, सब सरल से सरल. याद नहीं किसी को कि कभी वो सफ़ेद कुर्ता-धोती के इलावा भी किसी और वस्त्र में दिखे हों.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: large;">आज की दूनिया में लोग गुरु के दर्शन के लिए ही उतावले रहते हैं. लेकिन वास्तव में गुरु वो है जो दर्शन कराता है. चाँद की तरफ उंगली के इशारे को ही चाँद समझने में तो कोई बुद्धिमत्ता नहीं है. आज तमाम मानव-जाति वैश्विकरण के तीखे प्रहार के प्रकोप में जी रही है, और प्रकृति पर भी घातक हमला ज़ारी है. गुरूजी के दिए सूत्रों द्वारा इन प्रक्रियाओं को सरलता से समझा जा सकता है. और जैसे-जैसे धुंध छंटती है, पुराने मंज़िलों की तरफ नए रास्ते बनाये जा सकते हैं. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: large;">संगीत सिखाते वख़्त माँ हमसे कहती हैं, "गुरूजी की छवि सामने रख के रियाज़ करो तो शुद्ध स्वर निकलेगा अनंत से!" गुरूजी के सरल जीवन और दर्शन में दिखता है स्मृति और श्रुति का अनोखा संतुलन. उनका जीवन-दर्शन सनातन-सभ्यता की एक अद्भुत मिसाल है, जिस में नज़र आती है न केवल हमारे समय की साफ़ तस्वीर बल्कि शाश्वत की भी एक आनन्दमय झलक. हम इस महा-स्रोत से आगे भी प्रेरणा की श्वास लेते रहें, ऐसी महादेवी से कामना है. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span></div>
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Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-89708398022054113422019-04-28T07:39:00.000-07:002019-04-29T08:28:40.470-07:00Meher Engineer RIP… “Ami ki korbo?” <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In a world whose imagination is choked by chronic notoriety (for just fame is no longer possible in the deafening chorus of today’s cultural barbarism), we may readily fail to perceive that human greatness often comes without a big name to announce it.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">It was in one such way that I first met Meher Engineer who died tragically from a stroke last week in a Kolkata hospital. He lived alone (his two children both live abroad) in a small place near Chowrunghee and was found unconscious early one morning some ten days back. He had had a stroke the previous night and was hospitalised only the next day. Alas, too late.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Meher Da was, in 2007 (when we first met), as a decade later, a thin and tall, bespectacled man in an ordinary shirt and trousers. What stood out were his old sandals. In his less than modest appearance, few would have seen the veteran professor for what he was: an accomplished physicist, who had just retired as the Director of the Bose Institute, set up in 1917 by one of India’s greatest pioneer scientists, Dr. Jagdish Chandra Bose.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In 2007, we were both in Dehradun for a meeting on Special Economic Zones which the Indian governments of the day were actively promoting, after a Chinese fashion, around the country (they have not stopped this wicked activity yet), seizing forcibly the fertile lands of the peasantry all around the country, in the holy name of ‘development’. It was a policy which had the de facto blessings of most (though not all) economists, including Nobel-winning Amartya Sen.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Meher Da and I were introduced by our common friend, the stalwart Lohiaite activist, Vijay Pratap. Meher Da reported on the ‘Nano’ acquisition for the Tatas in Singur. I was expecting a somewhat ‘technical’ presentation from a physicist. It turned out to be anything but that. His talk was titled the same as his conclusion, the words of a 75-year-old woman, whose little plot had been taken by the CPM government to hand over to the Tatas: <i>Ami ki korbo?</i> <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I still had in my slow mind the dull residues of a little naiveté in those days and remember feeling utterly shocked to realise that a popular communist government could do something so cruel. It was Meher who made me see for the first time exactly how nefarious and dangerous the CPM rule of three decades and more had proved for Bengal, beginning with what is probably the greatest massacre in the history of Independent India: Morijhapi in 1979. He proceeded to enlighten us further on the gallant business ambitions of Buddhadeb, who he described accurately as a ‘Corporate Stalinist’. I began to see the remarkable affinity between communism and capitalism, an insight I owe almost entirely to that first meeting with Meher Da.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In subsequent years we grew closer, the traffic of emails always on the rise, so much so that I did him an honour I do for few friends (and parents): name a whole archive in my Gmail account after my physicist friend. More than any other single individual I can think of, it is Meher who has educated not just me but thousands of others, I am sure, about the great perils of global warming and climate change.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I am no scientist to be able to comment on Meher Engineer’s professional work in his discipline. But about one thing one could always be very sure. If something was coming via Meher it would be 100% reliable information and analysis. I have seen Meher at work at his table in his cubby-hole of an apartment in Kolkata: he was ruthlessly clinical in his investigative rigour, bringing to bear all his long, arduous years of scientific training on whatever theme he was examining. The first thing he always did before claiming anything was to test, as would befit a scientist like him, the contrary hypothesis. It was a sine qua non for him before opening his mouth in public.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">As a result, many of us first learned from Meher Engineer what we reliably know now about flooding seas, melting polar ice caps, retreating Himalayan glaciers, and ocean acidification. The ‘Meher Engineer’ archive in my Gmail box could be the basis of an excellent public primer on the subject of climate change. Always up with the work of IPCC and other authorities, Meher would keep us updated on what is probably the decisive survival issue for humanity in the 21st century, the smug complacency of Ivy League economists notwithstanding.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">For Meher Da, all science should have been citizen science, in the first place. He would often quote lines from Einstein or DD Kosambi to that effect. ‘MacScience’ (often serving military interests too) was to him a personal professional offence. He would have some choice sarcasms to describe the eager intellectual conformity and pusillanimity of those among his colleagues who contributed their brains to such corrupt projects. Meher Engineer could never have been a promoter, a fund-raiser or a salesman!</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">When it came to one of my disciplines, Economics, Meher Da would call me frequently to check a piece of World Bank data, or some argument made by a government economist in a newspaper column. He would assiduously go through any references I gave him, following them up with further questions. He had a brainy child’s curiosity which could trouble any professional consensus.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Over the years, our friendship grew deeper as we began to stay at each other’s homes on visits to Kolkata and Delhi respectively. Gracious and generous as a host, Meher Da would always find room for me in his tiny place on Lenin Sarani, engaging me in long conversations on his delightful balcony over a cup of tea. Then he would take me out to have jhaal-bhaat or a dosa at a favourite restaurant near Esplanade. Not merely that. He would invariably arrange a discussion or a meeting for me with people who he felt I would benefit from meeting. It was originally through Meher Da that I came to know such invaluable friends and advisors (for my research on Tagore) as Probal Dasgupta, Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, Samar Bagchi, and Subhas Roy. Each of these astonishing people has opened further doors for me in Bengal, a relatively mysterious place to those of us still halting in the lingua franca of what was the original laboratory for the British Raj in this part of the world. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Meher Engineer was such a sensitive soul, and approached the sufferings of humanity with so much compassion that he all but withdrew from formal physics in his later years and devoted all his time to social work, public education, and activism. His contributions are large and, true to character, hidden behind many a flourishing bush. They are unlikely to be known to the world through his name even in the future.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A model of professional and personal rectitude, Meher Da maintained high moral standards throughout his life. For this, he had the respect and friendship of many who shall mourn him now and miss him ever after.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Rest in peace, Meher Da. You have played your innings with exemplary integrity and done your daring best to delay the catastrophes that await humanity.</span></span></div>
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Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-35982679448785330982018-03-10T10:00:00.004-08:002018-03-12T18:55:42.369-07:00Dhrubajyoti Ghosh: The Intrepid Ecologist and his ‘laboratory of survival’<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: large;">In the course of his work on the wetlands of East Kolkata Dhrubajyoti Ghosh published <a href="http://www.dhrubajyoti.net/news.htm" target="_blank">many articles </a>in newspapers, magazines and academic journals. But he also published three significant volumes on ecology. The last of his three books, published by Oxford last year, is called <i><a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-trash-diggers-9780199474141?cc=ca&lang=en&" target="_blank">The Trash Diggers</a>.</i> It is a <a href="https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/buried-under-179537" target="_blank">pictorialised text</a> on the lives and ecologically cleansing livelihoods of the ragpickers of the wetlands village called Dhapa. The villagers have been practising the environmental gospel of “reduce-reuse-recycle” for aeons without ever knowing the words. Urban recycling of non-biodegradable solid waste has been pioneered in India precisely by such officially illiterate, poor, semi-urban communities.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Trash Diggers </i>begins with the following Foreword by a villager from the wetlands:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"> “Mr. Ghosh has been visiting us for a very long time. I do not remember anyone else who has taken our photographs with such care and shown them when he came back. All his pictures describe our neighbourhood - how we live there, how we make a living, the types of fuel we use, how we eat, why there are holes in pigs’ ears. You do not know these things. If you see the pictures you will know. We are farmers on the Dhapa agricultural fields. But we also collect and separate the trash into different types, and then sell them to the traders for a little money. The plastics, glass, cloth, metals - all these that we collect are used to make many kinds of things. The vegetables we grow go to the markets. You buy them cheap. But no one talks about what will happen to us tomorrow. We live in constant fear about our future. If you look at these pictures, perhaps you too will think about us.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">These are the words of Soshthi Mandal who lives in Dhapa. He is the elder brother of Kalyani Mondal, a waste-picker who was crushed to death under a bulldozer on 20 February 2015, while working atop the Dhapa dump site. (“No one blinked”, writes Ghosh about her in his book). Over 5,000 families are engaged in the sorting and recycling of solid waste in Dhapa. They belong to ten different castes, sub-castes, and tribes and have come there both from other parts of West Bengal as well as from states nearby. They do not have a legal right to live and work there. Yet, their ecological contribution to the sustainability of the metropolis is huge, if invisible.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">It was a Bengali entrepreneur, Bhabhanath Sen who first got a land lease from the colonial authorities in 1879 to grow vegetables atop the garbage heaps of Dhapa. Sen introduced the practice of co-recycling of solid waste and wastewater. The first urban garbage farmers in India worked in Dhapa. From the Dhapa experience of over a century, Ghosh concluded, and always insisted on, the twin principles of urban solid waste management: decentralised governance and managing waste as a resource.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">“To what extent a community, a race, or a nation is civilised depends upon the waste it has to throw away”, writes Ghosh in <i>The Trash Diggers</i>. “The present dispensation is not just about the behavioural pattern of an excluded community. It is also about the kind of knowledge they have mastery upon and the science underneath.” In the theory of knowledge, Ghosh argued, there is growing respect for ‘tacit knowledge’ which presupposes a rational subject who is often unable to verbalise and narrate what s/he knows (almost like a soccer artist unable to give words to his skill).</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">However, this scarcely means that the knowledge lacks content. It is real, substantial, and positively consequential. It is derived from long and close experience of living and surviving successfully in a challenging ecological context like the East Kolkata Wetlands. The villagers have learned to be “adaptive and resilient” in tough conditions. In Ghosh’s words, “the Dhapa co-recycling practice sets a comprehensive example of a low-carbon model for city waste management that has not yet received the attention of those who matter.” (Something that should have merited public attention by now is the manner in which the natural wastewater recycling mechanism of the wetlands removes E.coli that cannot be cleaned by conventional sewage treatment plants even in advanced countries. It decomposes fruitfully in the tropical oxidation ponds of the Kolkata wetlands).</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Ghosh was sarcastic about the manner in which the waste pickers of Dhapa are seen (more precisely rendered invisible) by municipal authorities and the metropolis at large. He wrote in his book: “A community that has been serving a metropolitan city with its painstaking practice of waste recycling, without recognition, remuneration, or social security, is a group that only merits the suspicion of being thieves and vandals! The beginning of this exclusion starts from the deliberate undercounting.” The waste pickers, mostly women, “remain unreachably beyond the notice of the average Kolkata citizen. That is the signature of our civility.” “We count the number of millionaires, but not the millions of pickers who are active in our nation’s backyards.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Finally, these wetlands, like others known to ecologists, play a part in carbon recycling and sequestration. This last benefit is not to be taken lightly in a time of rapid deterioration in the world’s climate because of rising carbon emissions. Kolkata is the world’s third most exposed city, when it comes to the risk of climate flooding.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">However, because these invaluable benefits of wetlands do not appear as cash in a ledger, they are brushed aside in the planning policies that allow developers to encroach and build there.</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Ghosh’s intellectual contribution </span></b><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">In his book <i>Ecosystem Management</i> (NIMBY Books, 2014), Ghosh provocatively suggested that we scrutinise the ‘cognitive apartheid’ that stops experts, media, and the educated public from recognising the ecological wisdom of poor, illiterate communities who have so much to teach us. In making their livelihoods, these modest communities illustrate the ecological principle of self-organisation in ecosystems, with humans active and conscious agents and participants in their functioning. Only studied ecological ignorance can explain a public that takes no notice of this long-standing virtue, and builds luxury offices on fragile lands.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Ghosh also made a case that such ecologically wise communities actually have a ‘positive ecological footprint’. They take away very little from their environment and give back so much – unlike metropolitan households, offices and establishments that take so much and return only effluents. Globalised, metropolitan India is so accustomed to thinking of footprints as intrinsically negative that we fail to imagine that livelihoods can actually return more to nature than they take. It is possible. It happens. It may also happen to be the only way to live in the future.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Ghosh argued for the replacement of the dysfunctional ‘environmental impact assessment’ (“<a href="https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/policy/Environment-assessment-is-a-joke-says-Jairam-wants-3rd-party-EIA/article20114558.ece" target="_blank">a bit of a joke</a>”, in the words of a recent Union Minister of Environment, while he was still in office) by an ‘ecological assessment’ which would have as its foundation “a charter of ecological ethics”, with the renewable livelihoods of communities directly dependent on ecosystems as its primary reference point.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Ghosh insisted that human culture does not consist just of literature, cinema, music and dance. Rather, the patrimony of ecological culture, which is not just an artefact of the past, resides in the practical collective memory of communities, showing pathways of “living creatively with nature”. Such rooted wisdom lights up paths to an ecologically viable future for all of India, teeming as it is with communities who ‘know’ how to live in harmony with nature.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">This is India’s epistemic gift, a privilege not available any more in the supposedly developed world. The ecological practices of people who live in intimacy with nature may be the key to the future survival of this civilisation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Ghosh’s work of a lifetime has led to the birth of a new organisation, the Society for Creative Opportunities and Participatory Ecosystems (SCOPE), now managed by several of his students. It works, through research and action, to conserve the East Kolkata Wetlands, protecting them from the gluttonous claws of developers. In the face of stiff odds, Ghosh remains for them a steady light of inspiration.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">(I wish to thank Dhruba Das Gupta of SCOPE for her suggestions).</span><br />
