Dim Outlook

Outlook magazine has just celebrated its 16th anniversary with an issue devoted to “Generation Awesome;” it tells how “India’s young are driving the change in politics, business, sport, music, news – and beyond.”

I hate to rain on a birthday party, but the issue seems a last-minute effort, with a disparate guest-list babbling rather incoherently about their presumed areas of expertise.

The piece that caught my eye as particularly requiring comment was “Past Forward” by novelist Amish Tripathi (The Immortals of Meluha, The Secret of the Nagas). Headlined “Mom, Give Me Shakti!”(an Indianization, he tells us, of "the Force be with You"), it was written in response to a request from Outlook for a “message to youth."

Tripathi's “message” is a dump on older Indians who complain that youngsters are losing touch with the country’s ancient culture. He sees the complainers as the real problem. They fall into two categories, he says, “India-glorifiers” and the “India-rejecters,” both equally close-minded, and thus fundamentally unlike Indians in their days of ancient greatness. The greatness of ancient India was, “at the core, all about confident open-mindedness.”

As evidence of such open-mindedness, he points to all kinds of things, ranging from Vedic Sanskrit (very different from the classical language we know today), to the “art of making idli ... probably learnt from Indonesia.” The point is a bit fuzzy, but in the interests of moving on, let us pretend it makes sense.

As evidence that the young today have regained “the syncretic strength” of their ancient forbears Tripathi makes another set of confused observations. He includes feedback from readers of his novels: “a Muslim youth conveyed to me he is a proud Muslim but he is inspired by the concept of Har Har Mahadev; a Hindu youngster wrote in to appreciate the fact that I keep saying inshah’Allah despite being a devout Hindu.”

In the past, India’s “open-minded and accepting society” enjoyed “mind-numbing” success. One sign of that success: “Despite not having massive gold mines, India has amongst the largest gold hordes (sic) in the world. Some historians believe this is the legacy of centuries of surpluses from gold-bullion-driven trade.” Tripathi thinks it is only in the last 300 years that Indians forgot “the true essence” of their ancient culture, and as a consequence, “lost their mojo.”

That was not because of British rule but “because we forgot who we were. We forgot our core culture. We forgot our confident open-mindedness. … The self-assured mixture of religions for centuries gave way to insecure exclusivist thoughts. Scientific temper declined … Unlike Japan, we did not capitalize on the great industrial advancements of the Western world. And then began our decline.” Mercifully, the analysis of that failure is not extensive, but it is enough to make clear Tripathi is almost wholly ignorant about the Indian past.

In that, of course, he is not alone. In my experience, most Indians have only the foggiest notion of history. (As a test, ask the next few people you meet when Indian nationalists first declared the aim of "purna swaraj.") As this state of postcolonial confusion has been off the radar of our politicians and intelligentsia, I will devote the next few posts to perceptions of history, Western and Indian.

The Ramayana as History

Criticism of the move to drop A. K Ramanujan’s essay on the Ramayana from the BA History syllabus at Delhi University has been entirely predictable.

Those who wear their “secular” label on their foreheads, saw the decision to drop the essay as a response to pressure from the Hindutva brigade. Some Press reports said the Hindutvadis considered the essay “blashphemous.”

“Cultural fascism” said some. “Talibanizing history” said others. "A matter of academic freedom" said milder folk. The truly fatuous decried the attempt to negate the Ramayana as "a continuing, many-sided conversation between cultures and religions."


It was as if the country had hit a time warp and woken up in the 1980s with its poisonous "Left-Secular" v "Right-Hindutva" confrontation.

I think we should all take a breather and re-examine what the essay contributes to our understanding of the past.

Ramanujan’s essay is nothing more than a testament to the enduring popularity of the epic in many lands and the irrepressible creativity of those who have retold its story. It says nothing about the Ramayana's significance in Indian history or its impact on Indian society. Written for a foreign audience, the essay emphasizes what we might call the folkloric, the quaint and the bizarre.

An essay on the Ramayana of value to Indian students of history would examine its enormous role in inspiring and shaping Indian society.

For millennia, the Prince of Ayodhya has been a role model for Indians. More, it is a critically important marker in the evolution of our society.

The story of Rama brought into the daily life of India the philosophical wisdom of the Upanishads.

The Ramayana records and justifies the emergence of the unitary State, not the Leviathan of enforced national security as in Hobbesian Europe, but acclaimed in the person of the virtuous and beloved king.

Rama is not an all-powerful dictator to whom people bend in awe but a popular ruler solicitous of his people's opinion in all things. He even rejects Sita because of murmurs among the citizens of Ayodhya that her pregnancy soon after returning from Ravana’s clutches implied a violation that made her unfit to be queen. In that, as in his self-doubt and anguish at critical points of the story, Rama is everyman. As king, he is a democrat.

