Sunday Posts

It is always poor people's fault. The world seems precarious at this moment. The neo-liberal activism since the 80s have destroyed the foundations of the Liberal system, its system of nations sustained by the welfare state: The neat structures of the world order seem to be withering away.  A Russian president openly talks about the possibilities of nuclear war; the leaders of Britain and Germany precariously hang on to power in the face of right-wing revolutions while the prospect of a left revolution looks real in France; in the United States, private interests of the President trump his public duties. At the turn of 2018, chaos reigns. If the newspapers have to be believed, it is all due to immigrants or poor people. In fact, it is immigrants AND poor people: Globalization unleashed people movements - from South and Central America to North America, from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe and from East to West Europe - and this has made the poor people i...

Gandhi is this incredible historical figure who is inspiring and absurd at the same time. He is a towering Jesus-like figure, who lives on in the street names and statues in his native India and memes on the Internet, exhorting us to be the change we want to see in the world. But he is also this absurd, saintly and irrelevant figure, distant from everyday realities and offering no concrete possibilities of confronting our disappointments. We have learnt to live with Gandhi the saint, who has an alluring other-worldly appeal and absolutely nothing to do with modern political life.  This is perhaps what it ought to be. Though Gandhi was very much a practical political man leading a mass movement, the nation he helped to create deified him. His legacy was cast aside as spiritual and moral rather than practical and political;  he was celebrated as the Father of the nation, one who exited conveniently early in the life of the Republic. He was designated to be treated, m...

Seventy years on, the Republic of India is now at one of those crossroads when its foundational ideas are being questioned. Its middle classes, in the throes of an existential crisis as the globalisation that made them reverses, have found their demon in the idea of India itself. Nations, usually, consider their origin stories with a special fondness and deep reverence, enshrining the creation ideas as the basis of all new imagination: Despite the passing of the years, the British therefore looks at the Glorious Revolution, the French to French Revolution, the Italians to Risorgimento and the Americans revere their Founding generation. But, in India, as a newly-rich, recently disappointed middle class hunt for the ghosts, they find their Republic flawed, its democracy rickety, its people disunited, and above all, the idea that unites it all misdirected. This makes a re-examination of the idea of India worthwhile. Surely, this is much discussed, but as the optimism turns to pess...

I write, but one advice I have taken to heart is not to take my writing too seriously. That, I thought, is the best way to avoid any traps - from writing blocks to scholasticism - and be able to enjoy writing. This is exactly I did, on this blog, for the last ten years. I wrote as words came to me, and stopped, sometimes abruptly, just as one would do in conversations. It was difficult not to be conscious of those who might read it - I experimented with private blogs but the conversations felt unfulfilled without others - and over time, this put some constraints of subjects, what to say or not to say, all those little things about appropriateness. There was, however, somewhere a wish, a hope, that I can attempt a meaningful writing project someday. After ten years, I feel ready to try. A few weeks ago, I wrote a post announcing my intention to write about the death of Mahatma Gandhi ( see here ). Or, rather, what then started as a general enquiry into an imperfect but persistentl...

As I wrote the earlier post declaring my intent to study Gandhi's life and death, contending that it is indeed a very 'Indian' life and death, I presumed that Gandhi mattered. It may seem too obvious a statement, but it is not the 'Father of the Nation' stature that we need to be talking about. In fact, this, and the vast cottage industry that sprung up on Gandhi iconography, can be seen in direct contrast to what the man stood for and what he wanted to achieve. We may celebrate Independent India as the great achievement of Gandhi, but there are reasons to consider this to be his great failure, though his legacy lived on.  It was a great mystery to everyone how India became democratic from the start. Most people were dismissive about Nehru's plans to offer everyone a vote even before that happened in the United States, and predicted chaos. Political Scientists, accustomed to the vaunted correlation between per capita income and democracy, could never fit i...

There are things that interest me, the stories of heroic and meaningful lives, the narratives of creative flowerings at certain points of time and in specific places, revolutionary ideas and why human beings, at certain points of time, degenerate into depravity and destroy their own achievements. These interests, as one could tell from my rather straight-jacket life as a business executive, lie outside my work, and only as a pastime. But, such interests are also the essence of my curiosity and creative pursuit, and define who I want to be.   There are times when I take these interests seriously and this is one such indulgent moment. My life is at a crossroad in many a sense, and a systematic enquiry is one way of uplifting myself from the compromises I have to make everyday to make a living and to be fully alive. Hence, the plan - to construct a series of essays on Gandhi - is more about my own life than about its subject.  However, the choice of the subject requires som...

That India opted to be democratic, and remained so, goes to the credit of Pandit Nehru, India's first Prime Minister. Nehru was a democratic man, in rhetoric and in practise, and despite his enormous popularity and stature inside and outside the country, he successfully avoided the entrapment of 'Big Man' syndrome, which afflicted so many of his contemporary leaders of new nations. It was a great exercise of imagination, and logistics (Ramchandra Guha talks about this in his masterly India After Gandhi) to get an enormous, diverse, largely poor and mostly illiterate country on the democratic path. It defied most theories about democracy that political scientists propound - that democracy is mostly a rich country thing - and became the crowing glory for India, and indeed a very convenient excuse for all its failings. At a time when Indian democracy, along with democracies all around the world, is facing existential dangers from the forces of globalisation and the after...

