How To Find Your Perfect Son-In-Law : Free Advice For Indian Parents

Dear Indian Parents,

Only in recent years has the portentous truth slowly dawned upon me that Indian parents who have an unmarried daughter in the age group 22 - 28 have one massively oppressive headache on their minds : how to find that peerless son-in-law for their nonpareil daughter. In order to help you to form a reasonably good idea of what to look out for (and also what to expect from young Indian men these days who can be pretty uncultured and uncouth), I present for your perusal four Indian bachelors whom I have categorised into the following four types.

(A) Marriage as A Social Debt : Mr Atal Bihari Dasgupta :

Mr Dasgupta is an excellent type of bachelor (may his tribe increase!), a person who is deeply rooted in the hoary traditions of Indian culture, who is aware of the rich cultural and linguistic heritage of his Motherland, and who passionately seeks to promote his country's rich patrimony into the next generation. Which, in short, is why he wishes for your daughter's hand in marriage, and I wish to assure you that you shall not be disappointed in giving your assent to his heartfelt request. As an additional bonus, he also comes from a very well-known family with excellent credentials : his late grandfather who was the Chief Justice in the High Court at Calcutta was also a renowned poet-novelist, and his father has recently retired as the Chairman of the Indian Insurance Company, an honourable post. His mother is a loving, caring, and devoted housewife who has ensured that he has picked up all the good customs and all the decent mannerisms of our ancient Indian culture, and his elder sister was married off two years ago to a family in Patna with impeccable credentials. He informed me the other day when I was listening to him reciting some Sanskrit verses (yes, he has mastered Sanskrit too) from the Bhagavad-Gita that he thinks of our sacred custom of Hindu marriage as a divine system through which he shall repay his social debts to his departed ancestors, and when I heard him say these words as precious as heavenly manna, I literally broke down into a flood of warm tears. How can I explain to you how sweet, how tender, how beautiful those delightful words sounded to my parched ears! How many so-called educated bachelors are there in India today who have attained to the heights of such a precious wisdom? He went on to tell me that it was not just your daughter that he was going to marry but her entire family as well, and what does this reflect if not our venerable Hindu belief that marriage is first and foremost a social institution?

Do I need to tell you after all this that bachelors like Mr Dasgupta are extremely rare to find these days, indeed as exceptional as a shining diamond in a muddy field of rice? So here is my advice to you : please do not delay and hasten to catch him when you still have the time.

(B) Marriage as A Heroic Defiance : Mr Jawaharlal Misra :

Now we are already moving into muddy waters, for here comes along the pompous Mr Misra who harbours all kinds of fancy notions about what marriage is, or more disastrously, about what it should be. Here, for example, is one of them : he thinks that marriage is not a social system but a personal contract between two individuals who are in love. Love? What on earth is that supposed to mean? He has an extremely pernicious habit of floating freely of all social and cultural moorings, and of pretending to be a multicultural, hybrid, global, and universal Citizen. He has no knowledge of Indian history, no engagement with Indian culture, and no sense of identity either, and thinks that just because he has mastered the intricate nuances of English he can repudiate all his links with Indian customs overnight and start fraternizing with the British. Most terrible of all, he has no respect whatsoever for his elders, and thinks that he knows it all better than them whom he routinely denounces as a bunch of reactionary windbags. What vile effrontery! Indeed, when I met him two days ago, and asked him to describe to me what his Ideal Wife would be like, he had the nerve to give me the following reply : 'She should be very cosmopolitan. Indeed, she should be so planetary that she should be able to read Jacques Derrida in German, Friedrich Nietzsche in French, Fyodor Dostoivsky in Italian, and Umberto Eco in Russian'.

(C) Marriage as An Ironic Superfluity : Mr Salman Aggarwal :

'Horror of horrors!' is how I shall summarise the only conversation that I ever had with Mr. Aggarwal, for I have never met a bachelor with greater impudence, a more depraved heart, and a nastier tongue than him. He is of the opinion that marriage is like the white icing on a birthday cake, you may have the icing if you want it but it really is just that --- superfluous, nothing more, nothing less. Can you believe that --- the consecrated Hindu institution of marriage being written off as superfluous? O' heavenly Gods, what hellish times are we living in, what new darkness has set upon the minds and the hearts of our dissolute young men? If that were all, however, it would still be a venial sin on his part, but he committed the mortal sin of rebuking bachelors who believe that marriage is a sacred system with his ironical remarks about Mr Dasgupta and Mr Misra. He said that Mr Misra is a bachelor who wants to marry a woman whom he loves, but as for Mr Dasgupta, he will compel himself to love the woman to whom he has already got married. Fancy that! Playing with words and bringing base irony into a holy matter as serious and grave as marriage!

