The Devil's advocate

I intended this post to be about Anna Hazare's supposed fast, but as I write this post, I read that the impasse has ended, and the government will indeed join hands with civil society to draft the bill.

Should we be happy? I am tempted to say "yes". We seem to be firmly on the path of battling corruption. It seems the government will be kept in check by the civil society, and hopefully it will be hard for the "corrupt politicians" to  derail the process.

There are, however, several caveats. Involving the civil society in legislation is not a panacea that will rid the society of all evils. Not all members of civil society are of as spotless a character as Hazare, and more importantly, there is no law of nature that the civil society should always be right. All of us have very good intentions for the country, but as someone said, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". Saying that there should be no corruption is easy, to implement a law that will be successful in eliminating corruption is definitely not.

It should also not be taken for granted that civil society is always correct in its intentions. Right and wrong are dangerous and slippery things, and this is especially true in a nation where the vast majority of the populace is not literate enough to log on to Facebook and air their views. It is easy for us to support the drive against corruption which seems very obviously right, but it is much harder if the issue at hand is, say, the Naxal problem, or, God forbid, the issues of Kashmir or the North east. Also, Hazare has a great backing now, but we are very likely to ignore him when the problems he is talking of do not concern us, us being the middle class, educated population that reads newspapers, logs on to the internet and signs petitions. Indeed, how many of us really knew about Hazare's work in a Maharashtra village?

It is easy to look at your Facebook page and be heartened by the flood of support for a cause. Yet the fact remains that the set of Indians who have the wherewithal to air their views, over the net or otherwise is a miniscule proportion of the true India. As such, chances are that a movement that agrees with the conveniences of the educated elite will be touted as a "revolution", and a movement that does not will be scorned upon as a "mutiny".

Last but not the least, we have to bear in mind that the ills we are fighting against are not external but internal. As someone pointed out in an article, this is free India, and the only evil empire that we can get freedom from is ourselves. When we say that politicians are corrupt, we have to bear in mind that we elect them. There is no external "pseudo-democratic" government: our country is the sum total of the people in it, no more, no less. We have to realise that the evil of corruption is not in some abstracted out entity far removed from the people: it is in every one of us. The law of corruption that we require is, technically, a few hours in front of the mirror.

I guess the thought that I want to leave you with is this: We all supported Anna Hazare's quest to get a strong Lokpal bill drafted, but why did we support it? Was it merely because we have all been at some point or the other been victimized by corruption? If the answer is yes, then it means that our activism is merely a product of the injustices that we perceive as being done unto us, and that what we are striving for is, at the heart of it, no more than our own self-interest. At a deep, and perhaps (but hopefully not) an unachievable level, what we should be driven by is a question of what the right thing to do is. If each of us tries to do what is right, then the politician and the bureaucrat are also not corrupt, and the civil society doesn't need to arm-twist the government into doing what it needs to do.

Memories

Memories.
Footprints left behind, that have long since been washed away. Fragrances left untouched, pressed in the leaves of books. Voices, unspoken, hidden in melodies and songs. Little joys that got lost in the cracks of life, but only to take root and bloom as flowers a long time hence. Gifts that come back every once in a while, just when you least expect them, and just when you no longer remember what they contained, and so you open them and it is all the same again. Words that form but lose themselves before pen touches paper, like a little firefly of joy that must perennially be just out of reach, yet bright enough to light you through the rest of your life...

Memories...

Timeless

There was a time when we had time,
To look upon the day,
To contemplate for months on end
How a game was played
To walk from home to the market,
(It wasn't ten minutes away)
As if it was a thing to do
And should take us all day

There was a time when we stood in wait
For a lazy winter sun
To dispel the fog so we might begin
That day's share of fun
Which wasn't anything but laze around
Till the day was done
And talk about how the winter's gone,
how warm the days become.

Not long ago, almost every day
Down the street we'd walk,
As the day toiled on around us,
For hours and hours we'd talk
I cannot count how many hours
I spent with you on the phone
And now you send me a gift and I say,
"Sorry, I must begone!"

And the clock hands run swiftly past,
Blink and the day is done
I only count my coffee last
And where I have to run
It's better this way, at least I forget
All that I leave behind
I don't remember what race I'm in,
But I must get to the finish line!

The beard

He stood in front of the mirror. He had grown a beard. He never thought he was capable of growing a beard.
He never thought he was capable of a lot of things.

"Bad things happen to good people sometimes, child. But good always wins" His mother had said that. When at the age of 18 he saw his parents divorcing each other he lost faith in that statement. It was a lie, he decided. His mother was either not good enough, or it was a lie. It was definitely a lie.

It was not that he did not love his mother. He loved her, even when he stormed out of the house soon after his father left, leaving her alone and stranded in a large, cold house. He loved Maya too. Back when she laughed at his jokes and lay her head on his shoulders, back when they exchanged marriage vows, back when they bought a new house, but also that hot summer day when the sun was so bright it made you think strange thoughts. But it wasn't the sun. It was he himself.

