On Inner Conflict

Conflict is an opposition between two or more entities.

Inner Conflict is the state of conflict in the mind. The entities here are thoughts, beliefs, feelings and emotions.

Recently, some of us were examining a particular incident of inner conflict. A friend recounted a lavish wedding party that he had just been to, and where he felt conflicting emotions of guilt, novelty, awe, embarrassment, etc. He, being aware of the ecological challenges facing the earth, and the stark economic disparities in the world, could not bring himself to fully enjoy the spectacle and the feast.

As we dissected the emotions involved, I was able to enunciate something which I thought would be worth publishing on my blog. It is a simple statement.

In essence: Facts do not create a conflict. Feelings about facts do.

To further expand: Facts do not contradict each other. Opinions about facts do, beliefs about facts do, feelings which are evoked by the cognition of those facts do.

Let's say a person knowledgeable about ecology and economy visits a lavish party in a five star hotel in a poor country. The facts are:

• The professionalism on display, the great spectacle and the sensory enjoyments available.
• The high ecological and economic costs of the affair.

Cognition of the first produces good feelings, because of the sensory enjoyment (unless of course one doesn't like that kind of thing) and appreciation of the skill of the chefs, the artists etc. Cogitation about the second produces bad feelings, due to various reasons.

The feelings are in opposition. The facts can exist together without any problem, the contrast of feelings, on the other hand, produces confusion and conflict.

Another example:

I want to fire a subordinate in my team due to poor performance. The facts are:

• He will lose his job and probably have some hardship.
  
• My team will gain in average productivity and I will be able to hire a new person.
  

The first fact produces bad feelings in me (due to empathy) and the second fact produces good feelings in me (due to my commitment to the success of my team). This conflict of feelings makes me uncomfortable when I am to communicate the decision to him.

Once an inner conflict starts happening, one usually follows one of the following paths:

• Ignore one of the feelings (usually the bad ones). Push them aside, suppress them, etc.
  
• Don't attend to the feelings at all and do what is to be done (usually the socially or professionally expected behavior). I.e. pretend to enjoy the party and stoically fire the employee.
  
• Engage in denial of the fact producing the bad feeling. E.g. in the second case, the thinking might go like this: "What hardship? He will find a job soon enough, and anyway we are giving him a month's pay as severance."

I will not comment upon what a rational person is to do in tricky situations. E.g. in the party, whether the ecologically aware man should (at the risk of not being invited to further parties) point out the waste etc. to the host. Or whether the firing manager should try to improve the productivity of the employee in question.

One thing is clear however: reason and rationality are crippled by good as well as bad feelings. And an inner conflict is even more of a handicap than a simple feeling-state. Once out of their grip, an action can be thought about which will make the situation better.

Most of us, however, spend so much effort towards feeling better about a situation that actual efforts to change the state of affairs are conspicuous by their absence. What is required is to inquire into why certain feelings are associated with certain facts. This investigation will uncover our hidden agendas, our instinctual behavior patterns, our conditioning, beliefs and fervent wishes.

Freedom of Expression in India, Theory and Practice

I am currently researching Freedom of Expression in India. I hope to ultimately cover:

• The legal framework
• The incidents in which this freedom was challenged and restricted

I do not, at this time, plan to cover the sociocultural reasons for the restriction of this freedom in India. Frequently, people or parties take matters into their own hands and illegally throttle an author or a work of art.

The article is currently published (and will be updated in-situ) at Google Docs.

I plan to evolve this article over a few months. Till now I have gathered some information on film censorship, books, and censorship of the internet. I am yet to begin on press censorship and on the censorship of theater, painting and sculpture.

If you know of any resources, have any information about a censored work, please let me know via email or via a comment on this blog. Thanks in advance!

Two Criminals

Exhibit A: Mohamed Atta, an Egyptian, a known associate of al-Qaeda, and the ringleader of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks. Atta was at the controls of American Airlines Flight 11 which was the first plane to strike the World Trade Center.




Exhibit B: Philippe Petit, a French high-wire artist, who gained fame for his illegal walk between the Twin Towers in New York City on August 7, 1974.



He is featured in the eloquent and moving documentary, Man on Wire. See it!

John le Carré

John le Carré is the pseudonym of the British spy novelist David Cornwell. Detective and spy fiction has always fascinated me. By identifying with the detective, one can revel in the pleasure of unraveling a mystery through the exercise of one's rational faculties, and the sense of intellectual superiority provided by this identification can be quite heady.

The detective is generally presented as a man (or woman) of extraordinary mental and logical faculties. There is usually a contrast between the detective's coolness versus the floundering and ineptitude of his man Friday and the police. The detective is normally very interested in science and philosophy as well.

The earliest detective stories that I have enjoyed were by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's detective stories revolve around the Frenchman C Auguste Dupin. The Dupin stories are remarkable for their economy of fieldwork (when he rarely ventures out, his observations and actions are almost surgical, marvelously short and precise). Especially in the story The Purloined Letter, he solves the entire mystery by his reflection on the mental depth of his adversary. His physical interventions are quite perfunctory.

If Edgar Allan Poe can be considered the originator of detective fiction, John le Carré is without a doubt one of the modern masters of the spy story. His novels are quite cerebral and are not mere entertainers. His protagonists are world-weary, know too well their own flaws and of those around them, have a sense of tragic resignation and are not ambitious or proud. While in college, I thoroughly enjoyed his Karla Trilogy featuring the British spymaster George Smiley.

