Monday, February 01, 2016

A summer in Turkey

It didn’t occur to me for a long time that for nearly a year while I had worked for Nomura in New York, I had walked amidst where the twin towers had once stood. From my office, I would often gaze at the mason pits where the constructions for a much talked-about memorial were under progress. As I would try catching eye contacts with the colleagues on smoke breaks, I would often turn attention to the slowly towering structures of the new World Trade Centre.
Big cities have a remarkable ability to move on - things we hold on dearly to in our lives often become trivial non-entities in the eyes of others. Last month, when bomb blasts hit the Sultanahmat district, the thought that I could have been one of the victims while I had vacationed in Turkey sends chills down to bones - but an extreme sense of ignominy that it poses is equally disturbing.
Long summer days of my childhood spent poring over literature retained in colonial libraries after all were to turn largely immaterial to the further generations. The school-teachers of my days - fully-trained academics fallen short of limited quotas of the Indian public sector - were to only find their literary enthusiasms misplaced in the modern India. An old magic that I had adored as a kid had died out as I entered into my late teens. It surprises me in retrospect, how amidst dire Indian poverty a passion for languages had survived in the generation that had educated me.
I can thankfully relive some of those magical moments in London - where a civilization seems to have survived all calamities. London houses multicultural neighborhoods as heartily as it harbours the vigour of the 18th century - an era when colonists had acquired new lands in Asia. Long before the seeds of colonialism and terrorism were sown, the law-makers had shuttled back and forth from England to the exotic lands of Asia to understand the local customs and languages. This was the time when Ballantyne had become the principal of Sanscrit [sic] College in Varanasi. Gun-toting men of East India Company - who had wished to repeat the Dutch success - were equipped both with military discipline and an obsession with the Greco-roman antiquity.
The discovery of ancient India, therefore, much like the rest of the Asia, was to be understood in terms of Greek history. The claims like Siva being Dionysus or Sanskrit having come out of Greek seems ludicrous now - but given the impact that Greco-Roman heritage had had on Western culture, these theories don’t appear very far-fetched in hindsight.
Ruins of an old Greco-Roman city lie within a mile from the hotel room in Turkey where I had written this note. The hunt for locations where the classics had been staged or St Paul had lived still excites the traveller and the relics of Roman empire never fail to impress. The sheer extent of an agrarian Roman empire nearly dwarfs the industrial ones of last centuries. That Greek writing systems and administrative institutions were transplanted in a mixed-race society in 6th century BC Parthia and India - dares to revive hopes for modern universalism.
Amidst this glory of classical civilization though, the sparkle of an Ottoman past is also quite conspicuous in Turkey- as is the genteel decline which followed the loss of territories. A political quickfix from Mustafa Kemal surfaces everywhere - in almost Leninist “red” fashion as flags at universities and administrative buildings. This could create fear or strength depending on one’s political stance - but wary of the mixed results from militarism of Nehru and Bose in India, I only feel a mild caution in face of Turkish nationalism.
Like anywhere else with military attempts at modernity, the centuries of culture seems difficult to be shunned in a generation. Changing palaces (Abdul Mecit I) or ending sultanate had never been part of a plan to change the Islamic character of Turkey. The rural and urban divide is therefore stark in Turkey. The economic constraints on working classes from less developed hinterland seem to prevent them from enjoying the same education and life-standards as the city dwellers. While the economy has made impressive strides, the post-war industrialization does not seem to have advantaged the society evenly. Like elsewhere in Asia, bitter political rivalries make Turkey prone to corruption and extra-governmental control.
