Two Brothers

Once upon a time, in a mountainous village in Yangon, there lived two brothers.  They were almost similar in age, and similar in temperament.

Both lost their tempers easily, were direct in speaking about what pleased and displeased them, and did not keep any feeling unexpressed.  They considered patience and tolerance to be a form of dishonesty.  "Better get it out" was their motto in life.

They were both members of the village council, and had married the twin daughters of a rich landlord of the neighboring village.

It so happened one day that a monk was passing through that village on his way to the town of Hiegu.  The monk stopped at the door of the house where the two brothers lived and asked for some water.

Only one brother was home, and as he offered water to the monk (it being a custom to never let a monk go hungry or thirsty), the monk lay down on the door step for some rest.  The monk seemed a little tired from his long journey.  Having nothing else to do that day, the brother sat down with him to keep him company.

The monk did not say much, but towards the end of his rest, he put his hand on the head of the brother who had brought him water, and quoted a verse from the Dhammapada:

"By effort and heedfulness,
discipline and self-mastery,
let the wise one make for himself
an island which no flood can overwhelm."

The brother, as the story goes, was thunderstruck by this utterance.  A few days after the monk had left, he became a student at the local monastery.  He became a diligent meditator and re-oriented his entire outlook so that no external event, no "flood", affected his poise and state of happiness.  His happiness was to be be found within and external joys and sorrows were to mean nothing to him.

The other brother continued to be the way he was.

After many, some say twenty, years, the monk was again passing through that village.  The meditative brother recognized the monk instantly, and after greeting him, sat down with him.  After washing the monk's tired feet and offering him food and water, he asked for permission to ask a question.

The monk nodded, and asked him to say what was on his mind.

The meditative brother almost erupted:

"O master, you had passed on to me a great wisdom.  But it has brought me nothing but harm.  I am happy in every circumstance, so nobody cares for my happiness.  I am not pained by ridicule, therefore rowdy children think nothing of ridiculing me and throwing rocks at me.  I am not after material pleasures, so my family at my home gives me nothing good to eat.  Everybody eats a proper meal but I eat the leftovers.  I do not go after women, so I have had no affairs, whereas my brother has tasted the affections of many a dissolute woman.  I am patient, so I am the last to be attended to at any event."

The monk removed his head scarf and looked at the brother's moving lips.

"It seems that the impatient, the short-tempered, the unhappy, the lustful, the easily-offended, are treated better in this world than men like me, who always patiently smile and do not let anything affect their poise.  Even with infants, the mother feeds him first who cries the loudest.  The unhappy seem to be profiting in this world, and happiness seems to be a disadvantage."

The monk sat still and looked into the brother's eyes.

"My brother has a wife who takes care of him despite his philandering, but my wife nags me no end.  My brother commands more respect and riches, whereas I live from one day to the other.  My brother is praised and showered with gifts, whereas people think of me as of no consequence.  My brother wins every argument from me because he loses his temper and because I want to keep the peace in the house."

"O master, what kind of a world is this where to be happy and wise is thereby to be ignored and uncared for?"

The monk dropped his gaze to the ground and continued to sit still.  He hadn't said a word till now.

After a rather long time, he looked up and said:

"Of course it is true that the body part which is hurt and in pain gets the attention, whereas one is not even mindful of the healthy part.  To be of this world, you have to be unhappy.  Some of Buddha's students advocated "showing" unhappiness while being happy inside, but Buddha disagreed with this. He considered it dishonest manipulation, as well as an ineffectual one.  People can see if you are really angry or just showing it.  To be self-sufficiently happy in this world is a recipe for failure.  Why would anyone do a favor for you if you are already happy?  This world cares about feelings of pain and pleasure.  This world regards someone who doesn't care about pain and pleasure as someone who needs no care.  If you have no needs, then nobody will meet those needs."

As the monk was getting up to leave, an extra robe fell from his knapsack.  The brother threw away his own clothes, wore the ochre robe and said, "Thank you, master."  They both, now monks, left the village, never to return.

The worldly brother inherited the meditative brother's property, made his wife his concubine and maid, and otherwise lived in prosperity till the end of his days.

The meditative brother, it is said, died in the Khayan monsatery, many years later, of a cold-related ailment.

The Pleasure of Opinionating

Among other uses, gossip affords us the pleasure of judgment and opinion.  To talk about others is to invariably engage in evaluating their acts.

"What a creep!", "Such a slut!", "Of course he would have said that,", "she deserved it,", "That's not fair.", "Lucky bastard." ...

When one's social circle is not wide or interesting enough to provide this pleasure, one can turn to mass media or social media.  TV serials, all over the world, excel in this.  The pleasure of judging characters in a movie is relatively mild, because the movie is soon over and one doesn't have to wonder for long what happens to this or that character.  On television, however, the settings are more familiar, the characters are slowly developed, and the situations are more intimate (friend, mother-in-law, business associate, dinner outing, bedroom fight).

