The Anarchy of Thought

2006-09-10T10:53:00.000+01:00

Exiled at ‘Home’ : the perplexities of an engaged self

It was sometime in the January of this year that I first understood or, to put it a bit prosaically, gathered into my inner being, (at least) something of what (some) women mean when they say that they find the ‘male gaze’ threatening and perceive it to be laden with ominous significations. I had returned from the UK after seven years, and had so thoroughly internalised the un/spoken rule that you do not stare at someone unless you wish to enter into some sort of conversation that the curious gawks of people eye-ing me made me feel uneasy, nervous and edgy. When I would step into a grocery, a cyber-café, a chemist, a milk-booth or cellphone-recharge outlet, the shopkeeper would, with uncanny regularity, stare at me and wait for a while, almost as if he were mulling over my question, searching for hidden contradictions in it. Matters were made worse by the fact that it was only after a few weeks that I ‘remembered’ that I am not supposed to ‘wait for my turn’ at Indian shops; I once waited at a grocery for half an hour on the assumption that I was standing in a (non-existent) queue. As time passed by, I gradually began to be made aware, through numerous subtle signals that dart through the dense criss-crossing chains that constitute the social matrix, that I was some sort of an ‘Outsider’. The owner of a cyber-café that I frequent once showed me a 20 $ note and asked me what its worth would be in Indian rupees; when I asked him why he thought that I would be capable of answering his question, he replied, ‘Oh, you are not from these parts.’ The slander (or the benediction?) that I was not ‘from these parts’ stuck on to my mind’s eye as the months rolled on. I suddenly realised for the first time that all the shopkeepers near my place never spoke to me in Hindi, and would try to match my circuitous Hindi with an equally tortuous English. When I would go to Connaught Place (a.k.a. Rajiv Chowk) in the evenings, tourist guides would walk up to me asking if me if I wanted to be shown into some five-star hotel or taken on a trip to Agra, and travel agents would press upon me to get my dollars exchanged at the ‘best market rates’.

Such experiences filled (and continue to fill) me with a curious ambivalence : simultaneously with dread, with irritation, and with ‘homelessness at home’. First, the dread. Though I suppose some people think that my ‘knowledge of the world’ is somewhat ‘bookish’, I would instead say that it is quite ‘filmish’. Over the last seven years, I have waded my way through such a deluge of movies based on the Crusades, World War I, World War II, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, Vichy France, the French Resistance, Stalinist Russia, Algeria, Cuba, Panama, Indo-China and Vietnam that there are times, especially when I am in a bus, a market-place or the Underground (!), when I cannot help asking myself if the person sitting next to or in front of me is a CIA, MI5 or Mossad agent in plainclothes. In its dispensation of the spy-genre, Hollywood has cast such an enticing spell over me that I seem to ‘see’ schemes, intrigues, stratagems, ruses, machinations and conspiracies everywhere : to echo Shakespeare, the whole world is one gigantic Plot and I am but a Secret Agent (even if not quite of the 007 variety). Indeed, students, Ph.D. or otherwise, who wish to investigate the role that the media or info-entertainment plays in ‘constructing consciousnesses’ or in ‘in-forming subjectivities’ might do well to have a chat with me on these matters. I have absorbed so much from these war-movies that I feel at times that I am now capable, (somewhat in the manner of Sherlock Holmes’ lesser-known brother, Mycroft Holmes), of fighting an entire World War right from my laptop, matching strategy with counter-strategy, and wonder, in fact, why I am not yet in the Indian Ministry of Defence’s counter-intelligence wing. Indeed, I believe it is extremely juvenile, not to say ridiculous, to wage wars with ‘real’ guns, tanks and soldiers; wars should be fought ‘in the mind’ as a ‘hyper-real’ means of exercising the grey cells. Be that as it may, when people are able to mark me out as non-Indian, or at least, as one who is not from their parts, a cold dread, almost as a reflex-(re)action, runs through my spine at once. I have to force myself to be ‘sensible’ and to remind myself that if those around me were indeed secret agents they would have never asked me such questions and broken ‘radio-silence’.

Second, the irritation : for all my rationalising away, and implicit condoning, of people’s inquisitive stares in this way, I cannot help feel irritated when I (am forced to) become the focus of their attention or, to use a delicate word, their ‘interest’. I suppose the greatest dilemma that faces me is that of becoming as anonymous as possible while living at the volatile interstices of the social world, and the knowledge that I am being observed or scrutinised by someone threatens to rend the protective veil of comforting obscurity with which I wish to be perpetually enveloped. It is at these moments that I sorely and desperately miss the anonymity that I enjoyed (and relished) during my time in the UK; I could, if (an important qualifier) I so wished, hide almost everything about myself from even the proverbial girl-next-door. A popular argument that runs through the Indian social fabric is that the ‘West’ is a land of abstract, individualistic, and egomaniac atoms that flit through empty space with no sense of community, kinship, cohesion, or affinity. High rates of divorce, broken marriages, substance abuse, drug addiction, and teenage pregnancies are the instances that comprise the well-worn artillery of those Indians who direct their fiery wrath (read : self-righteous indignation) at the allegedly tottering citadel of the ‘West’. To fully engage with the whole gamut of issues that these ‘East-West’ culture-wars throw up will require several pages, if not volumes; for the moment, I shall simply retort, even if somewhat obliquely, that ‘those who live in glass houses should not throw stones at others’. I have seen and experienced enough of what happens to individuals within the sanitised zone of authentic ‘Indian values’ to regard the straightforward equation, in the manner of an ‘essentialisation’, of the ‘West’ as a land of perverse, deracinated and asocial individuals, as anything more than a school-boy subterfuge intended to camouflage the violence, implicit as well as explicit, that runs through the skeins of the ‘Indian family’. This, in turn, is connected to the reason why I never watch Bollywood movies except in ‘exceptional’ circumstances. I am not temperamentally a ‘reductionistic’ person, but when it comes to Bollywood I cannot help declaring in a reductionistic tone that the singular message that rings out clearly (even if there are notable exceptions to this rule, and may their tribe multiply!) through the morass of the movies that it churns out is this : ‘Such is the doom that awaits you if you fail to get your daughter married off, or at least ‘engaged’, by the age of twenty-five’. The Indian family-values that Bollywood dotes on, patronises as a gesture of ‘social service’ to the nation, and exalts to the skies are precisely the ones that I find extremely didactic, moralistic, paternalistic, vapid, insidious, invasive and intrusive; and its sickening success is perhaps a menacing reminder of how deeply-rooted these values must be in the swooning audiences that it commands, manipulates and controls with such frightening regularity, across all religions, all castes and all classes. Thus I can say unhesitatingly that, given a choice, I would rather watch a company of fifty French and German soldiers shooting one another to death in some God-forsaken valley on the Somme, the Rhone or the Rhine than endure a three-hour long saga where an Indian woman is painfully battered to a slow, lingering death as a kaleidoscopic host of so-called Indian values are drilled into her, in a gruelling moralising narrative ranging from her childhood through her ‘marriageable years’ up to her old age.

These family-values assault you on every side with the weight of Normative assumptions, if only you pause for a while to examine the ones that saturate practically everything that is handed out to you. Here is one from ‘personal experience’ : some months ago, I was informed by a ‘well-meaning’ aunt that she had found an Assamese ‘marriageable’ girl for me. As many as three Normative suppositions are condensed into this terse statement, and, as it so happens, they are ones that I find extremely hideous. First, she assumed that I am heterosexual, thereby replicating the view that heterosexuality is the Norm and homosexuality an aberration; second, she assumed that I would be ‘interested’ in marriage in the first place, thus strengthening the standpoint that institutionalised marriage is the Norm; and, third, she assumed that I would be drawn to an Assamese girl merely because she is Assamese, in the process furthering cultural/linguistic chauvinism or jingoism as a Norm.