As I walk through streets in Canakkale, an obsession with cars, electrical gadgets, fast-food and plastic chairs offers a ambiance familiar from my childhood. It isn’t just the economic conditions that I can relate to, it is also the nostalgia that Turkey’s splendid Islamic architecture evokes. Its palaces, halls, mosques and offices built between 15th and 19th centuries carry beautiful Arabic calligraphy and remind of an era not yet influenced by Western advancement. The curiosity of someone who had spent his youth in the US (and having had a distant and circumspect appreciation of Islamic art ) seems misplaced in this overdose of calligraphy - particularly when the average Turk doesn’t seem to understand these taliq scripts.
A nostalgia feeds itself in solitude. As I walk through these mosques, a disconnection from past offers a familiar discomfort - but thankfully, the country’s success in modernization makes up very well for this slight unease. The sheer energy of ships, markets and traffic overwhelms. The country feels very much within Europe - but scrape through the surface though and you'll find middle-Eastern influences underneath. It is as if the modernity has been built out of Eastern history. To someone in India - institutionally trained to consider modernity as foreign (and thus destined depend on foreignness for modernity), this feels strange and yet desirable.
Turkish language itself is seems a great example of this melange. It is written in the Roman script - but is irreversibly intertwined with Persian and Arabic. The administrative and institutional words almost always rely on the Persian-Arabic vocabulary (adalat, ziraat, sehr) whereas the everyday language sticks to native roots (syntax, numbers). Similar to the French overload in English, the words from both Persian and Turkic origins are allowed in Turkish (Persian meshur and Turkic unlu are both Turkish words).
In this grand melee of cultures, one cannot lament for the calligraphy too much. In countries that have tried and have had some success with modernity, the merits of economic progress and public health seem far abound - but a feeling of disconnection from the past haunts. As I sip through the Turkish coffee, I remind myself that literacy itself is a modern, republican phenomenon (why cry over an extrapolated past). The average Turk in 19th century won’t have been able to read at all - so when modernity arrived, the medieval scholarship was set to disappear.
Central Europe itself precariously cherishes such time-warps in its smaller cities - defending itself against Americanization and rising immigration. The fate of medieval scholarship in the middle East is no different from that of the Latinate aristocracy of modern Europe. The real conflict in the middle-East - therefore - isn’t that of East vs West, but that of modern urban frameworks with traditional rural frameworks. Our requirements of standard truths for citizens - lends itself to nationalists everywhere and instead of a Latinate/Sanskritic/Islamic aristocracy which relies on ancestral hierarchies, we survive on global markets, science, technology and engines of innovative machinery - essentially killing the market for classical paeans and religious cannons.
Although I feel annoyed that my tour-guide cannot stop ridiculing the feudal lethargy of the Ottomans and the interest in “petty” matters like clock towers at the cost of modernization of their armies, I can echo the youthful desire to overthrow Brahmins, Ming dynasts and feudalists of all sorts. To a radical modernizer, this seems a task unfinished in most of the developing world. I too find the rajput habit of shooting guns at wedding ceremonies in India rather ridiculous - a habit they share with Turks that my tour guide finds annoying.
The rural hinterland of Turkey is more religious than the coastal Turkey. The average Turk may not be taught Arabic - but the qurans which I saw in mosques were in Arabic. While at other places, this may point to ethnic strife, Turkey seems to move forward with this ambiguity. Sufi dervishes - once banned by Kemal - now perform at the shrine where they had started from. As the older past is decimated, it is difficult not to hope for a better connection with the past but although an attempt to revive the past may seem urgent to an Ottoman romantic, it is symbiosis and energy that Turkey seems to move ahead with.