He held the blade in his hand now. He felt an urge to feel its edge. See how sharp it was. Would it cut skin? Was it enough to reach an artery? The blade he had used then was a kitchen knife, that most ubiquitous of weapons. He had been in the grip of an uncontrollable rage, he told himself later. The sight, the thought, that Maya loved another, was too much for him, he told himself. He told the people around him again and again. But it didn't make the nightmares go away. He could not forget the blood on the knife, the blood gushing out, almost laughably, like a water from a broken pipe, only it was redder, thicker, more vindictive. And surprised, alarmed; Maya's eyes were staring at hime the whole while, even as she fell. He stared back at her, stared at her and the knife, the knife and her, unable to comprehend that the blood on the floor meant that something bad was about to happen. Unable to comprehend that he was taking a life. Unable to comprehend that she had her hand in his sometime ago, that they had exchanged vows, walked round fire seven times, that her hair had fallen on her face just so, that she clicked her tongue to dismiss him when he teased her, that she was no longer here because the blade had killed her. He had killed her.

Through his prison sentence and even now, he saw her face again and again. Not her laughter that he had fallen in love with. Her terrified face, staring back at him, like him, speechless, too speechless to ask questions. Every day this past week he had held the blade in his one hand and the razor in the other, and he had remembered the blade of the kitchen knife. And had just stood frozen there, his hands shaking terribly as the whole day replayed in his mind again and again....

His mother was in the same house she had always been in, although creepers had begun to climb the walls and the drain in front of the house was perennially blocked. He hadn't talked to her since he left the house in the rage. He went back today. His mother opened the door. She was very old now, almost blind with age. She peered through her glasses at the face of her son. Do you need a coffee child? I can make one right now. She went to the kitchen while he looked around the house. She gave him the glass of coffee and sat on the sofa. He sat down beside her. He looked at the coffee. She had always made the best coffee in the world.

He lay down with his head on her lap. They sat that way for quite some time. She caressed his head, her wrinkled hands no longer possessing the strength of old. Yet it was just as the old times. Back when good always won.

He began crying. "I am sorry, ma" he whispered between his tears. She continued to caress his head. "Bad things happen to good people sometimes, beta. And sometimes good people do bad things. But good does win..." She smiled. "You are capable of a lot of good, A. Don't lose faith".

He looked at the mirror. He was capable of good. He looked at the blade in his hand and the razor. He put the blade in the razor and began to shave.

Endnote: Tried my hand at a very short(by my standards) story :)

Of fear and courage

I am just back from watching the movie "King's speech" and it is truly very good. It talks of the King of Britain during the times just before the second world war, and his battle against his own stammering and the associated fear of public speaking. The good thing about this movie is that it talks of the King in very real terms, terms familiar to you and me. Indeed there are points in the story when you ask yourself, "What wrong did the poor guy do to be forced to become King?"

I think fear is more universal than we care to admit. We might fear the most trivial of things, or we might fear the greatest. It might be the fear of height, the fear of failure, or the very simple fear of speaking aloud in public. But how we are limited by it! We skirt it, evade it, clothe it into so many different forms. We describe it as evil, put it beyond space and time and beyond our control. We talk about it, if at all we do, in hushed tones, angry tones, defensive tones. In extremes, we wage wars to convince everyone else it is not a fear anymore.

When we run away from our demons we make them larger than they really are. Even our own hands make scary shadows on the wall by the candlelight; not looking at our hands we cower away from the shadows. I can catch myself saying a hundred times in the past year: "Oh my God there were so many bad things happening and I have so many problems and someone please save me" when it is just a meeting with a professor that's fraying my nerves. I go hiking in the mountains and I cloak my simple fear of falling into anger at the clouds and the incessant rain and my friend who has forgotten the way. I turn my fear of telling the truth into a fluid definition of truth itself. There are so many little fears that would be really trivial to deal with if I could just look them in the eye and see them for what they are. Except that I don't because I am so afraid of them I just take the easy way out of seeing it all as a ploy by the world to get the better of me. You know, I would be the happiest man in the world if the world just stopped holding me down. Yeah, right.

It is truly a gift, to be able to hold your fears to the light. To be able to face your demons. And it is not that our fears are insurmountable; we merely lack the will to do so. I am not sure why, but many a times I feel I actually like being afraid. Maybe because it is so much easier.

"What are you afraid of?" asks the speech therapist of the King in "King's speech". So, what are you afraid of?

Rain in Berkeley, winter in Delhi and other assorted thoughts

Semester ends, leaving me with just about enough energy to write in bits and pieces. Also it is raining, which is stupid, because I find it hard to make sense of winter rain. I mean, of course parts of South India have winter rains, but winter in South India is no colder than summer in California (which is saying a lot, because summer in Berkeley was pretty warm), but rain in winter makes it all the more dismal, if it wasn't already. The days are way shorter, and my sleep cycle more or less attempts to follow the sun, which means these days I end up feeling sleepy sometime around 8 (the sun goes down before 5) and on days when it is cloudy and rainy(like today) I find it hard to justify to myself the need for wake-fulness.