But to return from the digression, the irritation at being denied this ‘right to anonymity’ is, of course, not simply a matter of being compelled to become willy-nilly the locus of curiosity, for this denial has implications that I can only categorise as sinister. One of the first questions that I am asked by those who want to ‘make conversation’ or ‘get to know me’ is about my father, and it is one that I find deeply odious, repulsive, and distasteful, for it is surely an indication of the pervasiveness of patriarchal values and notions in the Indian milieu that one believes that an individual’s identity, distinctiveness or personality is connected with Issues (no pun intended) of Paternity. Here are, by way of suggestion for those who just may wish, for whatever inexplicable reasons, to ‘make conversation’ with me, as many as ten non-odious questions they could ask me : ‘Would you rather watch baseball or football on TV?’, ‘Have you ever journeyed to somewhere within the Arctic Circle?’, ‘If you were living in 1918 Russia, would you have joined the Tsarists, the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks?’, ‘Who do you think are the greater racists, the Indians or the Europeans?’, ‘Have you watched the latest movie of Almodovar?’, ‘Who do you think was a greater composer, Schubert or Sibelius?’, ‘Is your mind one that is never at rest?’, ‘Who do you think sells better milk --- Mother Dairy or Amul?’, ‘Do you think Eva Longoria is over-rated?’ and ‘Have you ever been to the fort at Fatehpur Sikri?’ This pervasive obsession with the Family (and especially with the Sign of the Father), this all-encompassing perception that you have not ‘identified’ an individual unless and until you have ‘located’ him or her within some familial context is also associated with the omnipresence of the hierarchical notions of stratification that cut across the overlapping manifolds of the Indian social matrix.

Which brings me to the third type of ‘irritating’ experience, that of being addressed with the that most despicable honorific ‘Sir’. Looking back over the years, I can now see that the sole reason why I did not appear for the Indian Administrative Service or go into the medical, engineering, judicial or technical ‘streams’ was my horror that some so-called junior officer would, sooner rather than later, speak to me as ‘Sir’. The only time I came close to ragging a student during my college days in Delhi was when in my third year a freshman persistently addressed me as ‘Sir’ even after my repeated warnings to my contrary. So deep, in fact, is my distaste for such terms laden and permeated through and through with inegalitarian presuppositions and implications that it is with some degree of uneasiness that I speak Indian languages which make a distinction between the ‘personal you’ (Hindi : tum, Bengali : tumi) and the ‘honorific you’ (Hindi : aap, Bengali : aapni). (If I were some sort of a linguistic dictator, I would like to erase all traces of the ‘honorific you’ from Indian languages, thank you very much.) I once flipped through an examination text-book in a second-hand bookshop that declared on its cover, ‘50 Letters For Examinations’ and came across a letter written to a Bank Manager that went as, ‘Sir, I humbly beg [italics mine] to state that I am Mr.___’ A paradigmatic instance precisely of that servile ‘Sir-dom’ mentalite that is perhaps a lasting colonial hangover, one that I find so nauseating in so much around me.

A month ago, I was roaming through the vacant deserted places of Connaught Place at nine in the morning on a Sunday morning when a young boy walked up to me with the question, ‘What is your name, Sir?’ It was bad enough that he had ventured to ask me for my name, but to top it with a ‘Sir’ was infinitely more repulsive. I furtively glanced at the thick wad of tourist guides in his right hand, and could immediately see that he had taken me (not yet again!) for an ‘Outsider’, but not wishing to get drawn into another frustrating conversation over hotel-rooms, dollar-bills and Agra-trips, I walked straight into the underground market at Palika without answering his question. He tenaciously followed me in, and after a while I too gave in, trying to give evasive replies to a long set of questions that he began to hurl at me, until he came to this one, ‘Where are you from and what is your name, Sir?’ Swallowing my exasperation for once, I replied, ‘I am Pablo, from Spain’. What followed was a long-winded conversation in the course of which he told me that he was from Allahabad ‘only’, that he did not want any money from me ‘only’, and that he was trying to practise his English ‘only’. When we came out into the sunlight, he asked me for a 10$ bill for having ‘shown me around’, to which I could only reply that I had no such thing on me. Then he launched a Parthian shot at me packed with a crescendos of ‘Sirs’ : ‘Not worry, Sir. Anytime you need me, I am here, Sir. And I noticed you never asked me for my name. I am Ankur. You are not like the other tourists who come here, Sir. Although you are foreign, I think you are very Indian.’

So I walked back through the still-vacant spaces of Connaught Place, feeling curiously unsettled and yet at ‘at home’. The words of Jawaharlal Nehru, a much-maligned figure at present in some circles, came floating to me, and despite the jarring note struck by their gendered invocation of India as ‘feminine’, they resonated ‘somewhere’ deep within me : ‘India was in my blood and there was much in her [sic] that instinctively thrilled me. And yet, I approached her [sic] almost as an alien critic, full of dislike for the present as well as for many of the relics of the past that I saw. To some extent I came to her [sic] via the West and looked at her as a friendly Westerner might have done.’ In some respects, I have perhaps become that much-hated figure of the R.S.S. and parallel formations, a Nehruvian pseudo-secular Indian alienated from the wellsprings of the cultural heritage. And yet, if it is ‘secularism’ and ‘Hinduism’ (incidentally, two extremely slippery terms) that are stake, I am certainly in a highly ambivalent position, for if ‘Hinduism’ constitutes, whether in part or in totality (and this is an extremely disputable point), the ‘wellsprings of the cultural heritage’, I have by now been engaged for seven years with the plurality of socio-cultural traditions that go under the umbrella-term of ‘Hinduism’. That is, far from having studied too little of ‘Hinduism’, I have perhaps studied too much of it! Which is why the statement ‘Exiled at ‘Home’’ is not quite a helpless lament, though it is not quite a jubilant exultation either; it is rather an expression of my perplexity at finding myself so out-of-place in a space that I recognise to be my ‘home’.

Elsewhere, Nehru, struck perhaps by a somewhat similar perplexity, asked : ‘Which of the two Englands came to India? The England of Shakespeare and Milton, of noble speech and writing and brave deed, of political revolution and the struggle for freedom … or the England of the savage penal code and brutal behaviour, of entrenched feudalism and reaction? For there were two Englands … The two Englands live side by side, influencing each other, and cannot be separated; nor could one of them come to India forgetting completely the other.’ Perhaps there are likewise (at least) two ‘Indias’, and these two are so densely intertwined with and imbricated in each other that they cannot easily be taken apart, and my own bafflement emerges from the fact that while I know which ‘India’ I wish to go to, I cannot disentangle myself from the other ‘India’ in which I am rooted. The former is a ‘India’ that somehow manages to keep alive the sense of a yearning, a longing or a hankering after a primordial Silence that slumbers not beyond but in the midst of the racket that ineluctably stamps itself on the valences, ambiguities and uncertainties of quotidian existence, and the latter is a ‘India’ that is propelled by a mindless Noise that is believed to be the motor of a self-propagating automaton hurtling away to a so-called shining future. Like Nehru’s ‘two Englands’, the ‘two Indias’ that I have outlined here (even if in some ideal-typical fashion) have, in fact, co-existed throughout the historical record; and finding myself immersed in the latter ‘India’ while craving for a fleeting foretaste of the former ‘India’, I often find myself ‘homeless’ even when I know I am at ‘home’. Thus living on the fault-lines (even if not always clearly discernible) of these two ‘Indias’, life has become, so to speak, an experiment in being amphibian, with one foot in the one and another foot in the other. Or, perhaps it is precisely this experience of a separation, of a rupture or of a drifting apart from my ‘deepest roots’ that is the truest homecoming, even if that homecoming is only the temporary interlude before yet another estrangement, and so on ad infinitum before death mercifully intervenes to terminate this painful dialectic of partition, reconciliation, partition, reconciliation ...

