Pondering....

Way to go, Your Honour!

2009-07-03T03:50:00.005+05:30

Inspite of its penchant for over-reaching its limits & getting excessively preachy to the government, this time the Indian judiciary is bang on - the path-breaking judgement of the Delhi High Court decriminalizing homosexuality was long overdue. I just can't get over the eloquence of the court judgement, so for once I keep my own verbiage at bay.
"In our view Indian Constitutional Law does not permit the statutory criminal law to be held captive by the popular misconception of who the LGBTs (lesbian gay bisexual transgender) are. It cannot be forgotten that discrimination is antithesis of equality and that it is the recognition of equality which will foster dignity of every individual"

The judgement goes on to quote Nehru - "Words are magic things often enough, but even the magic of words sometimes cannot convey the magic of the human spirit and of a Nation’s passion…….. (this resolution) seeks very feebly to tell the world of what we have thought or dreamt of so long, and what we now hope to achieve in the near future"

"Those perceived by the majority as 'deviants' or 'different' are not on that score excluded or ostracised Where society can display inclusiveness and understanding, such persons can be assured of a life of dignity and non-discrimination. This was the spirit behind the resolution of which Jawaharlal Nehru spoke so passionately."
"a provision of law branding one section of people as criminal based wholly on states' moral disapproval of that class goes counter to equality guaranteed in the Constitution."

Quoting an earlier Supreme Court judgement - "A Constitutional provision must be construed, not in a narrow and constricted sense, but in a wide and liberal manner so as to anticipate and take it out of changing conditions and purposes so that the Constitutional provision does not get atrophied or fossilised but remains flexible enough to meet the newly emerging problem."

On the government stand that the judiciary refrain from interfering on an issue pertaining to 'legislative function', the court lays down -"We are constrained to observe that the submission of Additional Solicitor General reflect rather poorly on his understanding of the Constitutional scheme. The judiciary is constituted as the ultimate interpretor of the Constitution and to it is assigned the delicate task of determining what is the extent and scope of the power conferred on each branch of government."

I'm just left speechless and feel I've nothing to add to this vocal extravaganza.

How to Introduce Myself?

2009-03-21T10:50:00.006+05:30

One of the perennial dilemmas facing me since I moved to the US has been fielding questions about India from Americans & other international students. I'm always reminded of Salman Rushdie's quip in Midnight's Children about India having as many 'realities' as it has people (though this is probably true for every country, but I feel India's sheer diversity sharpens this view). Inextricable from this is also introducing myself concisely without delving into a long discourse about India.

It begins right with the name! - "No, I don't have a first name - last name in the conventional sense. You don't need to remember the long B... thing, just call me Harish. This is not true for every Indian. I'm just part of a small community of Indians with this peculiarity, though this community is vastly over-represented among the Indian students at grad school."
"My roots are in South India near Chennai (that sometimes rings a bell). I grew up in a small town in Central India, and lived in Mumbai/Bombay(another tangential explanation of renaming cities here, depending on which one brings a sign of recognition) for the last five years. And yes, I went to IIT (guilty as charged!)."
"Yes, I can speak 3 languages since I can remember speaking - English, Hindi & Tamil, the last one immediately eliciting a raised eyebrow thanks to LTTE - the Tamil Tigers!"

Sometime back I overheard a remark that it's so difficult to stop Indians once they start talking about themselves, and made a note to correct myself. But try as I might , I can't seem to stop myself and so instead I thought of a new scapegoat - the amazing American propensity for small talk! Surely, if you don't want to know a person, rather ask them about their research and I could utter some complicated that neither of us have to pretend to understand!

Anyway, I now realize that what I started with the intention of problematizing the representation of Indian 'reality' to an outsider, has turned into a bad attempt at humour (not my genre, I guess). But the more serious post will have to come another day, and I conclude this by saying it's nice to re-start blogging after such a long hiatus.

A Mirror to Life

2007-07-23T22:35:00.000+05:30

A long-standing argument I'm having with a friend (his name's Sham) is regarding the consumption of alcohol. While we are agreed that addiction is morally indefensible and socially undesirable, I don't see anything wrong in somebody indulging occasionally within reasonable limits. But according to S, even a drop of the stuff touching the lips is a potential and even inevitacle addiction. Having had several debates with S, invoking various analogies and pertinent real-life examples, I've now realized that the alcohol is really just an instance- the difference between us lies in our larger outlook in life.

After a particularly contentious exchange, S concluded with -"I know I'm right and you really have no point". This unexpected streak of self-righteousness temporarily dumbfounded me and kept me distracted for a long time afterwards. I'm not writing this to put forth my own point-of-view (which anyway I haven't been able to do convincingly enough with S), but rather to dwell on a tangential line of thought that I pursued during the sleepless night I spent after this incident.