(D) Marriage as A Nostalgic Yearning : Mr Lal Krishna Rajamohan:

After meeting Mr Aggarwal, a conversation with Mr Rajamohan is like a whiff of fresh air in a fusty room. Mr Rajamohan went to the University of Chicago for his Ph.D. in Astrophysics, but instead of pursuing his educational interests there he spent most of his time during the first six months carousing in the university's bars and pubs. One morning, however, he woke up at the crack of dawn, and as the sun's first rays touched his drunken lips, he underwent an apocalyptic conversion. He suddenly realised the immense hollowness, the utter perversity, and the inner moral bankruptcy of Western Civilisation which he felt at that moment was on a descending slope of irrevocable decline. Returning to India within a few weeks, he launched a national campaign to educate Indian children about the intrinsic purity of Indian Spirituality which, he believes, is far superior to anything that the West has produced so far. He is a pious twice-born Hindu who will never glance at any Western woman even once for he sincerely believes that they are the nests and the instruments of the Devil.

So, then, it is now time, my dear Indian parents with unmarried daughters, to make your choice from among these four Indian bachelors. Mr Dasgupta, needless to repeat, comes highly recommended from all quarters, with Mr Rajamohan, of course, breathing down closely on his neck, but which the lesser evil between the two of Mr Misra and Mr Aggarwal is must remain a ponderous issue that I am frankly unable to settle.

Yours transparently,
Mr Ironist

The Journey Towards Death

Suppose you have planned a holiday to Ibiza on July 12, 2005. You have bought your tickets, booked your hotel accomodation, and your travel agent has even given you a detailed itinerary for the one week that you shall be spending there. However, though you know precisely what you shall be doing in Ibiza and have quite a clear mental image of what you shall see there, you cannot actually be sure that you shall arrive at Ibiza. For all you know, the flight may be cancelled on that morning due to inclement weather, or you may be down in bed with a nasty flu, or you may have sprained your ankle the previous evening, or your sister may have to be admitted to some hospital for a postnatal complication.

Now contrast all these modalities with the journey towards death, a journey that you are engaged on even as you read these words. Firstly, this time you can be absolutely certain that there is no force in earth or in heaven that is potent enough to prevent you from reaching your destination, that is, Death. Secondly, unlike the proposed holiday to Ibiza where you know quite accurately what you shall see and do on that island if you get there, you do not have the same level of certitude concerning what shall happen to you on the other side of the grave.

The Irony of Primitivism

Until a hundred years ago (let us say 1913, the eve of the Great War), many Europeans thought that it was a part of their world-destiny to spread the light of their effulgent civilisation to the distant parts of the slumbering Orient steeped in primal darkness. More specifically, the Victorian anthropologists who travelled throughout the heartlands of India believed that the native Indians were disgusting and obnoxious primitives who needed a good deal of polishing through a thorough education in English etiquette, mannerisms, philosophy, and history.

Today, the wheel has turned full circle. The only place in the world where the 'primitives' of India are studied, and are in fact praised for having kept alive 'organic', 'synthetic', and 'cohesive' familial and kinship structures, are the socio-anthropological departments of UK, Europe and USA. I will not be very surprised if one of these days some British or American NGO decides to set up a Helpline for the people of these communities, or some Ph.D. students from Chicago, John Hopkins and Harvard establish a forum called 'Save The Indian Tribals' to exhibit their personal distaste for the homogenising effects of American globalisation. In short, within a span of one hundred years, the status of the primitives (or 'tribals') of India has shifted from being an object of the West's ridicule and abomination to being one of celebration and adulation. At the same time, however, go and ask any educated (and especially Anglicised) Indian where the tribals of India live, and you will receive the highly indignant and exasperated reply : 'For Christ's sake, I am telling you this for the last time! There are no tribals in India. Do you hear me? Blimey, we are a civilised nation now. Why can't you get that into your head?'

Metaphorical Changes

The traditional metaphors that we are used to deploying, almost unreflectively, in various types of social exchanges are distinctively corporeal. When we agree with each other, we say that we see eye-to-eye, and when we fight we struggle hand-to-hand. When we seek justice, it is tooth-for-a-tooth, and our bonds of solidarity bring us together shoulder-to-shoulder. Conversations take place heart-to-heart, and we move ahead hand-in-hand.

It seems, however, that the metaphors that we shall be using in the near future will instead be ethereal ones : we shall agree email-to-email, quarrel fax-to-fax, see .jpg-to.jpg, discuss blog-to-blog, and bond together net-to-net.