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Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-1704257666277152522018-03-08T00:03:00.001-08:002018-03-08T19:58:36.631-08:00The man who exposed the policy-elite's arrogance from ecological ignorance<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />"Good morning. Slept well after 15 days. I love you so much."</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Those were the last words I received on my mobile phone from Dhruba Da. That was on January 3, 2018. He breathed his last on the morning of February 16, but he was in no position to speak or write messages in the last weeks of his life. He was in hospital. He died of a lung infection which led to further complications. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">There was still so much left for Dhruba Da to say, to write, to do. It is striking for me to recall that I only knew him in the last two years of his life. It was as though we had a connection from a previous birth. He got my number from a common friend in Kolkata and called me. I was in Mumbai for a lecture. Our first call lasted over an hour and he said that I should stay with him next time I visit his city.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I did. And I stayed with him a second and final time last September. His generosity was boundless, his humour ever so wry, his intellect razor-sharp. Our conversations always ran out of time, signed mutually with a 'TBC' (to be continued). On September 11, 2017, he came to my friend Subhas Roy's home for a discussion among many friends on Rabindranath's ecological vision. That was the very last time I saw him.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Dhruba Da's gentle presence and warm smile live in the heart.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I wrote a 2500-word essay on his life and work with the East Kolkata Wetlands last week. Nobody was willing to publish the whole of it. So I drew two pieces from the original. And two media outlets have agreed to publish one each of them. <a href="http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-ecologically-subsidised-city/article22970933.ece" target="_blank">Here </a>is the shorter one, from today's The Hindu :</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-ecologically-subsidised-city/article22970933.ece">http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-ecologically-subsidised-city/article22970933.ece</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">(Related: A staggering statistic about wetlands in Chennai: "Around Twenty years ago, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras pegged the number of wetlands in and around the city to be at around 650. Less than 5% (27 to be precise) exist today. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">"It is a country-wide problem: one-third of India’s wetlands are already wiped out or severely degraded because of habitat destruction, pollution, and encroachment. In low-lying coastal areas where heavy rains are common and high tides can occur, the consequences are potentially disastrous.")</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">(http://theglobalcalcuttan.com/?p=4539)</span></div>
Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-32217394043839965032017-10-20T07:19:00.000-07:002017-10-20T07:20:54.289-07:00Nature's Grandchildren<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: large;">Rabindranath believes that the inevitable ecological alienation involved in metropolitan life cripples our cognition profoundly, leaving humanity in a condition of an ultimately destructive spiritual destitution. Intimacy with the natural world from a formative age is the only way to restore humanity to spiritual and ecological health. This, to him, is the core of his practical religion as well as his pedagogy.</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/natures-grandchildren/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">http://www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/natures-grandchildren/</span></a></div>
Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-35232464850465593092017-08-18T01:33:00.001-07:002017-08-18T01:33:16.117-07:00When Nehru's 'development' superseded Gandhi's 'swaraj'<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: large;">In October 1945, two years before India's independence, Gandhi and Nehru exchanged ideas on the question of swaraj. Nehru dismissed Gandhi's idea of Hind Swaraj as outlandish. The idea of swaraj was sumamarily superseded by the modern notion of 'development', with consequences which made even Nehru himself regret his views towards the end of his life.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/freedom-issue-2017-essay/who-killed-swaraj" target="_blank">http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/freedom-issue-2017-essay/who-killed-swaraj</a> </span></div>
Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-53083862603207260822017-08-13T17:58:00.000-07:002017-08-13T17:58:29.107-07:00Independence Day 2017: Educating India for true freedom<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">For this Independence Day, I have written a long 7000-word essay on Thomas Macaulay as the reigning influence on Indian education 70 years after the British left. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><a href="http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reviews-essays/biography-macaulay-unwritten-tell-us" target="_blank">http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reviews-essays/biography-macaulay-unwritten-tell-us</a></span></div>
Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-17116616171740904902016-12-22T05:57:00.000-08:002016-12-22T05:57:49.623-08:00Weapon of Mass Digitization - Part II<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: large;">As the deflationary spiral deepens rapidly across vast swathes of India's cash-dependent informal economy, ultimately impacting the formal sector too, what was seductively sold to the public as a "surgical strike" on black money may turn out to become the worst-ever carpet-bombing the country's economy has ever experienced at the hands of its own government.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">In any case, a militarised imagination is the last thing India needs to face its real problems today.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.catchnews.com/india-news/weapon-of-mass-digitisation-notebandi-a-superseded-rbi-elites-misreading-society-1482328535.html?pg=2">http://www.catchnews.com/india-news/weapon-of-mass-digitisation-notebandi-a-superseded-rbi-elites-misreading-society-1482328535.html?pg=2</a></span></div>
Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-33174706532992612802016-12-18T07:08:00.001-08:002016-12-22T05:53:25.839-08:00Weapon of Mass Digitization - Part I<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: large;">The popular appeal of demonetisation - and the reason why Modi Sarkaar still survives despite the criminal disruption of the Indian economy - rests on the government's claim that it will put an end to black money in the country.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">If things had been presented to the public the other way around, and the government had been up front about the objective of achieving a cashless India (the removal of black money being but a secondary goal), there is little doubt that the policy would have been immediately unpopular.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">As things are laid out, it will take a while for the public to see through the rhetoric of patriotism. This is how stealth reforms are meant to take effect. Meanwhile, just like in 1991, the economy is subject to fait accompli policy-making, digital coercion being a necessary part of the bargain.</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.catchnews.com/india-news/weapon-of-mass-digitisation-pm-modi-s-gambit-has-nothing-to-do-with-black-money-1482058424.html"><span style="font-size: large;">http://www.catchnews.com/india-news/weapon-of-mass-digitisation-pm-modi-s-gambit-has-nothing-to-do-with-black-money-1482058424.html</span></a></div>
Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-34346986228767368532016-10-02T10:16:00.000-07:002016-10-02T10:16:20.117-07:00Prithvi Manthan<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: large;">Ashish and I had submitted the copyedited manuscript of the Hindi version of <i>Churning the Earth</i> to the publisher in July, 2014. It has taken them two years for them to actually publish and release the book!</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://rajkamalprakashan.com/default/prithvi-manthan">http://rajkamalprakashan.com/default/prithvi-manthan</a></span><br />
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Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-16455521812536652362016-07-19T20:45:00.000-07:002016-07-19T20:47:31.149-07:00A-Meri-India @ 25 : A note from the land of frustrated aspirants<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
On the silver jubilee of the economic reforms euphemistically described as 'liberalization', India is much more a case of voluntary colonialism than ever before as we stride confidently towards ecocide.<br />
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<a href="http://www.epw.in/system/files/pdf/2016_51/29/A-Meri-India_1.pdf">http://www.epw.in/system/files/pdf/2016_51/29/A-Meri-India_1.pdf</a><br />
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Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-75279488721672128422016-06-08T07:21:00.001-07:002016-06-08T07:29:44.645-07:00A dumb primate ?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="color: #3b3a39; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 18px;">In the Cincinnati zoo, an innocent gorilla was murdered from</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #3b3a39; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">primordial dread. It is not clear which of us is a dumb </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #3b3a39; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">primate. It is chilling that the four-year-old Isaiah, whose </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: #3b3a39; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #3b3a39; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">mishap last week became world news, carries the name of a </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #3b3a39; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">Hebrew prophet.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-article-by-aseem-shrivastava-on-the-death-of-a-gorilla-in-cincinnati-zoo-a-dumb-primate/article8697397.ece">http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-article-by-aseem-shrivastava-on-the-death-of-a-gorilla-in-cincinnati-zoo-a-dumb-primate/article8697397.ece</a></span></span><br />
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Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-40882473594230570952016-03-15T18:08:00.000-07:002016-03-15T18:12:31.101-07:00The air in Delhi<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: large;">India’s new tax on car sales is a step in the right direction, but can the country address the wealth and power imbalance driving the health disaster? </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/series/rethinking-prosperity">http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/series/rethinking-prosperity</a></span></div>
Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-68041179570319136502016-01-22T07:42:00.001-08:002016-01-22T07:42:18.349-08:00The Lokvidya Standpoint<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: large;">Amit Basole has edited a useful new volume on Lokvidya. I reviewed it in EPW recently.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">BOOK REVIEW</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">Lokvidya Perspectives: A Philosophy of Political Imagination for the Knowledge Age</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Edited by Amit Basole</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Published by Aakar Books, Delhi, 2015</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><i><span style="font-size: large;">The Lokvidya Standpoint</span></i></b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">Aseem Shrivastava</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Do the people who grow or cook the food we eat ‘know’ something? If so, did they acquire this knowledge at school or college? If not, what is the status of their knowledge? Is there more to their knowledge than skill, pretending for a moment that knowledge is something more than ‘just’ skill? If yes, how did they acquire the knowledge? Do the conditions that generate such knowledge need to be nurtured? Do these conditions involve the living presence of a human community through which the experience behind the knowledge is imparted through multiple traditions, no less than serving as the receptacle for what is produced?</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Such are the fundamental cognitive questions prompted by the volume under review. The book brings together a set of valuable contributions made at a conference of the <i>Lokavidya Jan Andolan</i> at <i>Vidya Ashram</i> in Sarnath in November, 2011. The essays in the collection have been grouped under five themes: transition to knowledge society, epistemics and politics of <i>lokavidya</i>, economics of <i>lokavidya</i>, <i>lokavidya</i> and the university, and <i>Lokavidya Jan Andolan</i>.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">In his lifelong search for clarity, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had advocated ordinary language therapy for philosophy (and philosophers of course). The authors in the volume under review advocate everyday life and livelihood therapy for those in search of a new philosophy and politics of knowledge (<i>gyan ki rajneeti</i>), appropriate for the challenges confronting India in the 21st century. The goal of the book is to offer a “comprehensive introduction to <i>lokavidya darshan</i>” (<i>LP</i> p.8).</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">To start with, what is <i>lokavidya</i>? The “lok” in <i>lokavidya</i> is not the same as “working class” or “the poor”. The reference, the editor of the volume Amit Basole clarifies in one of the later pieces in the book, is to the social majority which repeatedly shows up in government surveys as “uneducated”, or lacking any formal training (<i>LP</i> p.455). The category is bound by the nature of knowledge held by people not generally regarded (often by illiterate, no less than by literate society) as ‘knowledgeable’.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">What is ‘lokavidya’?