 In the devotion to his father, love for Sita, loyalty to Laxman, and generosity towards Kaikei, he is the archetype of the good family man. He goes to war not to extend his kingdom or for profit but to regain his wife. In his misfortunes he is graceful, in victory he is modest. Rama is the God-king next door, neighbourly, considerate and kind.

In short, Rama is accessible to all Indians regardless of status or caste, a point the Ramayana underlines in many ways. Perhaps most striking is the legend of Valmiki the author of the Ramayana, the low born brigand whose devotion to Rama makes him India's First Poet-Sage. Repeatedly, the narrative underlines Rama's openness to all people. The gods applaud when the prince sits comfortably with the low caste forest-dweller Guha. A poor woman offers fruit to him after biting into it to make sure it is sweet; Lakshman protests but Rama silences him; she acts out of love. That unforced love of the ruler is the basis for Ramrajya – Rama’s virtuous rule – the widely held ideal of the Indian state for thousands of years.

Another point an essay written for Indian students might explore is the significance of Rama's insistence on going into exile to make good his father's old pledge. It makes clear the critical importance the Ramayana places on the integrity of the king, the ultimate guarantor of the safety and security of the state.

It might also be useful to get the young thinking about how India's rise from foreign domination by mobilizing the best of its tradition, and its success in maintaining democratic rule in the face of staggering odds, owe a great deal to values we can trace back to the Ramayana.

In the face of all this, I am all for dropping Ramanujan’s essay purely on the basis that it is a tawdry, insubstantial treatment of a great subject.

Ye Olde British Cultural History

The following came my way with no indication of authorship. To whoever wrote it, thank you for a great bit of cultural history. All of it might not be true, but it is amusing.

There is an old Hotel/Pub in Marble Arch, London that used to have a gallows adjacent to it. When prisoners were on their way to be hanged their horse-drawn prison cart would stop outside the pub and the guard would ask the prisoner if he wanted ''ONE LAST DRINK''.

If he had a drink it was "ONE FOR THE ROAD." If he declined, he was "ON THE WAGON."

Urine was a saleable item in Britain, for it was used to tan animal skins. Poor families used to all pee in a pot for sale to the nearest tannery. If you had to do this to survive you were "PISS POOR." Even worse off were those who did not "HAVE A POT TO PISS IN."

The popularity of June weddings dates back to the time when the British used to bathe once a year. That annual wash was usually at the end of May. In June everyone smelled pretty good, and bride and groom could get pleasantly intimate. Just to be on the safe side, though, brides carried a bouquet of flowers to dampen the body odour.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water. All the adult males went into the tub next in order of their age (or status), then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the warning, "DON'T THROW THE BABY OUT WITH THE BATHWATER!"
Houses in the old days had low thatched roofs piled high with straw. The straw captured the sun's warmth, so enterprising dogs and cats would go to sleep in it. When it rained and the straw became slippery animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence the saying "IT'S RAINING CATS AND DOGS."
Bugs and mice and other critters dropped from the roof inside the house too, and that was a particular problem in the bedroom. The need to keep them off the bed led to the invention of the four-poster canopy bed.

The floors inside the homes of the wealthy were made of slate that would get slippery when wet. In winter it was customary to spread straw (thresh) on floor to help keep from slipping. To keep the straw from sliding out of the room a piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way: the THRESH-HOLD.

Most people could not afford to eat meat. A man who could afford to do so "BROUGHT HOME THE BACON." When friends gathered around such a prosperous man, they were given bits of pork and they would sit around "CHEWING THE FAT."

Bread was divided according to status. The lowliest got the burnt bottom of the loaf, those of middling status got the middle, and the toffs got the ''UPPER CRUST''

The belief that tomatoes are poisonous arose because the wealthy ate off pewter plates, from which food with high acid content leached lead. Eating tomatoes off pewter could cause lead poisoning and death.

Dying was also a tricky business in Ye Olde Britain. Corpses were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days to ensure that they were not merely drunk or unconscious. Family and friends would gather around and eat and drink and make merry as they waited for a definitive outcome. Hence the custom of ''HOLDING A WAKE.'' To make sure that the dead were really gone for good people were buried with a string tied to a finger, allowing the corpse, if it came alive, to ring a bell by the graveside.

It wasn't only in the boxing ring that you could be "SAVED BY THE BELL."

Prashant Bhushan Assault

The shameful assault on Prashant Bhushan by thugs from the Sri Ram Sene has been condemned around the country, but our political class should be aware that it too stands heavily indicted in the criminal incident.

The anger that drove the attack on Bhushan must be seen as an indication of our political failure, not only in containing and defusing it, but in the inability to forge an ironclad national consensus on Kashmir.