How To Become An Intellectual : The Essential DIY

We live in a culture of DIY (‘Do-it-yourself’) where books abound instructing you on how to do-for-yourself medicine, plumbing, novel-writing, book-reading, and house-selling. And this, I believe, is just the way things should be for I am always suspicious of people who claim, on the one hand, to have stumbled over a 'universal' truth but declare, on the other, that this truth must always be kept sacramentally cloaked in some stylized vocabulary. The standard term, of course, with which we refer to such people are the Intellectuals, and since they are here to stay, whether we love them or hate them, you might wish to read a DIY for Intellectuals in case you want to become one yourself in the future (or are forced by circumstances to sell yourself as one).


RULE 1 : Know Thy Word : This is one of the foundational stones of the Intellectual edifice : in order to be recognized as an Intellectual, you will have to possess a repertoire of terms, concepts, and ideas to pepper your writings with. In particular, you will have to pick up a significant number of those abstract nouns which you will routinely find interspersed throughout the texts of most Intellectuals. With time, you shall also learn how to translate, with supreme facility, everyday English into Intellectualese with a series of one-to-one mappings, mental transformations which will yield beautiful, ponderous, sonorous, and prosaic Intellectual English. Here are three examples to clarify the matter.

Non-Intellectual wife says to husband : ‘I just don’t understand you!’
Intellectual wife says to husband : ‘Meaning is a never-ending series of differences, is always absent and is interminably deferred.’

Non-Intellectual husband says to wife : ‘I am sick of your constant nagging.’
Intellectual husband says to wife : ‘Marriage is a social discourse into which domination is subtly inscribed, thereby silencing my voice which cannot be heard.’

Non-Intellectual wife says to husband : ‘All the buildings in our city look the same these days.’
Intellectual wife says to husband : ‘The homogenizing effects of globalization have flattened out all heterogeneities on the cultural landscape.’

As you can see, the experiences that the non-Intellectual and the Intellectual are both seeking to analyse, understand, or explain are in one sense very mundane ones, but the Intellectual commands a set of incantatory terms which can be combined, associated, or disassociated in different ways in different contexts.

RULE 2 : Know Thy Time : However, it would be very erroneous on your part to assume that this is all there is to becoming an Intellectual. Indeed, if it was simply a matter of learning how to perform a set of translatory transformations from every day English to Intellectualese, I could make an Intellectual out of a City banker in less than 6 hours. In addition to mastering these transpositions, you must have a keen sense of what is happening in the world and in the neighbourhood around you, be ready to think things over carefully and patiently, and pen down your thoughts somewhere in some form. In this connection, there are two types of Intellectuals, and you are quite free to choose which sort you want to become.

Type 1 : This type publishes a regular series of Tracts for the Times, that is, such an Intellectual is always contemporary. She is forever on the dot, analyzing and dissecting events as they happen, and therefore producing a stream of short books every six months. For this, she is sometimes castigated as being shallow, reckless, and opinionated, but with hindsight she might also be praised, twenty years down the line, as a very clairvoyant thinker. And if she herself wishes to enter this messy debate, she is always free to plead : ‘I have arrived too early for my time. People will understand me only when I am dead. Sigh.’
Type 2 : Intellectuals of this type are the long-suffering tortoises who will wait, watch, and move one step at a time after a lot of mind-numbing cogitation. They will look for the Big Picture, the Hidden Structure, the Grand Theory, and the Deep Reading behind the phenomena that everyone else is surrounded by. They are skilled in unearthing conspiracy theories, in informing people that things are not quite what they seem to be, and that their present misery is not in any way built into the structure of things. They normally produce books that run into 500 pages, quite clearly not meant for the consumption of the people for whom they are allegedly being written, and are the sweet fruit of a life-time spent in pondering the imponderables of life.

RULE 3 : Know Thy Enemy : Even this is not enough, for you must know in addition how to make the right career-move. Transposed into Intellectualese, this means that you must possess a knack for choosing the right side to fight on. As a general rule, never, ever try to intellectualise in defence of the group that is winning right now, for if you do you shall at once become a tainted Intellectual. Here is one example. You may believe, for all sorts of reasons, that the Americn Republican Party is infinitely superior to Stalin’s communist party. Fair enough, but if you want to become an Intellectual, just keep your opinions to yourself and keep your mouth shut, and as long as the Republicans are in power, do not venture to write anything supportive of them. Instead, hunt down some group that is on the losing side (or being ‘hegemonically silenced’), say the Greens in America. Write a massive three-volume history of the Green movement, tracing its origins to Caesar’s angry refusal to land in Britain in 53 BC when he realized that an entire stretch of land had been denuded for his army quarters, and depicting the current president of the Green party as Caesar’s spiritual descendant. This masterpiece, titled ‘After Green : Conservative Conversions’, will launch you at once into the vertiginous heights of intellectual fame, and will establish you as a defender of the rights of the downtrodden, the under-privileged, and the marginalized.