2006-06-24T09:17:00.000+01:00

Perceptions of Otherness

About ten years ago, I was walking with a school-friend along a narrow lane in the city of my birth (a less circuitous way of putting this last phrase would simply be to say ‘my home-city’, but for the fact that the word ‘home’ has always had ominous connotations for me) when I blurted out, ‘This must be a Muslim area.’ To his question, ‘What makes you think so?’, I replied instantaneously, ‘I don’t think so, I feel so’. A few weeks later, I was on the North-East Express bound for Delhi when it got delayed for several hours at the rail-junction of Mugalsarai in the United Provinces (now, of course, called Uttar Pradesh; but I prefer the British term since it helps to further the illusion of unity). I was walking up and down the noisy platform for several hours when this brief conversation suddenly flashed across my mind, and I began to ponder over it. By the time the train moved into Delhi, I had begun to understand something of why I had felt that the locality had to be a ‘Muslim’ one. One of my mother’s closest friends was a Muslim lady who used to live in a highly congested part of the city criss-crossed with noisy long-winding alleys, and when I was in junior school, my mother often took me to her house which was itself rather dimly-lit (dimly-lit, that is, from the ‘normal’ perspective; given my ‘abnormalcy’, of course, I prefer to live in precisely such rooms). Unknown to myself, I had grown up with the perception that congested, shabby and dimly-lit areas are ‘Muslim’ ones, such that these socio-economic markers had become for me the identifying characteristics of a ‘Muslim’ zone. (This many years before I came across the word ‘ghetto’ or read about the Jewish ghettos in Europe.)

I was then in my second year of college at Delhi, and began, in an introspective turn, to turn my inner gaze onto whatever perceptions of otherness I might be harbouring within myself. I became acutely conscious of the various types of markers, socio-religious, socio-economic, and/or socio-cultural that are available as labels to ‘cut out’ the social world (what in technical terms is called the ‘social ontology’), or freeze its intractable messiness, into (ostensibly) neat (and usually binary) categories. To carry on with the ‘Muslim’ case, for example, during my time in the UK, quite often Muslim men passing me by on the street would greet me as ‘Brother!’, and this presumably because of my long beard. I would immediately return the greeting, though I would, at the same time, feel uneasy about the ‘reason’ why I had been marked out as ‘Muslim’. For these Muslim Brothers, keeping a long beard is apparently a distinctive (and supposedly decisive) mark of being a ‘Muslim’. (I suppose that my paternal grandmother, who is, for all practical purposes, an Islamophobe, would be horrified that her grandson has been perceived, and welcomed, as one of the Enemy.) Not only this, I always get into a spot of trouble at international airports : because of my ‘looks’ (an American friend at Cambridge once told me that I look somewhat like a starving Afghan refugee) and, in particular, my beard, I am subject to a special scrutiny, and on one occasion an intense interrogation was conducted at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi regarding why I was ‘re-entering’ India. (The passport official on that occasion should thank her stars that I saved her, and her ‘superiors’, a lot of trouble by forcefully keeping to myself the barrage of ironical replies I could have thrown at her. I really wanted to ask her if she would have put this question to Indira Gandhi herself when she was returning from Somerville College, Oxford.)

There are, of course, various types of historical ‘reasons’ for this perception of Muslims as the ‘others’, and this is not quite the place to rehearse them. Suffice it to say that the notion of Muslims as the descendants of marauders and invaders has descended (no pun intended) so deep into, or, to invert the spatial metaphor, ascended so high in, some forms of the ‘Hindu psyche’ that even Hindus who do not even know precisely where the Turks, the Huns, the Scythians or the Mughals came from are unanimous in their perception of Muslims as cherishing, deep under their skins, barbaric, ravenous and rapacious intentions. (As for myself, I would rather regard my presently-living paternal grandmother as a far more hostile and belligerent being than a Muslim friend simply because the latter’s remote ancestor six centuries ago happened to wield a sword in his hands.) Then, of course, there is the stock socio-cultural marker of food : the Muslims are the paradigmatic beef-eaters. The first time that I realised that Hindus do not eat beef was, in fact, as late (or as early?) as my tenth class in school when one of my aunts (who, perplexingly enough, is otherwise, to all intents and purposes, on quite friendly terms with the Muslim lady I referred to above) asked me not to date, or, to put it in less Americanised and more orthodox ‘Indian’ vocabulary, not to marry, a Muslim girl. On asking her the ‘reason’ for this interdict (for at that time, all girls somehow looked the same to me, and I was intrigued by the implication that it was possible, according to my aunt at least, to identify some of them as ‘Muslim’), I was told that Muslims are the ones who eat beef. For some reason, this spurred me on to find out more about Islam, and I was amazed to discover that what from an internal (what social anthropologists call emic) perspective is almost inconsequential to the self-understanding of Muslims themselves (for I myself soon encountered some Muslim friends who found beef tasteless) had been highlighted, from the external Hindu (etic in social anthropological terms) one, as the identifying marker of a ‘Muslim’. I began to ask practically every Hindu I knew precisely who s/he thought a Muslim was, and my irritation began to mount when I began to receive ad nauseam the same reply in the manner of an old gramophone record that had got stuck on one groove : ‘a beef-eater’. As moronic, I began to think, as ‘defining’ a Hindu as ‘a cow-worshipper’ : I would put down myself as ‘Hindu’ on a census report (even though I would actually prefer the Government of India not to ‘report’ my existence at all), but I can state in unequivocal terms that I am no worshipper of cows; indeed, to put the point bluntly, I have believed for a long time now that cows are some of the most superfluous entities on this planet and that instead of starving themselves to death on the Indian roads, in their attempt perhaps to emulate a Hindu ascetic, they should rather fill the bellies of emaciated men and women starving in the slums and elsewhere.

Another indicator of perceptual difference among Indians seems to be that of ‘colour’ : while I take it that not many Indians, because of the centuries of colonial experience, will be frank enough to admit this, ‘colour’ does play a vital role in ordering, classifying and evaluating the objects that constitute their social ontology. One of my earliest memories is, in fact, one of my paternal aunts commenting to another one : ‘We went to see a girl for him [that is, a cousin]. She is very fair-skinned, unlike the other one who was dark.’ This, of course, is no isolated incident, as anyone who reads the Times Matrimonials will know : almost every girl in its columns is either ‘fair-skinned’ or has a ‘wheatish complexion’. (Though I wonder if, for the rice-belt of India at least, the last phrase should instead be ‘ricish complexion’. It was, in fact, in these matrimonials, which as I always say, should be renamed patrimonials, that I first encountered the word ‘complexion’. On asking a friend in my college what sort of a complexion she thought I had, I had to satisfy myself with the somewhat obscure reply : ‘I think you have many complexes, yes, but otherwise you are rather complexion-less.’ Perhaps I was not ‘mature’ enough to understand that remark.) Again, it is symptomatic that millions seem to buy a so-called beauty cream that sells itself as ‘Fair and Lovely’ : apparently, it is not possible for an Indian woman to be the latter without being the former. Now, the perceptions of white as related to purity, innocence and spotlessness, and of black as signifying impurity, maliciousness and offensiveness are, of course, rooted in the classical (post-Vedic) Sanskritic literature. Sattva, the guna representing the ‘saintly’ qualities is associated with the white colour, and tamas which stands for the ‘hellish’ attributes is connected with the black colour. One can go off into all sorts of tangents from here, but I shall indicate only one, without entering into an extensive discussion on the matter. The term varna has been hotly debated by various scholars, and, in particular, by Dalit writers who argue that it should be translated as ‘colour’ such that the classical Hindu varna-asrama system is to be regarded as a ‘racist’ one. (Hence the notorious ‘fair-skinned’ Aryan versus ‘dark-complexioned’ Dravidian debate.) Whether or not this claim is valid, it does at least underscore the prevalence of various typologies of colour-association in the mental architecture of classical, and arguably ‘modern’, Hindu thought. Here are two instances. Some months ago, when I was in the ‘city of my birth’, one of my uncles put this question to me : ‘Are the Negros thieves and scoundrels?’ It took me several moments to recover from this question. For one, it was, as it so happens, the first time that I had encountered the word ‘Negro’ outside a novel, a documentary or a movie. And, for another, I was struck to realise how the White perception of Blacks as inherently aggressive, mendacious and violent had been transferred, through the invisible links that facilitate such cultural transfers of social perceptions, to my uncle far away in a corner of India. Perhaps he was unaware that his perception of the ‘Negros’ as hostile beings was, in fact, a neat (neo-colonial) replication of the British perception (though one with several outstanding exceptions) of the ‘Indian natives’ as such. (I wonder sometimes how the Kenyans and the Nigerians who study in the University of Delhi and elsewhere in India are ‘received’ by their landlords and classmates. I will not be surprised if the latter fear that the Motherland is being polluted by the presence of these ‘Negros’.) Again, some weeks ago, a cousin of mine sent me a text message on my cell which was a ‘SMS joke’ beginning with the question : ‘What did God say when he [a pronoun that was sufficient in itself to raise my indignation] created the first Negro?’ Perhaps for my cousin, this was an ‘innocent’ joke, and I too swallowed my indignation and took it in that ‘spirit’. At the same time, however, this led to me reflect on how certain perceptions are, depending variously on your lived experiences, are no ‘laughing matter’.

