People will say all sorts of things

People will say all sorts of things

Ernest Hemingway said all American literature began with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. But then L Frank Baum, coming later, shouldn’t have had the hassle he did in trying to sell his wonderful Wizard of Oz. Publishers said to him, full of omniscience, that there wasn’t and couldn’t be, any such thing as an American fairytale.

And all because the prescription was for importing such magic and fairy-dust from Europe, where the culture was considered old and deep. The Judeo-Christian and Anglo-Saxon world never paid much mind to the other “exotic” cultures such as ours, or that of the Chinese for that matter.  

L Frank Baum wrote over a score of books, besides the magical Kansas tale about Dorothy and Toto and the Kansas wind; but nothing else really mattered. But he was spot on about Oz with the lion who was a coward, and the yellow brick road, and the tin man worried about rust, the scarecrow with no brain, and of course, the wizard who knew the way home.

On the converse side of this argument, maybe that’s why so many American writers, and not a few of the painters, went to imbibe the spirit of France. Of course, help from the French, during their war with Britain, also created a subliminal kinship. It’s symbolised by France’s present of the Statue of Liberty, standing to this day in the New York harbour, opposite the fabled old immigration point of Ellis Island.

John Lennon, avant garde Liverpudlian and world citizen, art-schooled and acerbic, was very good at saying things, including something about the Beatles and Jesus. He  also said if you want to call rock n roll by another name, it’s Chuck Berry. He plugged the early Elvis by saying he had actually died the day he went into the US Army, (and not after starting a merchandising empire wearing his bejewelled jumpsuits and demonstrating his karate moves on stage in Las Vegas; and certainly not when he was, by his own description, “fat and forty”). Lennon said a few things about Nixon too, and they probably got him killed.

Rewinding a little, the commissioning executives at Decca and at EMI (the latter now ironically, but not surprisingly, defunct), said that there was no future for four young men with guitars (The Beatles), while turning down the opportunity to sign them up after listening to an audition. It’s fortuitous that the Beatles had Brian Epstein to do their Col. Parker parallel for them, because he did get them in on Parlophone, an EMI subsidiary, later with the help of legendary producer George Martin.

Across the Atlantic, Bob Dylan said to the Beatles, who were fans of his, shortly after their famous appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. This was right at the beginning of their US invasion, in 1964. What’s this about holding hands, said Dylan allegedly, here smoke this.

People, it appears, will say all sorts of things.

Some of the most inconsistent things being said locally are ironically coming out of the mouths of our  would be reformers in team Anna.

What need was there for Mr. Shanti Bhushan to fly that dangerous kite about Kashmir? Especially now, when all India has to do is wait for the disintegration of Pakistan, because of its extremely unviable internal contradictions, having run with the hares and hunted with the hounds to the point of terminal exhaustion. It is a little like these buildings that collapse in the inner-city every monsoon.

Particularly, when the vandals keep stealing the supporting pillars of US diplomatic protection along with the accompanying dollars, and expect Pakistan to leverage the other yellow pillar, or is it peril, of China, to do the work of both.

And more importantly, pay for the privilege, presumably in Renminbi and Yuan. Yuan apart, every red-blooded scotch drinking elite member of the ruling classes in Pakistan would rather take a George Washington faced dollar and go and bamboozle the Yanks as opposed to the Chinks, “all weather friend” and “deep as the Arabian sea and high as the Himalayas” notwithstanding. But these guys may be surrounded these days.

After all, Pakistan’s terrorist breeding programme is so successful that they are rapidly outnumbering and swamping all other local species including the despised “mohajirs” imported from India. These hapless exiles actually thought they would be better treated in Pakistan amongst their co-religionists than in Allahabad or Lucknow or Hyderabad or Junagadh for that matter. And they’ve been reeling from the shock for every one of these 64 years, even though they are loathe to admit it. And that includes Mohajir former president Pervez Musharraf.

Plebiscites too, much as Bhushan may advocate them, are a page straight out of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s ghost’s book. The one in which he wants the thing in Kashmir where the skewer of demographics is expected to give him the kind of democratic verdict he was fond of. That is when Zulfie wasn’t drinking the “infidel’s scotch” or profaning the atmosphere canoodling with kafir women.

