Ironic Txts


Frens R 4eva.
Boyz R whateva.
Grls R, howeva.
(Wri8n by whoeva.)

The Anarchist Manifesto

It is perhaps a bit disappointing that an anarchist is so easily mistaken for an arsonist, as if there is nothing more to the concept of Anarchy than the razing down of buildings to the ground. Anarchy can be defined succintly in one sentence as : The creed that the most fundamental and non-negotiable right in all dimensions of our existence, interpersonal, social, religious, cultural, economic, and political, is the Right to Opt-Out or the Right of Exit.

An anarchist position need not deny that we have densely contextualised relationships with human beings around us, nor that these relationships themselves are to a significant extent moulded and influenced by the social norms and the moral assumptions prevailing in our home culture. What, however, it will strongly affirm is that all individuals, even when they draw their moral and spiritual sustenance from within such rich enframing backgrounds, retain at all times the inalienable Right of Exit, to Walk Out, to say No, in short, to Opt-Out.

Is this a classical 'Western' form of absolutist 'Individualism'? Perhaps, yes. But an anarchist will also claim that whatever be the historical judgement over the origin of this creed, anarchy as understood in this post has the power to speak and struggle with all those who have been sidelined and marginalised in the so-called familial and communitarian cultures of the 'East'. All human beings must move away from associations, institutions, and systems which deny them this right of Exit; and to the extent that they are capable of achieving this withdrawal, they are all united in an anonymous brother/sisterhood of anarchists in a freely chosen exile.

Parents who compel their daughters into an arranged marriage, intellectuals who pretend that school education is not a form of violence, a form of Islam which brands apostasy as a criminal offence, a version of Hinduism which still holds on to casteist traditions, and a development of Marxism which forbids free speech and free association --- these are just some of the great time-honoured institutions which fall foul of the Anarchist Manifesto.

One way of summarising the reflections here would be this : There is such a thing called teenage Angst; an anarchist stance will submit that for the sake of this Angst, human beings should never, ever grow out of their teens.

On Infinity

Ever since I read about transfinite numbers in school, I have been fascinated by the concept of Infinity. Some years ago, I came across a phrase from Nicholas de Cusa : 'a circle whose centre is nowhere but whose circumference is everywhere.'

One can talk about Infinity only parabolically. That is, only in parables, in the manner of telling a story.

Here, then, are four stories.

(a) Think of the real number 1 and the real number 2. Now think of how many real numbers there are between 1 and 2? How many? 1 ............., 1.00000001, 1.0000000000001, 1.0000000001 ..............1.5, 1.500000000000001, ..... 1.99999999, 1.99999999999999, ..........

(b) Look at the tree outside your window. Look at it like you have never done before. Don't think of it as just another tree, just another botanical species, just another collection of green leaves. Look at it as that irreplaceably unique tree.

(c) To forgive a deed which should be forgiven is a piece of commercial calculus. You truly forgive when you forgive what is utterly unforgivable.

(d) You are standing on a hill-top at dawn. Having passed through a night of agony, your bones are so heavy with grief that you cannot even stand still. And then. And then the orange dawn slowly breaks over the horizon.

Death, The Leveller
An Indian Christian theologian, Stanley J. Samartha, tells us in a book that I was reading last week that he was once present at the funeral of a Hindu friend of his who had married a Christian. Noting how his Hindu and Christian relatives went their separate ways after the last rites, Samartha writes :
'How strange it is that Hindus and Christians come together only in death, and live apart from one another when they are alive! And what about this Hindu person? Did he live as a Hindu who died as a Christian or did he live as a Christian who died as a Hindu? Who knows?'
I include this in an essay that I am writing on the topic of 'Karma and The Notion of 'Cosmic Justice'' with the following comment :
'To Samartha's poignant question, we may respond with that much-abused phrase 'God only knows'. And we may then add, 'And we may hope that God shall draw him up to the same fulness of salvation that we pray that God shall grant his wife''.