What Bhushan said about Kashmir -- that India should dismantle all its defensive measures and submit to a plebiscite -- cannot be looked upon merely as an issue of free speech. That is so because Kashmir is not an issue merely of territory or "self-determination."

The British destroyed millions of Indian lives to split the country on communal lines, and deliberately created the dispute over Kashmir to keep South Asia permanently at war. Our defence of Kashmir is not just of territory but of the idea of India. To declare otherwise is not just to ignore the tremendous sacrifice of Indian blood and treasure to protect and preserve that idea, it is to open up the country yet again to brutal foreign manipulation and control.

For make no mistake about it. When British proxies like Bhushan and Arundhati Roy speak so blithely about India giving up Kashmir, they are opening up the rest of the country to new rounds of communal warfare that will certainly destroy our democratic system and our way of life.

We can condemn the Sri Ram Sene for its tactics but we must acknowledge the legitimacy of its anger. It is time the rest of us felt it too.

NYT Blog: Why no Indian Steve Jobs?

The New York Times blog on India has an item asking, “Where’s India’s Steve Jobs?” The writer, an Indian journalist by the name of Samanth Subramaniam who seems to cater mainly to foreign magazines, admitted it was perhaps a “hollow, even narcissistic, question" because "Brazil hasn’t produced a Steve Jobs; neither has China, the Philippines, Zambia, Australia or any one of dozens of countries around the world.”  But he proceeded to address it anyway.

In doing so he did not hazard a personal opinion on the matter but noted several from a supposed expert, a business consultant on “knowledge societies,” who blamed India’s failure to produce a Steve Jobs on the inadequacy of our educational system, the years of “flirtation” with socialism, and the incapacity of the Indian economy to support success on so grand a scale.

The piece is a textbook example of feel-bad journalism.

First, consider the false presumption that Indian entrepreneurs have failed to innovate spectacularly.

As Raghunath Mashelkar pointed out in his excellent book Reinventing India (Sahayadri Prakashan, Pune, 2011, 403 pages Rs.499. jadanghadan@gmail.com), there have been many cases of huge success.

There is Narayana Murthy’s Infosys, founded in his small apartment with Rs10,000 in capital, growing to a valuation of Rs. 60,000 Crores and vaulting into the front ranks of the global Information Technology industry.

There is Mumbai’s Dabbawala tiffin delivery system, a daily miracle of business organization without parallel anywhere in the world.

There is Dr. Kurien’s “white revolution” that helped make India the world’s top milk producer and Dirubhai Ambani’s soap company that emerged from a Mumbai chawl to become India’s largest business conglomerate.

There are the anonymous scientists of C-DAC who developed an indigenous supercomputing capacity in three years after Cold War politics denied India access to the Cray XMP-1205 in the 1980s.

There is the Indian Space Research Organization, overcoming the same Cold War restraints to design and build domestic capacity from scratch, making India one of the leading nations in the field.

As Mashelkar's book noted, innovation has also thrived outside the organized sector and without government support. When the National Innovation Foundation set up three years ago under his chairmanship organized an annual competition, it received over a thousand submissions the first year and 16,000 the second year. The winners included illiterate and semi-literate people. An illiterate farmer won with a disease resistant pea he had developed, another with a cardamom variety that now accounts for 80 per cent of the crop in Kerala; a high-school dropout got an award for building a complex robot.

 The problem in India is not that we lack success stories but that we do not celebrate them and do not see ourselves as winners. Despite awards ceremonies to recognize excellence and the occasional programme on successful people, our mass media focus consistenly on the negative. Even in reporting the grand and glamorous success of the Indian film industry, the largest in the world, they emphasize the negative. Their label, Bollywood, focuses on the monkey-see-monkey-do aspect of Indian films, ignoring their homegrown verve and grace. Can you imagine the Japanese media labelling their film industry Jollywood? Or the Chinese describing their’s as Chollywood?

The other side of the mass media projection of India as a semi-comic failure is a consistent promotion and celebration of the meretricious foreign. Our major television channels are slavishly imitative of Western trends, with much of the programming lifted from British sources. People are so used to this that few are aware of how bizarre it is, or indeed, how subversive. HBO India is running a month-long programme of James Bond movies sponsored by Tata Manza, with daily email updates on “Bond Girls” delivered to your computer.

The “HB007” promo promises to trace the “evolution” of the “licensed to kill” operative over the years. I am pretty sure it won’t include any reference to the real-life license to kill that Britain exercised in India, targeting not oversize “Bond villains” but Indian freedom fighters, with vast collateral damage. The death toll, if we include the punitive “man-made” famine of 1943 in Bengal and the engineered Partition “riots,” runs into the millions.