It was no laughing matter, for example, for some of the ‘Russians’ (I am using the umbrella-term here for the sake of convenience) at Cambridge who had gone, out of curiosity, to a musical called ‘Stalin’ at the Cambridge Arts Theatre which was, in some ways at least, a rather hilarious enactment of some of Stalin’s foibles. For me, who have access to only second-hand reports from books and documentaries about the spectre and the terrors of Stalinism, the musical was in some ways an ‘innocent’ jibe at Stalin. (And indeed, I am not sure that I was able to grasp all the allusions that it threw at the audience.) For the ‘Russians’, on the other hand, the events parodied in it were too close to their memories, and hence too direct and too painful, and were perhaps reminiscent of atrocities committed on their own near ones in the not too recent past. In other words, though we all have certain perceptions of otherness --- for such is necessarily the case unless we believe in the lazy slogan, ‘We are all the same in absolutely every way’, a slogan which, at first sight, seems to be very ‘inclusive’ but can rapidly turn out to possess ‘totalitarian’ implications by seeking to flatten out all distinctiveness into one homogenous ‘lump’ --- the perceptions that are acceptable to us depend vitally on what I have referred to here as the content and the nature of our ‘lived experience.’

For instance, one my greatest passions is watching World War II movies and documentaries (especially ones relating to the so-called Jewish Question), and I have, over the last eight years, absorbed such a voluminous amount of material relating to the Holocaust that today whenever I see the Hindu Swastika in a home, a hotel sign-board, a text-book, a taxi, an auto, or a T-shirt, a shiver of horror runs through my spine even though I am aware of its distinctive significance within the highly specific context of the Hindu socio-religious order. I am even more horrified when I see, every now and then, a young college-boy or college-girl sporting, apparently in the attempt to be ‘cool’, a T-shirt with the slanted, that is, the one slanted slightly towards the right, (Nazi) Swastika. What is even more ironic is that some of these students are from the North-Eastern part of India, and are what in the mainstream sociological literature are referred to (rather glibly) as the ‘tribals’. (Which itself is another perception of difference, this one between the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘margins.’ For who has delineated these ‘margins’? And where precisely is this ‘mainstream’?) As the ‘marginalized’ peoples of India, for such is often their self-understanding, surely they should be the last ones to brandish a symbol that stood for the marginalization, to the point of annihilation, of almost a third of European Jewry.

That leads me on to register another signifier of otherness : the rather mysterious category of the ‘tribal’. I do not remember precisely when but at some ‘point in time’ I did become vaguely aware that almost all the maid-servants who were employed in the house (note again that I do not say ‘home’; English is such a beautiful language which it comes to these subtleties) were ‘tribals’. (Now, of course, it is a bit clearer to me today than it was earlier why this was so : to put it concisely, ‘tribal labour’ is cheaper and more readily available than ‘mainstream labour’.) They all had, in the truly immortal words of one of my paternal aunts, the ‘tribal cut’, which, when translated into anthropological jargon, would read as : ‘possessing Mongoloid or Tibeto-Burman features’. I was rather intrigued that in the social perception of those in the ‘mainstream’, the tribals were supposed to simultaneously harbour contradictory features : on the one hand, they were supposed to be docile, shy, coy, quiet, pliant and pliable, but, on the other, they were also feared as dark, sinister, irascible, petulant, and hostile beings. Thus, as for the maid-servants, they were, on the one hand, praised (and prized) as hard-working, dutiful, respectful and obedient, but were also, on the other, viewed rather suspiciously as irresponsible, unreliable, vicious and resentful. Much later I was to realise that there are significant parallels between the perceptions of the Whites concerning the Blacks, of the colonial masters regarding the natives, and of the ‘mainstream’ relating to the ‘tribals’ : in each of these cases, the former re-present the latter as possessing contradictory characteristics, such that the Whites, the colonialists and the ‘mainstream’ respectively believe the Blacks, the natives and the ‘tribals’ respectively to be simultaneously docile and timid, on the one hand, and hostile and aggressive, on the other. Not that, I guess, many in the ‘mainstream’, especially the ‘educated’ ones among them, would be willing to admit their perception of the ‘tribals’ as people with split identities. Nevertheless, this ‘tribalism’ continues to be one of the most significant signifiers of difference, as exemplified in the delightfully precise remark of one of these aunts as to why she did not like the girl that one of her relations was ‘dating’ : ‘Everything is OK with her. But, then, she has the tribal cut.’

Some months ago, I went to visit my mother’s Muslim friend. The old house was gone, and two floors had been raised over it. The dimly-lit room too had disappeared, and all the rooms were now bright, well-lit, and freshly painted. Her (only) daughter had married a Hindu in the meantime. Had that not, to put it mildly, raised some eyebrows? In return, I was offered a most intriguing story about her ‘roots’ : one of her ancestors had been a disciple of the Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti at Ajmere. ‘We believe’, she went on to say, ‘that all these categories that we apply pertain only to the flesh, to the masks we wear, to these fragile structures that we carry around ourselves. But deep down, we are all the same.’ I would not quite phrase the matter in these precise terms (for, as I have noted above, the argument that we are ‘all ultimately the same’ has been used to justify totalitarian regimes which have denied, and suppressed, alterity and heterogeneity); I would rather say that there are no inherent marks or attributes that allow us to evaluate human beings in terms of the categories of ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’. Nevertheless, after a long time in my life, I felt, even if for a short while, that I not just in a building with four walls (a ‘house’), but also breathing an atmosphere that was neither hostile to genuine difference nor inhospitable to the search for a common humanity (a ‘home’) even in the midst of our seemingly radical dissimilarities.

Then, of course, after dinner at her place, I walked out into the streets of the city of my birth : the city whose roads are apparently filled with Muslims, Muslim girls, Negros and people with the ‘tribal cut’.

2006-06-20T08:27:00.000+01:00

The Summer of '06

I got my first real six-string

Bought it at the five-and-dime

Played it till my fingers bled

It was the summer of 69

Me and some guys from school

Had a band and we tried real hard

Jimmy quit and Jody got married

I shoulda known wed never get far

Oh when I look back now

That summer seemed to last forever

And if I had the choice

Ya - Id always wanna be there

Those were the best days of my life

Aint no use in complainin

When you got a job to do

Spent my evenins down at the drive-in

And thats when I met you

Standin on your mamas porch

You told me that youd wait forever

Oh and when you held my hand

I knew that it was now or never

Those were the best days of my life

Back in the summer of 69

Man we were killin time

We were young and restless

We needed to unwindI guess

nothin can last forever - forever

And now the times are changin

Look at everything thats come and gone

Sometimes when I play that old six-string

I think about ya wonder what went wrong

Standin on your mamas porch

You told me it would last forever

Oh the way you held my hand

I knew that it was now or never

Those were the best days of my life

Back in the summer of 69

I still remember the first time I heard (bits of) this song : the evening of July 14, 1995. I was walking down one of the empty corridors of Mukherjee West in St Stephen’s, Delhi the night before the opening of college for the autumn semester, 1995, when some of these words came floating through a half-empty door. Suddenly, the music was turned off and instead a question was barked out to me from a distance : ‘Are you a fresher?’ The door was now flung wide open and I was asked to come in. A flurry of some introductory questions followed in quick succession with the music turned back on : When did I move in? What course would I pursue in college? Where did I complete my schooling?