Edward Schillebeeckx

Father Schillebeeckx, a (Roman Catholic) Dominican monk, is one Christian theologian who has influenced me a lot. Having survived three enquiries into his 'unorthodoxy' by the Vatican, Schillebeeckx was asked why he continues to stay within the Catholic Church. To this, his reply went as : 'It is true that there are people in the Church today whose views I do not agree with it. However, if I move away from the congregration, it would imply that I want it to be perfect, here and now on earth. But no human institution can attain that perfection through itself, and to wish to reject it merely because it is imperfect is itself another heresy.'

Once he was asked what he does when he sees human beings suffering around him, and to this he responded : 'Oh, sometimes I just swear. Swear at God, I mean. Once when I heard that some of our Jesuit brothers had been gunned down in El Salvador I swore loudly. The next morning I told myself, 'Hey, I am a priest. I am not supposed to swear', but a voice within me replied, 'Don't worry. Swearing too is a form of praying. Just make sure, however, that you do something more than swearing.''

"Call Me Israel"

Between 1995 and 1998, I used to travel between Delhi and Guwahati by the Brahmaputra Mail. I do not like seating down at one place during train journeys, and I used to walk up and down the train, meeting various sorts of people and getting down at almost every station. In 1998, when I was coming back to Delhi, we were waiting near Mughalsarai for a green signal. I got down onto the platform and was staring at some black crows when I heard a voice behind me say, 'I so wish I could become a crow right now.'

I turned round to see a middle-aged person looking at the crows in front of me.

'Call me Israel', he said, extending his right hand towards me.

'Israel?', I queried, shaking hands with him.

'Yes, Israel. I am Israel Devadasan. In the Old Testament, Israel is another name for Jacob. It comes from the Hebrew word Yis'rael, meaning 'he who struggles with God''.

Thus started my friendship with Israel, and we talked through the rest of the journey until we reached old Delhi rail station.

One day, three months later, we met in Connaught Place for coffee near Nirula's, and the conversation turned round to the family. Israel was a man brimming over with one-liners and he threw one at me that afternoon : 'Every family, especially one with daughters in it, is a Fascism waiting to break out.'

'How do you mean?'

'Oh, just wait until these daughters grow up and come of marriageable age. Often, even the caste-parity will not be enough for the arranged marriage, it will have to be fine-tuned down to the nearest sub-sub-sub-caste. And if she wants to marry a Muslim or a Christian, ah well, I better not go into that story.'

'You are talking about Hindus?'

'Yes.'

'But the same hold for Christians too. Roman Catholics would usually not marry Protestants.'

'Yes, I know. A plague on all their houses.'

When I was in India in 2003, I tried to call up Israel in his home in Kozhikode and I was informed that he had died of a sudden illness in the winter of 2002.That one-liner of his, however, continues to haunt me, even in his absence : 'Every family, especially one with daughters in it, is a Fascism waiting to break out.'

Or, as I would put it, as a tribute to my dead friend : 'Anti-Tribalism is a higher revelation than religion.'

Death on the River

(A)

Jadunath was walking along the river bank. It was a wintry afternoon. A lazy sun was slowly sinking into the waters. Above him were clouds of every possible colour. Jadunath felt he wanted to go into a deep sleep from which nobody would wake him. He saw layers of thin mist veiling the other bank from his eyes.

A boatman came up to him and asked him if he wanted to go to the other side. Jadunath stepped into the boat and the boatman started rowing his boat away from the bank. Soon they were in the middle of the river. Jadunath looked into the boatman's eyes, mumbled something inside his mouth and then turned his head away.

The sun sank one inch deeper.

(B)


Jadunath had been in the police department for thirty years now. He had joined Homicide but soon his seniors realised that he had a keen sense for what 'goes on inside the killer's mind'. At any crime scene, Jadunath would be more interested in analysing its three-dimensionality than in collecting evidence. He tried to place himself in the shoes of the killer and the victim a few minutes before the crime. It was a gift. He had skills nobody had taught him.

Soon he was transferred to Forensics on the orders of people higher up. Over three decades, Jadunath built up a formidable reputation. He even stopped going to crime scenes. He would sit and wait for his juniors to come back with the bits and pieces and he would spend the whole night trying to fit them together. More often than not, they would hang together in the picture he would build up inside his mind. That was a picture only he could see, whereas others detected nothing but fingerprints and coincidences.

