Looking Back in Anger

Bigots and busybodies looking back in anger Candidates for the Civil Service Aptitude Test (CSAT) conducted by the Union Public Service Commission rocked the national capital with vociferous protests for two weeks in July-August demanding changes in the test format. They said CSAT was biased in favor of students from English-medium schools and those who came from ‘technical’ streams of learning such as engineering. In 2011, the commission introduced CSAT to test the analytical and comprehension capabilities of aspirant civil servants rather than mere ability to memorize. The test determines whether a candidate is qualified to write the main examination. Billed as the toughest in the world, the UPSC’s civil service entrance exam attracts more than 500,000 aspirants each year of whom a mere 0.01-0.03 percent make the grade and go on to join the premier civil services such as the IAS, IFS and IPS. There is no more elite corps in the world than of the Indian civil services. The agitators’ demands were based on a simple fact: analysis and comprehension are far removed from rote learning encouraged by the school education system. As such, CSAT became a formidable obstacle for them. The ability to define, categorize and organize requires considerably greater learning than to regurgitate memorized material. In the traditional education system where the image of a Brahmin mugging slokas exerts powerful influence, cognitive testing based on reason and comprehension is a great disrupter. Fastening on the emotive language divide in the country, the agitators cleverly argued that CSAT is loaded against Hindi-belt candidates. For decades, Hindi heartland political leaders have not pushed just Hindi as the medium of instruction and government transactions, but also the end of English usage. Some states like Gujarat and West Bengal went to ridiculous lengths to make regional medium education mandatory. Millions of young Gujaratis and Bengalis suffered over the decades. Any wonder then that these two states became harbingers of the most regressive ideologies and chauvinist worldviews? Advocates of Hindi and regional languages harbor a misbegotten sense of victimhood, spilled over from the colonial experience. For them the language and culture of the minority of English-speaking people is alien to the values and practices of “the real India'” i.e Bharat. Simultaneously, this ‘alien’ culture still enjoys a colonial-style advantage six decades after the end of British rule. What’s left unsaid is that English language learning has not only remained alive but has morphed into an aspiration for India’s growing middle class, chasing jobs and career opportunities around the world. This established trend can only grow as India begins to engage more actively with the global economy. Modern history is littered with victims of the India-Bharat divide promoted by language chauvinists, bigots and busybodies. After India won independence in 1947, these elements made a virtue of denying the nation’s British heritage and looking back in anger to a pre-colonial golden age. Of late, mindsets have turned atavistic and are beginning to hallucinate about a mythical Hindu age that Muslim invaders had allegedly obliterated and subverted. John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was a path-breaking English stage and screen production of the 1950s. It dealt with the longing in a once-mighty Britain for its glorious past. In the newly emergent post-World War II era and the loss of its colonies, some British people experienced remorse because “everything’s changed” while others rued that “everything’s remained the same.”  This syndrome is now sweeping india as various crackpots and extremists keep popping up with increasing frequency making absurd claims and bigoted statements about the glory of a mythical past on the one hand, and victimhood on the other. The inter-play between these emotions defines the current political agenda. Meanwhile important issues — education, healthcare, roads, water, transport, law and order — suffer neglect. By pandering to such agitators, governments and political parties are mindlessly promoting a culture of entitlement in which no judgments can be made about individual capability and proficiency. Like its evil twin, reservation, entitlement weakens an already frayed social fabric. Governance is too much to expect in these circumstances, and policy making is held captive in the dungeons of do-nothing. People start to believe that any achievements will result only from agitation and group solidarity, influence-peddling and corruption. What the CSAT candidates protested, political parties supported, and the government accepted the strange proposition that the entrance into the civil services is less about merit than ‘fairness’ to those who see themselves as disadvantaged. It seems self-defeating to strike at the heart of government, its civil services, with a contradictory demand to change everything and to change nothing. As such, the future looks bleak for the ‘steel frame’ services which are already at sixes and sevens, measuring up to the demands of a modernizing state and the aspirations of an increasingly assertive citizenry. This article appeared in the September 2014 issue of  Education World.

A Hard Day's Life

Not Linear but Disruptive

My Dad died, a victim of Alzheimer’s as did his Dad before that. Both lived well into their 90s. I have wondered all these years if the same thing would happen to me. I’m not sure I am condemned to Alzheimer’s; what I do know is I keep meticulous records about everything that happens in my life. I am a journalist and a journalism teacher, so I have notes…some old-style, on pen and paper, though increasingly on laptops and phones.

But that’s a digression. What I want to share is a concern that Alzheimer’s is a little understood condition. I refuse to call it a disease because there is simply no treatment. My intuitive grasp of the condition is it means you have no shared memories and therefore no friends or relatives. As such, the Alzheimer’s patient is denied nostalgia.

I am a huge fan of nostalgia and my life has been spent tracking and befriending people I knew as a child and beyond. So the initial rush was fine…we met or conversed on email and various other social media platforms…and I, for one, was delighted. In many cases, we even had several occasions to meet personally. Then reality set in…after the initial rush, the connect fizzled. Nostalgia is like a third-world currency…it fades soon enough.

After all these years, when I made it a mission to get in touch with old friends, I have come to realize a drink and dinner is great fun with people from the past…there is really nothing beyond that. So you share the old school tie, the shared neighborhood and the pranks and some old stories that can be told once, maybe twice. Beyond that, there is no connect…everyone has their own lives

So fine, nostalgia can only go far. But it’s made me think…when I was born in Surat, then lived on Juhu Beach, Warden Road, Byculla Bridge, Ahmadabad, Baroda, Athens, Cincinnati, Chicago and then finally Delhi…all these lives I have tried to understand as seamless…a temporal progression…as in the history books we were taught in schools. Perhaps they weren't.