The unveiling of the statue of Mahatma Gandhi in the Parliament Square in London is a moment of triumph for the British Asian community. The statue of the man, who, like no other, represented an unique resistance to British commercial imperialism, being put at the very heart of such institution indicates the prominence and influence of the British Asians in the public life of the UK. The representatives of the community turned up in large numbers, along with a number of students from Hindu faith schools in London. It was a great moment of asserting a community identity and of celebrating integration in the life of their adopted country. This is a triumph without a corresponding defeat though, fittingly for the man being celebrated. This is not one identity getting better of another - which is the usual zero-sum meaning we associate with the word 'triumph' - but the realisation of a much subtler message Gandhi embodied in his work. Vijay Merchant, the ex-Indian Cricketer...

'Happy Independence Day' is a new kind of wish, which may neither denote too much happiness nor independence. But chanting this may remind us of its exact opposite - that we were 'dependent' once - and that, one may hope, should remind us to strive harder and protect the Independence. This is needed because that state of servitude is a distant memory: Not many of us have known that state and what that may mean. Such vacuousness is easily demonstrated in the text and social media messages congratulating each other for Independence Day, but this has a more sinister effect as well. Take, for example, the current blockbuster joke, initiated by one prominent politician: 'One Dollar used to be equivalent to one rupee on 15th August, 1947; it is now equivalent to the Finance Minister's Age'. This statement has all the qualities of being nominated as the Joke of the Year in a Comedy competition, and would be hilarious if it came from a Comedian. However, coming...

I am reading Slavoj Zizek's Violence: Six sideways reflection and affected by the idea of three kinds of violence - subjective, objective and symbolic. Indeed, Subjective violence is what we know as violence, where a violent act is carried out by an identifiable actor, which disturbs the status quo. This ranges from institutional to personal, from individuals fighting to genocide to atomic annihilation, and this is what attracts the maximum attention. Zizek says, we have a frontal view of subjective violence, and we either condone (as in state sanctioned wars) or condemn (as in violent acts of peace breaking) this violence. The objective violence, as Zizek points out, is the state of peace itself. This is a difficult concept to accept, but not to see. We indeed live in an apparently 'unfair' world. The unequal consumption is one of the most visible aspects of this unfairness; the inequality of opportunity is its most damning proof. But, the system is still kept in its plac...

This fascinates me: Gandhi came up with an unheard of concept, non-violent struggle, and trained millions of 'unschooled' Indians to follow him. In the process, he changed a number of things, including throwing open the political process to those who were hitherto excluded, and defined the nation. In fact, I shall argue that Gandhi and his struggle built India as a nation. This will indeed go against the colonial conception that the British built India as a nation (My argument: They built a single economic entity, but that was the nation, because that excluded most of the Indians, living outside the city centres, from the process). This will also fly in the face of revivalist nostalgia, dating back to Vedas, that India was an ancient nation, defined by its age-old scriptures and stories. This version has its own truth, which is again partial: The spiritual/ cultural identity of India is built around such tradition, indeed, but India lacked the singular political identity of, sa...

Gandhi is fashionable again. For all purposes and intent, the Independent India discarded Gandhi. He did not matter - in fact, he became almost disruptive - in the politics of new India. He did not agree to the partition, which was the only way to get things going. He almost offered Indian leadership to Jinnah, and blamed Dr Rajendra Prasad for the violence against Muslims in Bihar . He stayed away from the celebrations of Indian independence. He was in Kolkata on the 15 th of August 1947, doing his usual prayers, and did not even unfurl the Indian flag. He, the father of the nation, was a disaffected, irritable, retired father. He did not do himself any favours even afterwards. He kept preaching peace with Pakistan. He insisted that Indian government pays its due money to Pakistani government, even when the new breakaway republic already started showing its colours. When things turned worse, he started fasting, creating embarrassment for the Congress Government, and proposed, wha...

There are times when I encounter a special book. A book which questions fundamental assumptions of my thoughts, the ideas I took as given. Over last couple of weeks, coincidentally, I encountered not one, but two such books. These, along with various experiences and reflections, allow me to think about the idea of India all over again. The first among these is a travelogue. Benard Imhasly , a Swiss cultural anthropologist and someone who knows India quite well, has written a beautiful book - Abschied Von Gandhi - which I read in its English translation, Goodbye to Gandhi . Beautifully presented, this is an attempt to retrace the footsteps of Gandhi - from Porbandar to Champaran to Sevagram - and reflections on modern India from the vantage point of its Gandhian vision. I must not give the impression that it is a biographic commentary or hagiography in any sense, the author travels to Devdungari to see MKSS and its founder, Aruna and Bunker Roy, as well as to Manipur to meet ...

Every bit of statistic indicate India is making great economic progress, except in the look and feel of its cities. It is rather obvious in what one sees while the plane approaches to land in Shanghai, the glittering towers, or Dubai, the Desert trail melting into an always busy metropolis of tall buildings and shiny cars, and in Mumbai : Endless slums with blue tarpaulin . Then, once outside the airport, the hustle of bazzar ; on the streets, the feel of swelling population and poverty, and chaos everywhere. Looking at this, every commentator wonders how India actually works. One marvels at the achievements of the Indian Industry and asks around how businesses could still function with the crumbling infrastructure. Non-resident Indians endlessly complain how nothing actually works as it should, and residents display a studied indifference or immense ingenuity to find ways around when they don't. India was in the public imagination through two award winning attempts last year. Two ...