Three years back, my reaction wouldn't have been very different from that of S. That was when I could still demarcate clearly visible lines between good-bad, right-wrong, moral-immoral; that simplistic black-and-white binary world where I was always right. So, coming from school to IIT, I can assume that I and S had quite a similar moral sense, and what is more, it was same for most of the first year. It is ironical that it was from second year onwards that while we got to know each other well, our larger worldviews started diverging radically. And I started mulling over what happened then that the ubiquitous grey shades of life became apparent to me, but not to S.

It is very difficult to pinpoint one event as the harbinger of wholesale changes in one's mentality, and maybe even wrong to put it down as the sole cause. Our cognitive powers are continually changing our thought processes, both consciously and unconsciously. But, at the same time, one attributes certain events as necessary, if not sufficient, in bringing about such changes. In my self-analysis, I concluded that such a catalytic event during that period was my exposure to literature.

By holding forth that literature gave me a mirror to life, I'm not seeking to take sides in the perrenial 'Art mirrors Life' verus 'Life mirrors Art' debate, but only submitting that I can easily relate to the former. Norah's assertion of self over family & society in Ibsen's Doll's House; the absurdity of all borders separating human beings elucidated by Amitav Ghosh's Shadow Lines; the poignant situation of two children who dare to break the love-laws of our society in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things; the irresistibly charming and adulterous heroine of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina; the ambitions and tribulations of an endearing Pip in Dickens' Great Expectations - the list can go on endless, and I never really knew when the blurring of the lines of easily distinguishable good-bad happened and I started appreciating the complexity of moral issues in life.

Coming back to where I started - the debate with S - I'm still wondering how to express this problematization of all morality and ethics to him; how to show him that there are seven colours in the rainbow, and none of them is either black or white; how to achieve the convincing articulateness of the masters of literature with their brilliant insights into human character. Oscar Wilde, in his artful manner of lacing profound thoughts between mindless witticisms, notes in The Picture of Dorian Gray - 'Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.'

Taking liberty to identify myself among Wilde's elect few, I'd submit that there are people who don't get the point even after covering life's journey in full. I intend to make S read this, and can only hope he understands that at least I've some point to make.

The Phenomenon of President Kalam

2007-07-21T10:42:00.000+05:30

"Call it Mission Shake-Up Home. That's what President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam is doing now. Armed with his precision weapon Change, tipped with his favourite warhead Vision, Mr Kalam is giving Rashtrapati Bhavan a spanking new look." (The Times of India, 20 June 2003)
A typical example of the innumerous encomiastic articles written over the last five years of President Kalam's tenure, the level of adulation he commands in the media and the chattering classes is comparable to the sycophancy of Congressmen to any member of the Nehru-Gandhi family. I have often been puzzled at this phenomenon, which defies the close and critical media scrutiny on most celebrities. It is almost as if perfectly intelligent people suddenly lose all their critical faculties due to some magic wand that he wields. There is no doubting his charisma and his ability to inspire people, but this unalloyed admiration for him by one and all is indeed curious.

The trumpeting of Dr.Kalam's scientific credentials provoke me to compare him with Albert Einstein. Dr.Kalam is the putative maker of the Indian nuclear bomb, he did this although he had already seen the catastrophic effects of its use, which Einstein was far-sighted enough to foresee even before it actually happened. Einstein chose both to foresake his home-country and upset the authorities in his adopted country, for the sake of his principles. But even keeping aside the alarm that a supposedly out-of-sync-with-reality (read impractical and idealistic) peacenik like me has at the idolization of a maker of a weapon of mass destruction (ostensibly for the cause of peace!), Kalam is no Einstein in the scientific world, in fact not even a C.V.Raman or C.N.R.Rao (before you wonder, the last-mentioned is one of the best scientists in the country today). He did not make some new path-breaking discovery or innovation, the basic scientific principles and concepts underlying his 'achievement' being known for at least half a century, so-much-so that a neighbour could achieve the same 'milestone' within a month of our doing so. I'm not seeking to undermine the tecnical feat India achieved here, but that's all it is - a 'technical' one, that has been blown out of proportion.