I now have come to understand that continuum is simply a timeline construct put on our lives. Fact is in Surat, Bombay, Ahmadabad, Baroda, Athens, Cincinnati, Chicago, I lived in different worlds. Increasingly, I am beginning to challenge the connective geometry of space and time. In the end, these phases of my life may not be a natural progression. These experiences are not unified in a single historical narrative; that life may be an agglomerate of experiences that have nothing to do with each other and that you are the only common factor.

Changes that take place in a human life, both internally and externally, are huge. I. for one, seem to have nothing in common with the four-year-old growing up on Juhu Beach. As such, our lives are really not a smooth progression from birth to death.

Not to get too esoteric, the point I want to make is all of us have disjointed lives, especially those who have the chance for mobility. I can remember going to a village in Gujarat with my friend from Chicago. What was most interesting he met a friend in the bazaar, who ran a kiosk and offered us a free Coke. This is someone he grew up with; my friend went on to become an influential doctor in Chicago but his buddy, like his family before him, still ran a small shop…the past (my friend’s) running into the present (his friend’s); different as night and day; today and yesterday.

I am no philosopher but I am increasingly convinced that work needs to be done to question, if not challenge, the assumption that individual lives are a serial progression from birth to death. My life from the 1950s onward has changed so dramatically, it takes old songs, movies and photographs to make it hold together.

The idea that it is a single life, a single person that journeys from birth to death is worth questioning. The links between the various phases are man-made; there is continuity in empirical terms. Just looking at my own experiences, I can see that a linear framework does not adequately describe my life.

In the decades I have lived on this planet, I have seen changes from where I wrote on a slate with chalk to a holder dipped in ink to a fountain pen to a ballpoint pen to a typewriter to a computer to a phone; from 78 rpm records on a crank-operated record player to an Ipod; from copious “hard copy” files to cloud storage.  The changes are disruptive in the sense they presaged completely new ways of doing things.

Disruptive defines, in my mind, the new understanding of my life. Everything changes…you can say it was thus in the 1950s, 1960s et al. Aside of my own memories, I find no connect between the guy who ran around on the beach and the guy who shivered in the Chicago cold and the guy who now battles life in Delhi.

Why the Congress Party was destroyed

It’s a bit of a long story, so you will have to bear with me.

In November 1981, I met Rajiv Gandhi, who had just given up his job in Indian Airlines because he had “to help Mummy” somehow. I lived in the US then but managed to get an interview with him. On a crisp November afternoon, my first-ever trip to Delhi; I walked into One Akbar Road.

The meeting was set for 2 pm. I waited in the outer office for a few minutes. He came out wearing a blue-checked shirt and the most perfectly-tailored blue jeans I’d ever seen. Used to buying jeans from the racks of Levi stores, I was struck…what a perfect fit!

“Hi,” he said. It was the beginning of a relationship that eventually brought me back to India after spending the most part of the 1970s and 1980s in the US. We became good friends. In 1987, when he came to the US, I met him.

“So are you a millionaire?” he asked me.

“Huh?” I responded.

“Well, you come to Delhi so often. Just come back and stay,” he told me.

So we moved lock, stock and barrel to Delhi in December 1987.

He was the Prime Minister then and I was giddy at 38 years of age to have unfettered access to the Prime Minister of India. Over the years, he was good to me, taking me on trips abroad and in India on his prime ministerial plane. I saw the world and India from rarefied heights.

And there were more such amazing privileges, including meeting world leaders, being personally introduced to them by India’s dashing new Prime Minister: Ronald Reagan, Hafez Assad of Syria, big guns in Germany, France, Hungary, Pakistan, and the Soviet Union.

Heady times for a 40-year old.

Two decades later, I sit and worry that the saffron party with an absolute majority might make life difficult for me and my family. As a Gujarati, I never bought into Narendra Modi’s impressionist painting of Gujarat as some sort of an El Dorado. And have said so in the newspapers and on television.

Should the new dispensation seek to hound opponents, I am a sitting duck
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But what is sad, and which explains why they were destroyed, is the Congress, in the past year, has practiced what a perceptive journalist called “bad faith politics.” The leadership remained inaccessible, surrounded as they were by the palace guard.

From 1997 through 2004, I met Mrs Sonia Gandhi regularly, sometimes even every day, not for any political purpose but simply for professional inputs on how to run an election campaign. She put me in charge of the advertising campaign and at my instance, set up a media committee to address the editorial part of the print media. Later, when television came to the fore, I persuaded Mrs Gandhi to revamp the press conference room into a television-friendly venue.

We struggled through losses in 1998 and 1999. In 2004, I thought I was in the thick of things until some Congress apparatchiks orchestrated a coup to take over. In the American way of saying things, I was shafted.

Even after the 2004 verdict in favor of the Congress, I insisted that that the BJP lost not because of its “India Shining” campaign but because of abundant evidence of bad governance, including the idiotic nuclear blasts in 1998 and the Pramod Mahajan machine of corruption.

The apparatchiks convinced Mrs Gandhi that a “pro-poor” policy was the lesson learned from the 2004 victory.

After that, the Congress lost the plot. Instead of capitalizing on the gains of UPA policies in their first term, they began this errant, arrogant program brought in by Rahul Gandhi, who the apparatchiks saw as their ticket to power for the next decade or more, given he was young.