The lights went out around this time, one of the many unpredictable power cuts that I would get used to during the next few years, and I was taken out on to the balcony facing the noisy basketball court.

‘Why did you choose to study physics?’
‘Well, it has something to do about power.’
‘What about power? What does that have to do with physics?’
‘You can want to have power either over other people or over yourself. Those who seek the former become engineers, architects, town planners, business executives, diplomats, psychiatrists, and I.A.S. officers. Those who want the latter could try studying physics.’
‘And what makes you think that studying physics will give you power over yourself?’
‘If you want to study physics, it could be because you have a certain faith in reality. A faith that lying under the apparent chaos, indeterminacies, puzzles and disorders which strike your eyes, there is a deep, cosmic order that you have to find out through the formal beauty of mathematical equations. A faith that ultimately, at some level or the other, everything is interconnected, symmetrical and harmonious, and that consequently there is no genuine randomness or discord in the world. Everything absolutely follows some pattern, even if that elusive pattern cannot be discerned by the physical eye. Once you have this faith, and nurture it everyday, and let it grow in strength, you begin to gain power over yourself.’

Even today I often find myself returning to this somewhat surreal conversation. Those were the days when I was in love in numbers, especially with the abstract symmetry of mathematics which I believed (and, in fact, still believe) to be truly timeless, far removed from the messiness and the muddledness of the world around me. Today it is instead words, their delightful playfulnesses, their passionate absences, their hidden presences, their silent yearnings, and their intractable obscurities, that I am in love with, and yet I still remember the exhilaration I would feel on solving a partial differential equation and knowing why the so-called natural world ‘behaves’ (and, more strongly, has to ‘behave’) the way that it does. The conviction, that there is a deep mysterious order underlying the universe, an order that human beings did not simply ‘invent’ but which pre-exists them, is, in fact, one that has never left me. And yet, there is much in what I believed at that time which makes me queasy in my reflective moments.. I would today not make the sharp dichotomy that I proposed to that senior in the summer of 1995 about seeking power over others versus seeking power over oneself. To begin with, the word ‘power’ and its cognates have become deeply distasteful to me for I now view power and domination as co-terminous; and, for a second, I realised somewhere along the line that seeking power over oneself can often, and does, become a subtly disguised way of seeking power over others. The ponderous dilemma, then, is how to attain the former, in however fragmentary and incomplete a manner, in such a way that it does not lead to the latter. And, third, I believe today that the very attempt to search for a complete explanation for anything, perhaps in the form of a grand theory of everything, will, sooner or later, inevitably lead to (implicit or explicit) forms of violence.

Nevertheless, as I moved through my years at St Stephen’s, I met an increasing number of people who seemed to be devoted, almost fanatically, to this song, until in my third year I finally began to live in a ‘shady’ corridor in Mukherjee West with four other Stephanians who played it at full volume every now and then, and especially in the hour before dinner when three hundred ravenous wolves readied themselves for the descent on the mess chicken. One of them was Vineet who listened to it religiously (almost) every midnight. I always told him that the song was ‘bad poetry with good noise, or perhaps the other way round’, but, perhaps unknown to me, it began to grow upon me, and I would often catch myself humming the tune. On the night after the last exam in third year, Vineet took me on his bike to the restaurant Karim’s, nestled in one of the narrow lanes near the Jama Masjid bustling with countless traders, passers-by, veiled women and shop-keepers living inside the rather ominously-termed ‘walled city’. After dinner, we went for a long ride along the Yamuna, and sometime around midnight sat down under a massive oak tree near the quiet river. The silence, however, was soon shattered by a silver-painted Maruti Suzuki that whizzed past on the empty road above us, its car-radio screaming out the ‘Summer of ‘69’.That was, in fact, the last time that I listened to that song alongside Vineet. He died in a motor-bike accident three weeks later on the road to Jaipur. Apparently, he had been listening to Bryan Adams at full volume on his ear-phones and had failed to hear the loud honking of a truck trying to overtake him.

After some months, in the autumn of 1998, I found myself on a plane bound for Trinity College, Cambridge. I had just moved into my small room in Angel Court when someone with a shock of green hair knocked on my door.
‘Did you arrive today? I am Mark Ingram. Care for some coffee?’
Mark had moved in a few days earlier and his room was dotted with odds and ends, including a gigantic poster of Simone de Beauvoir. At that time, I had only the vaguest of notions who she was (indeed, I was under the somewhat mistaken impression that a ‘feminist’ was a woman who was trying her best to be ‘feminine’), and seeing me staring at her, Mark immediately proceeded to put in a disclaimer. (I soon realised that he apparently found it impossible to say anything at all without loading his remarks with a series of disclaimers.)
‘Oh, don’t get me wrong now. I don’t like her at all.’
‘Why have you put up her poster in that case?’
‘Precisely because I don’t like her at all. You see, imitation is the best form of dislike. Hold on, let me put on some music as the water boils.’
It was the ‘Summer of ‘69’ all over again.
‘Do you like this song? Bryan Adams at his best, eh?’
‘Well, I have been made to like it.’
‘Have you ever thought about the number ‘69?’
‘What about it?’
‘Well, why is this guy singing about 1969? Why not 1847, 1914, 1949, 1959 or 1984? What is so special about the summer of 1969 that he needs to go on shouting at the top of his voice about it?’

It would take me another two or three years before something of the range of significances of the year 1969 would begin to dawn upon me : Vietnam and the cloud of anti-war protests, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, the counter-culture movements, the ‘sense of an ending’, Jimmy Hendrix, transcendental meditation and the Beatles, free love, gurus, psychedelic experience and so on and on. However, as I look back on those years, I now realise that that question put to me by Mark Ingram on my very first day in Cambridge taught me an enduring lesson. I clearly remember feeling extremely stupid on reflecting that I had been listening to the song for three years or so without ever enquiring into why Bryan Adams was singing about 1969 and not just any other ‘damn year’. In his own way, and perhaps even unknown to himself, Mark taught me to question precisely that which I had ‘taken for granted’. As the years passed on, and I was meticulously groomed by some of Cambridge’s finest dons into the subtle art of writing essays for the somewhat daunting tutorials, I constantly kept in mind the question, ‘Why 1969?’ every time I would begin to write an essay, in order to remind myself that I must question precisely that which I thought was obvious to me. It might sound somewhat bizarre to put the matter in this way, but it was a ‘pop’ song that made me start ‘thinking’ in a manner that I had never done before, by diligently and unswervingly pushing a single line of enquiry until the very ‘limits of thought’ (though whether such limits exist at all is another, very interesting, question).

Except on another occasion, I never heard this song during my days in Cambridge. This was during the Christmas vacations in the winter of 2000 when Cambridge was clothed with a fine layer of the whitest snow. Walking through Neville’s Court towards the Backs on the night of Christmas Eve in near-freezing conditions, I stood for a while in the darkness on the stone bridge over the Cam. At that moment, the words of the ‘Summer of ’69’ came floating to my ears through an open window on the second floor facing the river. It was only then that I became vaguely aware of someone standing behind me. I turned around and saw a middle-aged woman, dressed in heavy woollens, staring at me.

‘Yes, those were my best days too. I was nineteen in the summer of 1969, you know? Oh, those mad days! That was the year that I met Tim. We were protesting against the Americans in Vietnam in front of the American Embassy in London. It looks so far away today, and yet lives on in me every day of my life.’
‘Well, I have learnt a lot too from this song. Friends I have lost, and new ones I have met, all lie hidden somewhere along its lines.’
‘Do you study here in Trinity? You did not go home for Christmas?’
‘You think I need a home?’
‘Oh, come on now, I did not say that! But did your mother not ask you to come home?’
‘Well, she died some years ago.’

There was a long silence between us, one that cut through the cold wintry air.

‘Will you walk down the Avenue with me?’