Three decades into the job, Jadunath realised one morning that somewhere along the line, something had snapped. The city police had been on the track of a serial killer for three months. The killer had struck six times within that period. Jadunath spent sleepless nights going over the details that had been collected from the crime scenes. The victims were always women in their teens, who were students and who smoked cigarettes. There was nothing much he could do with that : there were thousands of such women in the city on any one day.

And then one night, it all fell together in together. Jadunath saw it. The previous murders had been just a ploy to send the police running along a false track. He knew where the killer would strike next. The killer had been sending him messages through the earlier crimes about who his final victim would be.

(C)

But ... But Jadunath did not do anything. He felt a strange alliance with the killer. He did not want to be a spoilsport. He wanted to let the killer finish the job. He realised that he was so much inside the mind of the killer that he had become the killer himself. He and the killer were now the same, and there was nothing he could do to prevent the next strike. The killer he had been tracking was a master at his job and he did not want to catch him before he had finished his masterpiece.

The next morning, Jadunath knew he had been correct. He picked up the newspaper and the headlines told him that the police commissioner had been killed the previous night.

Jadunath began to feel that he did not know anymore the difference between good and evil. A strange malaise began to haunt him. He began to re-read the reports of earlier crimes that he had solved and felt that they had been all too naively executed. There was no criminal with an imagination to equal or challenge his. He had reached the stage where he could himself plan the perfect crime. He spent another six months tracking down killers and felt disgusted at their lack of finesse. He began to wish that criminals would have a talk with him before contemplating the next crime. That way, life would be at least a little bit more interesting inside the force.

(D)

The boatman had reached the other bank now. Jadunath slowly rose from the boat and jumped onto the sand. He looked behind him. On the other side, he could see the faint figures of a cowherd taking his cows home. The dust from the cows' feet and the sand had become one.

Did he find the Other Shore a strange place? Well, it was too early to say anything. He felt that something inside him had died when he was on the river. What would take its place? He did not know. However, at least he felt that he was walking on solid ground here. He did not want to spend the rest of his life debating over what was good and what was evil concerning every single incident inside his tired mind. He wanted to be liberated from that incessant cycle.

The boatman had now reached the middle of the river again. Behind his boat, a few ripples shining in the red sun.

Jadunath walked away.

His thick boots left deep footprints in the moist sand.

On 'Escapism'

Suppose I told you the following story about a certain Mr X. One moonlit night, when Mr X's wife and little boy were buried in the abyss of dreamless sleep, he got up from his royal bed, and slithered out of the palace into the mango groves nearby. He travelled on foot for a week until he reached the cool foothills of the Himalayas, set up a small hermitage for himself and lived there in silent meditation for the next ten years of his life.

Question time : What would we ('we' = 'Western, liberal, politically-correct, intellectuals') say about such a man?

An escapist, a philanderer, a Utopian, a misognyist, a coward, a fool?

Perhaps.

Anyway, I sometimes wonder how the Buddha (=Mr. X) got away so easily.

(Which brings me to another question. Some women have re-written the epic, the Ramayana, from Sita's 'point of view'. Why has no woman re-written the history of early Buddhism from Yasodhara's 'point of view'? Why accept the traditional hagiography of the Buddha's valiant rejection of the world and his heroic trail-blazing into Nirvana as the final world on the topic?)

Vicarious Suffering

(1) Take the case of a scientist who spends thirty-years working away at an organic compound trying to unearth its physical structure. Most of us will probably never hear of her, even if she manages to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Let us say, however, that she also happens to be someone who suffers from some serious physical/neurological disorder/disability. Film companies will immediately rush in to make movies on her, journalists to write books about her, and the halls and the bookshops will be packed with viewers and readers delighting in the suffering of a fellow human being.

(2) Some Hindu families have a deep respect for the supreme sacrifice (tyaga/sannyasa) made by the 'world-renouncers', the Acaryas, the Swamijis, and the Gurujis. I take it, however, that Hindu parents, even those who have this veneration, would be utterly distraught if their own children were to announce to them one morning that they wanted to renounce the world too. I wonder why this is so. If 'world-renunciation' is a noble move, why is it other people who have to 'renounce' the world and not people in their own family?