It would be difficult to imagine anything else - Turkey is after all a country where the Hellenic heritage can be truly celebrated. It is home to Troy, Aphrodisias, Hierapolis, Ephesus besides having maintained the capital of Roman empire and of early Christianity for centuries. At its peak, the Ottoman empire extended into Bulgaria and modern Greece and however undesirable this may appear now, the conquest years have left Turkey closer to Europe than any other middle-eastern country. This is a place where synthesis of a new world where East and West can meet seems possible.
It is by far the only place I have been to where Western universalism plays within the realms of Eastern traditions. It is not a society so structured and dependent on metrics like the West, that an idea of a Turkic “race” has yet taken a stronghold. Islam, in fact, keeps the country anchored to Asia. Probably confused for a Kurd, I was expected to speak in Turkish on multiple occasions. In India, where I won’t be allowed in a mosque as a non-Muslim and my friends of white color (Turkish use the same word for them - firangi ) won’t make it inside most Hindu temples from before 17th century, the grandest of all mosques are open to all in Istanbul. At a time when most of right-wing politics in India survives on an 18th-century dual self-identity of a devil-worshipping cult and a great Aryan civilization - the self-image of Turks seems to have veered far away from the horse-riding Asiatics which European travelers of 18th century had talked about.
For someone still longing for colonial nostalgia, Turkey seems to have positively moved on. Turks don’t appear to be making money through enactment of an orientalist imagery. I couldn’t find very many equivalents of elephant rides or stylized begging in Turkey. While there were a few belly dancing cruises I could have opted for, the splurge of classics kept me unprepared for the wonderful possibilities. I kept trying hard to find an orientalist motif to my experience - patterned pottery, sheesha lounges, bare stomach nikab-ed women, jugglers, acrobats and tricksters of all kinds - but it was remarkably easy to cut through the orientalism. With its sense of controlled chaos, Istanbul appears not so different from the Georgian London I have read about.
That said, Istanbul does have its own mess. From the vantage point of the popular culture the West, Istanbul can be seen as a middle-eastern city with less rights for women, annoyances of catcalling, bad sanitation, general chaos and a crippling lack of “freedom”. But despite its chaos of the Egyptian bazaar, dumpsters, scamming taxi drivers and brutal police - the general feel and drive of the city imparts immense energy. Not only does the city seem to function, it outperforms in every way. The people seem content and happy. Women don’t dress as conservatively as we are made to think - while the mosques aren’t abandoned either. In remote outskirts of small towns (Canakkale and Selcuk where I had stayed), huts made of mud and bricks are easily visible - but people still get out in the evening and enjoy a borek or simit with a shot of coffee. Cafes are close to the mosques - where young women can sit relaxed up until midnight. The image of middle-east presented to us in the West may still bear some truth (my tourist guide tells me that holding hands can cause riots in rural hinterlands of Eastern Turkey), but Agean Turkey dismantles stereotypes in every way.
I had heard from people and read in books - that East and West shake hands in Turkey. As I walk through its streets, columns from all empires seem to appear out of nowhere. The conflict of modern vs traditional has been flattened - not so much through containment or crackdown on traditional Islam (as many continue to recommend) but through adjustments to the idea of nationalism and a common language. Collapse of massive empires often leads to strife, but the decline which Ottoman empire underwent hasn’t yet left Turkey in the kind of civil wars that had plagued the Balkans. The country had always been in conflict - my tourist guide tells me - but the microcosm of Istanbul welcomes all the world’s problems and possibly the clues to their solutions as well.