Trouble was Mr Gandhi brought into his team, bright young sparks from Ivy League universities who had a post-modern view of the world. Imposing policies such as the food security bill, the tribal rights bill, the land acquisition bill that won kudos on highfalutin campuses the world over, Mr Gandhi and his team thought India’s pre-modern voters would buy it and vote the Congress to power again.

It is true that in the West, there is growing intellectual movement against corporate capitalism and questions are being asked the motives and practices of large corporations. In bringing such post-modern issues to the election campaign against the simple message of aspiration Mr Modi purveyed, Mr Gandhi now presides over the ruins of the 130-year old Indian National Congress.

Mr Gandhi and his Ivy League acolytes have presided over the utter decimation of the Grand Old Party founded by Allan Octavian Hume in December 1885.

A New Narcissism

The Culture of Righteousness

Oh the irony! 

Delhi’s Khirkee village sprawls across the street from the Saket malls, with their seductive offerings of consumerist dreams. Khoj, an exciting arts collective, is located there and most of the artists and writers who come there share an outspoken disdain for the malls across the street.

Khoj attracts creative people from all over the world. They are as far removed from its location as the people who shop in the malls. Both are light years away; the malls, where once inside you could be in any American suburb. Equally, given its cutting edge creative sensibilities, Khoj may well have been in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.

Having known and publicized Khoj for many years and been impressed by its progress, this was my first trip to their newly refurbished quarters. In the event, many years later, we found ourselves in their edgily restored offices in Khirkee, the village where the law minister of the ill-fated government of Arvind Kejriwal, led a raid against the many Africans, who live in this disgusting arrondisement.
 

To get to Khoj, you negotiate the heart-attack traffic near the malls and finally pull into the village, where there are no roads to speak of but there are hundreds of cars, honking and worming their way in a hell-bent-for-leather approach. It has no infrastructure but has the problems of traffic and pollution,

One Wednesday evening, we found ourselves there after a trip that can best be described as appalling. The Khoj property is world class: slick and modern. It is a building that Pradip Sachdeva, a well-known Delhi architect, set up as his office in the 1990s. There’s not much left of his imprint; the Khoj office is interesting still. We learned that the redevelopment was undertaken by a Singapore architectural firm.

The irony doesn't stop there. On the way, the substitute driver, who brought us there, fielded insistent calls from his wife. I heard him say, “Ask the next door neighbor for milk and sugar.” He has a seven-month old child. After his conversation, he turned to me and said, “Please, Sir, can you give me an advance? I have a financial problem.” It made me distinctly uncomfortable to think of our destination and the event we were attending there.

Then we walked into the slick Khoj quarters, there to listen to Ryan Bromley, an academic with an undergraduate degree in international relations from a college in Warsaw, Poland, and a graduate degree from the City University in London in “food policy.”

Bromley’s presentation was titled “Spanish Conceptual Gastronomy: A Curatorial Approach.” He took off from Ferran Adria’s el Bulli restaurant in the Costa Brava region of Spain. The restaurant got varied reviews from people who ate there; many said it was  hard to get a reservation; others could not get over the experimental nature of the chef’s menu. It still started a revolution in gastronomy.

Bromley said molecular gastronomy has its roots in the application of laboratory physics and chemistry to cooking. Cutting-edge concept that it is, the extension from a post-modern science to an avant-garde art form seemed just a bit contrived; it was a bit like witnessing a caesarian birth. I suspect he had to stretch his thesis to accommodate the “artists” who were present there, with little interest in food.

Also haunting and distracting me was the driver’s conversation with his wife. It jarred every sensibility in me and made me much less responsive to the proceedings.I had read lots about molecular gastronomy and even made a laughable attempt some years ago to book a dinner table one afternoon at Alinea, the buzzy Chicago restaurant run by Grant Achatz, who worked with Ferran Adria in Spain.

Back at Khoj, Bromley was joined by Shuddhabrata Sengupta, from the Raqs Collective, a group of creative individuals that has been making waves in Delhi as the 21^st century Bohemians. Sengupta took off into philosophical areas; building on Bromley’s thesis that the Establishment including philosophers, scholars, clerics and sundry disciplinarians provided the historical obstacles to the evolution of gastronomy, referring to sacerdotal strictures against gluttony.

What Sengupta added to the conversation was a wow factor. All the young impressionables had shining eyes as he expounded on philosophy and culture, with perfect sound bites that had the audience reeling with hushed applause at the man’s sweep of western philosophy and Hindu mythology; reminded me of my friend. Ashis Nandy, the rock star of the alternative universe.

In the end, I came away from the Khoj event, troubled. Bromley had some good insights, when it came to new school cuisine. Sengupta was impressive with Wikipedia-style knowledge.. In the "interactive session" that followed, a twenty-something artist talked about her eating only raw food, mostly because she opposed processed food and corporations.That was when we left..

Still it was a good evening. 

My take was very different from the earnest questioner. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, my generation questioned societal norms and pushed for human rights.Christopher Lasch wrote his 1979 classic “The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations” in which he lashed out against the transformation of  the "Boomer" generation in America into a self-obsessed constituency as it entered its 30s. He deprecated the "pathological narcissism" of young America after the protests, first against the Vietnam War and then against capitalism. Going by the back and forth at Khoj that evening, I can only conclude that we now have in India a culture of narcissism masquerading as righteousness. 

Sadly, the interesting presentation by Bromley on new trends in gastronomy was overwhelmed by the narcissistic righteousness of the audience. Adria was lost as was his concept of molecular gastronomy. Which is what we went there for in the first place.

Capital Chatter

Heard in the Capital...