We walked along the bare winter-struck leafless trees in silence. All around us was the beautiful bleakness of the harsh English winter. When we reached Queen’s Road, she paused, turned towards me and looked into my eyes.

‘In the winter of 1975, I lost my baby boy. He died of meningitis, barely three months old. If he were alive today, I guess he would have been of your age. Since then, I have lived largely on the kindness of strangers. Thank you.’

She turned around, and slowly began to walk away towards Grange Road. Her feet left silent prints in the fresh snow.

As I moved through my Ph.D. years, I almost forgot this song, though some of its words would keep on coming back to me once in a while. The only other time I heard it during my time in England was, in fact, on December 30, 2005 when I was travelling to Heathrow in a Stagecoach bus. I could not help reflecting then on how it had, in a sense, welcomed me to Cambridge in 1998 and was, in a manner of speaking, bidding me goodbye in 2005.

Since then the song has never quite left me. On February 10 this year, one day before my birthday, four of my ‘Summer of ’69’ friends who had lived in 1998 on the same corridor in Mukherjee West, St Stephen’s happened, by a series of most extraordinary coincidences, to be in Delhi on the same night, and we all ‘met up’ in a restaurant in South Delhi. It so turned out that all four of them had got married in the intervening period, and I was rather taciturn for a while, not wishing to bring up anything that would, without my realising it, be viewed as ‘politically incorrect’ in such an august company of four women.

Thankfully, one of them broke the ice : ‘I have a heard a lot about you from Vishal. You love to ask a lot of questions, don’t you?’
‘Do I?’
‘So you do! And why is that?’
‘It has something to do with Bryan Adams.’
‘Bryan Adams? Who is he?’

Vishal now turned towards me from across the table, his mouth half-filled with a chicken burger, and growled at me : ‘Man, you still listen to that song? What was it called?’
‘The summer of ‘69?’
‘Yes, yes. It’s been ages since I heard it.’
‘Well, in a way that’s just right. Your summer days are over now.’
‘You mean I have reached my autumn?’
‘Perhaps. But then this is not quite the right company to admit it, right?’

And then the main course arrived, and Bryan Adams was buried under the weight of the chicken and the mutton kebabs.

Some days ago, I went back to Mukherjee West on the final day of submission of forms for admission to St Stephen’s, 2006 - 2007. The corridors were deserted once again, as they had been on that day ten years ago in the summer of 1995. I waited for a while in front of the brown door of my old room, vaguely remembering the indistinct echoes of the ‘Summer of ‘69’ floating down the brightly-lit corridor as hungry hordes had once rushed down the stairs for their dinner.

I walked through the college towards Andrew’s Gate, past the cricket field where a pack of dogs were having a ‘field-day’ and finally onto the main road. A silver-painted Maruti Suzuki glided by, loudly honking at the rickshaw pullers, stopped beside the bus stand, and a young girl with delicately cropped hair and a pair of black goggles stepped out from it. Her garish red T-shirt sported an image of Che Guevara which screamed out : ‘The revolution is in you!’ She walked back towards the car and snarled at the boy sitting at the wheel : ‘For heaven’s sake, Vineet, don’t put on that horrible ‘Summer of ‘69’ again. You are going to go deaf with that noise in your ears. And make me deaf as well.’ I was desperately hoping to hear the retort, ‘What makes you think that you are not already deaf?’, but the poor boy was perhaps too peeved for that. As they say, no man is a hero to his valet, especially when the valet happens to be a ‘liberated woman’.

In any case, I slowly walked past the car, a gentle sadness sinking to my bones. I had lost one Vineet to the ‘Summer of ’69’ many years ago. But the song was living on in and through another Vineet.

2006-05-07T11:21:00.000+01:00

The Birth of Irony : Or, the life of a ‘social anthropologist’

Looking back over the years, I realise that I can say, if with some diffidence, that I became an ironist, almost overnight, one cold misty winter afternoon in 1990 during my grandfather’s funeral. His children (or, to be precise, most of them) who had gathered for the funeral feast (itself an irony, when you think of people feasting over a dead man’s body, if not his soul), were caught up in a dense network of intrigue and scheming over the division of his property. To this day I have never been able to overcome the instinctive horror that runs through me whenever I hear of brothers and sisters settling property issues on legal documents. This ruthless incursion of the juridical-legal complex into the life-world of familial relations implies, to me at least, that brothers and sisters do not genuinely trust one another; indeed, that they suspect one another of being thieves or brigands waiting to pounce upon one another unless their assets are clearly enumerated and declared on paper stamped with the aura of the law. What was so ironical about what goes on, possibly in every family with two (or more) siblings when it comes to the question of the division or distribution of parental/ancestral property? This very fact that for all the ‘tribalistic’ claims that brothers and sisters keep on repeating ad nauseam that blood is thicker than water, surely it seems to be ‘liquid money’ that is much thicker than both of the former! If they do not have sincere faith in one another’s honesty, integrity, and goodness, why not make it clear at the very beginning instead of having to wait for the morning when the grim bespectacled estate lawyer will arrive on the scene?

That, however, was only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Though I was probably unaware of the word ‘irony’ and its cognates at that time, I realise now that I have spent the greater part of my adolescent life as an ironist, constantly shuttling back and forth between two allegedly fixed and clearly identifiable poles, not waiting for too long at either. I have thereby become a ‘man who refuses to be moulded into a myth’, though it is not always easy to communicate the pain, the isolation, and the loneliness that is also associated with this persistent refusal. I shall mention three such groups of poles here, ‘Assamese’ and/or ‘Bengali’; ‘Hindu’ and/or ‘Catholic’; and, finally, ‘Indian’ and/or ‘European’ : whereas people around me have sometimes forced me to accept one of each of these binaries, I have constantly attempted complex negotiations through the broken, and uneasy, middle across each of them. And this was possible only if I were to live as an ironist; if I were constantly aware of my contextualised ‘location’ in deep socio-cultural matrices; if I were to remind myself incessantly that the views I hold and the beliefs I practice are, to a significant extent, a ‘product’ of my childhood upbringing and adolescent experiences, which cannot therefore be ‘universalisable’ or superimposed on others without further ado.

First, then, the binary of ‘Assamese’ and/or ‘Bengali’. I once horrified an elderly Assamese gentleman with my comment, stemming ultimately from a conviction whose intensity has not dimmed down the years, that I am essentially ‘Bengali’ and only accidentally ‘Assamese’. Or to put it a bit more gnomically, this is the conviction that a wo/man is not born as, but becomes, a ‘Bengali’. (Which is an extension of Simone de Beavouir’s celebrated dictum : ‘One is not born as, but becomes, a woman’.) What, however, is it about ‘Bengali-ness’ that drew me, and continues to entice me, so deeply and powerfully towards a tongue and a set of cultural patterns which are, at least in the opinion of some of the ‘Assamese’, alien, forbidding, and strange? In attempting to answer this question, I have always sought to avoid the misreading associated with what has come to be known (and, rightly maligned) as ‘essentialization’, that is, the fallacy that is committed when an ‘interested onlooker’ picks out one strand out from a complex matrix that characterises ‘another culture’, and puts this forth as its ‘quintessence’. Such was the misreading perpetrated by several writers during the colonial period when India was stereotyped as an ‘essentially’ spiritual land of everlasting mystical truths, thereby ignoring the rich traditions of atheistic, sceptical, ‘humanistic’, and agnostic thought in the classical heritage. They were, of course, not utterly off course (no pun intended) in discerning the occurrence of certain ‘spiritual’ components in Indian civilization, but they overlooked the presence of other quite ‘anti-spiritual’ (or what we might today call ‘secular’) aspects, and thereby constructed an homogenous entity called ‘Spiritual India’ which even today does the rounds not only within the country but also in various Western circles.