After having seen two US TV series ("Mad Men", and "House of Cards"), I am convinced that "drama" on television means creating situations in which some egos clash, some outrageous act or word is involved, and in which we are asked to feel some sympathy or antipathy towards a character.

To judge others is no small joy.

That is also the reason why Reality TV, live competitions (x-Idol, Who wants to x Whom?, etc.) are so addictive.  You are made the judge, and it's a heady trip.

That's why most people can't seem to enjoy non-judgmental cinema or literature.  "What's the point if I don't get to approve or condemn?"  Post-modernism is strictly for those who are getting their fix elsewhere, say, by condemning the lesser mortals who find their pleasures in Jerry Springer.

This is also why reading news which is unrelated to one's life is such a prevalent pastime.  The reason tabloids, including Times of India, are booming and real journalism is declining is because in the absence of an active family or community life, we are turning to news for stimulation and intimate gossip, instead of information or elucidation.  The more shallow the news, the easier it is to have an opinion about it.

Opinions about shallow stuff are almost instinctive.  One doesn't have to think about them too much.  Involved discussions, about privacy or global warming, are boring.  Nuances are for nerds.  The pleasure has to be quick for it to win.

The pleasure of watching criminals, trials, sentencing, police chases, emergency rooms, infidelity in action, is now big business.  Media executives have elevated knee-jerk reactions to an art-form.  I am not sure if these shows are scripted, but it is a genius of media depravity to capture on camera, and then sell, people's emotions about their sex lives.

That is also why celebrity news is so incomprehensible at first glance.  An intelligent human must think it is a waste of time to read about who has had a wardrobe malfunction, or where Kim Kardashian is having her baby.  One can scowl, shrug and move on, but understanding requires effort.  Why does celebrity news and gossip continue to flourish?  In what way does it make the lives of humdrum drones less empty?

I think celebrities evoke a measure of envy, jealousy and a desire for ruin. Very little of it is admiration.  So, when they see a candid shot, or hear about a drug haul, or read about some divorce, or see a nip-slip, it makes the drones happy.  "Their lives aren't that perfect, after all!"

The most newsworthy celebrities aren't those who are toiling at their art.  But those who have nothing to show in terms of art, and everything in terms of spectacle or loudness or chaos.  Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, Sherlyn Chopra, Rakhi Sawant, Chris Brown; the bottom of the barrel, in other words.  The more chaotic their life, the more interesting it is to read about it and to shake one's head.

The appeal of opinion-based social media websites and engagement frameworks such as Yelp, FML, AmIRite, news comments, comments on blogs, reddit, Quora, Liveleak, is not just that they keep us informed.  Most of them offer no useful information.

Their primary reason for existence seems to be that they offer us space to express our opinions.  "With nobody else to listen to us, might as well click upvote/downvote, or publish my likes and dislikes for the world at large!"

Humans have a need to opinionate and to be counted for their feelings and thoughts.  In the absence of meaningful engagement with the community and public institutions, vacuous channels of opinionating occupy the turf.

Spiritual Aphorisms

I have listed these aphorisms for a detailed critique in my as-yet-unfinished book.  Please add to these if you think I have missed any important one:

1. Live in the Present.
2. Do not depend on anything/anyone for your happiness.
3. There is no "I", ego is an illusion / there is only flux.
4. Don't be attached / Have no desires.
5. You are not the body.
6. The mind is a limited / dangerous tool.
7. What is true cannot be expressed in words.
8. You are always free, you only need to realize it.
9. Appearance is not reality / The world is an imagination.
10. We are all one.
11. Do not judge anyone, or yourself.
12. Condemn the act, not the actor.
13. You are not the mind, you are pure Awareness.
14. Be spiritual, not religious.
15. Love unconditionally.
16. Be free of others' expectations.
17. In deep sleep, the "I" and the "world" are no more.
18. Bliss is your natural state.
19. Live from the heart, not from the mind.

The case of the trivial appeal

Earlier articles on Justice Delivery in India here and here.

In India, and to a similar extent in Pakistan, the Supreme Court frequently handles cases about relative trivia: child custody battles, bail for a crime related to trespassing, and so on.

There is no finality in Indian courts.  A criminal trial or a civil case starts in the "lower court", then there is the "Court of Sessions" (or District court), then the High Court, a "bench" of the High Court, and then the Supreme Court, then a "Bench" of the Supreme Court.  Even after the Supreme Court delivers its verdict on a case, one can file a "review petition", a "curative petition", appeal to the "President", appeal to the Supreme Court against what the President says.  Frequently the Supreme Court will ask the litigant to again approach a lower court, and the merry-go-round starts again.