"The main victim of Modi's goebbelsian propaganda is the candidate himself...his disastrous ticket distribution strategy is based on the assumption that there is a wave in his favor."

Capital Chatter

Heard in the Capital...

"Modi destroyed the BJP; the BJP destroyed his artful campaign."

Satya Nadella ascension: misleading triumphalism

The elevation of India-born and schooled Satya Narayana Nadella to chief executive officer at Microsoft Inc, USA — the world’s most well-known IT corporation (annual revenue: $77.85 billion or Rs.484,149 crore) — has been widely reported in the media. All reports were anchored by a streak of pride proclaiming it as an Indian achievement. This puffing of the collective chest is one more indication that the media responds to such stimuli in an overwrought manner, used as they are to what Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul described as “a negative way of perceiving” events and trends.

Elaborating on his construct in India: A Wounded Civilization (1976), Naipaul wrote: “In an active, busy country, full of passion and controversy, it is not an easy thing to grasp, this negative way of perceiving. Yet it is fundamental to an understanding of India’s intellectual second-rateness… (which) may be the most startling and depressing thing about the world’s second most populous country.”

Naipaul’s insightful observation is still valid in the second decade of the new millennium. After a decade of promising growth and unlocking of the nation’s unlimited potential, India’s “second-rateness” seems to have overwhelmed it. Everywhere one turns, the promise seems to be in terminal decline with the media typically blaming government. This is the essence of this “negative way of perceiving” — externalize the problem and bring in fascists or anarchists to save the day. Any option is preferable to deep thinking and introspection.

At the heart of the problems debilitating the nation and Indian society, is a dysfunctional education system. Indeed, it may not be too far off the mark to tag the Nadella ascension as a full-blown indictment of the Indian academy. The higher education system does produce world-class scientists, engineers, managers and doctors but the economy lacks the sophistication to absorb them. Consequently, these heavily-subsidised technical and professional academic institutions produce skilled manpower for more evolved global corporations.

But even as the brightest and best move on to script success stories elsewhere, Indian enterprises struggle to find the engineers, managers and doctors needed to meet the demands of a growing economy. To fill these demands, the education bureaucracy and freewheeling entrepreneurs have devised a system of selection defined by examinations and rote learning. 

The ones with the highest scores are usually recruited by global corporations; the remainder battle for survival or success in local enterprises and joint ventures which struggle to cope with the demand for marketing, supply chain, maintenance, logistics managers and the dead hand of socialism — regulation, labour laws, taxation, finance. This leaves little room for innovating new products, services, processes, and systems.

Nadella’s ascension nevertheless provides a welcome opportunity for assessment of an education system which has become a programme of elite selection rather than public empowerment and enlightenment. National pride is probably the last reaction it ought to evoke, given the fact that Nadella and a whole host of such immigrant success stories are scripted outside of India. In the end, Nadella’s achievement is an American success story, an endorsement of the American dream. It’s also a summary rejection of the Indian milieu in which conformism and mediocrity inevitably triumph over innovation and excellence.

It bears repetition that the elevation of Indian-origin executives to apex positions at Microsoft, Citibank, Pepsi and others is a grim indictment of India’s education system. It is vital not to be misled by triumphal media which adulates the success of Nadella, Vikram Pandit, Indra Nooyi and others as feathers in the nation’s cap. True, these are men and women shaped by India’s higher education system. But they went away, knowing well that opportunities for intellectual growth and pursuit of knowledge lay outside the country.

Things did change as the reforms of 1991 struck root. Admittedly, there are more jobs, larger incomes, and more choice in the market for products, services, and business options. But simultaneously our cities, towns and villages are trapped in the chaos of traffic and pollution, and lack power, water supply and sanitation. Political conflicts have been exacerbated by acrimonious public debate fanned by ignorant and self-serving media. To watch the news on television, or read newspapers and periodicals is to confront doom-and-gloom scenarios purveyed by opinionated apparatchiks of the news business.

Meanwhile, the education system offers little to help young people struggling to understand the mismatch between economic growth and civic responsibility. It’s still mired in the bogs of bureaucracy and robber-baron capital. Yes, there’s been a substantial expansion in the number of universities, colleges and professional institutes. But the end product still remains rote graduates, ill-equipped to do more than pass examinations and unable to handle the demands of a growing economy and changing society.

This article appeared in Education World magazine,  March 2014.

Read The News…

A Review Essay: India Psychedelic

Disclosure: Sidharth Bhatia, the author of the book, India Psychedelic:  the Story of a Rocking Generation, is one phenomenal friend. His celebrated book is making waves. Many of the bands he’s written about and the circumstances of India in the 1960s and early 1970s, I have a personal experience of…because I grew up in Bombay. And as he says, many of us just wanted out from a hopeless situation. I was certainly one of them: Quit India in the early 1970s to make a life in the USA.

What Sid writes about and clearly declares is about a sliver of the population in the cities he includes. Nice thing he is not apologetic about it. He simply talks about the westernized lot, a segment that was and still continues to be dismissed as somehow not Indian, out of touch with the real India. Fact is they were in touch with the world, which people in the political and bureaucratic regime recognized only in 1991, when India was forced to open up for pecuniary reasons.

Sid’s book, above all, is a story of Bombay’s cosmopolitan culture. Only in that wonderful city you had access to the global mainstream, halting and stilted though it was. Globalization first happened in Bombay. As an example, I grew up in Juhu’s Theosophical Colony, going to a school founded by Maria Montessori, the Italian educationist, whose theories on child development were very influential the world over.