</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Lokavidya</i> points to a philosophy of knowledge and knowing which emerges from human communities in the course of their negotiation of the challenges of ordinary, everyday life. It is knowledge that lives in them, passed on by tradition, but often amended to address changing circumstances, helping them negotiate real questions of life and livelihood, ecology and culture. It refers to the myriad living traditions of knowledge among peasants and artisans, fisherfolk and forest-dwellers, home-makers and home-builders across the country (and indeed so much of the world).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: normal;">Just before he died, the lifelong student of the peasantry Teodor Shanin pointed out the redundancy of labour in an ever more robotised industrial world: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“the modern formal economy needs only about a quarter of the global workforce. The other three-quarters are engaged in survival through the informal economy. The core of the informal economy is not peasant farming, but family and neighborhood relationships of mutual support. So while the informal economy is seen – if it is seen at all – as the political economy of the margins, when you put it all together, you can see it is not marginal at all.”</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: normal;"><sup></sup></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">In India, the proportion of the overall population engaged in the informal economy is well over three-quarters. At least 8 to 9 working people out of 10 belong here. It is inconceivable that any of them (or any of us able to read reviews like this) could survive for too long without the enormous labour performed by such people, not to forget in the present context the practical working knowledge that they must have to do what they do. If all the food critics in the country were to suddenly die off, India will survive. But it cannot if the same happened to all the food producers. And yet, such is the astronomical absurdity of the society we have come to live in that the former get paid amounts which are orders of magnitude greater than those earned with so much blood, sweat and tears by the latter. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Lokvidya Perspectives</i> (<i>LP</i>) is an urgent plea to acknowledge, nurture and reward the vast and varied range of knowledge embodied by the hundreds of millions of working people who enable India and the world to survive from one day to the next. </span><span style="font-family: Times; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: normal;">“The cognitive foundation of a people’s strength in the ultimate analysis lies in the knowledge they possess to organise their lives, to understand the world, to resist” oppression (<i>LP</i> p.2).</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">“The modern university, instead of recognising <i>lokvidya</i> and seeing that society is knowledge abundant, sees itself as being located amidst knowledge scarcity.” This comes with the “denigration of other ways of seeing, knowing and doing that belong to the ordinary people in the colonised countries”, victims as they are of cultures derailed by imperialism. A <i>gyan andolan </i>based on<i> lokvidya darshan </i>is not only possible, the writers who have contributed to this volume call for it. “Unless the University is challenged alongside the State, restorations will recur” (<i>LP </i>p.2).</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">In deference to <i>lokavidya</i> Basole writes in the Introduction that “that huge store and variety of knowledge…may far exceed the total knowledge content produced and accumulated by universities so far” (p.4). This obvious fact has gone unnoticed because of the ease with which the complexity of the labor performed by hundreds of millions of people has been overlooked even by radical thought. “Radical social and political movements of the 19th and 20th centuries challenged every oppressive structure of the capitalist social order except one: the hegemony of modern science and modern knowledge over other traditions of knowledge. In particular, knowledge traditions of the “uneducated majority,” those millions of peasants, adivasis, artisans, small retailers, and women all over the world who are outside the modern economy, were considered inferior” (<i>LP</i> p.1).</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">How might one view the politics and philosophy of knowledge at stake? “In the Gatesian age, knowledge itself is being redefined in terms of organizability by machines”, leading to dangerous conflations of information and knowledge, knowledge and wisdom, and so on (<i>LP</i>, p.379). This “juggernaut of virtualisation” - which can only deal with knowledge that can be put down in text and images - can only be challenged by repeatedly asserting the significance of sites of knowledge that simply cannot be virtualised (<i>LP</i>, p.380). How do you virtualise the complex know-how involved in <i>Lokavidya</i> - referring not just to knowledge but to the associated and underlying ethics, politics, aesthetics, epistemology, ontology, a whole weltanschaaung? <i>Lokavidya</i> It does not allow “epistemic reduction” (<i>LP</i> p.16). </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"> It is argued that <i>lokavidya</i> is among the few “genuine hopes for a different future” (p.380). As Sunil Sahasrabudhey, one of the intellectual pioneers behind the volume under review, points out, “<i>lokavidya</i> is what it is because it is not organisable through a paradigm acceptable to organised knowledge systems, both traditional and modern” (p.369). It is knowledge difficult, if not impossible, to abstract, commodify and sell. Besides, it is produced at multiple sites, by nature widely dispersed and decentralised. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">The lead authors in the volume argue further that placing the significance of <i>lokavidya</i> at the centre may just provide the necessary missing link between the many movements for social and economic justice taking place today. “The myriad ongoing struggles against displacement and dispossession, inequality and imperialism will acquire a new civilisational significance as well as a sense of solidarity with each other if they are seen as knowledge struggles, struggles for restoring legitimacy to people’s knowledge or <i>lokvidya</i>” (<i>LP</i> p.1).</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">The social dimension of <i>lokavidya</i> is critical to this quest. “The crises of <i>Lokavidyadhar Samaj</i> (that vast section of Indian society which bases its life and livelihood on <i>lokvidya</i>) is that traditional livelihoods have all but collapsed and the members of this <i>Samaj</i> (largely small and medium farmers, agricultural workers, artisans, tribals, small shopkeepers and home-maker women) are forced to live a life sans basic human dignity” (<i>LP</i> p.450). Most such people have not even had the misfortune of being exploited directly (in the organised sector) by the mainstream, globalised capitalist economy.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">The holders of <i>lokvidya</i> are in the overwhelming majority. This <i>lokvidyadhar samaj </i>(the society of <i>lokvidya</i>-holders) are at once the <i>bahishkrit samaj</i> (boycotted society), the vast informal sector in economic terms. Their everyday struggles and movements for survival would be sharper if they make bold and just claims for their own creative traditions of knowledge through a <i>lokvidya jan andolan, </i>instead of merely attempting a modest defence of meagre livelihoods, risking being seen as “anti-progress”.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">Women’s lokavidya and the Karigar Samaj</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Two of the most incisive pieces in the book (with as many as 36 contributions!) have been written by Chitra Sahasrabudhey. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">In the first essay (published originally in Hindi in 2001), she proposes a <i>lokavidya</i> approach to the women’s movement. The main thrust of the essay is that the spread of imperialism (in independent India, through the destructive mechanisms of state-led development of markets) and the general dynamic of present-day modern society have continuously stolen from women a growing range of socio-economic activities which traditionally came within their domain of creative work. From domestic industries and textiles to agricultural work, healthcare and feeding the family, crores of women have been sidelined by the ascent of commercial and bureaucratic forces, rendering them “inactive, helpless and weak” (<i>LP</i> p.192). Domestic industry has fallen into disarray, while agriculture has been increasingly mechanised and modernized, turning women unemployed. To the extent that women have found work, they have to work outside familial contexts, in “alien conditions” (<i>LP</i> p.197). “Imperialism has made its roots firmer through democracies and development…the great misfortune is that women blinded by the shine and twinkle of modern development, saw this process as one which will make the poor and illiterate women self-dependent” (<i>LP</i> p.195). </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">A whole cosmos of valid women’s knowledge - <i>lokvidya</i> - has been repressed as a consequence of the fact that such knowledge has never found due recognition from the modernizers including very often, metropolitan feminists. She contrasts the experience of independent India with the freedom struggle under Gandhi when women’s knowledge was a “leading value”, resulting in far greater presence of women in public life across the country (<i>LP</i> p.198). </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">The <i>Lokvidya Jan Andolan</i> must fight then for beginning the process of retrieval of the traditional areas of women’s activity. Even if just food and clothing were to return to the realm of women’s control, “unlimited possibilities” can be envisaged (<i>LP</i> p.200). Thus, “the movement for reorganisation of the production and market of textiles and food materials on the basis of women’s knowledge can become the mainstay of emancipating women from the vicious web of exploitation and erecting a promising challenge to globalisation" (<i>LP</i> p.201). Advocating economic localisation, Sahasrabudhey argues that production by the family must find a just place in the local economy, reinstating the role of women and artisans as knowledgeable people. A sustained campaign for the dignity of women’s <i>lokavidya</i> can “initiate the reorganisation of society such that it gradually inactivates the greedy and exploitative imperialist system” (<i>LP</i> p.205). </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">In a related essay Chitra Sahasrabudhey also proposes that the <i>Karigar Samaj, </i>duly restored, could become “the liberator of enslaved societies” (<i>LP</i> p.317). A resurrection of artisanal human creativity - entailing due recognition for the enormous wealth of <i>lokavidya</i> among the country’s myriad artisans, not to forget local control of resources - is called for in order to promote “a just and fraternal relationship between man and man and between man and nature” (<i>LP</i> p.318). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Underscoring the significance of <i>karigar lokavidya</i>, Sahasrabudhey writes: “minute details of river and ocean waters, its fauna and flora are known to the fisherman but the university professor of hydrology holds the right to knowledgeability and the right to a fat salary. The knowledge of the potter is no less than that of the ceramic engineer, nor that of the weaver any less than that of the textile engineer. But it is not valued more than his meagre wages. This is the injustice that pervades society. The <i>karigar samaj</i> must break it in order to establish a position of honour for itself” (p.334). It must fight for an “autonomous social life” which can regulate an economy built around household industries and localised markets. “There is no escape from the shackles of globalisation without the liberation of the <i>karigar samaj” </i>(<i>LP</i> p.342)<i>. </i>One thinks in this context of the importance Karl Polanyi assigned to “embedded economies”.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: normal;"><sup></sup></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Echoing the visions of Gandhi and Tagore, Sunil Sahasrabudhey points out in the Afterword to the book that “there is no civilisation where there is no village…it is impossible to realise the Rights of Nature and Mother Earth in a world built around the city.” (<i>LP</i> p.459) He calls for a <i>gaon-shahar samvaad </i>which would initiate the process of renegotiating the all-important, but terribly strained relationship between metropolitan and urban India on the one hand and the countryside on the other.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">In a volume of this size (almost 500 pages in length!) one wishes that the ecological dimensions of such radical proposals were explored further, since a renegotiated relationship between town and country and an alternative - small and dispersed - industrial system, shunned in India since the days of Nehru, is surely a large part of the answer to the impasse of development in 21st century India. Re-embedding economies in a renewable ecology and culture is the key to any future worth contemplating for a world imperilled and defeated every day by, among other things, climate chaos. One hopes that many of the authors who have contributed to this volume will explore these themes in future work.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">A few shortcomings of the book may be pointed out at the end. Reading through it, I missed an index. Secondly, the volume could have been edited down significantly, given the repetition of ideas across essays, often by the same author. Thirdly, verbal references to non-Hindi vernacular equivalents of <i>lokavidya</i> would have been helpful for non-Hindi readers. Finally, given an anglophone readership (but even otherwise), it would have been useful to offer many more examples of <i>lokavidya</i>.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Yet, the book is an invaluable and pioneering effort which should provoke far greater research in directions tragically ignored by Anglophone Indian radical thought, which has unfortunately drawn more from a borrowed imagination than is helpful or merited. </span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/2/book-reviews/lokavidya-standpoint.html"><span style="font-size: large;">http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/2/book-reviews/lokavidya-standpoint.html</span></a></div>
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Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-18015377022683365612016-01-03T01:50:00.001-08:002016-01-03T03:30:27.379-08:00The Revaluation of Nature: A Conversation<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: large;">I am in Mumbai for an audio recording. Yesterday I participated in an hour-long four-way conversation at 'SynTalk' on <i>The Revaluation of Nature</i>. The conservationist Dr. Ulhas Karanth, Bangaldeshi environmental economist Dr. Enamul Haq and Rajat, our host and moderator, were the other three participants. The enjoyable conversation ranged over a number of interrelated themes in Economics, Finance, Ecology, Conservation and Philosophy. It would be interesting to anyone interested in issues connected with the ecological crisis:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://syntalk.wordpress.com/episodes/turn-two/tron/">The Revaluation of Nature: A Conversation</a></span></div>
Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-23782954202243526022015-11-10T12:10:00.000-08:002015-11-11T09:18:06.878-08:00What Bihar means<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>“Bahati Hawa sa thha woh, Gujarat se aaya thha woh, kaala dhan laane wala thha wo, kahan gaya use doondho. Humko desh ki fikr sataati hai, woh bus videsh ke daure lagaate hain, humko badhti mahangai satata, wo bas mann ki baat sunata. Har waqt apni selfie khinchta thha woh, Dawood ko laane wala thha woh, kahan gaya use dhoondo…” </i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">- Nitish Kumar, parodying in an election speech a song from the film <i>Three Idiots</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It must have been a sullen birthday for Advani Ji on Sunday. And it will be a dull <i>Deepawali</i> for the <i>Sangh Parivaar</i>, their thunder stolen by the unlettered <i>gwaalaas</i> of Bihar, the former’s greedily anxious patronage of the cow notwithstanding. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I first came to live in Delhi when I was 16. I was born (in Arrah) and raised in Bihar. It is the part of the earth I still feel closest to. From childhood we were raised on the adage <i>Arrah jeela (zila) ghar baa toh kauun baat ke darr baa?</i> (If Arrah is your home, what can you possibly be afraid of?)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After spending some time traveling in Bihar some weeks before the polls, including a 45-minute meeting with a very self-assured, but watchful Nitish Kumar, I became quite sure that Modiji will meet his match soon. Before the last phase of the polls in November I told a number of people that the <i>Mahagathbandhan</i> would win by a two-thirds majority. Only Laloo himself was crazy enough to make such a prediction. Many went sleepless for a few nights, thinking of Chanakya’s prediction of 155 seats for the NDA. And on the morning of the counting the bluff masters and omniscienti in the national media began counting the NDA’s chickens long before they had hatched. In the event, it was Laloo’s 190 seats for the MGB which came closest to the final result, especially if you take into account the 12 seats that went to candidates other than those of the NDA and the MGB, in which case Laloo's prediction was uncannily spot on! Something for our national pundits and know-all metropolitan journalists to ponder. A thoroughly well-deserved drubbing for the NDA.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is backward Bihar that has saved India again. Consider the opposite verdict as a counterfactual: Had Modi-Shah’s NDA won 178 seats out of 243, we could have reasonably expected the Indian Constitution to be imperilled by the ruthlessly ambitious communal hate-mongers, their eyes set firmly on winning a similar majority in UP in 2017 and seizing control of the <i>Rajya Sabha</i> - all that stands between them and the rape of the Constitution. Instead Modi-Shah and the RSS find their <i>Ratha-Yatra</i> blocked yet again by the nearly forgotten Laloo Prasad Yadav, back from long political wilderness to haunt the <i>Parivaar</i>’s dreams like a bad penny. His RJD finds itself the single biggest party in the assembly with 80 seats. In the last assembly the party had just 23. It explains in some measure why the BJP-led NDA, which had tasted success in 172 of the 243 assembly constituencies in the 2014 <i>Lok Sabha</i> polls, was struck down to a paltry 53.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What does this widely unexpected turn of events mean?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>The DNA of the NDA</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One thing it clearly means is just how much more politically astute is the unlettered, largely rural, Bihari <i>janta</i> than the educated classes of metropolitan India. Love and hate are passions which any honest human heart can divine. It does not take education. On the contrary, as we often find, it may hinder a clear view of the truth. Bihar has demonstrated this abundantly. If political sagacity lies in recognising the perfidy of a power that seeks to divide a people for political gain, Bihar has it in greater measure than any other part of India. (The Bihar polls also featured over 2000 third gender voters. Wonder how that will compare with an election in the US or the UK!)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">While it is true that Nitish’s governance and developmental achievements over the last decade weighed significantly in the voters’ minds, caste, community, and the urgent need for communal harmony and decency in public life have played the decisive role in this election. Campaigning for the RJD candidate at an election rally at Keoti earlier this month, Nitish Kumar said: <i>“Prem aur sadbhav banaye rakhiye. Tarah tarah ke log jhagda lagane ki koshish karenge, ek kanphukwa </i>(rumour-monger)<i> ghoom raha hai. Sama mein jahar gholne ki koshish karenge, haddi phek denge, murti tod denge, mara suar phek denge dharmik sthalon ke paas. Inke uksane se sachet rahiyega.” ("</i></span><span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: medium;"><i>Maintain harmony and peace. People will try to create trouble of every kind. A rumour monger has been doing the rounds. Attempts will be made to poison the atmosphere by throwing bones, breaking idols, leaving dead pigs near religious places. Remain alert, do not get provoked.")</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Bihar is perhaps unique in that it has hardly had a communal riot during the last 25 years. The RSS plan of “uniting” Hindus (against all others) across the country has bitten the dust in Bihar, perhaps setting the tone for the rest of the country. Their view that reservations ought to be purely along economic lines betrays a typically modern lack of understanding of the socio-economic complexity of <i>jaati-vyavastha</i>. This is not to endorse the idea of caste in the slightest. It is only to remember the occupational historical correlate of <i>jaati</i> for most Indians and to underscore what should be the bleeding obvious: as the Patel agitation in Gujarat showed, the demand for reservations in education and jobs is only going to get more bitter as the crisis of unemployment (which, a vast amount of data suggests, is impossible to address within the economic framework of the reigning development model) gets worse over the next few decades. This will put paid to any attempt at “Hindu” unity. RSS Hindutva idealism has read the ground completely wrong, leading to electorally costly repeated blurts from the pulpits of Nagpur by <i>sarsanchaalak</i> Mohan Bhagwat. To address the jobs question within the Hindutva ideology is likely to prove utterly difficult, if not impossible, especially since folks like those in the <i>Swadeshi Jaagaran Manch</i> have been totally sidelined by the Modi <i>Manch</i> (of three). When you couple this with the unfettered corporate investment agenda of Modi’s, the writing is on the wall for the present rulers of India. India refuses to shine like this, a lesson they should have learned from the 2004 debacle. Given the depth and range of interests at play, they are unlikely to learn it this time either.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Bihar is also, at a deeper level, a vote against hatred in public life. What we have witnessed over the last six weeks was easily the most vicious of all electoral campaigns in the history of Independent India. Desperate to win at all costs, the NDA went hell for broke in its attempt to communalise and polarise the electorate, divide, for instance, Dalits and Yadavs from Muslims, and Yadavs among themselves. Even Modiji outdid himself when it came to lowering the standards of public speech, especially for a serving Prime Minister. Early in the campaign he found “some problem with Nitish Kumar’s DNA”, a remark which alone may have cost him more than a few seats. At a recent rally in Buxar, keen to divide the opposition’s votes, he did not pause to think before accusing the grand coalition of plotting to reduce quotas for SCs, STs and OBCs in order to benefit “a particular community”. Rabble-rousers like Giriraj Kishore went to the extent of saying “Lalu says that (you should) throw meat in a Durga temple”. Lead campaigner and BJP President Amit Shah said that if Nitish’s coalition won, firecrackers would go off in Pakistan. (There were actually many more in India!) And so on. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The venom and poison that has been unleashed during the last year should make anyone wonder if this is a civilised society any more. The hate brigade reintroduced a vicious form of beef politics in recent months, leading to the lynching of an innocent man last month, the Prime Minister maintaining a typically cowardly silence. It is not for love of the cow, but for love of the power that the pretence of protecting it is seen to give that the beleaguered animal has found such enthusiastic patrons in recent months. Nobody should miss the point that the surge in beef politics during the last couple of months was scarcely coincidental. It was prime-timed for the Bihar elections. (This happened despite Nitish repeatedly drawing attention to the fact that cow slaughter had been banned in Bihar since 1955). You will see the hype come down sharply now. The attempt was to divide the large Yadav vote in the process. In the event, the divisive tactic proved counter-productive, one more instance of the alertness of the ordinary voter in the state. One finds it hard to imagine if a region like Haryana or Western UP would have responded with the same sagacity. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The MGB’s victory in Bihar restores the idea of India to its pristine dignity, an idea wounded and imperilled seriously over the last 18 months by a hate-inspired leadership hypocritically more keen to see a <i>Mahabharata</i> than an <i>Akhand Bhaarat</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Fortunately, every seductive slogan of Modiji’s - beginning with the ridiculous DNA slur - was turned around by his Bihari opponents into a <i>jumlaawaar</i> which fractured the NDA strategy. He was outwitted fair and square.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is time people stopped considering Bihar “backward”. Without making any apologies for the rampant corruption (as much a feature of other places), it is important to keep in view the fact that Bihar has been systematically denied its due share of Central funds over the past 25 years, affecting its performance more than any other state perhaps (the dues going into hundreds of thousands of crores, Modiji offering a small fraction of it, as if from his own private kitty), because it has always faced a hostile government in Delhi in these recent decades.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There is also something else to consider. During our meeting with him Nitish Kumar expressed the view that provincial elections in no other part of the country inspire as much wide national interest as a Bihar election. Why is this so?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Bihar has always led the curve in Indian politics, all the way since Gandhiji’s Champaran Satyagraha in 1916, through the JP movement and the revolt against the Emergency in the mid-1970s, to the Mandal agitation and Laloo’s stopping of Advani’s Rath-Yatra in the early 1990s. For anyone who knows the socio-political ground in Bihar (and retains a deep distrust of the political intelligence of metropolitan media savants), it would have come as a huge surprise had Modi-Shah pulled off an upset against the Laloo-Nitish combine, especially after Modiji chose to commit (yet another) folly. <i>Kisne hidaayat dee thhi Modiji ko Laloo se moonhh lagne ki, auur wo bhi Bihar mein?</i> The NDA brains trust also preferred to have Amit Shah give more than 60 speeches while blocking local point-men like Shatrughan Sinha, committing the same blunder they did in Delhi, of preventing the state unit of the BJP to take charge. Somehow, Modiji (and Shah himself of course) believes that the people of India also voted for Amit Shah in 2014. Trying to save themselves from the Delhi blunder of announcing pre-emptively a candidate the state unit of the party had not endorsed, they went for the opposite gamble of not announcing a candidate at all this time. (This is typical of a power-drunk leader without any Plan B, presuming that everyone will kow-tow to him anywhere in the country once he is triumphant). I remember Nitish Kumar saying to us in September “<i>Modiji Bihar ka additional charge lenge kya?”</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I have lived in four countries on three continents. Within India I have lived in four different states and travelled to virtually all, except a few in the North-East. I have not come across people with a sharper political intelligence anywhere else. This is the reason for the wide national interest that a Bihar election provokes. There are objective reasons why Bihar - apart from its large population (one out of thirteen Indians is a Bihari) - is of enormous political significance for India, a trend likely to grow in the future.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Regionalism played a far greater role in this election than communalism. Parties like the Shiv Sena and the MIM came from outside the state to participate. It was widely noticed that top NDA leaders from out of the state had come to campaign. Amit Shah camped all October in Bihar and addressed over 60 rallies. Modiji himself spoke at more than 30, his party losing in most of the places where he spoke. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The obvious question this campaign strategy provoked was why local leaders were not given the lead roles in the campaign. The opposition made full use of this lapse, especially since the NDA failed to announce a CM candidate, Modiji himself at the forefront of the campaign. It naturally prompted Nitish to ask voters to choose between a Bihari and a <i>Baahari. </i>Wouldn’t Modiji himself have done the same had Sonia Gandhi aggressively fronted a Congress campaign in Gujarat when he was CM?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Moreover, taking its cue from the <i>Lok Sabha</i> polls, Modi’s campaign was mechanically pitched for urban (and urbanising) India. But almost nine out of ten Biharis live in villages. It was natural for the large rural vote to go against Modi, especially as he mocked at the scale of labour migration from Bihar, forgetting what a major contribution is made my millions of migrant Bihari labour both to the country and to their own households. Our elites and middle classes would find it difficult to believe that even Rahul Gandhi's words about "<i>suit-boot ki sarkaar"</i> had greater traction in so many parts, resulting in 27 seats for the Congress, when it had just 4 last time.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>What can we expect now?</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">First of all, we can expect a lot of national entertainment, now that Laloo is back before the media cameras. He has already promised some fun when he said that he will go with a <i>laal-ten</i> (lantern) to Modiji’s constituency Benares to look for his achievements! From there he threatens an agitation to challenge the regime in Delhi. As the <i>Parivaar</i> knows now, if there is one man in India who is serious about destroying communalism, it is Laloo. He is not a man to be trifled with!</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The story is told that after blocking Advani’s Rath-Yatra in the 1990s, when he was Chief Minister of Bihar, Laloo Yadav was giving a speech somewhere in UP, in either Kanpur or Lucknow. Heckled by <i>Bajrangis</i>, he turned the mike off and sat down. When things had quietened, he stood up again, turned the mike on and said into it <i>“Ee Ram Chandra Ji kauno BJP ka card-holder hain ka? Humko cheente hain? </i>(Do you recognise me?) <i>Hum bail </i>(bull) <i>ko seengh pakad ke chadhte hain!”</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The political lesson of Bihar is that the man who knows his cow wins. The man who pretends to love it loses in the end. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Will the <i>Mahagathbandhan</i> hang together, or perhaps dissipate into the sort of factional fights which have been the undoing of coalition governments in the past? The risks are not low, given that the coalition here is between two former rivals, even enemies. Yet, both sides know very well what is at stake. They came together in a moment of national peril, to not only defend Bihar against a perceived outsider, but to kill the deadly virus of communalism before it got worse. The virus is far from gone. And the two leaders know that they must hang together for it to remain at bay. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For his part, Nitish needs to reflect carefully on the future economy of the state. The country is living through an unacknowledged impasse of development. 'Development' can mean many things. It is for him and his supporters to define afresh what it should mean for Bihar, what would bring the greatest benefit to people long deprived and exploited. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>“Bihar mein bahaar ho!”</i> is a much better direction to go in than <i>“Bihar mein bazaar ho!”</i>, for “bazaar” no longer refers to actual bazaars, like our traditional <i>haats</i> and <i>mandis</i>, but to the “share bazaar”. The latter is the sort of development which will keep most Biharis in a state of deprivation, while narrow elite interests in the cities are promoted. In the long run, such a model of development, unleashing enormously destructive ecological forces in the wake of growing inequalities, especially between cities and the countryside, will bring ruin even to the wealthy in the cities. <i>Sabka swaarth, sabka vinaash.</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The election results show that people in Bihar know where to place the blame when it comes to fundamental macroeconomic issues like inflation, especially the price of essentials like <i>daal</i>. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Instead of following the </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">arhar</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Modi model of promoting big business, Nitish could pay due attention to basic services, agriculture and small, sustainable industry to generate livelihoods, deepen his already substantial commitment to renewable energy and pioneer for all of India an entirely new form of ecological development, something which could lay the foundations of a future state of what may be called </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Praakritik Swaraaj. </i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Such attention to rural Bihar</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> would also allay Laloo’s well-known suspicion of development, helping to keep the coalition together.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Bihar is only 12% urbanised. Instead of succumbing to the dominant view that this is a sign of “backwardness”, it may be wise of Nitish to see this as perhaps one of Bihar’s great long-term ecological assets. A whole new style of development can be pioneered in Bihar which may not be so easy to pursue for highly urbanised states like Tamil Nadu, Gujarat or Maharashtra. This would also require appropriate infrastructural investments (in basic amenities and training) from the government in small (tier 3 and 4) towns, addressing the need for employment amongst educated, mentally urbanised youth, keeping them from metropolitan frustration, while also easing the pressure in the cities. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Above all, the big lesson of this election is that leaders must avoid the hubris that strong mandates bring. They must read these mandates well. This is the era of extreme verdicts in Indian electoral politics. Speaking solely from the perspective of the country, it would be a lot better if the verdicts were more slender: it would give stronger incentives to the ruling coalitions to behave themselves and stick closely to the tasks within the mandate. If NDA had 75 fewer seats in Parliament they would not have chanced their arm so freely, spouting, encouraging and permitting the scale of communal rubbish that has been served over the past year to seek to make narrow electoral gains.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: 0px;">On the other hand, a mandate like 178 out of 243 can be turned to great effect under astute leadership. Nitish is known for his sober qualities. He will need every bit of this sobriety to stay humble, grounded, and focused. The people of Bihar have waited long. They are bubbling with enormous </span><span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: medium;">potential and hopes; they will require at least this from him.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As for Modiji and his vanquished crew, there is just over a year left for the UP elections. After massive defeats in Delhi and Bihar, the RSS may ask for Amit Shah’s head, as against allowing him to take charge in UP too. (Rajnath may be their preferred choice.) If they do so, it will inaugurate a blood feud within the <i>Parivaar</i>. At any rate, if they continue in the same communal vein, forgetting the substance of their real mandate, they will deservedly lose again, given people’s rising impatience on issues that matter. (Beef-eating is hardly one of them.) </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If that happens, the unlikely may come about and Modi may not last the full term in Parliament. Not so long ago, I was the only crazy forecasting such an outcome. Even now, there would be few takers for this view.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For now, let us savour the fact that you can’t fool many people in this country all the time. Those out to destroy <i>dharma</i> will themselves perish in the dust.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Satyameva Jayate!</i></span></div>
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Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-89641130804834128902015-08-30T09:05:00.000-07:002015-08-30T09:05:08.847-07:00An Ode to Cowards<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: large;">You send your unmanned drones to murder babies in Afghanistan.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">You rape and impregnate little girls in the name of bringing them</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> closer to Allah. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">You murder Mohsin and Pansare, Dabholkar and Kalburgi,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> besmirching the noble name of Ancient India.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">All of you should be awarded a desert island on Mars to debauch</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> yourselves in toto, murder each other to mutually assured </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> extinction, and make the red planet redder.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Only then will our beloved Earth bring forth the love to bless its </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> soil and its innocent children.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Only then shall there be Christmas on Earth.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Only then shall <i>Jannat </i>appear.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Only then shall the reign of <i>Shaashvat </i>commence.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Of one thing I am sure.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Your kind is the same, though they go by different names.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Our kind are all different, yet one.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">You will lose.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">And we will win!</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Even if we do not live to tell the tale.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">And you live to perdition and eternal damnation, </span><span style="font-size: large;">cursed with</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> infinite regret.</span><br />
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Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-81441127737976537862015-08-28T21:32:00.001-07:002015-08-28T21:35:03.164-07:00Four Environmental Photo-Essays<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: large;">I share with you four marvellous environmental photo-essays. The first is my co-author Ashish Kothari's work on Ladakh. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.frontline.in/environment/despair-and-hope-on-the-roof-of-the-world/article7550148.ece"> http://www.frontline.in/environment/despair-and-hope-on-the-roof-of-the-world/article7550148.ece</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The second is a moving portrait of the fauna of Kanha National Park. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.frontline.in/environment/a-new-life-in-kanha/article7489569.ece">http://www.frontline.in/environment/a-new-life-in-kanha/article7489569.ece</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The third is actually a set of 30 best images for the 'Environmental Photographer of the Year'. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/06/27/environmental-photographer_n_7677434.html"> http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/06/27/environmental-photographer_n_7677434.html</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">And the last is a shocking set of aerial images showing the industrial devastation of the earth from the air.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.bernhardlang.de/Website/AV_Coal_Mine_ALL.html"> http://www.bernhardlang.de/Website/AV_Coal_Mine_ALL.html</a></span></div>
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Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-69693106257437847702015-08-16T10:33:00.000-07:002015-08-22T07:28:36.158-07:00How to render democracy harmless<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>How to render democracy harmless</b></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Let public and private merge for effective state<b>graft</b></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>“Many of India's billionaires have made money by their proximity to govt.”</i></span><br />
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- Raghuram Rajan, Governor, RBI. He was Chief Economist of IMF in July 2010, when he made the remark in an interview to ToI. </div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Raghuram Rajan spoke, in the same interview, of the “privatization, by stealth, of the State in India.” Privatization is the ruling mantra of the age of corporate totalitarianism that was inaugurated by American and global business elites with the uninhibited backing of powerful governments the world over after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. This takes a hundred forms - from the poaching of lucrative public assets by wealthy corporations when governments are fiscally stretched (often) to the ever growing frequency of use of the “revolving door”, whereby nobody finds conflict of interest objectionable as the public officials of last week become corporate bosses this week, or vice versa, a practice well-learned in this country from our imperial masters two oceans away.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">A blatant instance of the phenomenon is illustrated by this image from 8 years ago. It shows Ratan Tata flying a US fighter jet at an air show in Bangalore in 2007:</span><br />
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<a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/photo.cms?msid=1580783" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/photo.cms?msid=1580783" height="273" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I wrote about this image 8 years back. The best I can do here is to simply quote what I wrote then:</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">"Picture this. At an air-show in Los Angeles one of the biggest arms manufacturers in the world, British Aerospace, invites Mr. Bill Gates of Microsoft to have a go at flying one of the latest models of their Hawk fighter aircraft. Would the American media respond by flashing front-page images of a beaming Bill Gates waving to supporters as he was entering the cockpit of the Hawk, following them up with adulatory reports describing the elevated feelings felt by the unexpected new pilot as he conquered the sound barrier? Or would the event not generate a national scandal that a private businessman accepted the invitation to fly a military aircraft, which ordinarily can only be tested by pilots on public duty?</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">"More than likely the latter possibility would transpire. However, what happened in Bangalore last month was another story, as the Indian national media fell to new depths of celebrity “journalism”…</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">“…A private fantasy was gratified. Mr. Tata’s dream of flying a fighter jet came true.”</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">If you have 10 minutes, it may be worthwhile going through the 2000-word piece I wrote then:</span><br />
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<a href="https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/as-india-goes-global-the-public-goes-private-by-aseem-shrivastava/"><span style="font-size: large;">https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/as-india-goes-global-the-public-goes-private-by-aseem-shrivastava/</span></a><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">or</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.countercurrents.org/shrivastava300307.htm">http://www.countercurrents.org/shrivastava300307.htm </a> </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">If you wish to grasp the depth of our national illusions and ambitions today, please take a while to watch this video in full, which NDTV chose to show as one of its “Classics” in its silver jubilee year, 2014: </span><br />
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<a href="http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/ndtv-special-ndtv-24x7/flying-high-ratan-tata-flies-the-f-16-aired-february-2007/308356"><span style="font-size: large;">http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/ndtv-special-ndtv-24x7/flying-high-ratan-tata-flies-the-f-16-aired-february-2007/308356</span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The video not only shows Ratan Tata in a jacket with the US flag emblazoned on its upper arm, it also shows him performing flying stunts at the Bangalore Air Show in 2007. For good measure, NDTV’s Vishnu Shome is also shown a good time by the US defence contractor firm, Lockheed Martin, eager to grow the potentially vast Indian market. He learns from the American test pilot that the aircraft he is flying has just arrived from combat duties in Iraq. He returns from the fighter jet ride with (in his own words) “a silly smile on his face.” Finally, much closer to reality, the video shows two accidents, one of a helicopter, the other of an aircraft, both manufactured by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, at the same air show. One of the pilots was killed during the show.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Public-private-partnerships under Indian corporate nationalism</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">What is going on here? Neither Ratan Tata nor Vishnu Shome nor any of the scores of media cameramen at the air show show any sign that they understand a distinction vital to the health of a democracy, or even a republic. The time-honoured distinction between the public and the private realm, so sacred to the making and maintenance of democracies across the world for many a century (and perhaps even more to the making of republics since the days of Greece and Rome), has blurred into invisibility. How can the promise of “transparency” or “accountability”, two of the abiding demands made on contemporary democracies, ever be fulfilled if private tyranny dovetails into State power so seamlessly? (I deal with the issue at greater length in the 2007 piece I wrote: </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/as-india-goes-global-the-public-goes-private-by-aseem-shrivastava/">https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/as-india-goes-global-the-public-goes-private-by-aseem-shrivastava/</a> or</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.countercurrents.org/shrivastava300307.htm">http://www.countercurrents.org/shrivastava300307.htm </a>)</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The problem is far more widespread and deep-seated than is commonly understood in public life in India. In this century, the “cloud elites” of global finance and the extractive elites in league with mining mafias have taken control of the State in more countries than one can think of. The Untidy State of America has pioneered the trail and conflict of interest has ceased to matter even in the high offices of the Western world, as the bailouts after the Great Crash of 2008 showed. Countries like India have followed the West blindly without pausing to ponder the consequences of such a collapse of the public into the private. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Additionally, India has a further legacy issue to live with. In general, the Indian State is a soft version of its Western counterparts. The centre of gravity of Western societies is squarely within the domain of the State. If the State collapses, society gets wiped out in a matter of days. Such has never been the case in India, and is not the case even today. Mrs. Thatcher, who believed that “there is no such thing as society”, could not have won even a <i>panchayat</i> election in India with such a nihilist slogan, whose vacuousness would be transparent even to those below the age of voting in India.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Communitarian identity, involving the <i>biradiri </i>(which could be seen variously as caste, region, language or religion, depending on time and place), is central to Indian social and political life to this day. Elections at all levels are conducted under this basic parameter. One reason for the corruption in offices high and low is that everyone’s first loyalty is to their communities and not to the ‘public’ that office-holders in government claim to represent, no matter that oaths are taken when they are inaugurated. Politicians of divergent ideologies are quite unashamed to sponge off public offices for the good of their communities, as they see them, the tax-payer be damned. In many cases, as we have seen in places as different as Bihar or Haryana, politicians are unafraid to admit this before the camera. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">These conditions in India are really a world apart from the situation in Western countries, where individual citizenship came of age many decades ago, and communities of the sort we are talking about eroded (for better and for worse) even farther back in history. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">So, in addition to the trend towards the privatisation of large areas of State activity going on in the West since the days of Thatcher and Reagan (the Second Gulf War saw the powerful re-emergence of private mercenary security companies and fighting units, essentially outsourcing and privatising warfare itself), the Indian polity has the additional issue of a long-standing conflation between the public and the private sphere of existence. In this, Ratan Tata is closer in mentality to the rickshaw-wallah who spits on the street, than to Bill Gates. In India, unlike in the West of yester-years public space is not sacrosanct. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">It is this colossally profound conflation and confusion between the private and the public realms that accounts for a thousand failures of Indian public life today. To list just a few here: the coal and spectrum scams of recent years, the way “public-private-partnerships” have created new avenues of graft, the manner in which SEZs were created by UPA-I to exempt corporate economic activity from the Indian Constitution, the manner in which governments have been acting as land brokers for private firms (ab)using the “public interest” clause in the Land Acquisition Act, the casualness with which companies are tasked with ‘self-monitoring’ in the critical areas of environmental regulation (like pollution of air or water) and labour standards. One could go on endlessly.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">These are just a handful of the scams that have mushroomed in the last generation as a result of ever-growing intimacy between the State - which has mutated from being a ‘traffic-cop’ to being a ‘player’ in its own right - and India Inc. What we have today is what Ashish Kothari and I describe in our book <i>Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India </i>as an unabashed ‘corporate nationalism’, whose ideology of choice for masking its truth is ‘development’. Developmentality involves the “cultivated failures of cognition” we analyse in the Conclusion of our book as part and parcel of the systematic smoke and mirrors national self-deception needed to mask the enormity of the graft under way in this age of gluttonous power. ‘Development’ is by far our longest living national lie. It is our word for elite denial.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The consequences of the lack of understanding and acknowledgement of the roots of graft in Indian public life will continue to grow at alarming rates in years to come, as the ever-growing mafioso blood-trail in the recent <i>Vyapam</i> scam shows. The fact that social scientists show scant recognition of the location and depth of the ailment is only a sign that even the world of knowledge and the academy has been corrupted by the blinding global and national fog that has settled like a suffocating canopy over our times. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">At an event the other evening at the India International Centre, I brought up the point about Ratan Tata and the fighter jet before a large audience that had just heard a leading figure from the national commentariat trace India’s “aborted transitions” to successful modernity to the conflation of the public and the private realms. There was a hasty nod in response, but no attempt was made to see the invisible social thread that ties Ratan Tata and the rickshaw-wallah into the same spider’s web of living confusion.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">This is not an India that anyone can be free, happy or safe in, no matter that ‘prosperity’ has mounted so visibly (and understandably!) in certain quarters. One can only expect rapidly growing business for security outfits and psychiatrists under the conditions of structural anxiety that have come to prevail. This is certainly not the India that the men and women who sacrificed so much so that we, their progeny, could be free, had dreamed of.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Yesterday, there was a mail from Flipkart in my inbox. It wished its customers “Appy Independence Day.” When happiness is no longer possible, or even believable in principle, the best item on the available menu is mobile ‘appiness’. <i>Wah Bhai, India. Aaj Gandhiji zinda hote toh kitne prasann hote! 80 crore logon ke paas mobile phone ho gaye hain, desh duniya ke top investment destinations mein shaamil ho gaya hai, aur Amreeki gola-baarood banaane waali companies ko dher saaraa business de raha hai... </i></span><br />
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Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-50604089961292592562015-08-15T10:32:00.000-07:002015-08-16T00:35:21.532-07:00Independence and Partition - II: Kashmir ka Khat<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: large;">I had to attend an ecology conference in Ladakh in July. My co-author Ashish Kothari, as well as the environmental group he helped to start, <i>Kalpavriksh</i>, was involved in organising it. It was part of a set of regular meetings that have been happening in different parts of the country that go under the name of <i>Vikalp Sangam</i>. The first one was held in October 2014 in Timbaktu, in Andhra. The second was in Madurai in February 2015. The third one was organised in Leh, Ladakh in July. The idea in these <i>Sangams</i> is to share experiences and exchange ideas on practically viable alternatives to the predatory development model that is ripping through the country's ecology and cultures like a remorseless, self-destructive juggernaut.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I arranged with some friends from Bangalore and Mumbai to meet in Srinagar and take the road route from there to Leh, a distance of 400-odd kilometres, via Zojila and Kargil, to be covered over two days. While I had traveled to Ladakh in 1986, I had flown, and so missed much of the stunning landscapes along the way. This time, armed with a brand new Sony camera gifted to me by my kind brother (the second camera he has gifted me over the years!), I was really excited about traveling to Leh by road.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh59IUB_jm_NQJ6ga_UbtW4KpKWWR568Xl9M1g6LU0F4Ss_dr6SJV2lpVbRfhNcNZvL640bkIPoAZ2DsyTPl4GnLbgkOdJYiqRKnjLoDxkpH7d3uehRw4nL79s2_7j3CykAeA7bZOea6Cg/s1600/DSC00037.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh59IUB_jm_NQJ6ga_UbtW4KpKWWR568Xl9M1g6LU0F4Ss_dr6SJV2lpVbRfhNcNZvL640bkIPoAZ2DsyTPl4GnLbgkOdJYiqRKnjLoDxkpH7d3uehRw4nL79s2_7j3CykAeA7bZOea6Cg/s320/DSC00037.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I spent a day and a night beforehand, by myself, renting a room on a houseboat on Nigeen Lake. It was lovely. I heard from one of the boatmen the story of how the British gradually and subtly inserted themselves into Kashmir. It appears that in the 19th century, there was a British Resident stationed in the Maharaja's kingdom. They were forbidden from acquiring land in Kashmir. On one occasion a British merchant came upon a houseboat with a shop built atop it. He took a fancy to it and asked the owner if he could buy it from him for a price. The owner refused, but promised to build and sell him a new houseboat. This, legend goes, was the first piece of property the scheming Brits bought in Kashmir, without breaking their agreement with the Maharajah about acquiring land! Today a houseboat can cost up to Rs. 2-3 crores.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxLuRoyGrokNAM30MfAafnT0z3z47BwYHXNw3iXyMc29bJ8pqkx_JlMYLsiMdVhC9l5PiOaz7jFDOCWIt8wLUjRaBFqagmP0p8Tf92v-PU9nHfhGaoSOx5jjaU7QwmtEuuVwIiD-TSdk8/s1600/DSC00121.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxLuRoyGrokNAM30MfAafnT0z3z47BwYHXNw3iXyMc29bJ8pqkx_JlMYLsiMdVhC9l5PiOaz7jFDOCWIt8wLUjRaBFqagmP0p8Tf92v-PU9nHfhGaoSOx5jjaU7QwmtEuuVwIiD-TSdk8/s320/DSC00121.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Enterprising young boys make humble livelihoods on Dal lake.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSizHUXgrPcdXLiJ5-QXpTOKagT4Vke2NTo-JZiW5paANjkh88ajuwrz-sU_wnieRYU-3rWLDX_KTF-I__hTcRO-oYnfqtoc0QShr0jrR6vzE3tnxsZZhlEk0muljLcgCg4AzSi3Zm8uY/s1600/DSC00279.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSizHUXgrPcdXLiJ5-QXpTOKagT4Vke2NTo-JZiW5paANjkh88ajuwrz-sU_wnieRYU-3rWLDX_KTF-I__hTcRO-oYnfqtoc0QShr0jrR6vzE3tnxsZZhlEk0muljLcgCg4AzSi3Zm8uY/s320/DSC00279.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">My friends from Bangalore and Mumbai arrived the next day. </span><span style="font-size: large;">One of our colleagues was a friend of Jyoti Singh, daughter of Karan Singh, from the ex-Royalty of Kashmir. Jyoti so very kindly hosted us in her utterly beautiful and hospitable Almond Villa, at the base of Shankaracharya Hill, overlooking the famous Dal Lake. She embarrassed us with the sheer prodigality of her hospitality, serving some truly delectable food, other than the splendour of the rooms we stayed in.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">We had a good look at the fabulous mosques of Srinagar one day, seeing some exquisite places.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">We were to set off for Leh by jeeps on July 17. </span><span style="font-size: large;">However, luck (or rather weather driven by climate change) was not on our side. Ladakh had unpredicted rains because of repeated cloudbursts and two attempts at approaching Zojila from Srinagar were thwarted by mudslides and flooding near Sonmarg. We were obviously disappointed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">On each occasion, we were violently stopped by heavy cordons of CRPF <i>jawaans</i> and J&K Police. They banged the vehicles with their batons and screamed at the drivers of the jeeps for daring to go towards Sonmarg. There were mostly young Kashmiri men among them. When we got off the vehicles to explain the purpose of our visit to Leh, they straightened up, especially when they realised that Jyoti Singh was traveling with us. They showed us pictures of the flooding ahead on the highway explaining, this time gently, why we could not go. The same armed men who were throwing their weight about a minute ago were behaving like obedient schoolboys. Their behaviour was schizophrenic. I was reminded of the TV advertising in Srinagar one evening when I saw ads of mental health counselling. There are many commercials like this. The other ad you see frequently is of cures for infertility among women. It appears the whole valley is sick from the ongoing conflict with Indian security forces. The place is the nearest thing to Palestine I have seen in my life. There are up to 800,000 armed men in uniform in the Kashmir Valley. Armoured vehicles with '<i>Sadbhavna</i>' written in front of them have gunmen at the ready.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I had visited Kashmir in 1974, with my parents and my brother. I had just begun playing serious golf (briefly contemplated turning professional when I was about 18). I do not remember seeing a single army <i>jawaan</i> on that trip to Srinagar, Gulmarg and Pahalgam. This time, 41 years on, was different. Very different.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">There is a construction boom across the Kashmir Valley, very reminiscent of what happens in Palestine. On the other hand the old homes and shops are crumbling. I was puzzled as to what is going on. How come so many new homes and mosques are coming up in such a context? Who is financing them? I was informed by more than one person that land and real estate markets have been very active across the Valley. People are selling off land, forest, and any other assets in order to raise capital to build fancy new homes. Banks are also giving attractively priced loans for home construction and ownership. A lot of mosque construction, it turns out, is being financed by money coming from the Middle East. The new mosques are being built on the Central Asian design, without the big bulbs and minarets familiar from the Sub-Continent.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Next to every mosque is the inevitable CRPF or BSF camp with security forces on the alert. Every few hundred yards on the road to Pahalgam are armed commandos and <i>jawaans, </i>ready to address any exigency that is never too far under the<i> </i>surface.<i> </i>Security arrangements were particularly tight (you had to go through security layers, almost as bad as at Srinagar airport) when we were in the Pahalgam area, since the annual Amarnath yatra was going on. In the Valley, there is hardly a home which has not lost a family member to death or disappearance. At the airport I saw a number of books documenting such tragedies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">This boy grinned from ear to ear when I teased him that he resembled Shahrukh Khan!</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">As the film <i>Haider</i> (which was shot partly in the basement of Jyoti's lovely house) tried to show, the one thing most palpable across the Valley is suspicion. You can virtually cut it with the proverbial knife. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">A man somewhat older than me I met in Pahalgam's Lavender Park asked me where I was from. I said "Hindustan", which has, revealingly, a better chance of inviting friendship than an answer like "Delhi". He said "<i>Ab toh jenaab hamaara Hindustan se koi waasta nahi hai. Hindustan-Pakistan ab hamaare peechhe hain. Hame toh aage dekhna hai."</i> When I asked him to elaborate, he said "<i>aap ko Hindustan ki kaun si fauj Hindustan mein nahi mil rahi hai? BSF, CRPF, ITBP...yahaan aa jaiyye Kashmir ki ghaati mein, mil jaayegi. Aathon faujein yahaan maujood hain." </i></span><br />
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Yet, daily life goes on amidst these stiff odds. Big billboards advertise higher education - such as medicine or engineering - in Bangladesh, not in India or Pakistan!</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">People speak openly against the Indian government, against all Indian political parties and the National Conference, and against Narendra Modi. Our driver Mehraaj Bhai told me that PDP would have won with a far handsomer margin had Mufti not allied with Modi's BJP. Srinagar's leading newspaper <i>Kashmir Rising</i> is openly critical of Indian policies in Kashmir.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">We saw something surprising in Srinagar one day: a liquor store busily conducting its trade among the youth of the city, at the base of the Shankaracharya Hill. As soon as the Ramzan rozas finished there was quite a crowd at the liquor store, loud music blaring from cars on the boulevard by the Dal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">At the airport I saw a large number of new books documenting the atrocities and excesses of security forces in the Kashmir Valley. The alienation seems to have got so encrusted that things appear to have passed the point of no return. No maturity or sagacity has been shown by leaders. Gone are the days when one could expect an Indian Prime Minister to quote the great Kashmiri poet Mahjoor and say to militants "<i>agar aap samvidhaan ke daayre mein nahi baat karma chaahte hain toh chaliye hum insaaniyat ke daayre mein baat kar lein." </i>Vajpayee is still the most respected Indian leader in Kashmir.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The last picture I took in Kashmir was of our departure lounge at Srinagar airport. It resembles an army sports arena!</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The picture tells us much about why the Kashmir Valley is in the shape it is in, why the BJP could not muster a single seat there. The picture also reveals the immense value of some of the peace and healing initiatives being undertaken in the Valley by citizens. Jyoti Singh organises every year in the last week of August the Annual Dara Shikoh Festival for the Arts, in which a range of Kashmiri artists get a chance to show and discuss their work. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Jyoti's goal is to address local youth and help revive faith in the great syncretic traditions of Kashmir, ways of community life and philosophical and religious thought and practice, not to forget poetry, that have sustained the people of this beautiful land over the centuries.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Kashmir refuses to be treated as a trifling yo-yo in the predatory politics between India and Pakistan. And in this defence of dignity lies its hope for the future.</span></div>