As Mashelkar says, the problem “is not the Indian mind but the Indian mindset.”

Activist Manifesto for Rio+20

Environmental activists going to the "Rio+20" Conference in Brazil next June  should use it for two things primarily: to springboard civil society action aimed at bringing about global change, and to reject the governmental agenda.

The reason for rejecting governmental proposals is simple: for four decades official action has been ineffective.

The world today is far more polluted than it was in 1972 when the UN convened the first world conference on the environment. Numerous new problems have surfaced, ranging from the accelerating extinction of species to global warming, and there is a grim pall over every environmental prospect we can see or imagine.

The basic problem with the governmental approach is that it is inadequate. Improved environmental standards and controls cannot "green" the world economy as it tries to cater to six billion poor people hoping to become "developed" and live like the rich. The belief that new technologies can make much difference in this scenario is little more than fervent corporate faith.

Governmental action has been constrained by the fear of damaging the wealth-creating capacity of the existing economic system. Big corporations, which fear radical change because they inevitably reduce profits, have been the primary promoters of caution.

So what can environmental activists do at Rio+20 to change this situation?

They should adopt their own plan of action and begin implementing it with or without the support of governments. (Governmental support is a certainty once power brokers see that they will be cut out of the action if they do not participate.)

The Plan of Action should consist of the following steps:

1. Network: Activists should create a global electronic network arranged in an easily accessible hierarchy (local, national, regional, global), to facilitate sharing of information, interactive discussion, and concerted action.

2. Organize: Activists should work with entrepreneurs and leaders of small business to establish community-level organizations for cooperative action. (This will be good for business, so gaining entrepreneurial support should not be difficult.) As these units develop and proliferate they should become the basic units of the global network.

3. Survey & Monitor: Using the network to share the best available expertise (including that of the UN Environment Programme), activists should begin a global environmental survey based on community-level feedback. It should put in place a permanent environmental monitoring system capable of providing real time status reports for consideration by governments at the national, regional and global levels

4. Analyze: Analysis of the data collected by the Survey should indicate the need for remedial and preventive actions, their scope and cost. In contrast to existing analyses, those generated by activist networks can be expected to pull no punches in identifying what needs to change, and where.

5. Educate & Mobilize: The community level organizations and their networks should be engaged in educating and mobilizing popular support for environmental action.

 Energetic implementation of these steps should create a global apparatus for effective action from the local to global levels. It should also create the general public awareness and support for continuing action.

The Largest Bank Heist in History

There are several levels at which we can understand the “debt crisis.”

As currently reported by the mass media, it is a crisis of the 17-nation Eurozone centered on the inability of the government of Greece to service a national debt of nearly half a trillion dollars.

If we step back a bit, the crisis grows larger. Because banks in most developed countries hold varying amounts of foreign sovereign debt, the entire global financial system is at risk of collapse. That would throw the world economy into a deep recession, causing a vicious downward spiral of layoffs, manufacturing cutbacks, and falling trade.

China would also be seriously affected. Its “workshop of the world” path to booming growth has landed it in a position where a financial collapse in major Western countries will implode its huge manufacturing economy. That would set off a global deflation of commodity prices, bringing misery to many developing countries dependent on their export for much of their income.

If we step back even further from this looming global crisis and look at the fundamental nature of the problem, we can understand it as one of corruption and abuse of power by a small financial elite.

Borrowing has been an essential part of the growth of the global economy over the last four hundred years, but it was always an ancillary factor. What has happened in the last two decades is that those who lend money have got into the driver’s seat, and flooded the world with credit as an easy means of increasing their own income. With greed getting the better of common sense, they then recklessly packaged this debt, much of it to people and institutions without the capacity to repay, into “investments.”

The banking system in developed countries through which this financial elite operates, bought those “investments” on a massive scale, spreading the bad debt to the portfolios of a whole range of investors, including pension funds, universities and insurance companies. In 2008, when these follies first came to a head, governments used taxpayer money to prevent a disastrous and far-reaching collapse. In effect, the financiers got away with the largest bank heist in history, leaving ordinary people to pay for their theft.

 As governments resorted to austerity measures to cope with the unsustainable burdens of debts imposed on their own populations without consultation, there has been rising popular anger. Some sections of the media have resurrected Marxist terminology in presenting this anger in terms of “class war.” However, it is far from that; public anger is directed not at the business community or at the rich generally, but at a very small and powerful set of financial operators.  

Understood in those terms, the current situation offers an opportunity for a creative response beyond the “haircuts” imposed on banks and legal action against those seen to have acted irresponsibly. Social activists, small and medium businesses and credit unions should network to create a new community-based financial infrastructure. That would not only insulate the larger economy from the current crisis, it would be a decisive check on the power of a financial elite that has long outlived its utility.