Growing up in Juhu and later in Byculla Bridge, I imbibed Western music. My early memory is of the Doris Day song, “How Much is the Doggie in the Window.” Beyond that, mercifully, there was Bill Haley and The Comets…I saw the film “Rock Around the Clock” at Shree Cinema in Mahim off of Cadell Road; then Elvis and Pat Boone and Cliff Richard. And Tony Brent, the old Byculla boy of Portofino fame.

But this is before Sid’s story, which really begins in 1962 after The Beatles’ first single “Love Me Do” in 1962. I remember going to a movie in Regal Cinema in 1964. The trailer was a short film called “The Beatles Come to Town.” The music seared my teenage soul. Soon after, I went to Rhythm House and asked if they had any Beatles…they didn’t. 

  

The bands that played in Bombay through the 1960s didn't really do the Fab Four…heard more of The Rolling Stones, Gerry and The Pacemakers, Herman’s Hermits, The Animals. Doesn't surprise me…was hard to play The Beatles with their complicated chords and their incredible harmony. Tell the truth…from 1964 to 1967, I never heard a band play The Beatles.

A legendary group in Bombay that Sid mentions is Reaction. One of my drilled-in memories is a plate of “potato chips” (aka French fries) slathered with Dipy’s pumpkin ‘tomato’ sauce and a coke at Venice on any given afternoon...listening to them do The Rolling Stones. All, I may add, was a little more than rupee a piece for the four of us who shared the fries and had individual cokes. We thought we were the cool crew. In the event, as Sid’s book affirms, we were totally that…cool, except we couldn't afford shades.

There is a reference in Sid’s book also to Jimmy Dorabjee. In 1968, I went to Simla with my parents. Didn’t like to go anywhere with my parents except I had never been north and the town, I thought, was cool; it gave its name to the legendary “Beat Contest,” in which selected bands did their stuff and got prizes. Met Jimmy performing at Davico’s, Bob Dylanesque: with shades, denim jacket, a harmonica around his neck and playing Dylan on his guitar. “The Times,” he sang” “are a-changing.”

What I did not know until later was that Simla referred to the cigarette brand, not to the town. In fact, these contests, as Sid writes in his book, were held in Bombay’s Shanmukhananda Hall in the conservative neighborhood of Matunga. I was once part of the audience there and was reminded of it when in a small private university in America I attended a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young concert a few years later
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In Ahmedabad, in the mid 1960s, there was surprisingly a huge rock scene. Good bands, great music, sad technology. In Baroda, years later, we formed an event management company…as engineering students…that brought the bands from Ahmedabad (surprise!) and made some good money from organizing the concerts. We were four of us…it was the late sixties…and we made more money each event than we got from home in three months.

Beyond that, after I left Bombay reluctantly for Baroda, my girlfriend, now my wife, and I attended jam sessions in Havmor restaurants in Ahmedabad and in Baroda. New Year’s Eve I always went to Ahmedabad to the dance at the Rotary Club Hall where sometimes Scandal, sometimes the Xlents and most times Purple Flower sang.

Finally, for my friend Sid, who wrote this excellent book and made a thought-provoking presentation at the Oxford Book Store in Connaught Place, I want to agree the rock scene in the 1970s was ebullient but grim…peopled as it was by PLUs. My wife asked why there was no reference to Goans rockers in his book. Fact is, and she knows this, the Goans introduced rock music to Bollywood…and in the end made more money than the bands, plus gave us Hindi music to rock by.

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Has Rahul's AICC speech redefined political discourse?

Rahul Gandhi’s speech in the AICC meet on Friday has raised the bar in political campaigns. By his allusion to concepts such as freedom and liberty, values and ideas and trusteeship and aspirations, he left his opposition between a rock and a hard place. With its high tone, Rahul's speech cannot be condemned in the usual coarse terms used by the Opposition; else, it will show them up as small men bereft of ideas, steeped in the culture of vile abuse. We can only hope that they rise to the occasion and, finally, the political debate becomes substantive.

Rahul's speech also sought to lift the spirits of the Congress leaders and workers who had gathered to hear him. He laid out the achievements of the UPA government over a decade, talking about the dent made on poverty and emphasising on the empowerment and aspirations of men and women. In particular, he spoke of the new segment that has emerged in India of a socioeconomic group that is above poverty levels but below the middle-class lines. He spoke of the need to take lawmaking away from media and courts to return the function to legislators. He asked lawmakers to join hands to help steer significant pending legislation through Parliament in its final session.

Even when combative, Rahul used humour to put down his opponents; one of them, he said, has a good marketing strategy that can sell combs to the bald; the other specialises in giving haircuts to the bald. He said the complexity and diversity of India called for accent on enhancing democratic foundations, saying that the Congress has always faced such challenges with a zeal for revolutionary reform. Playing his favourite theme, Rahul said the challenges of the 21st century are such that there is no room for "oversimplified nonsolutions" championed by "a communal party led by an individual who is known for stoking communal fires to achieve political ends".

In the final analysis, Rahul achieved a remarkable objective: he asserted the constitutional convention of elected legislators choosing a prime minister and at the same time kept his supporters' hopes alive by promising he will accept whatever role they want him to play after the election.

(This article appeared in http://indiatoday.in, January 18, 2014)

‘Tis the Season…

Days of Future Past

Some sort of a sweet foreboding sweeps over me in this season of glad tidings and joy. I get transported back to Chicago when our daughters were still in the single digits, age wise. Especially the music and the warmth, even though the temperature outside was four Celsius below zero. I think back to the days, hoping with my girls for a white Christmas so they and their mother and I could build a snowman or at the very least, throw snowballs at each other or my girls could make angels in the snow.