Saturday, October 10, 2015

学习 (learning) - set 001

Another random task I have set myself on to is learning the Chinese script. Learning French has never inspired me to live or visit France (although I have visited Paris for two days once) and learning Chinese has hardly anything to do with desire to visit China. I want to learn Chinese the same way I wanted to learn French a few years back.

I never ended up romanticising about French culture but I did fall in love with its literature. So far having read Maupassant, Voltaire, Verlaine and Baudelaire (apart from whatever I find online), I am quite content with the decision I had made about sticking to reading the French language. Speaking a language is a rather different organic process ; and I think one exercises empathy far more than the left-side of our brain in speaking a new language (If you feel the French way, for example, speaking French turns out far easier). Reading and composing a language is very different - it is what this post is concerned with.

With 4000 letters after abridgement, Chinese is no less than formidable as new language to learn. It is the first language I have encountered where etymology and morphology of Western languages seem irrelevant. The etymology of Chinese words doesn't need to be mined or researched from primeval languages - since it's always there in front of you. The letter "大" presents a stick-figure stretching his arms. The letter "在" en-capsulates a certain plant. These figures are then combined to create an approximate sense of every new word encountered. The semantics is always relevant in Chinese.

If this sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. Often times, words evolve from sounds (e.g. loan words). When that happens, the pictorial representation falls apart in Chinese and figures are brought in just for sound. Americans are 美国 (měiguó - beautiful people) in Chinese. This is not inspired by Marilyn Manson - but by how similar 美国 sounds to (a)merican. The substitution for sound doesn't just happen for foreign words. 個 (gè - individual), for example, once implied a bamboo-segment - but has been borrowed just for sound.

Considering that a billion people speak, read and write the language fluently, this must be all still be manageable.Here, in this post, I intend to keep a log of all 4000 letters (split in 100-each to be revised in 40 days). I am helped a lot by two websites in taking these notes - 1. www.learnchineseez.com and 2. www.chineseetymology.org - both of which I think have done a terrific job in putting up these resources for free.

Set 001


- white() + spoonful - now meaning "of"(de5) (also aim/clear - d`i)
- sh'i - flower on a slope (to be)
- b'u - blocked (not)
wǒ- hake (now meaning - I)
- yī - single line (one)
yǒu - a hand holding some meat (月) (have)
- dà - man stretching his arms (big)
- zài - earth (土) + phonetic only (才). Meaning "at"
人 - rén - {people} 
- liǎo - {know}
zhōng - {central}
- dào - reaching destination - { to arrive}
- zī - cowry () + secondary (次 - water[冫]coming out of a man's mouth [欠] ) - {capital/wealth}
yāo{demand}/yào{to want/must} - 女 + West - 西 - want/must
- kě - cane {can}
yǐ - {by means of, because}
zhè - 辵+ (step-with-left-foot(彳)+only(止)=>彳止 i.e. stopper =>辵) + writing( 文)/speech(言 - upside-down man's mouth 立 +口) - place to stop and write - {these}
gè - bamboo segment - {individual}
你 - nǐ - 亻(人 - people) + loom(爾/尔 - like that) - {you}  
huì{meeting}/kuài{account}
- hǎo - {well}
- wéi - {act as}
- shàng - mark above {up,above}
來 - lái - Fruit on a tree {come}
就 - jiù -  tall(京- jīng)+particularly(尤- yóu) () - {at once, approach}
學- xué -  子 taught by teacher's hands (𦥑) for marks (乂) {to learn}
交- jiāo - crossed legs {to intersect}
也 - yě - {also}
用 - yòng - waterbucket {to use}
能 - néng -   "strong-bear" from mouth(厶),(月肉) and feet (匕匕) -{can}
如 - rú due to phonetic 女 - {if}
文- wén- language/culture {man with a tie/dushala}
時 - shí -from sundial( , time)