Plebiscites have had their failed day, and have actually never worked anywhere. They were nevertheless favoured by excellent Roman Emperors such as Nero and Caligula, with death as a reward for ticking the wrong box.

Mr. Bhushan also recently argued his own case seeking Income Tax exemption for his heart-bypass surgery, because he considers it an occupational hazard as a lawyer. He may have something there. Still, Anna Hazare obviously knows how to pick them, but it is a relief to see he knows how to discard them as well!

I wonder what Anna’s going to do with his expense fudging frontrunner for  Jan Lokpal? Or his master’s voice, who hasn’t paid quite a lot of taxes and spent a quantity of time moonlighting from his government job. Or Mr. Bhushan senior blithely garnering himself a farm property “allotted” to him by Chief Minister of UP Kum. Mayawati’s largesse.

What makes it particularly disappointing is the lame excuses they have handed out when it comes to their own integrity and probity. And this, at a time when the race is far from run.

To be fair, it is indeed a very difficult game to stay a jump or two ahead in the honesty stakes, particularly with your supporters immolating themselves on the fervour of their own combustibles (also known as vanity).  

And as for dictators and other infallibles, they have a strange habit of coming to ultimate grief in the vicinity of drains and underground crevasses. Who knows what Saddam and Gaddafi called safety, but it certainly didn’t work for them.

(1,097 words)

October 21^st, 2011

Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader on Edit Page of The Pioneer as "Shake it like Elvis" on 2nd November 2011
and online at www.dailypioneer.com/ as well as in The Pioneer ePaper.

Please Sir, may I have some more?

Please Sir, may I have some more?

Charles Dickens, said to have been reincarnated as JK Rowling, the author of the phenomenally successful Harry Potter series, never got over the trauma of being sent to the Poor House with his entire family, on account of his father’s bankruptcy.

The brilliantly conceived Harry Potter, though an ace wizard, is an orphan, maltreated by his remaining family. Could it be the same Dickensian soul in JK Rowling carrying on with the expiation?  

Dickens mined the trauma of that poor house experience of some two years in book after book including Oliver Twist , David Copperfield and A Christmas Carrol. He, even after he became rich and famous, also demonstrated several colourful mundane and profane quirks in his personal life as well.

In Oliver Twist, the protagonist famously has the temerity to ask for more porridge in the orphanage and brings down the wrath of the establishment on his hapless if innocent head.

Dickens’ thematics of deprivation, hunger and brutal repression brings to mind the strange ongoing discourse about the so-called Poverty Line, with a blue-turbaned Mr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia of the Planning Commission trying to calm the troubled waters in his considerably pucca accent while wearing his air of inviolability.

But showing surprise at the media focus on his Rs. 32/- per person per day Laxman Rekha, when it used to be only Rs. 24/- is somehow missing the point. Nobody seems to realise that having such a thing in itself shouts about the failure of our remedies and nostrums in this regard after more than sixty under-achieving years!

It is shocking the amount of newsprint and broadcast media time that has been devoted to this obscenity. Noted columnist Mr. Swaminathan.A. Aiyar added to the surrealism in a recent article by opining that since poor families tended to have more members and had say five or six mouths to feed; a rate of Rs. 32 per day times 6 would work out to a not totally shameful Rs. 6,000/-  or so per month! And that the middle class were not morally qualified to ask for more for the poor because they cribbed about paying this kind of wage to drivers and servants. What happened to the logic of 6,000/- times 6 here, presumably for a family of domestics all cleaning and swabbing in unison in neighbouring homes, or drivers of either gender, from ages 10 to 79 doing likewise? Then, the poor would be veritably middle-class, and we could move the Poverty Line to say, waist-high!

The fact is that Socialism over 40 years has done us no favours. We became a nation of lofty, lecturing, hectoring, arrogance-laden theorists, our reach nevertheless always exceeding our grasp. Then Liberalisation came, with an ultimatum from the World Bank in 1991, and changed the rate of growth, slowly, and then very fast, considering it was climbing from a paltry little third-world base.

