Against the Grain

Due to a quirk of constitution, I find it utterly unable to follow a popular trend.  Though I am guilty of being a fan of Michael Jackson when I was 15 (I didn't have much exposure to alternate music then), since then my life has generally been against the tide.  Perhaps it is a fake sense of superiority, but perhaps, as the joke goes, I am actually superior.

I harbor a long-standing revulsion against going to an overpriced Broadway play, watching an overacted Shahrukh Khan blockbuster, buying an overhyped Apple device, purchasing a luxury vehicle because it can go from zero to 60mph in 5 seconds instead of in 7 seconds, and so on.  Perhaps it is parsimony, perhaps it is an unwillingness to be a dupe, perhaps it is the assertion of an identity that is somewhat misanthropic...

There are costs to blazing one's own trail.  Sometimes one gets lost, and often one realizes that there was no need to go anywhere in the first place, that the need itself (rather than the wrong fulfillment of it) was a mistake, and occasionally one finds that the well-trodden path is actually an instance of the "wisdom of the crowds".  

But the constitution is a hard thing to amend, and so even when it would be much less effort to just watch Netflix and chill, I find it fruitful and uniquely pleasurable to go for a walk instead.

I find this trait in me as far back as I remember, even when I was a six or seven year old boy, and it can perhaps be called the protection of one's soul in a den of thieves.  Or perhaps one is just an old-fashioned malcontent.

But after fifty years of living, I can say that the rewards, intangible as they might be, have been worth it.  As a measure of my fondness for this quality despite its costs, I hope my son inherits this quirk, and in his later years, as I do, tells tales of his adventures and mishaps, and is a lion true to his name, and not a sheep.

On M K Gandhi

In college, I became enamored with non-mainstream ways of living.  I joined a group of activists who considered Gandhian philosophy as worthy not just of study, but of veneration and following.  The inspirations or western echoes of Gandhian philosophy, from John Ruskin to H W Thoreau to E F Schumacher, were also considered venerable.  Capitalism, Wealth, Arms, and Science were considered evil, and village life, manual labor, simplicity were virtues.

I met and worked alongside many activists: Sunderlal Bahuguna (who was a nice man), Medha Patkar (who was alright as well) and some weirdos who moved around in Delhi in Khadi clothes.  I was a confused man looking for direction and I learnt a lot in those years, and damaged some of my teeth for good by using some badly made daatun instead of toothpaste.

Once we went to the under-construction Tehri dam in the Himalayas, and the group leader lied to an engineer working at the dam in order to tour the site and to get some details about the dam's features.  Later that engineer came to know of our true intentions, and as he looked down on us from a small hill, we (or at least I) remember lowering our faces in shame.  Wasn't truth in the means, as important as truth in the end?

I now regard M K Gandhi as little more than an easily influenced simpleton who could write reasonably well, who was put forward by the politically savvy as a "pure" symbol of their less-than-pure political ambitions, and who was finally ignored and discarded when his usefulness had lapsed.

His ideas on almost everything are wrong.  He had no understanding of science, or of philosophy, or of politics, of human sexuality, or of nation-building.  His charisma was mostly due to him being regarded as a "noble soul" because he had returned from the West and despite being of means and being well-connected, dressed and acted as a poor and devout man.  His English-speaking followers (the western journalists and acolytes) also increased his aura of being a great man.

He treated his wife and children abominably, was an unusually obstinate man who then suddenly changed his views on a topic, had little understanding of physiology but thereby not deterred from lecturing others, and had too many contradictions in his life and work to be considered seriously.

The one feat I do credit him with is capitalizing on the guilt of a squeamish ruling class by practicing non-violent civil disobedience (in the manner prescribed by Thoreau).  This would not have worked against a more ruthless agressor, so the success of his strategy is more a credit to the British morality, in a sense.

His most well-considered work, Hind Swaraj, is written in the form of a dialog where Gandhi assumes the role of the wise man tutoring a noob.  In college, one of the men I admired (the late Professor Dinesh Mohan) raised an outcry when he held that book high and criticized it openly as he read passages from it that decried modern medicine, education and feminism.

Being enamored of him is perhaps excusable for a naive young man, and I know of no man of understanding (in my opinion) who still considers him worthy of admiration, what to talk of emulation.  Perhaps worthy of study, if only to understand why Indians quickly fall at the feet of godmen to this day.

His idea of going on a hunger strike to force a decision from his opponent is infantile, and is still followed in India.  But now the ruling class is more ruthless, and they break the fast and the resolve of such naive fools quite easily.

Choice vs Depth

Modern man seeks to preserve his choices, but thereby dooms himself to never leaving the shore.

A journey inherently has a direction and a route.  To seek to preserve the freedom to go in any direction, is to seek to stagnate.

A lifetime is finite, and therefore one must commit and move.  To preserve choice is to want to remain young, the epidemic of modernity.