The laws in India are framed so broadly ("any", "whatsoever", "notwithstanding"), ambiguously ("public morality", "decency", "abetment", "incitement"), and subjectively ("hurting of sentiments", "outraging of modesty", "emotional cruelty"), that any lawyer worth his salt can question a judgment on a "point of law", a requirement if your case is to reach the Supreme Court.

Moreover, the High Courts of the country routinely diverge in their interpretations of the letter of the law.  It is all good fun for the lawyers:  Find a High Court judgment that contradicts some other High Court judgment on a similar matter (and it is not that difficult to do that, believe me), and rush to the Supreme Court.

Frequently the judgments in Indian courts offer no rationale, they are merely propositional, and while seeming to dispense justice, do anything but.

For example, there was recently a case when a salaried man petitioned the Punjab and Haryana High Court to intervene because the government has been delaying his salary payment every month.

The High Court, justly I believe, summoned a high bureaucrat to explain the conduct of the government, generalizing the issue since this issue obviously affected a large set of people.  But then, a "bench" of the High Court set aside its own Court's order and stated (emphasis mine):

Admittedly, during the pendency of the writ petition, the benefits claimed by the petitioner had been given to him. We are, therefore, of the view that when the grievance of the petitioner stood satisfied, the Single Judge should not have broadened the scope of the writ petition on the ground that the State of Punjab as well as statutory bodies had not been making payments in several other cases.

As the petitioner has already been granted relief, his writ petition is disposed of. The order dated March 12, 2013,by the Single Judge summoning the Chief Secretary, Punjab, is hereby set aside. Consequently, the appeal preferred by the State of Punjab is allowed."

Now I respectfully (since disrespectfully disagreeing with an Indian Court makes one a criminal) disagree with the Court's "view".  To my limited common sense, the earlier order "broadening" the scope was eminently sensible.  Just because a kidnapped child is returned later does not mean the original crime of kidnapping stands nullified.  Just because the man got his salary eventually doesn't mean the government's delay can be condoned.

In any case, the "bench" doesn't offer any justification for its view.  Just its view.  And obviously there is no punishment given to the errant government.  Quite typical.  Is this justice which can satisfy a reasonable, rational man?

So, since the laws, the process and the judgments are all wishy-washy, our courts are clogged with reviews and revisions and appeals of trivial matters.  The law can be said to be in the hands of the "lawyers" since, in the vast majority of cases, they can continue to appeal till eternity and delay any final judgment.

If you can afford a lawyer indefinitely, you can afford anything in India.

I have an inkling why the state and the judiciary are loath to change this dysfunctional system.

It is because the more law is in the hand of the lawyers, the more a case can remain in a "pending" state, and the more a rich and powerful person can evade a conclusive judgment against his interests.  A poor man cannot afford a High Court or Supreme Court lawyer, and cannot travel every few weeks to the state or the national capital.  But a rich man can hire a good lawyer, and be assured of fiddling with paperwork while Rome burns.

This system is to the massive advantage of a corrupt state and a corrupt crony capitalist class.  They want this system of never-ending appeals to continue so that they can, with impunity and with ruthlessness, loot the country and flout whatever little spirit of law remains in our badly designed Constitution (more on that some other time).

The more one can spend money and evade rules which apply to others, the more unjust is a society and the more cynical its poor people.

India is dysfunctional by design and carefully kept that way.  The more things change, the more they remain the same.  The basic structure of our institutions is non-democratic and colonial.

The "problems" of India: Corruption, lack of transparency, paid media, non-democratic party politics, non-existent justice, are boons for the privileged.

That is why things will not change in a hurry.  Lokpal ain't happening in a hundred years.

Some Notes on Gender Politics in India

In economic terms, and keeping aside exceptional circumstances, sexual affection and intimacy is a female resource which males compete for. (cf Baumeister, Vos, 2004)

Competition is a fact of life, and cannot be wished away.

Rape, being non-consensual by definition, is therefore a looting of this resource.

Females, as is well-known by ethologists and sociobiologists, bestow this resource on worthy males.  (Worthiness being defined by various parameters.)

Females are the decision makers when it comes to decisions of sexual pairings.  Males compete, females choose.

Female consent to sexual interaction is an affirmation of the male's value.  In the prolonged absence of female consent, a male will feel his self-esteem eroding.

In India, vast sections of population are still to embrace an open sexual market.  In those sections, decisions about sexual pairings are made by the community or the family.  It is not necessary that the decision is only made by the father.  Usually senior women are also involved.  In fact, matchmaking, and the related gossip, is normally attributed to women in many North Indian societies.

Even in these "arranged" marriages, there is obvious competition for a "worthy/powerful" male and for a "beautiful" female.

Beauty is mostly genetic, but power is a social construct, especially in modern human societies where raw physical power is not of much consequence.