Christmas Eve, we sat at the kitchen table while Mom baked cookies and the girls helped. The stereo played “Jingle Bell Jazz” and we sang along about Rudolph and Frosty and sleigh bells. We ate the cookies, warm from the oven with hot chocolate to drink. “Dad,” the girls chorused in unison, “we have to save some for Santa Claus.”

So we put a bunch of cookies and a glass of milk on the kitchen table, I snuck a scotch and we ate Cornish Hen stuffed with chestnuts with a side of  boiled sweet potato  and topped it off with Mom’s fabulous dessert. And we said to ourselves, what a wonderful world! We stared longingly at the presents under the Christmas tree in the living room, bundled ourselves and drove to church for midnight mass.

Coming back, we fell upon our presents. Thanks to their mother, the girls got environmentally friendly presents like wooden Scandinavian toys while I got them crass American gifts like a cat and a robot that responded to voice commands. We still have the wooden toys that our granddaughter, Kiara, plays with.

Decades later, we wonder what gifts we can get for our granddaughter. We wanted to get her a pedal car but it wasn’t available. A store in Khan Market ordered one for us but when we went to pick it up, it was shabby and seemed to have been a sample piece, dirty and tacky. So our big plans for Kiara fell victim to the shoddy salesmanship of India’s disgusting, two-bit retail sector.

We banished the bitter experience aside to focus on the season. Christmas is about giving and receiving but most of all, it is about family and nostalgia. It’s a time when we put aside the cares and demands of reality and plunge into the world of Rudolph and Frosty and Santa Claus to celebrate the most wonderful time of the year. My hope is in the grim reality of India our granddaughter  will actually believe in Santa Claus, like her mother and aunt did when growing up in Chicago.

As always, this Christmas Eve, we attended an early mass at the Vatican church in Lutyens Delhi. As always, we heard the proclamation of the mystery of faith as the choir sang “O Come All Ye Faithful.” The idea of a savior to guide you through the thickets of ethics and morality is seductive, even for gray-haired men who value rationalism.  The quid pro quo is faith. In my understanding, this savior asks you to believe in compassion and communion. I’m good with that. So I’m happy to go to church Christmas Eve and participate in the rituals that celebrate peace and goodwill.

Amazingly even our daughters, who are like me: rational skeptics, always come to church Christmas Eve...our younger one comes all the way from Manhattan’s East Village.  To them, it is a family tradition to uphold. They dress up and accompany us to the high mass, just to be part of the concelebration. For years, they have come to midnight mass with us; the Vatican service is much earlier at 8 pm and that works well for the party animals we all are. Enough time to eat, drink and be merry and still be ready the next day for the decades-old tradition of Christmas lunch at our house.

When you think about it, the appeal to faith and tradition is an uplifting experience. The music, the food, family and friends and the dollops of camaraderie and nostalgia that seem to overwhelm the season make you soar above mundane cares. If that ain't spiritual, I don’t know what is.  Listen to “Silent Night” and “O Holy Night” and let the eyes tear up; a tighter hug; a huge kiss; a warm embrace; mulled wine; a special table; family and friends. If that ain't spiritual, I don’t know what is.

Above all, Christmas is about continuity. We still make the sweets my daughters’ grandma made and the same food, if inflected with post modern fusion. We listen to the same music, traditional, jazz and classical, except on a state-of-the-art music system. The Christmas tree is the same except the ornaments now include little cutouts made by our granddaughter Kiara plus the lights are nicer.

Christmas is also about the passage of time.  Just recently, at the funeral of Nelson Mandela, a South African commentator told the BBC that in Africa death was not just about mourning a loss but also a celebration of ancestors. “Mandela has become an ancestor,” he said, “and that is a cause for joy.” Christmas is a reminder that if you keep the faith and continue the tradition, you will too become an ancestor. For us, Christmas evokes my wife’s mother who carried the standard and became an ancestor.

On this foggy Christmas eve, when Santa’s on his way, my fervent hope is my wife and I become ancestors, remembered and honored…not because of any achievements or accouterments but because we enhanced the tradition and kept the faith.

THE INDIA CONTEST

Bentley at the Red Light: Old Poverty, New Wealth

For the first time, the electorate faces a clear ideological choice. The Congress is the architect of liberalisation that unleashed the animal spirits of competition and innovation in the economy. The ensuing economic boom peaked in 2004; in the following decade, the economy grew at an average of 8% a year. This is evident as many sectors, including telecom, automobiles, pharmaceuticals and IT, became globally competitive.

Somewhere down the line, this growth story came up against some cruel facts: a large population afflicted by poverty and illiteracy, high malnutrition and abysmal public health. In stark contrast, world-class private schools, private hospitals, private estates, private planes, private roads and private banks blossomed.
There was always disparity, but never in your face. The pathetic picture of a car worth over a crore, waiting at a red light, besieged by begging children, is a new phenomenon. There have always been beggars, never Bentleys and Jaguars. Over the years, the rich became richer. This was not the outcome that Manmohan Singh, as finance minister, envisioned in 1991.

A year later, the BJP changed the debate with its sacking of the Babri Masjid. Suddenly, the debate was about Hindutva and the Ram temple. In the tumultuous decade that followed, the opened economy was hijacked by crony capitalists and middlemen. Mistaking this to be genuine reforms, the NDA government launched a highvoltage “India Shining” campaign. They even called an early election, hoping to cash in. In the event, a Congress-led coalition came to power in 2004 on an inclusive growth manifesto and was reelected in 2009.