沒- from water氵水 and action-by-hand 殳 - {méi-have not and mò-be drowned}
說 - shuì (persuade) shuō (speak) - speech (言 -) + a person talking {speak}
他 - tā - {him}
看 - kān - hand (手) + eye(目)  {look after or look}
提 - dī - hand (手) + phonetic 是 (sh'i) - holding in hand {carry/lift}
那 - nǎ nà - originally city name (阝) - {how/which,that}
問 - wèn - gate (门) + mouth (口) - {ask}
生 - shēng - small growing plant - {to be born}
過 - guò - walking on a road (辵) + inch (寸 or tr. 咼) - {to pass time/to cross}
下 - xià - downwards signal - {down}
請 - qǐng -speech(讠言)+phonetic 青 {to ask/invite/please (col.)}
天 - tiān - {sky}
們 -men5 - people(亻人)+ phonetic 门門 {they}
所 - suǒ - door (户) + ax make a door 斤 {actually/place}
多 - duō - too many moons (夕){much/many}
麼 - mó - {question-mark}
小 - xiǎo - three marks {small}
想 - xiǎng - heart (心)+ phonetic 相 {to think}
得 - dé - step-with-left-foot(彳) + phonetic 㝵 {to obtain}
之 - zhī - feet {him/her/it}
還 - hái, huán- walking on a road 辶辵(彳止) + phonetic 不瞏 orig. repeat {hái- more/still, huán- return}
電 - diàn - rain 雨 + lightning 电 {lightning/electricity}
出 - chū - {to occur/produce}
工 - gōng - carpenter's square {work}
對 - duì - hand 寸 (measure) + (follage) 又丵 - {pair/opposite}
都 - dōu/dū -  city(阝邑) + phonetic 者 {dōu-all dū-city}
機 - - {}
自 - - {}
後 - - {}
子 - - {}
而 - - {}
訊 - - {}
站 - - {}
去 - - {}
心 - - {}
只 - - {}
家 - - {}
知 - - {}
國 - - {}
台 - - {}
很 - - {}
信 - - {}
成 - - {}
章 - - {}
何 - - {}
同 - - {}
道 - - {}
地 - - {}
發 - - {}
法 - - {}
無 - - {}
然 - - {}
但 - - {}
嗎 - - {}
當 - - {}
於 - - {}
本 - - {}
現 - - {}
年 - - {}
前 - - {}
真 - - {}
最 - - {}
和 - - {}
新 - - {}
因 - - {}
果 - - {}
定 - - {}

Saturday, June 13, 2015

Visiting as if never left



The photographs - Qutab looked more fantastic in sight than in photographs. The photographs couldn't recreate the effect they usually do with other places I go to. The immediate effect of the Qutab on a sunny day - the red-ness in Islamic architecture was very unusual.

The train gives the perspective of the poor, undeveloped India. The kind of India that is in a time-warp where nothing has changed and where people are completely insulated from the rest of the world. Sometimes, I think the country shouldn't have been free and people should've just been exposed to all the problems. But nobody is going to invade India now - there is nothing left.

But despite its abject poverty and its miserable lack of hygiene, there is something still appealing about it. The fact that it has survived all that and people are still willing to live. There is that which makes this country appealing. There is very little other than that, but this enough is a compelling reason to be in India. India has been disconnected from the Western world and hasn't received much of what was good about the Western culture. The time rest of Asian world spent improving their institutions based on learnings from West India was reinvigorating its ancient institutions and helping them survive. It has only partially succeeded; it has given its people the taste of modern world but hasn't really forged the path to economic development.

Whatever is wrong with India, is not in its tradition or its religion. It is indeed in the weakness of its institutions, the lack of practical wisdom and (prominence- Adhikya) of self-centredness in its people. It lacks the communication among its people - a kind of communication that sets West apart. Where media tells people about themselves and where governments help people what they aspire and where the individual is strong to accomplish what he aspires.

The Eastern philosophy nevers lets the strong individual come forward and take charge of himself. The taste of development India has seen requires her to do so. India hasn't been able to build its own path to economic success - one where it doesn't have to compromise her self-respect for economic development. That is apparently why the development resides and is localized to the cities that were settled by British. No other (except Ahmedabad, may be) city has been able to provide the locals the path to success.

The south is different, but then we don't see the typical adherence to Indian tradition in South - except the ritual connections. It can be argued that South has been more successful because of its adaptability to English ways ( that is only partly true - expertise in English is more of an effect rather than cause of economic development)

What India needs, I think is a greater exposure to the West, probably a better one so that people can look at themselves.


Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Coders and Writers

I know very few good coders that are also good writers. While the best writers are not expected to write any code at all, the average-to-good coders are all expected to communicate at least a little. Being not able to write well can be a limitation. Whether you're running a start-up or communicating with your management, writing well cannot hurt.

Having been a coder and having had decent verbal skills, I often feel that the trouble with coding is that it is too different from conventional thinking. The way coders have to think everyday, makes them worry about details quite a lot. This often discourages you from "connecting" with your audience.