To not marry, to not have a child, to not set down one's anchor and be part of a community, to not become active for an issue close to one's heart ... is to live free, to live "in the moment" but perhaps not to live at all.

A direction and a chosen path is scary.  What if one is wrong.  But to not move because of that fear is a greater wrong.

Move.  If the path is wrong, so be it, you will find out.  A tragic life is infinitely better than a life of un-made choices.

All paths can only be wrong if you have lost your heart and your inner compass.

A ghazal by Ghalib, or a novel by Maugham, or a story by Poe or Chekhov, cannot be imagined without a heart that felt immense grief and pain and expressed it.  But that pain was due to a commitment.

There was a time when commitment was the safer choice.  But times have changed.  Today, freedom is the safer and the more cowardly choice.

Freedom for the sake of freedom is the fear of making a meaningful choice.

To continue to browse what is available is to be a casual human being.  At some point, you must say Yes to a path presented to you, and then walk on it till you fail or you succeed.  

If to not start is not to live, to leave things halfway is to live a half-hearted life.

As Tennyson said (and this poem of his, his magnum opus perhaps, was in grief over the passing of a dear friend):

I envy not in any moods
The captive void of noble rage,
The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods:

I envy not the beast that takes
His license in the field of time,
Unfetter'd by the sense of crime,
To whom a conscience never wakes;

Nor, what may count itself as blest,
The heart that never plighted troth
But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
Nor any want-begotten rest.

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Disempowerment and Rapes in India

(An earlier essay that I wrote on the horrific frequency of rapes in India.)

A series of observations:

1. India disillusions its citizens with a theoretical promise of democracy and freedom (we do celebrate an "Independence Day") and a reality of utterly shameless corruption, disempowerment and humiliation in daily life.
   
   
2. There is a drive to power, fulfillment and autonomy in any normal human male.
   
   
3. This drive is thereby strangled and trampled upon in daily life in India, leading to immense neurosis, feelings of helplessness and despair.
   
   
4. Men and women therefore become despotic, exercising their power in vile and criminal ways.
   
   
5. Indian women routinely exercise their despotism in internal family dynamics, while Indian men, being by nature more brutish, want a more tangible exercise of that un-channeled energy.
   
   
6. They either exercise their drive to power by being arrogant and domineering to the men weaker than them, or to harass, humiliate and assault any un-defended woman that they can.  They will rape a little girl or an elderly woman if they get a chance.  A rape is of course about sexual gratification, but it is as well an act of wiping away the experience of being an impotent incel that one lives through every day.
   
   
7. The society can keep prosecuting the rapists, but it is the society itself that is producing them.  What factors in Indian society are leading to an ever-present population of rapists?  An important factor is the vicious cycle of being humiliated and dominated by ones stronger than oneself, and then indulging in the humiliation and domination of ones weaker than oneself.
   
   
8. The default condition of a man and a woman in India is that of having been socially and systemically raped.  In many (too frequent) cases, this rape is the actual act of physical assault and physical rape.
   
   
9. To solve this problem in the long term, we have to look at slowly reducing the almost universal occurence of the dehumanizing exercise of domination in India.  That phenomenon starts at the very top of political and state machinery, and continues in families, schools and marriages.  We are a country of bullies and the bullied.
   
   
10. Without checks and balances, despotism is inevitable.  And in a despotic region, those who the despots treat with disdain will occasionally and brutally erupt in ways that will seem exceptional but should be expected.

Rising Above the Past

It is a common but a "loserthink" habit to blame one's childhood or one's past for one's bad behavior in the present.

I know three people: a man, his wife and his brother, all of who had less than ideal childhoods.  The man spent his childhood in relative deprivation, doing odd and sometimes menial jobs.  The woman spent her childhood away from her home, with a horrible aunt who was mean and vile.  The man's brother, like the man himself, had a similarly deprived childhood and perhaps took on even more responsibilities than the man himself during their mutual childhood.

The man grew up to be a bitter, insecure, selfish (almost narcissistic) individual.  The wife turend out to be a gentle, meek and un-assertive woman in her adulthood.  And the man's brother became a happy-go-lucky, jovial and living-in-the-present kind of man.

All of them spoke of their childhood with hurt and pain.  But they all became different kinds of people.

You will find it everywhere.  People go through the same circumstances and turn out to be very different in character and personality.

Our childhoods are mostly spent in relative unconsciousness and un-self-awareness.  As adults, we have a responsibility to be self-aware, to strive to be better, and to try and transcend our past.

Carrying the wounds of the past is perhaps inevitable, but I believe many of us can choose to live a better life despite those wounds.  We need not consider the implications of those wounds as inevitable and inviolate.  

We can learn from those wounds, and choose not to inflict similar wounds on others.  We can be better than many others who may not have had those opportunities of learning.

Some experiences are too traumatic, but most experiences, if one is willing and reflective, are springboards to a higher level of consciousness and sensitivity.