Now, Narendra Modi, the new RSS mascot, has turned the BJP around to make it a US-style Republican party, stalling reforms in the legislature, promoting laissez faire and protectionist policies in the same breath, railing against government welfare spending, espousing a hardline but whimsical foreign policy. He speaks to an urban, upper-middle class audience and believes there are enough votes there to see him through.
Modi and his supporters believe he can form a government in 2014. It’s hard to believe, though, that his agenda of gated communities, luxury cars and conspicuous consumption will garner votes from the urban and rural poor, Dalits, tribals and Muslims who form the bulk of the young population. Meanwhile, the Congress has again arrayed itself in support of the excluded. More than his mother, Sonia Gandhi, who nudged the government into adopting a welfare-based legislative agenda, Rahul Gandhi is vocal about the skewed priorities.

The Indian business elite is up in arms against the Congress welfare agenda. They say India can’t afford it; they demand business-friendly policies that encourage growth, never mind the disparity. Senior ministers in the government are at pains to point out an inclusive agenda is not anti-growth and point to the national manufacturing policy that aims, in the next 10 years, to boost the share of manufacturing to 25% from 15% and, in the process, to create 100 million jobs.

In the face of heightened disparity, no political party can embrace trickledown economics and expect to form a government. Hence, the Congress lays emphasis on welfare along with its track record of growth. Modi’s noisy campaign, on the other hand, is based on disputable claims about growth and governance; the underlying message, however, is an unmistakable one of Hindu chauvinism.

Modi hopes to ascend on many contradictory platforms: authoritarian capitalism, muscular nationalism as a subliminal plank against minorities. In voting the Congress back in 2004 and again in 2009, the electorate turned its back on the BJP’s growth hype. The question now is whether voters will buy Modi’s high-voltage pitch. The idea behind the multilayered campaign is to fudge his track record that is sullied by allegations of his involvement in the 2002 Gujarat riots.

These charges have proved difficult to shake. Modi’s controversial role in the riots also attracted global concern. Major western countries instituted a diplomatic boycott; the US revoked his travel visa and is yet to restore it. Will the US presidential-style campaign help overcome the stain of 2002?

This article appeared in The Economic Times, November 5, 2013.

The India Contest

Majoritarian Thinking

The World Bears Witness to its Destructive Outcomes

Sixty-eight years ago on August 6, American planes dropped “atom bombs” on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  This reprehensible act 0f the Harry S Truman administration is worth examining. Apart from the moral and humanitarian dissent against nuclear weapons, there also were strategic differences. Allen Dulles, who was CIA chief at the time, admitted in a candid television interview years later that he knew the Japanese wanted to surrender and had informed the administration. There were other influential voices, including one Gen Dwight D Eisenhower, ranged against the bombings.  President Truman and his advisers ignored them.

Truman’s motives were duplicitous: one, avenge Pearl Harbor and two, get a head start on the Soviet Union in the incipient arms race. Besides, the Democrats had been in office since 1933, having been elected for three successive terms under Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  So it was easy for Truman, who was sworn in after FDR’s death in April 1945, to ride roughshod over dissenting voices.

The allusion to this controversial decision is by way of drawing attention to a political phenomenon that is sweeping emergent democracies in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Russia, in Belarus; also in established democracies like Turkey and Hungary: that democracy is a winner-take-all system in which the majority can assert power without any concern for dissenters.

Majoritarian politics has prevailed in most Western democracies. Concepts like public order and national security have often triumphed over notions of privacy and human rights. We’ve seen the case of the US National Security Agency snooping on citizens; Swiss authorities confining asylum seekers to mountainside bunkers and restricting their movement.

Challenges to the majority principle first arose in the United States and the United Kingdom, where equal rights, racial discrimination and nuclear disarmament became central political issues, on which elections were won and lost. In both countries though, conservative leaders emerged to revive the Majoritarian agenda: in Britain, Margaret Thatcher and in the US, Ronald Reagan succeeded in restoring national security and free-market economics as the focus of public policy, steamrollering “bleeding heart liberals.”

In India, too, prevalent political winds are driving policy in the Majoritarian direction.  Hindu nationalists want to define India as a Hindu nation. On the other hand, India’s business barons want a Thatcher-Reagan style focus on business-friendly government policies.  Both support a Majoritarian order, in which policies are made without concern for alternative views.

Such hard-line thinking, notable for its deaf-blind approach to alternative streams of thought, can lead to serious breaches of national security. Witness the strife on the streets of Istanbul, Cairo and elsewhere. It happens also in the mature democracies of the West, though  a strong and effective security regime there simply overwhelms protest.   

Back in India, the current government seems to be aware of the ascent of Majoritarian forces. Given an inept security apparatus, it has allowed dissent full play. For that, it has been lambasted as being paralyzed, without vision, corrupt and inept. A lot of the criticism is noise; fact is, the ruling dispensation has been able to complete nearly two full terms and notch up some significant policy gains.

Negotiation and the art of compromise could help govern this diverse milieu of warring interests and rising aspirations. However, in India, as elsewhere in the world, intolerance is on the rise and people, bureaucrats and politicians articulate extreme positions on every subject from economic policy to foreign affairs, from urban governance to rural development.

One group of people feels the government’s policies in aid of the poor are profligate, pointing to “leakages.” Another group feels the government is not doing enough to help the poor; a third lot feel the government’s policies are a drag on the economy. This clash of perspectives has fueled public debate in India since Independence. Today, this is compounded by an immature opposition party that disrupts Parliament; a shrill media with opinionated and crusading journalists, obstructionist bureaucrats and a cynical citizenry.