A writer, on the other hand, always connects with his audience. In journalism, history or fiction, writers go in the field, research information and communicate the essence to their authors. That is a full-time job. The job of a programmer is very different. He questions every finding in the field and then when he is done, he abstracts the logical details as far as necessary from its audience. Connecting with the audience is never required of him.

Having a high-level idea - which his intuition may encourage - also works against the art of the programmer. So he often ends up discouraging the intuitive process as well. Having structural design of a solution is a skill used by management but it is never enough for a coder - for whom almost everything requires getting down to the nitty-gritty. A friend of mine, while explaining to me how much of debugging does his real life is about, used to say that if you're a believer of "de minimis non curat praetor"  (king doesn't care about minor details) - make sure you stay away from programming.

It may sound ironical - when you observe that linguistics is the best place to study logic (language is where Lewis Caroll started study of logic with), it seems surprising that coders and writers have gone completely separate ways. Despite the historic appeal of coding to the logician - even the writers who would write about logic hardly benefit form a "coding" mindset in their art.

This brings about a certain "social" separation between coders and writers. As a teenager, I myself was inspired by writings of Bertrand Russell. It impressed me how well he could write. Clearly, his writings weren't appreciated by everyone. While students of logic loved him so much, Yeats himself had once called him stupid (ironically while explaining the importance of teaching mathematics to kids).

I know that Bertrand Russell must, seeing that he is such a featherhead, be wrong about everything, but as I have no mathematics I cannot prove it.
Source: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4392


That a separation exists between coders and writers in our society is not an exaggeration and doesn't need more evidence. I think the reason lies in the very lack of a need of audience by the programmer. Lack of a need of audience is both the strength of the programmer's art and his severest limitation.Not needing an audience destroys the need to write.

I clearly remember, that as a teenager, I was inspired particularly by logic and mathematics and ended up having little regard for poetry for example. Yeats,Keats or Coleridge, despite their appeal to me as kids, seemed all the same in my teens. Writing a novel of size of War-And-Peace or Lord-of-the-rings seemed nearly impossible, even a grand waste of time sometimes.

The next ten years showed me how little my experience of the world had been because of this disconnection. I think I was only starting to understand what Wittgenstein had meant by saying - "The limits of logic are the limits of my world". The language of logic is all that mattered to me at that time - and yet there were people - my family, friends and women I was attracted to - who had no connection with logic whatsoever.

For a long time, still, my perspective was formed by evaluating everything logically. The need to be loved - was to do with reproduction and the need to socialize was to do with mobility. Too soon I felt I wasn't doing anything I truly enjoyed - or rather I wasn't enjoying anything I was doing. This didn't happen because I was tired of pretending but because I didn't know what my true feelings were any more. The need of feeling was precluded by the need to reason. Yet at the same time, I had several irrational propensities - a desire to learn new languages, an inexplicable liking for cinema, eat out, cook and read history. These activities weren't entirely logical, nor male entirely. I was doing them because I liked them.

As I started reading what I loved, the problem that I soon had was that I wasn't able to compose what I loved reading. Coding never posed a similar problem to me. When I was coding - I always came out as a conqueror - strong, robust and resilient. On the other hand, I would sound extremely miserable when I wrote. In my writing, the memories of past and dreams of future were driven inexplicably by a world of battles, famines and sorrow (thankfully I didn't read too much science fiction). While I was able to feel a lot more than that, what I wrote was just terribly and narrowly associated with search for causality.

It took me years to realize that the way we think is easily detectable from the way we write. The reason why most programmers I know can't write well is that they actually don't like writing. A certain level of stoicism helps a mathematician and a coder - but it's not a trustworthy friend of a writer. If you want to organize your thoughts, like many programmers do, it does help to question the thoughts and express what you truly mean. But a writer needs to connect with the audience and for that he needs to offer far more than the skepticism to his audience. I don't believe that programmers can't write. What I do believe is that they must write differently - and attempt to put their heart and soul into it - not just minds.