RULE 4 : Know Thy Market : In addition to mastering the above rules, you must also be a very good salesperson, and must be constantly aware of what market lies there outside your studying room. And even this is not enough, for you must also learn from your friends in the business schools how to create a market for yourself. These days, one of the most fertile areas in this context is Nationalism : pick up a certain stretch of land, go back into its past in some dusty archive, and try to show why the diverse and disconnected people living there today actually belong to the same ‘nation’. Before publishing your ground-breaking thesis, however, you must get the timing right : if you produce it too early, you will be damned as a reactionary, but if too late, you are just that --- too late.

RULE 5 : Know Thy Children : Having grasped these points, you are now ready for some advice concerning your Intellectual children. When you write, always keep something hanging in the air, some edges around your words, some gaps in the midst of your sentences, some whispers between your pages, and all of this is in order to give your readers the feeling ‘something is amiss’. This deliberate ambiguity will help you to reach out to a wide readership, and some of your readers may soon develop a micro-industry trying to interpret what you were ‘really’ trying to say. It may so happen that some of these Intellectual children of yours will publish views that are actually quite different from what you had intended to say. Never mind, just sit back and relax, everyone likes to be given a chance to intellectualise, even if in the shadow of a Great Master. You must also be ready to accept, however, that (at least) one of these children of yours will murder you (metaphorically, that is), and by renouncing all affiliations with your school, branch out into a completely new direction, and pretend that she has never heard of you, seen you, or met you.

RULE 6 : Know Thy Popularizers : Carrying on the former rule, suppose, however, that you do not actually commit the heinous crime of eating your Intellectual Parent for breakfast (metaphorically, that is, once again). In that case, you would like to ensure that the sacrosanct message that has been handed down to you remains uncorrupt and is transmitted inviolate to the next generation. You must then find a suitable vantage-point in the Intellectual world, and dutifully scan therefrom the barren landscape for anyone who might be trying to popularise this consecrated message without first being inducted into your holy community with the appropriate rites. As soon as you find some cheap journalist, news reader or novelist peddling your Intellectual ware to a wider public, you must assume at once a grave prophetic tone of apocalyptic judgement over the heathen public who persist in worshipping the false demons instead of bowing down to your Intellectual Parent, the one True God of whom you are the one True Messenger.

RULE 7 : Know Thy Lemon : When the fox could not reach the sweet grapes, he consoled himself with the thought that they were actually sour and that he was better off by not eating them. The reverse adage applies in Intellectualese and it is the one that can be labeled Sweet Lemons. In the Intellectual world, you will have to learn, whether you like it or not, to view the world through the spectacles of your words, your texts, your essays, and your books. Very soon, you will realize that you have stopped looking at the world, and are spending too much time juggling your words. The living world, that is, has collapsed into your lifeless words. Not to worry, however; just remember the Sweet Lemons advice, and all will be happy. What you will get from Intellectuals is a series of lemons, some yellow, some green, being passed around the dinner table, but unless you want to get kicked out from their charmed circle you must somehow convince yourself that these lemons are really sweet. (Trust me on this one, really.)

Post-Easter Depression

If you are suffering from Post-Easter Depression, just hang on and try to enjoy the moment, for my calendar says that the next Depression this year will be the Pre-Christmas Depression which is at least eight months away. To help you to survive through your PED, I offer you eight of my aphorisms on the Death of God :

(A) In the beginning was God. But God would have to be very lucky to be still around when it all comes to an end.

(B) Jesus Christ came into our world to show us how much God loves us. We have never forgiven Jesus Christ for that insult.

(C) If God is dead, everything is permitted. A powerful argument to be liberally used in all places --- all places except, of course, the court-room.

(D) God created Man in His own image. Man repaid God the compliment by creating Woman in his.

(E) Everything that Sigmund Freud said about God can be condensed into one short sentence : Religion is a sexually transmitted disease. Freud himself was the first man to be diagnosed with this disease; however, whether or not he was also the last man remains a hotly disputed matter in Vienna, Oxford, Chicago and Princeton.

(F) God is not born as, but if He can learn to suffer He may become, a human being.

(G) God is the Supreme Colonialist. He divides men into different religions and rules over them.

(H) Some religions prohibit human beings from eating chicken. This is because they object not to the suffering of the killed chicken but to the pleasure of the delighted eater.