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Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-39737677051728687472015-08-15T08:06:00.000-07:002015-08-16T00:40:03.666-07:00Independence and Partition - I: Azaadi aur Garam Hawa<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #660000; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">After watching </span><i style="color: #660000; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Masaan</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #660000; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"> for a second time last weekend, I realised, while discussing the film with a friend, that one of the big gaps in my cultural upbringing is the fact that I somehow missed seeing M.S.Sathyu's </span><i style="color: #660000; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Garam Hawa</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #660000; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">, perhaps because I was too young when it was released (1974) and later, I was away from India for nearly two decades. A story in last weekend's edition of Hindustan Times informed me that the film was available on Youtube. So I promptly decided to to see it, and now realise why so many regard it to be one of the great films of Indian cinema.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Appropriately, I finished watching it yesterday, August 14, just in between the anniversary of Pakistan's and India's Independence Day celebrations (in fact, the two days are actually the same when you consult the Indian Independence Act of 1947: Karachi's <i>The Dawn</i> had a fine piece the other day on the theme: <a href="http://www.dawn.com/news/1199235">http://www.dawn.com/news/1199235</a>)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The film is altogether too chilling, too real for our bubbled lives of 2015. It begins with a scene whereby Salim Mirza (the immortal Balraj Sahni) has just bid goodbye to his elder sister, who has caught the one-way train to Pakistan. On the way to his factory, he remarks to the taanga-waallah:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">"कैसे हरे-भरे दरख़्त कट रहे हैं इस हवा में!" </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">("Such leafy, green trees are being felled by this wind these days!")</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">And the taanga-waallah responds with workmanlike gusto:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">"बड़ी गर्म हवा है मियाँ, बड़ी गर्म!" </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">("It is a very hot wind, very hot!")</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Every moment of the next two hours, the viewer is kept on the edge of the seat, as one tragic scene after another unfolds with premonitory perfection.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: large;">What a film! The movie breaks your heart again and again, and yet again, but ends on a note of redemptive hope, howsoever meagre. It should be watched compulsorily, especially by our young people in schools and colleges: </span><br />
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZTvF_1AN8A%E2%80%8B"> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZTvF_1AN8A</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: large;">This 2014 interview that Teesta Setalvad (who says she has seen the film 27 or 28 times!) does with MS Sathyu and Shama Zaidi, the film-maker/scriptwriter, on the making and re-release of <i>Garam Hawa</i> (as <i>Garm Hava</i>) is worth watching too: </span><br />
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEGhKn4LhzA"> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEGhKn4LhzA</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The cruel absurdity of Partition was understood even by the man invited to draw the line between the two birth-marked Sub-Continental twins. Cyril Radcliffe "never forgave himself. He was summoned to Delhi in 1947 — he was neither an administrator nor a cartographer, but only a lawyer, who had never set foot in India before — with the specific assignment of partitioning Punjab and Bengal on religious lines. He arrived on July 8 that year, and having done his job, left India the very day it attained Independence, burning all his papers and without collecting his fee, 40,000 rupees — so appalled he was by the killings." Over a million people were killed and at least 12 million were rendered homeless to serve the political ambitions of our wicked leaders. Gandhiji was virtually alone in his mourning.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: large;">There are farmers, both on the Indo-Pak and on the Indo-Bangladesh borders, whose home falls in one country and their fields in another. There are neighbours' adjoining courtyards through which the Radcliffe Line runs!:</span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Before we are Hindus and Muslims, we are human beings, equal in the eyes of the one and only Creator. Not only was this borne out once when a Hindu bigot had to unknowingly accept a Muslim man's blood for his bleeding child in hospital, there is also evidence aplenty in our traditions of art, literature, and music. Yesterday's edition of The Hindu had a splendid piece which reports the influence that the great Ustad Amir Khan has had on a very large number of musicians in succeeding generations, including on the likes of Vidushi Kishori Amonkar, and Pandit Ulhas Kashalkar:</span><br />
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.thehindu.com/features/friday-review/ustad-and-the-world-of-gharanas/article7535908.ece">http://www.thehindu.com/features/friday-review/ustad-and-the-world-of-gharanas/article7535908.ece</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: large;">If Indian and Pakistani leaders in 2015 have any courage left in their hearts whatsoever, they will never allow 1947 to repeat itself. Partition is the massive, unacknowledged gaping wound in our history. Even before it had begun to heal, more pogroms were launched, more wars fought. The pathology has only grown. The denial has become cancerous now. It shall prove truly fatal, unless the facts and passions are faced through mutual acknowledgement of very inconvenient truths. We urgently need memorials, museums, histories, films, literature, art, and, above all, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, howsoever belated that may be. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: large;">One reason to study and acknowledge history collectively, in the public sphere, is to prevent it from repeating itself farcically, once communities have grown accustomed to the gravity of the original tragedy and have all but forgotten its spiritual, emotional, and physical impact when the bloodstains had not dried up.</span><br />
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Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-20605039838547444202015-08-13T18:39:00.000-07:002015-08-14T10:26:50.629-07:00Five reflections on Independence Day<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: large;">For the next week or so, I will be posting a series of five short articles, each of which asks a specific question in relation to India's independence. In sum, the articles ask one fundamental question which constitutes the compass for all the others: Is India really free?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The five articles are titled:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">1. How to make every Indian fly</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">2. How to render democracy harmless</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">3. How to destroy an ancient culture</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">4. How to outgrow agriculture</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">5. How to conquer nature</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The first of these is posted here for your considered reading.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-large;">How to make every Indian fly</span></i></div>
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<i style="font-weight: normal;">The imperatives and dilemmas of aspirational India</i></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>“Impoverished India can become free, but it will be hard for any India made rich through immorality to regain its freedom.” </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>- </i>Mahatma Gandhi<i>, Hind Swaraj (1909)</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Aspirational India is enjoying a stunning boom under the leadership of a spectacular new government which has effectively promised <i>sabka swaarth, sabka vikaas. </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">However, stunning booms come with their own baggage of vexatious problems. My mother’s driver Ashok has run into one such this week. As a consequence, the smile has been wiped off the face of a man who normally lives up to his name, which refers to the one without sorrow. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Ashok has two sons and two daughters and lives the aspirational “medium” class lifestyle in Ayanagar, on the border between Delhi and Haryana, very close to Gurgaon. Their family has two motorcycles (eldest son - now married and working at Spencer’s as a security guard - hopes to make the down payment on a sub-compact car in the foreseeable future), two bicycles, a TV set, four mobile phones, a fridge, and a boom-box (though as Ashish Kothari and I reported in Churning the Earth, they are not able to feed the kids daal at every meal for reasons not far to seek).</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">So what has stolen Ashok’s peaceful smile? His cute little daughter decided to get a cute little dog for a pet last year. Some months back, this beautiful creature was attacked by a neighbourhood stray, who tore into its flesh. The little one survived - though it had not been administered anti-rabies injections. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Last week, the pet dog decided, in turn, to bite Ashok’s daughter. When Ashok tried to restrain it, it bit Ashok too. This is the story I heard when I saw Ashok bleeding from one hand and asked him for an explanation. He asked me for Rs.3000. “What for?” “The mad dog has to be put to sleep. That is how much it costs at the local hospital.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Amidst sadness in the family, the dog was laid to rest. The next step was for Ashok and his daughter to get shots. Five each. At Safdarjung the injections are free, but it could take up to a whole day to get to the head of the queue. Ashok asks for another few thousand from me - so that he can go to a private clinic and get the job done without having to stand in a day-long queue. (He won’t get leave from work to stand for five full days in queues to get the shots at a saarvajanik aspataal). </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">As I write these lines, Ashok still has to get through three more shots. The smile is still missing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I have noticed that in recent years, the smile is less often in evidence, for though the aspirational consumption of the family has shot up measurably, each one of the seven (including a daughter-in-law) members of the family is falling sick more often, often suffering from respiratory ailments in what is, with each passing day, less a world city, and more a corrosive cancer of a giant, crumbling metropolis - once you look past the boulevards of the diplomatic areas of the city.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">There are many other medical issues which affect the family’s sense of well-being on a relentless basis, not to mention the nutritional deprivation resulting from expensive, and much more chemicalized, food.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">If Ashok gets even with his family’s medical bills, there are other “aspirational” dilemmas staring him in the face. His elder daughter is jobless and unmarried at 23. In his gothra, he says, they are already very late. Another two years, and the daughter would be seen an “ineligible”. An aspirational imperative his daughter has laid down is that (even though the family is from Bihar) she is unwilling to marry a Bihari. Is it because she (self-)reflexively agrees with our PM that there is a “DNA issue” with Biharis? Or is it because this is in fact the essential meaning of developmental modernity, as the brilliant new film Masaan brings out with such force, that each one aims at marrying above their station in a collectively unwinnable scramble for upward social mobility?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Ashok sighs as he tells me that the daughter’s marriage (obviously to a man at least as educated as her - she has done college) would cost them at least 6-8 lacs within their gothra. Maybe, he feels, he should try his luck outside the community, here in Delhi itself. Maybe that will work out cheaper. He does not know the real answer. But his expression tells me he feels he has little reason to be optimistic on this score either. Dowry and weddings, like everything else, have become much more expensive.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>A Bangalore detour</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Some years back I took an Air Deccan flight from Delhi to Bangalore. On the way to Bangalore, I read (the now defunct Air Deccan’s CEO) Captain C.D.Gopinath’s editorial in the in-flight magazine in which he expressed his wish of enabling every Indian to fly. I assumed that he was being metaphorical. I discovered soon that he was being quite literal! (If you have some minutes, you can see one interview with him here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUxkFnLqeGo">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUxkFnLqeGo</a>)</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">My ecological mind very quickly did numbers in the head to label the Gopinath vision for India as ‘unsustainable’. Giving a talk at IIM-Bangalore I told students that they need not be environmental experts to see the absurdity of the view, by no means an exceptional one at an institution like theirs. Our task, I proposed, was to honestly reflect upon the rung on the ladder of consumption we found ourselves on and to step down a few, while at once evolving approaches and policies to bring those near the bottom of the ladder up a few. Needless to say, I did not make myself too popular with the students!</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">When I returned to Delhi Ashok picked me up from the airport. Uncannily, for the first time in years he asked me what it was like to fly in an aeroplane. I had sometimes thought to myself that this man had never been inside one, even as he had ferried people in our family hundreds of times to airports over the years. I answered his query with a counter-question. How did he imagine life above the clouds? He gave me a most dreamy description, complete with an account not only of the spas and saunas he had seen (from the outside) in five-star hotels, but even more vividly of the round earth as seen from the window of the aircraft. Hearing his account, I felt that for such dream-ing to survive, the corresponding dreams should not be fulfilled.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Interestingly, Ashok did not express any desire to ride in an aeroplane himself. It struck me that people like Gopinath, who want to make such people travel in planes, are far more adolescent in their views. The same cannot be said for Ashok’s children, whose desires and hopes are closer to those of the students at IIM-Bangalore and those divined for them by business leaders like Gopinath. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The realisation has not begun to sink into this significantly large, young, and vocal minority in the country that there is what philosophers call a ‘fallacy of composition’ in their thinking when they advocate universal jet-travel (and by implication, holidays in Singapore or Paris), for every Indian cannot fly, and ride BMWs to airports, without bringing all traffic to a standstill and turning our cities into lethal gas chambers. Furthermore, there is the cultural flip side of aspiration that Ashok’s experience with their pet dog reveals. Here, so-called ‘modernity’, with its ceaseless marketing media blitz, is wreaking havoc on the lives and several sane traditions of human communities across the Sub-Continent, all in the name of putting an end to social backwardness, caste and the like, while promoting ridiculous forms of consumption. In the process, human freedom itself is being bartered away for a few dirty pennies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">No less a figure than the Father of the Nation himself has forewarned in writing, and many more times than once, that freedom is easier to ensure with a degree of poverty than with imitative consumption and an ‘excess’ of wealth. It will probably be a painful while before the nation catches up with the wisdom of its father.</span><br />
