A trip to Indian backwaters

The plan to get to Mysore was last minute. I had already booked a hotel for the night in Bangalore and we could have just stayed there - running water, no power cuts, shiny chrome taps and an A/C whose workings had just been explained. But we all knew how difficult it has now become to get around in Bangalore. In the once garden city where I had had the bumpy rides of my youth riding auto-rickshaws, I was now met with eye-burning pollution during long waits at traffic lights. What once were villages were now “skylish” apartments. We could do better than staying trapped in the hotel - we said to ourselves - and the plan to Mysore was hatched. I found a cheap hotel in Mysore to convince myself of the plan’s economy and hailed a cab to Mysore. A lot of cab operators still haven’t found GPS feasible enough in India and so were to rely on my cell-phone to get to the destination. After some navigation from the back seat I got ourselves to the hotel in Mandi Mohalla. The driver was to sleep in the car while we headed to our cheap room.

It was past midnight and I was too tired to worry about anything else but a good sleep. The squat toilet worked just fine and the checked pure wool quilts which hurts your skin bad gave me a sense of that nostalgia of 80s which I still seek in India and quietly put me to bed.

Morning was to wake me up with chatters on the street in a familiar language which I didn’t so much understand. The noises of bicycle bells, scootie horns, miscellaneous pots shaken on carriages by road bumps and occasional yells in Kannada were filling up the streets. There was a knock on the door . Which I answered but was unable to understand. I picked up the few words in English which the boy said and walked straight to reception. There was no concern about anything I was told. The boy had apparently misunderstood what he was asked to do and came knocking at the door.

I walked back getting a better look of the hotel now. Right outside my room on the right was a courtyard paved with irregular stones that were joined together with cement and dust of time. The sunlight shone at all corners and had kept the potted plants alive. The floor of the hotel paved in mosaic, was studded with glass fragments that formed square patterns converging into a flower. The morning light in India, more so than other places, gives a yellowish tint to reality. The noises then form a certain music and a small corner maintained with only little order makes a refuge from chaos of markets and the world around.

It was this order of world which my childhood was built with. There was no internet, the TV ran only in evenings and we spent our summers playing carrom board, card games or reading thick Indrajal comic books. The TV ran in the evenings and was fullu controlled by my grandpa much the way TV broadcasts themselves were controlled by the government. The half hour of Chitrahar on Wednesdays played songs that sew the ideas of love and separation much before sexuality could have made any sense to a child’s mind.

Back inside my room, I switched the TV on out of curiosity. I had preconceptions of what was to be on. The free and dynamic world of the TV had become quite repetitive in the decade of globalization - sensationalization of trivial reports, retorts and empty slogans exchanged between dynasts, goons and politicians and soft-porn of the mainstream cinema. Men were all now hooked to it in the increasing order of these.

The quiet world of my childhood now found only in poor neighborhoods of India had long departed from its cities and though I have only hit 30s this world seems to have been moved to a museum - of which I can only pick up the reminiscence of at places where globalization still has not made its way.

Not without their clashes the two worlds - market and backyard - seem to coexist in India. The urban India claims to have become West already while the rural backwaters of India struggle to survive - untrained in Western ways and trying hard only to get by.

There is a new song on TV for a film to be released next year - models as Nicole Faria and Evelyn Sharma show up in the trailer song, enjoying the beach, the sun and company of the Indian rapper Yo Yo Honey Singh. There is a certain buzz to the song, vibes of a new, money squandering, prosperous India and I quite like it.

But there is also the other song on Zee Cinema, of which I still relish the poetry of.

جب چلی ٹھنڈی ھوہ جب ئٹی کالی گھٹا

مجھکو اے جانےوفہ تم یاد آیے

زیندگی کی داستاں چاھے کتنی ھو ھسیں

بن تیرے کچھ بھی نھیں بن تیرے کچھ بھی نھیں

As the wind caresses me and clouds come up to the sky,

I think of you - the soul of my promised life*

The story of my life may be as pleasant as it is right now,

But it means nothing without you, nothing without you.

Asha Parekh, the actress, takes leave from a pair that tried to engage her into dancing and sings the song - out of nowhere as is always in the movies of the time and spends about five minutes mostly staring at the camera in an agony of separation which we don’t see on camera any more. It is that innocence, that rather repressed longing for the beloved that is nowhere to be seen in the new India. But why then is it still on TV - I wonder - and why do I keep coming back to it?

I think a lot of what we consider happiness did come out of this innocence. We often find comfort in losing ourself to another person - caring for someone else without the hope of getting something back. The world of my childhood may have departed but this control-sharing of Indian families, probably inherent, still survives. That could be why that seeing the cacophony of India media, it is my granddad’s (remote) control that I miss the most.

To reconcile the departure of the 80s world I often tell myself that the life was a bit too controlled in the 80s. Perturbed by the noise of Indian media, I often relish the memories of dharmyug, saptahik hindustan and krishi darshan when the license raj wouldn’t have allowed just anybody to broadcast whatever they wanted. In quitting the era of parental and governmental control, we seemed to have lost a bit of self-reflection as well. I see an excess of thinktanks, aspiring writers and international commentators but an orchestra of international acclaim is yet to come out of India. As I move closer to 40s and witness the departure of the world that brought me up I try coming to terms with that some things gone would never come back. The Hindi commentary, its popularity and its literature are not going to come back in that same form and whatever comes back or is reinvented would be as alien to me as anything else.