His book The Spy Who Came in From the Cold prompted Graham Greene to praise it as the best spy story he had ever read. It is a short read, and haunted me for days when I first read it.

In Le Carré's early novels, one could still identify with the central character, because despite his flaws, he was presented as a man who no longer believed in things but still retained a modicum of human dignity.

I was, therefore, quite surprised when I recently watched a film based on his novel "The Tailor of Panama". As a film, it is mediocre. But it is remarkable for at least one thing.

Audience identification is a well-known phenomenon in literature and film. The audience invests its sympathies in a certain character (usually the male hero). No matter if the hero loses in the end. That is the stuff tragedy is made of and it provides a sweet sorrow where we become thoughtful and cry at the injustice in the world.

However, in this film, we are the unwitting participants in a strange narrative where at the end, it is revealed that the protagonist is not at all deserving of our sympathies. Throughout the film we are quite happily enjoying his craftiness and charm (especially since the character is played by Pierce Brosnan). We regard him as a variation on James Bond, as flawed but interesting. In the final minutes of the film, the full extent of his perversity becomes clear.

The audience is left reeling at the sudden shift.

(A similar ploy is used, almost as a gimmick, in Pulp Fiction, the famous film by Tarantino, where a famous actor, playing an important role, is killed half-way through the film without much ado or explanation.)

Many people claim that the film (The Tailor of Panama) is more of a farce, whereas the book is tragic. I leave you to make your comparisons.

The Knee-Jerk Response

The Knee Jerk Response:

... From the tendency of the knee to jerk involuntarily when hit sharply, properly called the patellar reflex. That was recorded by Sir Michael Foster in his Text-book of physiology, 1877:

"Striking the tendon below the patella gives rise to a sudden extension of the leg, known as the knee-jerk." ...

I received a text message the other day:

An Olympic shooter wins Gold (only a game) & Govt gives him 3Cr + awards. Another shooter dies, fighting with terrorists (saving our country and our lives) & Govt pays his family 5 Lacs. Truly Great India?? (Plz forward to all Indians, that it somehow reaches the President, P'M (sic), C'Ms (sic), IAS, IPS and all (sic).

It is easy to rationally respond to this. The award to Abhinav Bindra was for his singular achievement of having won an individual Olympic gold medal. He was driven by his inner motivation and perseverance. It was not a contractual obligation for him to train hard and win. That he did had the expected effect of making Indians proud, and he was showered with praise and awards for this national moment of pride.

On the other hand, the commandos and soldiers who die in the line of duty have chosen a profession which is risky, which carries the danger of being killed or maimed. For most of their lives, they live in preparation. Once in a while, they have to engage and intervene in extremely violent situations. The risk is not something they take on out of choice. They have no option but to do it. Desertion of a soldier during battle is a crime punishable by death in almost all countries, to this day. What needs to be discussed is whether their wages and the social security provided to their families in case of their injury or death is reasonable for country like India.

...

The second instance (amongst many) of knee-jerk reactions to the recent tragedy in Bombay is the following blog entry: Most Loathsome People in India: 2008.

I would have ignored it as another ignorant rant on the blogosphere, but the blog post is sympathetically covered in one of the most popular blogs from India, the award-winning Atanu Dey on India's Development.

The content of the above blog entry is congruent with its title-word "loathsome". The words seethe with malice and hatred. Disagreement is one thing, asking people to (even euphemistically) "insert burning charcoals down Barkha Dutt's throat" is another. It is symptomatic of a violent intolerance, the very reason why incidents like the Bombay riots happen in the first place. Terrorists carry out the bombings in real life, whereas these bloggers "sentence" journalists to death or to "solitary confinement" or to have "loose all the stray dogs in Bangalore inside his house."

...

The third instance is an online petition. It is almost natural in calamitous times to put restrictions on media freedom. I am no fan of Indian media, and I disagree with their methods and their sensationalism to the extent that I do not have a television connection at home. But to ask for a law overseeing news coverage in a free country is again symptomatic of pre-modern viewpoints which don't value freedom but value control. Safety in the long run cannot exist without freedom of expression. The live coverage of a police operation is obviously counterproductive to its success (if it is available to the criminals), and media needs to be kept away from the scene of a violent operation, just as it is wise for police to use scrambled radio communication to restrict eavesdropping.

But to ask for a law prohibiting media to cover an event to which they have rightful access, and to restrict them from the coverage of what somebody considers "inflammatory propaganda" is asking for state censorship. If Indian media is muzzled as suggested by the petition, BBC or CNN can always relay the footage. The only option in that case is to restrict foreign TV channels as well.

During the Blue Star operation in 1984, TV and radio were cut off in the state of Punjab, but international news agencies covered the operation via satellite.

What is more sensible is to restrict media entry into a sensitive zone, and that too on grounds which are constitutionally valid, and not restrict what is broadcast to the public at large. Another technical solution is to jam satellite and cellular reception in a sensitive region, subject to constitutional validity, where criminals are using communication tools.

...

We decry the ineptitude of our leaders and the lack of planning and foresight. But our responses too betray the fact that we are a society of knee-jerk responders, who cannot see the effects of our ideas, suggestions, mindset and actions. Even the enactment of laws and social programmes in India is done in a cavalier manner, without much public debate and planning.

One is tempted to say that India is not yet evolved enough to be committed to the principles of democracy, it is democratic only in name.