Over the years, I have become extremely sensitive to this issue of subsuming entire patterns of socio-cultural existence under ‘globalising’ umbrellas which forcefully (indeed, violently) wipe out or discard those which cannot somehow be squeezed into its cover. And given the fact that I regard myself as essentially Bengali, does this self-understanding not make me particularly guilty of a similar act of picking out some constituents of ‘Bengali life’ out of their total complex in specific settings, and raising them to the timeless status of ‘Bengali-ness’? This is a question that has bothered me off and on during my interactions with ‘native’ speakers of the Bengali language (this, incidentally, is my ‘definition’ of a ‘Bengali’, and a parallel definition holds, for that matter, for an ‘Assamese’), and in the process of such relations I have found myself time and again in the role of a ‘social anthropologist’ who is at once almost completely immersed in the life-styles that she is trying to indwell from the within, and yet feels a certain degree of ‘conceptual distance’ or ‘alienation’ or ‘cognitive dissonance’ from the ‘tribe’ that she has consciously made her second (and sometimes only) home.

I entered the multifaceted world of what I have here tentatively called ‘Bengali-ness’ through the Ariadne’s thread of the two specific pieces of Rabindranath Tagore and the songs of the late mediaeval wandering minstrels or troubadours, the Bauls (and, as it turns out, the two pieces are, as we say, of one piece, for Tagore himself was strongly influenced by some of the themes in Baul music). Thus every time I meet a ‘Bengali’ (note the definition above) I unwittingly find myself trying to shift, or at least, orient the conversation, however subtly, towards either Tagore or the Bauls. Great indeed is my joy, akin to a sense of ‘home-coming’ (even if a ‘home-coming’ in the reverse), when it turns out that my interlocutor him/herself is immersed or rooted in these two, and it is always a certain dejection that overcomes me when I meet a ‘Bengali’ who is apathetic, or even antipathetic, towards them. This, however, only raises the ponderous question of whether I am guilty of a certain form of ‘interpretive violence’ in trying to see ‘Bengali-ness’ through these two components : in expecting, or hoping, that every ‘Bengali’ that I meet or talk to should be grounded in Tagore and the Bauls, am I not culpable of the very same gross ‘cultural stereotyping’ that I have warned against in the preceding? Or, in other words, have I not ‘reduced’ the rich complexity and diversity of ‘Bengali-ness’ into two signifiers that I have set up as its ‘essential’ markers? What about the Bengal of Anglicized Calcutta, the Bengal of the C.P.I. and Naxalbari, the Bengal of Suman Chatterji and Mohinir Ghuraguli, the Bengal of the interminable adda on the road-sides, the Bengal of Durga Puja and Kalibari, and the Bengal of the rapidly vanishing quaint exotica of North Calcutta?

It was a long engagement with this painful question that gradually brought home to me that though it was/is a constitutive part of my self-understanding that I am essentially Bengali, in approaching ‘Bengali-ness’ I remain nevertheless a ‘social anthropologist’ as a person who is highly conscious that he is an ‘eclectic’ figure. That is, I pick and choose certain elements (but not all) that lure me, and seek to combine these with other elements that go to form my self-identity (which itself is not a static entity but a dynamic process). And when I go back to the world of ‘Assamese-ness’, I try, almost unconsciously, to see or unearth these very same elements, and call myself an ‘Assamese’ only to the extent, which is usually very limited, that I actually find their parallels there. Consequently, I am a ‘social anthropologist’ even with regard to the ‘Assamese’ : in some genuine cases, I think I ‘know’ them, but I cannot truly ‘understand’ them, and this lack of ‘understanding’ precisely because they have not stepped into the world of ‘Bengali-ness’ to the extent, and in the specific ways, that I have.

Hence, when it comes to the ‘binary’ of ‘Assamese’ and/or ‘Bengali’ I have to live as an ironist. With the ‘Assamese’, I desperately seek, usually in vain, to find elements of ‘Bengali-ness’ in their lives, and craftily pretend to be an ‘Assamese’ for the rest of the time (for their sanity, not mine), even when carefully hiding my bitter disappointment at my failure. With the ‘Bengalis’, on the other hand, I have to remain conscious of committing yet again the fallacy of stereotyping an extremely vibrant and multifaceted world with the stamp of Tagore and the Bauls, while yet hoping for that encounter with that ‘Bengali’ (who is, after all, thankfully not that hard to come by) who shares my passion for the former. Consequently, the hard-nosed and exasperated Census official who might tell me someday, ‘But you have to be either Assamese or Bengali, you can’t be both!’, I can only reply, ‘I am neither ‘Assamese’ nor ‘Bengali’ because I am something of both at the same time!’

An ironist is thus a ‘hybrid’ person, and is a threat in some ways to those who seek to maintain the social fabric by inscribing onto it the distinct silhouettes of clearly-defined, stabilized and secure identities. Consequently, an ironist lives on the fractured middle where s/he is exposed to fire from both sides. From the (orthodox) ‘Assamese’, I have to bear the brunt of having ‘diluted’ the ‘validity’ of ‘Assamese’ culture by ‘mixing’ it with the ‘contaminated’ and ‘alien’ elements of ‘Bengali-ness’. For some of the (orthodox) ‘Bengalis’, on the other hand, I would be at the end of the day a ‘freak’, a sort of ‘cultural tourist’ who selectively appropriates whatever suits his fancy without wanting to participate in the minutiae of the life-worlds of ‘Bengali-ness’. On both sides, then, I could be accused of a lack of ‘authenticity’, of ‘loyalty’, of ‘allegiance’ and of ‘steadfastness’. Why, indeed, trust someone who is ultimately neither here nor there, who is (apparently) free from all cultural fastenings or roots?

Is this alleged deficiency of ‘cultural moorings’ a source of ‘liberation’ or of ‘condemnation’ for the ironist? Probably both. To take the latter first, some form of ‘condemnation’ because it involves a certain amount of ‘loneliness’, associated particularly with the cold realisation that it is not everyday that I will meet someone who will be able to genuinely appreciate my ongoing experiments with ‘hybridity’, someone who will not wave away with a scornful gesture my ‘lack of authenticity’; and yet at the same time of ‘liberation’ because it infuses me with the hope that there are indeed some ‘hybrid’ people such as me whom I might run into round the next street-corner.

Some of these complicated cultural dynamics are also manifest in my ongoing negotiations between the two dense life-worlds of ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Roman Catholicism’, but I shall necessarily be somewhat brief in this matter. (Ultimately these are also reflected in my Ph.D. thesis.) It was in class six that I first came across this text from the New Testament, ‘Foxes have their holes, and birds of the air have their nests, but the Son of Man [i.e. Jesus] has no place to rest his head’. As it turns out, this text fell upon me with something of the gravity of a Upanisadic mahavakya (‘great saying’), and I found myself returning to it, mesmerised by the notion of the deity who ‘had no place to rest his head’. I was even more impressed by the rather austere lives of the Catholic Brothers and Sisters in my school who were trying to ‘imitate’ the Son of Man by dedicating themselves (however imperfectly) to the ideal of a human community with no internal divisions while seemingly not having any place to rest their own heads. Thus, just as I entered ‘Bengali-ness’ through Tagore and the Bauls and began thereafter to look backwards at ‘Assamese-ness’ in the light of the former, I stepped into the intricate socio-religious patterns of Roman Catholicism (and, more broadly, of Christianity) with this text, and then started to cast a backward glance at ‘Hinduism’ through it, looking specifically for those elements in ‘Hinduism’ wherein I could hear its echoes or see parallels to it.

A set of questions, similar to the ones raised above, however, have again haunted me here : have I not ‘reduced’ the sheer complexity of the beliefs, the conceptual frameworks and the liturgical practices of Roman Catholicism by picking out just one text out of a hundred others? and, surely there is much more to the lived worlds of ‘Hinduism’ than a motley band of ascetics and so-called world renouncers? And, similarly, I find myself immersed in a different sort of a ‘hybridity’, this time with respect to these two religious patterns : to the (orthodox) ‘Roman Catholics’, I am, at best, an agnostic (for ‘agnosticism’ is the most accurate description of myself in ‘religious matters’) and, at worst, a dilly-dallying indecisive ‘heretic’; whereas to the (orthodox) Hindu (though it is by no means easy to delineate the contours of ‘Hindu orthodoxy’), I have muddied the clear and pristine waters of ‘timeless Hinduism’ by importing the (‘foreign’) contagion of Roman Catholicism. And yet, if the Census official were to indignantly protest to me, ‘But you can’t be both Hindu and Roman Catholic!’, I can only repeat with somewhat tiring consistency, ‘I am neither ‘Roman Catholic’ nor ‘Hindu’ because I am something of both of them at the same time!’