And gradually the middle-classes swelled, till now we talk of some 300 million people, with the poor being twice as numerous, and a couple of hundred million people in the rich category, differentiated between those who have cash and assets worth crores of rupees, and yet others with so much that they could never properly tell you just what they were worth.

Besides the number of Indian US dollar billionaires is swelling respectably, not just in the domestic but the Asian context, and millionaires are plentiful enough to hardly elicit comment.

This singular fact of growth in the economy near the double-digits year-on-year has led to whatever change and transformation we see around us. If the poor are going to get anywhere at all, then they are going to benefit from the effects of this sustained growth and transformation in their possibilities.

But there is indeed another problem that hasn’t quite hit the comfortably pontificating middle-classes here in India as yet, but might, when rising wages drive low-end jobs overseas to poorer countries.

Remember, once the developed world busy exporting jobs, spoke of cheap Japanese and Taiwanese imported goods of dubious quality.  Even China with its formidable manufacturing strength and current export competitiveness is going to have to move up the value-chain and hopefully be saved from the fate of many others. They, like us, have a potentially massive domestic market to run to.

Similarly, as India climbs up the same globalised economic tree in hot pursuit, the middle classes will have to keep expanding to fuel more and more domestic demand.

But if we export low-end jobs, our economy, as in the West, will turn from being investment driven and manufacturing/service industry/infrastructure based, to a consumerist/trading one.

This tends to favour the rich with the resources to corner trading opportunities, and the economy tends to get polarised between the rich and the poor, relatively speaking of course.

America is seeing the shrinking of its middle-class now, grown strong in the post WWII years with its massive job creation programmes, and, if we tread the same developmental path we could see the same thing happen here.

Of course, we have a long way to go before the worm turns, particularly with our birth rate persisting and prolific, and the years in between are assuredly good ones.

But decades from now perhaps, we will have to face not the problem of monetary scarcity, but one of plenty without that many jobs. And that is provided the rich who control the finance haven’t bet it all on the wrong horse like Lehman and Goldman and all those happy Jewish people in Wall Street, now being occupied by a bunch of irate “smelly hippies”.

But even if the famous Indian conservatism and rectitude keep us on the straight and narrow, it might still be a feeling amongst those of us who are not rich and probably not poor. A feeling of being all dressed up with nowhere to go unless we plunge into the world of the self-employed. This more so with no Laxman Rekha drawn up to tell us our place in the scheme of things.

(1,004 words)

10^th October 2011

Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader Edit on Edit Page of The Pioneer on 14th October 2011 as "May I have some more?". Also published online at www.dailypioneer.com and in The Pioneer ePaper. Archived under Guest Columnists online at www.dailypioneer.com 

A suitable metaphor

A suitable metaphor

What is a suitable metaphor for our life and times in India today? Was it encapsulated in the picaresque 1993 novel Suitable Boy by author and poet Vikram Seth?

The book chronicled the emerging new nation of the 1950’s busy abolishing the Zamindari system, working on women’s emancipation etc. in the backdrop of an idealistic, if ineffectual, Socialist India that only succeeded in increasing poverty even as the population exploded.

Or is it the shifting of gears in big-time geopolitics in the South Asian theatre and the Indian Ocean region as well?

America has sold war planes to Taiwan and entertained the Dalai Lama. It is not very happy about the growing Chinese involvement in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar, Baluchistan, Gilgit and POK, and China’s evident policy of pushing India around in Arunachal Pradesh and other places.

It is uncomfortable with China’s nuclear submarine programme and the launch of its aircraft carrier with more being built. It is cross about its nuclear proliferation using North Korea and Pakistan as proxies. And then there is the relentless infrastructure upgrading and talk of a new Silk Route, alongside of the revival of the old Stillwell Road one. And also its muted belligerence in the South China Sea and China’s laying claim to its oil, gas and other resources, the needling of Japan, etc etc.

With regard to Pakistan, China’s side-kick desperate to dominate Afghan politics and power play, President Obama recently said: “We’re not going to feel comfortable with a long term strategic relationship if we don’t think that they’re mindful of our interests as well.”

There is an evident shift in stance both from the frequency and the more than usually candid nature of the statements from not only the President, but also Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (wild animals being reared in the Pakistani backyards), outgoing Joint Chief of Staff Mike Mullen (ISI supports the Haqqani network), and Vice President Joe Biden (unreliable ally), Defense Secretary Leon Panetta (retaliation)...