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Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-84848578173847655152015-08-10T10:52:00.001-07:002015-08-10T10:54:48.313-07:00Cowardice thrives in the age of barbarism !<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: large;">Yesterday (Sunday), The Hindu carried my piece on the murder of Cecil the Lion by a cosmetic dentist from Minnesota:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">A friend remarked the other day that to a grizzly bear, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Jew, a Catholic, a Protestant would all taste the same - just like chicken tastes roughly the same to us humans, regardless of whether it has been reared on this continent or some other - and this is even more true in the age of the global stupid!</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">And while we are still speaking about just how much maturer than humans animals are proving to be, please take 3 more minutes to look at this cutting satire too. It is brilliantly titled <i>More-on: The Lion Dentist</i></span><br />
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Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7106720154631000736.post-77611358520726906902015-08-08T21:09:00.000-07:002015-08-10T10:45:41.912-07:00Salman ko Salaam !<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b><i><span style="font-size: large;">“Kyonki tu Dhad-kan…main dil!”</span></i></b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">When Munni and Pawan made me weep</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Today is August 9, 2015. Exactly seven decades have passed since Washington committed perhaps the greatest war crime in the history of man by testing a plutonium bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, close on the heels (just three days) after testing a uranium weapon on Hiroshima’s innocents. I say “testing” because such weapons were new to our species and it was yet to be known precisely what their destructive potential was. These two tests in real time helped zero in on the right numbers (for that time. The remarkable thing is that we still do not know exactly how many - obviously non-White - innocents were butchered in this dual savagery. Estimates vary between 130,000 and 250,000). </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Equally importantly, “Little Boy” and “Fat Man”, as the twin bombs affectionately came to be referred to by the Allied military establishment, also enabled the Untidy State of America to supersede the rising Soviet Union and define the contours of the remainder of the century (by controlling the terms of the Cold War and its hundreds of hot proxies in the “Third” World), if not also the distant outlines of the century we now live in. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">I remember that many years ago, after India and Pakistan had conducted their nuclear tests, some words of war criminal Henry Kissinger had leaked in the media and he was caught saying that the only two countries on earth which are “nuclear neighbours” are India and Pakistan and they offer the (obviously for Kissinger, salacious) possibility of what an actual nuclear “exchange” between such powers would look like in reality (as opposed to the war-games which provide only conjectural data to military planners and strategists). </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Warmongers and leaders on both sides of this foolish, metallic, electrically charged border have done everything possible in the last 17 years to bring everyone living in this part of the world rapidly closer to the day of nuclear reckoning. I remember a cartoon from around 1998 in which India and Pakistan go to (yet another) war. Islamabad launches a nuclear-tipped missile at New Delhi. It falls short and lands in Lahore itself, decimating the ‘city with a soul’ instantaneously. New Delhi retaliates by taking aim at Islamabad but instead finds Amritsar’s Golden Temple in the way. In their enthusiastic ghost sonata, in the spirit of Stanley Kubrick’s brilliantly funny Dr. Strangelove, leaders on both sides declare victory!</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">“Jai Bajrang Bali ki!”</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">It is with this background, supplemented by the latest refinements of absurdity on both sides of the border, that the film <i>Bajrangi Bhaijaan</i> is to be viewed.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">I had refused all these years, on principle, to watch a Salman Khan film. Not only has he made a hobby of taking the law into his own hands, what an example he has set for boys and young men across the <i>kasbas</i> and metros of this land! With each sock on the jaw of a ‘bad’ guy, he not only shows the way to ‘handy’, ham-fisted, readymade justice, he also appears to be saying to his hundreds of millions of fans around the world “it is alright never to grow up. Life in the American global age is an endless adolescence - especially if you are a boy - and not only is it ok to indulge it, it is something to be celebrated with an impatient, agile fist!”</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">How could anyone outside an asylum for the delinquents put up with this hormonal nonsense?</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Yet, yesterday I broke an important personal code and went to watch <i>Bajrangi Bhaijaan</i> at the strong recommendation of an old and trusted friend. Serendipitously, I found that while I was watching the film in Delhi, my parents too were in a Gurgaon multiplex watching the same film! Certain things are meant to be and sometimes our conscious minds must retire from their supervisory duties. So I left my thought-policeman at home and went to the Vasant Kunj Mall to give Salman a first - and last! - chance.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">I was not disappointed. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #232323; font-family: Times New Roman;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It is worth starting with the film's </span>denouement<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> The last scene of the film is shot in the snows of Kashmir. A huge crowd of common Pakistanis defy military orders and knock down the high-tension wall separating the Partition Twins in order to let their new-found hero Bajrangi Bhaijaan return to India and reunite with his loved ones after having accomplished his Mission Impossible. He has just succeeded in reuniting, in turn, a sweet little girl (who lost her speech after an accident in childhood and who had lost her way in India after being separated from her mother), with her family in Pakistani Kashmir. All of this is achieved without visas and passports - just with lots of help from Pakistani friends who work for a media lovingly curious about India, and who ride colourful buses and are willing to lie in unison to the authorities if necessary - in order to enable safe passage for their ‘trespassing’ Indian visitor on a noble mission.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">A simpler denunciation of the modern system of nation-states, a cowardly, cruel import in the first place from the God-forsaken (hypocritically “secular”) Western world, is difficult to imagine. Its deep-seated indifference to human well-being and its routine cruelties on all sides are in evidence throughout the movie. Love for one’s country is a wonderful thing, the movie seems to agree with Albert Einstein, but must it stop at the border? And why must love have to stand in queues for passports and visas? <i>Shaahon ke darbar mein kahin ishq jhooka hai</i>, I can hear Geeta Dutt sing behind me. In a memorable scene, poor Bajrangi goes with little Munni to the Pakistan High Commission in Delhi to look for a visa - without a passport in hand! Not only is he summarily dismissed, he is witness to a riot organised by a Hindutva mob trying, in the language they know best, to get back to India a certain ‘Karamjeet Singh’, held by Pakistani authorities. Bajrangi has to defend himself and Munni against them with the help of a bamboo bayonet which has “POLICE” emblazoned on it!</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">The film does not spare the religionists who are always in search of the political capital that God can help them accumulate and disburse. Salman’s character, Pawan Kumar Chaturvedi, is a bumbling dropout from Pratapgarh (UP) who clears Class X exams at age 30, on the 10th attempt, giving his father a fatal heart attack in the process! He becomes a <i>Hanuman-bhakt </i>after failing at the local sport of public choice, wrestling. Masculine bravado is mocked when it turns out that Pawan gets tickled when he is tackled! No one ever performed a better judo on the RSS - one of whose <i>shakhas</i> is seen fleetingly in one scene. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Love conquers even ardent vegetarianism when we find Bajrangi Pawan Kumar Chaturvedi arranging a feast of chicken for little Munni when he realizes that she is “Mohammedan” and finds her secretly enjoying a meal in a Muslim household in Jama Masjid.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Pawan’s slogans throughout are “<i>Jai Shri Ram!”</i> and “<i>Jai Bajrang Bali ki!” </i>They could not cut closer to the jaw-bone. His faith is so redoubtable that even in Pakistan he looks for <i>Hanuman-Bhakts</i>!</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">During the last sequence, shot at the snowed-in border in Kashmir, when the emotional melody <i>Tu jo mila</i> returns as a reprise, I found myself singing along “<i>kyonki tu dhad-kan main dil!”</i> When Munni became Shaheda again and her speech returned as she bid goodbye to her beloved Pawan, I realised I was in a pool of prideful tears, immensely grateful to be born to the part of the world I have been born to! For I can see no such movie even being conceived by Hollywood in which - for instance, the Americans and the Russians could unite as a people, bypassing and rejecting their governments altogether. Unimaginable! For such social and cultural genius, no less for the faith that hundreds of millions carry in their peaceful, and ultimately friendly hearts, our Sub-Continent is utterly unique. Forrest Gump Bajrangi learns to acknowledge and say <i>“Allah haafiz!”</i> in Pakistan, much as some of his Pakistani friends learn to follow and say <i>“Jai Bajrang Bali ki!” </i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">God is one. His <i>forms</i> are countless many. This is the message. It is this Great truth that will bring our people together again one day.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">We have already seen the first real consequence of this landmark film. Geeta is a young “Indian” woman of 22, who is unable to speak. She lost her way to “Pakistan” many years ago. She was found by someone who took her to the famous Edhi Home in Karachi. Despite repeated attempts by people, Indian authorities took no notice of her, let alone help her return home. Now, after <i>Bajrangi Bhaijaan</i>, Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj asked her ambassador in Islamabad to visit Geeta and help bring her back. Is there another part of the world where popular art has more real consequences?!</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Judging from the popular reception of the film in both India and Pakistan (it has broken all box-collection records in both countries), <i>Bajrangi Bhaijaan</i> has achieved at a stroke what a thousand State-level dialogues and a hundred erudite tomes on war and peace in the Sub-Continent could not: It has cleared the room for a new, intelligent imagination of love, faith and faithful coexistence in this turbulent part of the earth. The beauty of Kashmir and Thar are invoked to metaphorize what is at stake in the cowardly shenanigans of leaders, armed forces, warlords and terrorists, or for that matter, in the shouting matches of warmongers on television or the laboured analyses of many intellectuals. While we certainly need good, incisive and accurate analysis, what we need even more is the public imagination to build happy, creative, peaceful narratives of faithful coexistence in the face of machine-guns, armoured vehicles, electric fences, high-security prisons, irresponsible governments and media, intelligence agencies, armed forces and terrorists virtually hell-bent on pre-empting and sabotaging any such collective initiative.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #232323; font-family: Times New Roman;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In this enterprise </span></span><i style="color: #232323; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; letter-spacing: 0px;">Bajrangi Bhaijaan</i><span style="color: #232323; font-family: Times New Roman;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> succeeds beautifully at a popular level. The entertainment from one end of the film </span>to the other is non-stop! <span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Perhaps Salman’s existential predicament - born to a gifted Muslim Bollywood writer (no less than the co-scriptwriter of the game-setting </span></span><i style="color: #232323; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; letter-spacing: 0px;">Sholay</i><span style="color: #232323; font-family: Times New Roman;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">) and a Marathi mother, making him the very embodiment of an Indian in so many ways! - helped him conceive the idea of a funny film on such a serious theme.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Now Salman has set a higher bar for himself than he, perhaps, ever has. He has a lot to live up to now!</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">For you, Salman..</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">Hum ko nahi maloom Salman ki tum doshi ho athva nahi. Ki ghalati tumhaari thhi ya phir kisi aur ki, ki tumne hiran ki hatya ki athva nahi. Insaan hoon, vakeel ya antar-yaami nahi. Nyaya aur kaanoon ki cheezein main nahi samajhta. Lekin itna jaanta hoon ki Khuda ya toh nyaya-poorna ho sakta hai ya phir karunawaan. Uska dono hona asambhav hai. Aur nyaya aur karuna ke beech agar hum se kisi ne bola choon-ne ko, toh is mein koi shaq nahi ki mera rujhaan kis taraf hoga.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">Sau khoon maaf karne ke liye toh gantantra ke buzdil leaderaan ya phir sadiyon mein ek baar aane waale Gautam Buddha ya Mahatma Gandhi ki zaroorat padti hai. Anguli-maal sabse sahan nahi ho paata. Lekin ek-do khoon maaf karne laayak toh hum mein se bahut saare hain. Un mein se bahut se log sarkaarein chalaana jaante hain, sarkaaron ka samarthan aur unki sahaayta toh karte hi hain. Aur aaj-kal toh ek mahaan desh-vyaapi-vyaapam chhida hua hai. Toh phir hum tumhaare gunaahon (ya tathaakathit gunaahon) ko kis nazar se dekhein? Agar tum qabool kar lo apni ghalati, to phir tumhe kyon na maafi mile?</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">Bajrangi Bhaijaan ke baad hamaari taraf se ab sab kuchh maaf hai Salman…magar tumhe ab line pe bane rehna hoga. Samay bahut jatil hai, aur bahut kam bhi. Kahin Shiv Ji ka balance khatam na ho jaaye! Agar tumhaare jaison aur tumhaare mureedon ke jaison ne aadatein nahi badlin, aur samaaj mein bhog, upbhog aur himsa badhti gayin, toh ab catastrophe ‘testostrophe’ ke roop mein aayegi. Climate change raftaar pakdega, aur prithvi se uthega taandav ka vyakul swar: bhoo-kump, baadh, aur samudri toofaanon ke maadhyam se dharti maata hum sab ko - haan, tumhaari pyaari Munni/Shaheda aur Rasika ko bhi - apne lapete mein le legi! Hindustan-Pakistan ka naam-o-nishaan nahi bachega jab Himalaya koyle ki maha-jalan aur tel ki maha-khapat se gal ke hamaare upar haabi ho jaayega…Bajrangi Bhaijaan ke zariye tumne ye dikha diya Salman, ki “Pakistan Zindabaad!” aur “Bharat Mata ki Jai!” jaise naaron ke liye ap prithvi par bilkul bhi wakht nahi. Devi-Devata ab be-chayn ho rahe hain…</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">Hum sab ko ek swar mein aawaaz deni hai: Jai Bajrang Bali ki!Dharti maata ki Jai! </span></i></span></div>
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<i><span style="color: #232323; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Tumhaara gaanaa amar </span>rahe<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">!:</span></span></i><br />
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<i><span style="color: #232323; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL8KbSR4Pno">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL8KbSR4Pno</a></span></span></i><br />
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Aseem Shrivastavahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03299005590640591609noreply@blogger.com0