Its winter in Delhi, and I guess that means fog and caps and gloves and sweaters and jackets (I haven't really looked at the weather reports, mind!) And there's just so many things I want to do this winter, apart from fulfiling the quite impossible promise of meeting each and every one of my friends that winter this year is going to be a blur. There's also a certain amount of "research" to be carried out, and the fact that I should be "self-motivated" means, as usual, that I will pretend that my ass is on fire.

Which it is not, to say the truth, because this semester has been pretty chill as far as courses and all are concerned. True, I have witnessed, alternatively, moments of crushing self-doubt and moments of inspiration, but I guess that is par for the course. Especially since my usually active emotional life has been flattened out, because of which my out-of-commission amygdala has decided to have some fun with my academic life.

I guess the intensity of my emotional life is pretty much proportional to the number of girls I have around me. I am tempted to qualify the statement to "the number of undergraduate girls I have around me", which becomes kind of like a tautology till the point I actually end up messing around with a graduate girl. However it is kind of true: there's a lot more "life, the universe and everything" quality about undergraduate life, mainly I guess because people around you are of a much greater variety. I mean, it's kind of hard to discuss the usefulness of a "conditional random field" to a physics student, but it is even harder to keep "average precision" out of a talk with a lab mate. Plus, instead of a coffee shop we have a coffee machine at the pantry, which cleverly translates into no more than a few minutes of conversation per coffee break, as opposed to hours of philosophy at the Nescafe stall. Also, they somehow managed to create a lab which has an awesome view of the whole California bay, and of the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, and in doing so completely removed the incentive to go out for a walk. (Why do you want to go out when you can see the Golden Gate bridge from your office floor?) Not that I am complaining of course; the sight of the orange sun falling behind the far away bridge and letting off crimson streaks into the clouds will make me sigh any time of the year.

And finally Berkeley is beautiful. It's an amazing campus, and it's one of the few places that seems as amazing when the clouds are low and the rain is incessant as when the sun is out and the dew glistens on the blades of the grass......

A-patriotic

Suddenly for some reason I am seized with doubts about my own country. Is it because I never read the news very thoroughly back when I was in India? Has my sudden separation from India suddenly and Bollywood-ishtyle-ly inspired in me a desire to stay up-to-date? Or is it merely the fact that events in recent times have taken a turn for the worse?

Of course, that India is not utopia is obvious. Nor are all bureaucrats, politicians and the like benign. Nor is the general public sensible, or even sympathetic. This is not to say that I am willing to ignore all the glaring inequities that exist in the country, and that seem to grow with development, or the fact that in human development India ranks far far below. Yet, somehow the image in my mind was of a country, and a government, trying to take care of the people, in spite of its flaws. I always kind of assumed that we might be dumb, stupid and selfish, but nevertheless we were somehow in the same boat.

Two things have contributed to my growing doubts. The first was Arundhati Roy's comments about Kashmir, and the second was a talk I recently attended about human rights violations in Kashmir. Probably human rights abuses happen in almost every part of the country, in some form of the other; what shocked me was the constant reference to India as a "State", sometimes even as an "occupying power" that was systematically perpetrating these violations. It was weird to hear about the "Government of India" in the same vein that we used to hear about the "British Empire" in our school history classes. Are we suddenly an imperial power come to rule all the innocent Kashmiris, tribals and poor people, as Roy seems to make it out to be?

But who is "We"? What is the identity of this country that I call India? Am I not as much a part of it as a farmer in Andhra Pradesh, or Manipur, or Kashmir? Do I not share the identity of being an Indian with all these people? Why these doubts and questions and the injustices being perpetrated by "the Government of India"? Why is the problem suddenly external? Why do these walls suddenly crop up between the "have's" and the "have nots"? Or rather, why do these walls suddenly take the form of national, race or caste boundaries, as if somehow independence from "the ruler" automatically implies upliftment for "the ruled"?


I am not taking the side of the "Government of India", or the big "Corporations" or all those people upon whom we have agreed to place the blame. Nor am I attempting to take a stand on Roy's, or anybody else's, opinions about whether Kashmir should be independent or not. All I am asking is that, when every human being in the world needs the same basic rights to well-being and life, why are always battle lines drawn? How come that there is always that ruler who is a tyrant and the people who are exploited, and how come that no matter how many revolutions and freedom struggles come and go, the exploited always remain the exploited? Is it ever possible that there is "good governance", that the society is just and equitable, and that development reaches the lowest rung of the ladder as much as(and hopefully more than) it reaches the  highest rung?

Did we not, when we became independent as a nation, found ourselves on principles of equality and liberty? Where then do such questions come from? Why are we not one nation on the arduous path of development; why are we a million nations fighting ourselves?