Indeed there are those who see continuity amidst the disparities of India and are fine with the demonic contrasts which globalization has unleashed. Enjoying the comforts of Western life, however, I still wish that I had spent more time on carrom, cards rather than video games and soft-porn. There is too much tantalizing on TV - everywhere - I think. There is a constant rush to reclaim what you could be missing out on without answering what you really want. What started as science in the era of enlightenment has now been reduced to knowledge of chemicals and genes that drive your body to get what it desires. The quite backwaters of India offer a stop where you could still think of what you’re missing before you’re madly after it.

*وفاء wafāʼ - loyalty, sincerity; consciensciousness

http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/steingass/

Religion and war

The rather latent interaction of our society with paganism always amazes me. I am often that told that my tendencies of withdrawal and of seeking solitude partly drive my often awkward observations of pagan roots of our social customs. It is true that my withdrawal from society often enables me to see, for example, roots of Christianity in blood rituals or images of martyrdom that the early Christianity expanded with.

It is not just for amusement however that I find paganism in our modern notions of martyrdom and sanctity of war. Reading modern media of all kinds, it is war it seems, of one kind or the other, that justifies and perpetuates our existence in the world. Celebrations of war in our society may not be very compatible with the compassion of Christianity (or any other "religion" for that matter) but the celebrations survive - the pagan roots of our societies having not been superceded by any religion as yet. Religion or government which descended from the former, only cherrypicks the means of violence while the our pagan untamed tendencies of violence remain wild and uncontrolled. Instead of sanctifying such tendencies, which war does, it is better to understand our tendencies. Sadly our governments don't always help us do that.

Rhythms unnecessary - Attempts at Poetry

X90

Coming back after a day full of meetings,
I take the bus out of London.
Soon we'll be in the countryside,
where glassbox offices would appear Martian.

It's dark now and a dim light is on
for the passenger sitting before me.
It's not Daily Mail that he reads,
a topic far too numbing for his ride.

London
 
The red buses and grayed pavements,
Rain, lipsticks, heel and umbrellas.
the constant flurry of pedestrians,
waiting for one another to arrive,
are the paradox in defending quietness.

Concentration

I find it somewhat amazing that for academic achievements just concentration alone matters the most. In my early childhood I could perform well (relatively) without needing to concentrate. Later when I was in college it appeared that I worked better under pressure. I considered this realization as my inherent nature throughout my studies and it probably even let me choose more "challenging" tasks in places where I would have to struggle a little.

It was difficult to find happiness with belief in working-under-pressure. In reality pressure had worked better for me only because I could concentrate only when I was under pressure - by eliminating all distractions. It was not easy to eliminate distractions in my adolescence without a pressure of some sort. It is probably only natural to experience this in adolescence. However, social withdrawal meant that my prolonged hours of studying literature, history and philosophy, although for fun but were always just "wanderings" of the mind. I could never think of making a career out what I enjoyed only because I could never concentrate on what I could give to others and thus make a career out of.

Polishing

There is just one word, so far, that defines business school for me - "polishing". It is polishing all around - you polish your resumé, you polish your speech and of course you need to keep your shoes polished at all times.

There are not many rules in business but the basic rules which exist cannot be broken. You cannot break the rules of smalltalk, you cannot discuss politics, you don't talk about ethnic or cultural backgrounds or worse - how they might matter in the global environment. The gleam of money and status knows no prejudice or boundaries. It is seductive and draws everyone in. The businessmanship that you are meant to develop is upward mobile by definition - at least always mobile anyways.

So this necessary phase of polishing by itself what would make you forget for once where you have came from and let you build this polished image which can take you anywhere.

abstract reasoning

In studying physics and in mathematics, what fascinated me most was abstract reasoning. There was a sense of comfort in avoiding equations or free-body diagrams and using logic to rule out inelegant solutions. That is what I loved physics for.

When asked why does a cord hanging between two ends sags only in the middle, I could provide the answer with free-body diagrams but I am far more likely to explain the solution with symmetry. Since the state of the cord must be same to all observers (within relativistic limits I guess) I could argue that the cord has nowhere else to sag.
In retrospect, such reasoning is why I appreciated physics. I wasn't motivated to solve problems of n-ended chords or asymmetric chords as much I was interested in the abstract reasoning and moving on to seeking symmetry in other places.

News not views

In a blog entry, Neha Paliwal points out that food prices after all have not been so much of a trigger for Arab Spring. Earlier Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed had declared food price volatility a fundamental trigger for political instability. Neha points out that inflation-adjusted prices have in fact not gone up in the middle-east – so it's difficult to assert that food prices had a big role to play in the Arab Spring.

It just goes to show that we lack the standards which can let us measure the accuracy of political analyses. Some scrutiny is needed before fiction can make it to the public masquerading as analysis. The conclusions which journalists and writers often draw on economy and politics are subjective – even fictional. Although our institutions – law and governments - don't run on subjective grounds yet somehow a wide gap seems to exist between law and media when it comes to ed-pieces and commentary on economics or politics. It's not just that media stories read a lot different from documents of law. It's that what media offers as analysis is often a selective medlee of laws and data.

Such gaps won't be a problem if entertainment is all that media was offering. But unfortunately truth is claimed to be offered in those sweeping conclusions drawn on politics and news. The interpretation of data – whether it be that of Mr Ahmed, Paul Krugman or Jim Cramer - seldom receives scrutiny. We assume the truth in extrapolation of data judging by the repoutation of the author or the journal.  Stating the extrapolation or adding scatter plots often don't sell the story - so what we're sold instead are prose of doom or self-appraisal written by people who we trust. This may not offer us consistency or semlbance of a truth but allows us to choose our news the way we swtich channels on TV.