President Kalam has a gift for mesmerizing people, and there is no doubt that the nature of interactions of people with Rashtrapati Bhavan during his tenure has covered previously unexplored terrain. However, when it was clear that he didn't have the requisite political support for a second term, his claims of "overwhelming love and affection of the people from all sections of society and from all parts of the country" as a justification for standing for a second term "provided there is certainty about this" and his being "willing to wait for a few more days for this certainty" smacks of outrageous poitical brinkmanship. His staking a claim to "people's support" presented a real danger of Rashtrapati Bhavan emerging as a rival power-centre, in blatant disregard of our system of parliamentary democracy with a ceremonial President. It is noteworthy that he sought 'certainty' of an electoral victory and not an across-the-board consensus, inviting questions on his credentials as a democrat. The willingness to wait for certainty was a euphemism for a willingness to be party to manipulative politics, and was most unbecoming of a country's first citizen. His subsequent retraction -"Enough is enough" (we should have been the ones saying that to him!) and portrayal of himself as a naive man who was manipulated by crafty politicians was a cunning PR coup, reminiscent of Dr. Shilpa Shetty.

Preident Kalam has been coveted as the best President we had and his self-proclaimed 'tough' decision of returning the Office of Profit has won many accolades. However, Vidya Subrahmaniam puts things into perspective with her stinging indictment of two of his worst decisions in office -'he signed a late night proclamation allowing the dissolution of the Bihar Assembly which the Supreme Court held to be illegal and 'a subversion of the Constitution'. Thanks to him, a portrait of Savarkar hangs in the Central hall of Parliament — right opposite the portrait of Mahatma Gandhi in whose assassination he was once implicated." (The Hindu, 23 June 2007).

Today, the role and usefulness of symbolism is debated even as we are set to have our first woman President, but it is conveniently ignored that Dr.Kalam's election was also a clever jugglery of symbols. A nuclear scientist, involved in defence research (patriotism being connotative here) and a Muslim who has studied the Vedas was a politically correct choice, which nobody could controvert.

Kanthapura - History through Literature

2007-07-12T02:52:00.000+05:30

There are various approaches to study history - the most mundane being our standard texbook chronologies of kings,dynassties and wars; an interesting way being biographies and travellogues and then there are various people who try to give different representations through varying perspectives(for example, Nehru's Discovery of India or Dominique Lapiere's Freedom at Midnight). But history through literature (or rather fiction) is quite unusual. And i guess most of us would be quite sceptical of an attempt to represent something that actually happened(hard facts) using fiction. But reading Raja Rao's Kanthapura, I cannot help feeling that literature can indeed give a new and refreshing perspective to our view of particular events.

Anyone who has studied through the Indian school system (and having a decent memory), when asked to give a summary of our freedom struggle since the beginning of 20th century, will recall the following movements - Partition of Bengal, Khilafat, Non-Cooperation,Dandi March,Civil disobedience and finally Quit India. While the end of the Non-Cooperation is the most well-chronicled(the Chauri-Chaura incident), how many of us know how and why these other movements ended? And how many of us have ever bothered to think of this not-so well-documented. aspect?

The novel Kanthapura traces the freedom movement at the time of the Dandi march & Civil Disobedience in Kanthapura, a village of Karnataka. Understandably, a village finds it more difficult to absorb the changes in its feudal mentality that is demanded by the Gandhian principles of our freedom movement, especially its emphasis on caste reform. A literature connosieur would delight at the novel's marvellous narrative structure and the subtle social and political satire, but here i want to emphasise this novel's importance in depicting history. The narrative point-of-view of an old woman in the village showcases the dilemnas of a conservative and, in some senses,feudal society struggling to comprehend the nature and scale of the changes around them.

To help the villagers understand the nature of the anti-colonial struggle, the medium of 'Harikatha' is used, wherein Gandhi, the Mahatma becomes an incarnation of God, who has come to rescue the people from the bondage of foreign powers. But while this assimilation of Gandhian principles and religious beliefs provides an excellent political base, the social reform aspect of the Gandhian ethos comes in to direct conflict with the rigid caste system and proves to be a fleshy thorn, when the 'pariahs' (Harijans as Gandhi hasd christened them) seek entry into the temple.

To me, the most interesting poser of the novel comes at the end, when the Civil Disobedience movement comes to an end. No explanations are provided as to why a movement that had been so successful in uniting Indians across all castes and religions, should have been discontinued. As the narrator ruefully notes(though she has no irreverence to Gandhi in mind), 'Gandhi had made his peace with the Viceroy', while the people of the village lose their lands and home because of their non-compliance in paying taxes.

This brought me to the larger question of how we never read in our history textbooks why any of these agitations were ended, although each of them is acclaimed to have brought the British down to their knees. I'm not suggesting conspiracy theories of any collabation between British and Gandhi/Congress, but we certainly need to know why none of these movements were brought to their logical end, the end of British rule in India.