Economics and politics is a struggle for gaining more power at the expense of other competitors.

If this struggle is severely rigged, what can we speculate about the state of mind of the weaker competitors?

Here we must distinguish between competition, and fairness.  A fair competition is where two men run a race, and the faster man wins.  An unfair competition is where two men race, and one of them is given a head-start.

I posit that a healthy society needs a preponderance of instances of "fair competition".  If a society has too many instances of unfairness, then it will naturally lead to the losers losing all respect for the "system", for "law", and so on.

The females need not worry about the fairness of the sexual competition, as long as they (or their families) are allowed to freely choose the winner.

However, the vast majority of males are intensely interested in the process of this competition and its fairness.  Because their self-esteem, their access to sexual resources, and their status in society depends on it.

The females need to start getting worried, when instead of the winners, the losers start laying hands on them. Then some draconian laws are called for. (!)

...

I posit that India has good competition within the classes, but there is an alarming lack of mobility between the classes.  If the classes are broadly considered: the poor (blue collar), the salaried (white collar), and the capitalist/politicians (silver spoon), then it is quite obvious that inter-class mobility is a rare event in India.  So much so that it is considered newsworthy (an autowallah's daughter clearing the Chartered Accountancy exam, or a salaried man entering politics (Mr Kejriwal), etc.).

The poor don't know how to get a salaried job (salaried desk jobs in the government or in the MNCs, are available only to those who have had a certain upbringing and educational opportunities and coaching, etc.).

The salaried don't know how to get into capitalism/real-estate/politics (it is clear that this arena is available only to those with family ties, history of granting favors, or a ruthless lack of ethics which the middle class folks find hard to digest/internalize).

Coupled with this economic class division is the existence of various other class divisions: racial, caste, religious, ...

(As an aside, an elopement in India (except in cases where the union is banned due to the couple being close cousins or from different religions etc.) necessarily happens between a man of lower status and a woman of higher status.  If the man is higher status, he can just marry the woman.  The elopement can be elaborated as: the man being able to convince the woman of his worthiness, while being unable to convince the larger community, and the community regarding the woman as an emotional fool.  In a more individualistic society where individual decisions trump community thinking, the woman will marry the man, and probably live to regret.  In India, not so.)

Keeping aside child abuse, and looking at adult behavior only, I further posit that rapes within classes (intra-class-rapes) are rare.  Most rapes are inter-class.  A laborer raping a middle-class housewife or a student, a politician raping a journalist or a schoolteacher, a middle-rung actor raping his maidservant, and so on are plausible.  A politician raping a businesswoman?  Unheard of.  A salaried man raping his colleague?  Similarly unheard of.  (Let's not consider the "rape because he promised to marry and now doesn't" kind of nonsense).

The higher-male-lower-female rape is an assertion of one's so-called right to have sex with every woman of the lower class.  "How dare she deny?"  The lower classes don't usually resist, but every once in a while they do, when the violation becomes too egregious, or the insult too demeaning.

The lower-male-higher-female rape is the current focus of Indian educated classes and the intelligentsia.  Rapes of Dalits and poor villagers by Zamindars and suchlike have been happening for hundreds of years in India, but it hasn't ever raised many eyebrows.  The rape of a middle class woman by a low class male is considered a fit case for swift retribution and violent justice.

Now, consider the notion that these low-class males live highly subjugated and moreover, in a hopeless and fatalistic state of mind, born of a pervasive sense of unfairness in the society.  No matter how hard they work, they can never imagine eating at a fancy restaurant, they can never anticipate watching a film in a multiplex while eating popcorn, their children will never go to IITs or medical schools, their parents will never get good healthcare, and so on.

If there is a great number of these frustrated, psychologically-impotent, unfairly-treated, resentful males in a city, then that is a powder keg waiting to explode.  That is the real danger.

They beat up bar-going women because they themselves can't afford to go to such bars, they beat up Romeos giving valentine's day cards because they themselves can't afford those cards and rose-bunches and because even if they do, the women will reject them summarily, they molest women on buses because they stand no earthly chance of ever touching their breasts in a consensual way.

The lasting solution to the problem of looting, social unrest and sexual assault is to ensure that the economic system is not unfair, that it does not make hundreds of millions feel like suckers and having no chance at a better life.  Draconian punishments will not deter these men, because the roots of their acts of violation run deeper.

An unfair society is an unsafe society.

The capitalist/political class can use state-provided Z-Plus security and appoint private guards, but the middle class will continue to live in fear.

The lasting remedy for an unsafe society is fairness and enforcement of existing laws on all citizens equally.  Not more, and more draconian, laws which will again be selectively enforced on the weak.

An atmosphere of pervasive unfairness compels an otherwise normal man to act violently and dishonestly towards his fellow humans.  We can hang that man, but we can also choose to look a little deeper at the atmosphere.