Long before he became a nobel laureate in literature, J. M. Coetzee used to be a programmer at IBM - something he wrote about in his work Youth in 2002. He did talk about being miserable in London - for reasons similar to what I had when I was in New York. Even though you do not want to become a full-timer writer or publish in literary criticism journals, you can certainly write as a coder if you want to. When someone trained in Applied Mathematics can win a nobel prize in literature, a lot of trained programmers could definitely get that sales pitch working. The separation I often see between coders and writers in the industry is really unnecessary.

My special case

There is an overwhelming sense of being special when you are an Indian man living abroad. Those who grew up in India bear the identity of a colonial people. As kids we were meant to feel through TV and books ( which mattered more when there was no internet ) that the British had conquered India over past centuries, had enslaved its people and ruled by dividing them into factions. An Indian man often lives with an immense sense of responsibility to revive this old, golden past - which was momentarily manipulated for empire-building interests.

In doing so, he has a difficult task - to connect the two disparate worlds - one where there was no English influence and one where there is nothing but English ideas.

Such a conflict thankfully hasn't resulted in civil wars in India as yet. There are two reasons for it - one is modernity which is liked by Indians and the second is that despite the nationalist spirit of colonial struggles, the migration of the Anglophile elite to the West was not as massive and the old colonial structure was retained as such (particularly so if you believe Perry Anderson - who rightly points out that 70% of Indian constitution is Govt. of India act from 1935).

There was in fact a lost paradise with the departure of British. The connection of the modern world with the native was broken and what was left to Indians was this new uncertain world - a world  probably as uncertain to the West.  Here, all of a sudden there was no foreign rule, no unanimous ruler was possible. The memories of having been "divided" persisted and the confidence to rule, invent or lead still required approval from foreigners. The English language, culture and institutions were to remain of importance - because shunning it completely would imply turning away from modernity.

The ambiguous connection of the Indian mind with the British is therefore born of the necessary evil of a loss. The attachment with English rule amidst India's elites was not shaken off after India achieved its independence from the empire - thus despite all the nationalist propaganda, the attachment with things English among Indians remained as a private music amongst many.
 
When an Indian travels abroad, he often doesn't know that the "fact" about past riches of India - taught in Indians schools is completely unknown to the West. India, was always a country ridden with caste and poverty, it is widely assumed. The private music is therefore secluded even further - since the memories of colonial rule in West aren't of cooperation or education, but really of armies and subjugation.

This continued obsession with power in the West - often presents Indians abroad with only two choices - one is to completely reject the delusions of the past and avoid issues which their schizophrenic attachment with India's past can bring. The other choice, is to completely embrace this private music and start viewing English influence itself as one of the many traditions of India. These choices are just a restatement of the already present conflict amongst Indians.

I myself have gravitated towards the latter choice - not for any other reason than my commitments to my family. For me to completely reject the attachment with India would mean rejecting my Indian family - who is subject to the very propaganda and ignorance that I complain about. The choice to embrace humanity over nationality is far easier for me than many others I know.

I think it is important to see the condition of immigrants in this light - since it explains the issues with national origin in the West. Being from a non-Western world prevents you from becoming a good soldier - and hence an ideal citizen of the country. Historically, loyalty to the kings is where ideas of nationality come from. So in the post-colonial world, I believe, no amount of integration or education can make every human within a certain boundary the part of a nation that is believed in by the majority. The nation itself often compromises its historical definitions to assimilate the new entrants.

The dilemma, which the Indian faces, is thus not a unique condition of post-colonials. Regardless of where we come from, we all face the  dilemma-  whether our notions of humanity can be superseded by the notions of nationality. Many of us make up their minds but others either avoid the question or end up choosing humanity over nationality.