And this new exasperation with Pakistan, frank criticism of its ways, threats of discontinuing the massive military and non-military aid, is being publicised worldwide by a global media, slowly but surely hardening its own stance.

It seems clear from all this that America is getting ready to do something more effective than finger-wagging, and has moved on to strategising about exactly how to restore the balance of power in its own favour. The scurrying around of Pakistan’s military top brass also echoes this perception.

But the back story is indeed long and fascinating. Probably much too much of both for proper analysis in this short piece. Still, it all began with America’s historic and infamous tilt towards Pakistan in the Nixon-Kissinger years, aided and abetted by its concurrent overtures to open up to China.   The rise of China into the world’s fastest growing economy is a direct consequence of that tilt, and so is its growing posturing and militancy.

Pakistan, in the interim, has gone through its “good terrorists” era under President Zia Ul Haq helping America free Afghanistan from the Soviets, alongside comprehensive Islamisation of the Pakistani polity domestically. Then came the corruption and loot of the Benazir Bhutto years, followed by the artful dodging of commando President Musharraf.

The killing of Osama Bin Laden at Abbotabad recently however has torn the veil right off the mutual denial and deception.

 And now it is time for another tilt away from the toxicity of the situation.  Don’t be too surprised if we wake up one morning soon to a frontal American attack within Pakistani territory launched from the Arabian Gulf and Afghanistan. This could take place, starting with a crippling of Pakistan’s nuclear assets, as soon as the Americans work out their quid pro quos with China.  

 India will, of course, benefit from the change, and began to do so under former President George W Bush. But, is our defining metaphor then some kind of big brother largesse or happy coincidence of geopolitics?

Or does the question resonate better with revered journalist Mr. Sunanda Datta-Ray’s recent article that invokes Kipling’s 1901 India novel Kim; saying much of the description in it still strikes a “contemporary chord”. Mr. Datta-Ray also quotes Paul Scott, the author of the Raj Quartet, set in the 1940’s, just as India was making its transition towards independence.  

A character in the novel Division of the Spoils, Sargeant Guy Perron, an upper-middle class gentleman who prefers to be a non-commissioned officer, says, “I have never been in a country where the sense of the present is so strong.” Point taken, but I dare say we may not be particularly respectful of our hoary history, but it is still embedded in our DNA.

Perhaps a more apt metaphor is the new film by Mr. Tigmanshu Dhulia, who has adapted the themes of Guru Dutt’s baroque Zamindari tale Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam into a stylish if somewhat sly Sahib Bibi aur Gangster, with no apologies to the iconic period piece based on Bimal Mitra’s novel.

Dhulia interprets, but it is not a retelling at all. It is more of a comment on what we have to do to get ahead, or even just by, in a resurgent, if somewhat morally decayed contemporary India. So the metaphor is not just about peeling paint and backless cholis that provoke hot, if inappropriate, sex. It is also about the notion that one may not always get what one wants, but with a little effort, it is possible to get what one needs - to paraphrase a very catchy Rolling Stones number.

 If contemporary India is a wheeler-dealer haven then, does it mean it is time to give the straight-up and honest a hasty mass burial in a shallow grave?

No, but you might get run over by wheeler-dealer traffic going down both sides of the road. Which may amount to the same thing if you have the temerity of wanting to cross the road.

Casting aside the cloak of metaphor, one has to be struck by the sheer death of incompetence though. It is no good being a bad crook today. Ditto goes for a neer-do-well do-gooder. This is the era of delivering the goods for a price.

You would be spiritually bankrupt if you didn’t want to move on. But the fact is Indians are in a hurry to catch up with, and perhaps surpass, the developed world. We no longer consider such ambition a pipe dream. And that means we are not only focussed on the future but innately aware of our glory days of the past.

(1,099 words)

7^th October 2011

Gautam Mukherjee


Published as Leader Edit on the Edit Page of The Pioneer as "In search of a metaphor" on 19th October 2011. Also published simultaneously online at www.dailypioneer and in the facsimilie   edition ePaper.