On my future journies

As I grew up, I was torn between two ideas of success. 

First was to be able to sit on the terrace of my ancestral home, a beautiful art deco mansion built in 1940s, on a winter morning, reading something beautiful. This was my idea of vita contempletiva.

Second was to travel around the world, doing something meaningful. This was my idea of vita activa.

These two ideas are obviously incompatible. My entire life was shaped by this tension. But it was a tension not only in my mind, but in the outside world too. By the time I finished college, Soviet Union disappeared, and the ideas environment I grew up in changed. Even in 1989, one of the subjects in my Undergraduate Economics course was Soviet Economic development, and I spent my paltry college pocket money on buying books published in USSR (primarily because they were cheap). In a sense, my idea of certainty fell away at that point. With that went my first idea of success, one of a quiet, stable life.

India was changing, too. This was more dramatic than just one budget speech on a July evening in 1991: The change was already there. If the 1973 OPEC crisis broke the back of the Soviet Economy, the Gulf War induced energy price hike made India's moribund, public sector driven economy unsustainable. India's trade with the Warsaw Pact countries were collapsing, its debt was downgraded by Moody's and IMF and World Bank suspended its assistance. Something had to give: The only available idea was to look to the West and embrace the idea of private enterprise driven economic growth. 

This changed my whole world. Today, I tell students, only half seriously, that if anyone met me on my 22nd birthday and asked about my future - where I would live, what I would do and even who I would marry - I could have given a set of answers with absolute certainty; by my 23rd, all of these answers changed. The dream of that sedentary life - my vita contempletiva - had given way firmly and irreversibly to the idea of footloose life. 

First, my budding career as a stock market analyst ended in May 1992. That was one of those certainties - that I shall have a private sector career - which started well with an informal internship. I was all geared up, dreamy-eyed about the new India and enrolled for a CFA qualification (which turned out not to be the CFA as we know it today, but an Indian variety started by two enterprising US returnees). But the stock market excitement in which I saw the future was all vaporware, pure fraud cooked up by one Harshad Mehta, about whose existence my Economics books taught me nothing.  

By December 1992, I was all set to leave my beloved home. This was to take place on the 8th of December: I had a job offer to teach Computer Programming at a school in Jharsuguda, a town in interior Odisha, 350 miles away, a strange turn of things for one who thought of being an Analyst. But recovering as I was from the shock of my first job loss, I saw redemption in computers. 

Going back to the university, I was to finish my MA examination on 7th December, Monday, and go away to teach. But, 6th of December, the evening before my final paper, Babri Masjid was destroyed and a nationwide riot ensued, closing down everything for weeks. My job disappeared yet again. In another strange turn of events, the morning after my final exam, on 7th January 1993, I was tinkering with a new thing - a Modem - trying to connect to something called the Internet. My vita activa started, but in a form I could barely imagine.

No man is an island 

This has now come to a full circle.

From this vantage point, I can read the above as a story of globalisation. The change of circumstances that I personally experienced, which changed my life and my aspirations, was not personal. There are those ups and downs - deaths in the family, falling in and out of love, getting my first job, stock market  - which felt significant at the time, but I still see the long arc of my life shaped by those things outside my comprehension. There were also other things: Learning English by reading Graham Greene (I went to Bengali medium school and couldn't speak English even after I started working), meeting interesting people (e.g., a particular seminar by someone called Atul Chitnis, whose columns I used to read, who, for the first time in my life, showed me Internet) or new experiences (e.g., getting into a plane first time in 1994, or travelling abroad, to Bhutan, on someone else's name)! All significant at the time, all memorable, important signposts to tell me that I came from a different world altogether. 

This reality check is necessary, as it is too easy either to think that my life is entirely my own making, or that it is just a series of accidents which got me where I am. It is all those things, but more. Even my personal aspirations, recounted above, are more than personal - they were desires shaped by the life around me. And, while I may sometime feel that what I lived through is a boring period (at least in the parts of the world I lived in), the big life-shifting events were all present. They, in turn, were shaped by even bigger, even longer term events, the phenomenon we call History, though we may not know it except in the episodic form that interact with our personal lives. But they are there - I analogise them as tectonic plates of time - and by my peculiar experience, I have learnt to pay attention to the tremors. 

Which brings me to the present subject.

The pivot 

As the Yogism goes, it's deja vu all over again!

If 1991 was a pivot moment when time's tectonic plates shifted, they are moving again. The convulsions are visible and the ideas are catching up. It took several years for the Internet to enter common imagination; in three years since GPT 3.5, chatbots have gone mainstream. Gorbachev's intellectual prevarications tore apart an entire belief system, then called Communism; Trump's anti-intellectual activism is doing the same for its opposite, Capitalism. 

The 90s worldview that shaped this phase of my life assumed that Capitalism is a consent-based system, a consent expressed in market mechanism rather than bureaucratic power. It was a gentle lie, but the lie had its use: While power was exercised brutally at the peripheries, at or near the metropolitan centres, the only violence people had to endure is boredom. 

But now this has changed and the consent is being replaced by coercion. While it is easy to blame it on Trump, it is perhaps wiser to see the coercion as necessary, rather than personal. Perhaps, the bread-and-circus formula is no longer working. One would instinctly think that the real-estate fuelled economies can only go so far, the formulaic entertainment can not go on pleasing and even the sports is too financially boosted to be interesting to all-comers. And, of all, the biggest disappointment is Tech, which has gone from being the portal of freedom to a tool of intrusion and repression.

Such a thing must have happened in the Soviet experience. It was always brutal and repressive at the margins, but coercion came nearer home as the fragile foundations of the belief system faltered. This is the tremor I feel: It is not about Trump expropriating a forever Presidency, but the disintegrating world of ideas that we are trapped in. There is plenty of cash slushing around everywhere, it is allowing the system to live a little, just as the red plenty of the fifties gave a few extra years to the Soviet experiment. 

My future journies 

Age is what others see in my face, but I feel ready for another journey now. 

But I feel it is not upto me to decide what happens next. History runs in longer phases than we can perceive, but we may be that one generation which experiences breaking and making a new configuration. I tend to think that a man living in England in July 1914 could have felt the same - a life of prosperity and peace notwithstanding an embarassing African war in the fringes - before the world changed in the next thirty years. He may be as clever, as educated, as worldly wise as any one of us today, but we embhasise too much on our innate abilities and desires, and too little these big historical factors, in what happens to us. But, as I imagine this nameless Englishman, it becomes clear to me that I should think of my future journeys with the world in mind.

To return to where I started, perhaps that sedentary idea of success was not so pointless after all. As an immigrant, I live between two journeys: One that I made and one that I wish to make, and waiting to make all my life. Suddenly, that idea of return is normalised, as the world pivots. I have no illusion that the future would look like the past, and yet, the prospect of slumbering on a winter morning on the terrace of my grandfather's house appears very attractive.