The choice is false one, in my opinion. Outside of the world of armies and football teams, what difference does nationality make anyway? Besides what kind of a country is it where you have to compromise on values of humanity? India, UK or US - where I have lived so far, don't ask you this question directly. You read about certain radical view-points in the news, run into flag-bearers when there is football or cricket match and get back to life as usual. No one, thankfully, has ever imposed a certain agenda on me except through bad writing.

The conflict itself is therefore a continued state of existence. The special case of Indians, which requires a rather false belief in India's glorious past, is actually a projection of its difficult present. In reality, belief in a golden past is hardly a special case for Indians - only a sign of modernity that creates a conflict between power and equality, between hierarchy and humanity.

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Cultural Gaps

What we know as cultural gap between East and West has been engineered through colonialism. It is through the colonial experience that the image of a pure, traditional, forgiving and often meek - Indian man has been engineered - an image that modern Indian male and the freed female has forsaken. Sociologists and post-colonial writers point out that the institutions which attributed softer qualities to female had worked in a similar fashion in colonies to objectify and celebrate the attributes in a whole "race" of people.

It is evident from history that the "cultural" gap wasn't as wide in the more fluid history of the 17th and 18th centuries. This was a time when East India company officials could have Indians wives and the lashkars from Western India could settle at English ports with British wives. I highly doubt that James Brooke was concerned about sending his kids to Oxbridge when he became the maharajah of Sarawak. But as we all know, the communication technologies and transportation improved by a lot in the 19th century. As East became more and more deprived, the preferences transformed. The discrimination could easily prosper when East couldn't offer any resistance - either cultural nor political - to colonialism.

The cultural gap which we talk to this day is actually not about culture at all. This talked about gap is largely determined by the perceptions of backwardness which have survived from 19th century. People in both East and West suffer with this prejudice. The right wing in the West cannot shun the idea of having imparted civilization to the East and the right wing of East cannot get over the perceived humiliation of the past. I don't see this as a cultural difference, it's only an error that needs to be corrected. In 18th century, Westerners would travel to India and delve into its literature without necessarily proving it as inferior - much the Easterners enjoyed learning the sciences without shunning their past identities or traditions. Both activities seem implausible in the modern culture as well as in the 19th century. The cultural gap which we live with was created for empire-building purposes and if that need is over, the talk of cultural gap seems unnecessary. The need is probably to stress upon what's good amongst each other without holding anyone accountable for mess-ups of our past generations.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

Poets and Readers

When I was a child, I was surrounded by those who talked of national poets. Pushkin was a big name. Nirala and Dinkar were big names. So were Wordsworth, Milton and Yeats. But nobody ever quite crossed the mark which was set by Tagore. Tagore was the man. He did things that nobody had foreseen. His literature was vast. His works alone meant more than all of Hindi literature combined - his literature so great that even the English swore by it.

Yet there were very few who had read what he wrote. The exhortations to walk alone were sung on TV and his poems on national pride were engraved or sung as anthems. They imparted a sense of comfort and continuity when I read them transcribed, engraved on marble in a script I could read. But that mythical and feminine country of his pride, was a lot less mythical than those who swore by his name. In their minds and speech, he was of an order so tall that it precluded most of us from reading him. Understanding him was nearly impossible.

When I grew up, the hypocrisy had given in and soon died along with communism. We cried for the sad end of a comrade in a battle for the poor. The poets were no more relevant in the new world. Dinkar-Nirala, Yeats-Keats became things for the feeble-minded - unproductive lovers of literature who couldn't feed themselves. The biographies of CEOs made more sense now. Everyone wanted to be them. Unread by most, Tagore's name licked the dust of time. Those other poets not as great as him slowly passed out of memory as well.

Where are the poets now? Who writes and who reads? Are we up for revival again or can we descend into chaos much worse than ours? For Tagore to live or relive, I wish we could just read like he did. Reading any poetry could do perhaps - of any language or any race. Let's never claim anyone's greatness without reading him.