The result is a pervasive sense of disaffection in which rational and mature opinions have been marginalized; in their place is a general disenchantment with politics and its practitioners. This sort of opting out has created space for champions of Majoritarian politics. They offer visions of decisive leadership with a sub textual rant against the “vermin,” religious, ethnic and ideological opponents.

Kemal Ataturk, the first president of Turkey, led the nationalist movement after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. He is credited with turning his Muslim majority country into a modern, secular democracy following the First World War. India had a parallel in Jawaharlal Nehru, who did something similar after the Second World War.  Ataturk’s Turkey and Nehru’s India are both under challenge today by advocates of Majoritarian politics.

An edited version of this article appeared in The Economic Times, August 17, 2013.

Majoritarian Thinking

Livin' the Impromptu Life

On the Spiritual Roots of Loafing…

There is a deeply spiritual element in spurning ritual to do something completely different: it’s liberating, this idea that you can just go off the grid. Call it going AWOL. No permissions taken; no explanations provided. This is not about vacation or travel. There aren't any surveys or statistics to cite but it’s a pretty good guess that not everyone can or wants to do it. It is an attitude that for me has begun to take hold as I grow older. Maybe it stems from a growing awareness that in the end, everyone goes AWOL.

No; this is not a lament about growing old or a nervous look at death. On the contrary, it’s about life and joy and sensual pleasures; about the free spirit and the liberated mind that enables the impromptu life.

Periodic trips to Goa fall in that category. They let us explore the elasticity of time in which breakfast is on the table and every bite of buttered poi (Goan bread) with homemade jam satisfies so much you think you’ll never have lunch. Thinking of lunch while eating your breakfast is the impromptu state of mind in which minutes expand to fill an hour; the same minutes disappear in a fleet rush of seconds to leave you breathless, as you finish the clams or put down the book.

In the end, you become so embroiled in non-purposive activity that you lose track of time and begin to live on the wax and wane of nature: sunlight, moonlight, stars, dusk, dawn, rain, breezes, birdsong, rustling palms and the scent of the sea.

You lounge, you laze, go on long drives; read books and magazines all day or go to the beach and watch the Arabian Sea churn and roil in the Monsoon or gently roll at other times. You look for exciting new restaurants, cafes and watering holes; hook up with local friends and shoot the breeze late into the night; catch a movie at Panjim’s slick Inox cinema and in the auditorium, eat bhel instead of popcorn.

Eventually, when the sojourn draws to a close, you are refreshed and ready to look routine in the eye. That lasts a few weeks; then the soul begins to stir; your mind turns once again to the impromptu life in Goa and the serene experience of green rice fields, large rivers, lovely beaches, calamari, clams, shrimp and beer. So you go back again and spend another few days, unmindful of time. In that sense, it is a slice of immortality.

As you grow older and begin to see life’s finite horizon, such experiences gain in importance. You realize you may have done okay for yourself if, in your later life, you can indulge in such spiritual pursuits.  As you plan another journey into timelessness, thoughts hearken ahead to the new restaurant that’s just opened; succulent figs for breakfast; shrimp curry and rice for lunch; for dinner, chilly fry; dessert, custard apple ice cream; pickled green peppers in the fridge and the very dry vodka martini which their corns will flavor.

But wait…why can’t we disrupt routine more often? Is the impromptu life only available in Goa or some other such idyllic place? Of course not; it is a state of mind, as I recently discovered.

Having slept over at our house on a Sunday not too long ago, our granddaughter awoke early and climbed into our bed, making sweet sounds in her own dialect: “Wake up, sleepy head,” she seemed to be saying. My eyes opened and she smiled. I knew immediately then, Monday or not, there was no going to the office, no newspaper…even my tea remained undrunk.

Soon we were in the garden, chasing after birds and chipmunks. Of course, they disappeared; so we spent time scanning the skies and trees, whistling, gesticulating, making noises: trying to lure them back. Finally, the sapping heat got to me so we shifted the impromptu show indoors and went upstairs to sit directly in front of the air conditioner.

Then she happened on the remote control. Well, if we were going to watch TV, I felt Discovery HD was the best option for a stunning visual and learning experience. Except that we came upon the Cartoon Network while surfing…and lo and behold, it was the Tom and Jerry show, with Brahms’ Hungarian Dances as the soundtrack. So heads leaning together we watched as Jerry outwitted the cat every which way.

Another work afternoon, we took her to a playground in a nearby mall where she climbed up slides from bottom to top and ran around among the ingenious sprays that kept the place cool with their mist on a sultry day. Equally thoughtful were the soft cork board tiles that lined the playground…no scraped knees or elbows, no tears, no fears. Then last week, we took the time out of a weekday morning to take go swimming with her.

There was a time when even a half-hour delay in reaching the office would upset me. The pride and joy of my professional life was never missing a day of work, arriving early, leaving late. Things began to change when our house in Goa was ready to be occupied some dozen years ago.

Suddenly, a new appreciation of reality dawned: time isn't all about achievement. It’s about books read, movies seen, friends met, food enjoyed…or just sitting in an armchair, nodding off moments after flipping on the television set.

Years ago in a psycho-linguistics class, we learned the distinction between nominal definition, chair and operational definition, thing to sit on.  This disruption of ritual, which includes squandering of time and indulging in sensory pursuits, is living the impromptu life. The nominal definition is loafing.

The key is to let time wash over you; not watch over you and bind you with punitive schedules.