Thirdly, am I ‘Indian’ or ‘European’? A straightforward response, in keeping with the foregoing discussion, would simply be to interrogate my easy assumption, implicit in this question, that there exist two neatly identifiable, and hermetically sealed, entities, one called ‘Indian’ and the other ‘European’. But how could I, a person who, on the one hand, not only speaks but also thinks in English all the time, but who, on the other hand, firmly believes, rather ‘parochially’, that there is no language as spontaneous and beautiful as Bengali, regard myself as either ‘Indian’ or ‘European’? Surely this dichotomy between ‘Indian’ and/or ‘Europe’ completely breaks down in my case? Nevertheless, as a personal confession, until I went to the United Kingdom in 1998, I did believe that ‘attachment to the family’ was a distinctively ‘Indian’ trait; and having absorbed some portions of home-spun ‘second-hand’ literature about ‘Europe’ was under the (false) impression that ‘detachment from the family’ was a distinctive ‘European’ trend. After a few years of my ‘sojourn in the West’ I realised that there indeed was a significant grain of truth in this popular re-presentation of the ‘West’ as a land composed of decontextualised freely-floating social atoms, uncoupled from their familial milieus. This perception, which I was able to ‘verify’ or substantiate on several occasions, then became my point of departure for approaching the ‘West’, and in the presence of such ‘detached atoms’ I felt for the first time in my life very much, and indeed truly, ‘at home’, for all the paradoxical ring of this statement. And yet, I was only too aware that I was engaging in yet another type of crude ‘cultural stereotyping’, this time of the ‘West’, for there are vast swathes, spreading over the Mediterranean, Southern Europe, and the Great Plains of the United States, where family bonds remain vital, powerful, and strong (though, in my more uncharitable description, ‘totalitarian’). And having ‘entered’ the West with this ‘hermeneutical’ key, I once again began to bend over backwards (perhaps somewhat in the manner of my predecessor at Trinity College, Jawaharlal Nehru) for my personal ‘Discovery of India’; and I indeed ‘discovered’ that the rejection of (or expression of distaste towards) the family was by no means unknown to the classical traditions of India, that Buddhism, Jainism, and (to a lesser degree) the occasional bhakti ‘revivals’ viewed (though in their highly distinctive ways) the family as an inward-looking ‘tribalistic’ system, somewhat in the manner of a remorseless octopus that drags individuals willy-nilly towards its insatiable cavernous maws.

Thus I found myself once again moving back and forth between ‘India’ and ‘Europe’. The more I ‘discovered’ in European writers, thinkers, poets, iconoclasts, feminists, nihilists, novelists, and theorists confirmation of my (almost) life-long ‘prejudice’ that the family is ‘an insidious institution created by men to dominate (‘their’) women and to punish (‘their’) children’, the more I ‘discovered’ side by side elements in ‘Indian’ civilization certain resonances and parallels of this view. And yet, questions similar to the ones that I have flagged in the foregoing, are not far behind me : is rejection of the family the only aspect of ‘European’ civilization? and, have I disregarded the existence of the so-called extended Indian family?

Thus I have become, over the years, a complex and highly unstable ‘product’ of uncompleted and fragmentary mediations between ‘Assamese-ness’ and ‘Bengali-ness’; between ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Roman Catholicism’; and between ‘Indian-ness’ and ‘European-ness’; and I carry around within and on my person the ‘effects’ or the traces, some perhaps hidden to my own introspective gaze, of these provisional and partial experimentations. I keep on moving dialectically between the two bounds of each of these ‘dualities’, and feel somewhat apprehensive and distressed in the presence of those whom I feel have got ‘stuck’ to either of them. Thus, a person who describes him/herself to me as an ‘orthodox Roman Catholic’ makes me as uneasy as someone who resolutely insists on something called ‘orthodox Hinduism’; and someone who maintains that there is an ‘Indian mind’ which is absolutely different from, and alien to, a putative ‘European mind’ makes me highly uncomfortable.

And yet, for all that, I am marked by a profound ambivalence in that I do at certain times envy such people. For they enjoy a certain stability and security that is denied to me, the self-assurance of knowing where their ‘roots’ are, the certainty of remaining clear about where they ‘belong to’; whereas ‘home’ for me is an interim construct built out of makeshift scraps that I have collected from here and there, crumbs whose ‘authenticity’ I cannot guarantee to those ‘purists’ who may wish to examine them. Slightly altering the words of Salman Rushdie in a similar context, ‘home’ for the ironist is an ‘edifice we build of out scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved.’ To be forever ‘on the move’ in this way might seem a welcome style of living to those who believe that they are trapped within some structure (whatever this might be). But to the ironist himself, he can be never sure whether his ‘hybridity’ is ultimately a font of ‘liberation’ or of ‘condemnation’.

Perhaps it is neither of them, because it is something of both at the same time!

2006-02-20T04:00:00.000Z

February 11, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

I had a horrible dream last night that I must now recount to you, that is, to you, my diary, my other self. As I sit here beside my window looking out into the snow-swept Simla highlands, I begin to feel that my soul is but a loose unity woven out of various bits, pieces, and fragments forever threating to break loose from its centre. A centre for which it desperately yearns but which it can never possess, for the very moment that it has attained it this centre has already moved away. Thus I have become the site of many a battle within myself, some past ones which have left me permanently scarred and whose memories linger on within me even when I do not seem to be able to accept them as my own, and some present ones which bring to me the dread of forgotten stories as well as the promises of a future redemption.

I dreamt that I was in an India that I somehow did not re-cognise. Gone was the dark, melancholy and comforting greys and blacks of Simla, I was now in the midst of the heat and the dust of an Indian town in the stifling summer of the sun-baked plains. An old man in a red turban beckoned towards me to enter his house, and I gingerly approached him. He smiled at me, suddenly grasped both my hands, shook them warmly, and led me into the first room. There on its bright yellow walls I saw a Swastika painted in a gaudy red. I felt that I had stepped into a sizzling cauldron of fire, and I shrieked out in utter panic. I desperately wanted to wake up from my maddening dream, but try hard as I did I could not break free from the coils of sleep. I ran out of the house into the sun-scorched village-square where a group of thirsty people were buying lime-juice from a young boy. I waited for a long while for my turn, hoping that he would soon turn towards me and serve me. An old woman walked up to me and told me that if I kept on waiting in that manner I would have to stand there for the rest of eternity. And as I stood there contemplating the meaning of 'eternity', three loud voices shouted at me to move on or stand out of the queue.

Since this morning I have wondering about my dream. The India of this dream is so different, so unfamiliar, so elusive from the one than I have known and grown up with these past few years that in my dream I found myself returning to her as a stranger who approaches her from the outside for the first time. India is a strange beguiling woman who entraces you from afar with the promises of exotic wealth, only to shroud herself at the final moment with a thick veil of impenetrable Otherness. I felt that I had become exiled at home, separated from my own countrymen and countrywomen across a great chasm of incomprehension.

In the garden there was a trail of black messy footprints carved into the beautiful virgin snow. The trail suddenly stopped near the winter-struck speechless trees, as if the person had been suddenly lifted up into the sky by some strange celestial, or perhaps demoniac, power.

2006-01-03T05:29:00.000Z

January 1,1876

Under Oriental Skies

I have been rather quiet these days. Or to be more precise, and keeping in mind the grammatical rule that Mamma once drilled into me as a child, I should instead say quite. So, then, I have been quite quiet.

Today, however, I must write something about James I have been neglecting him for far too long. He had some remarkable company over dinner last night.

The Revds. H.T.Blackett, G.A.Lefroy and Edward Bickersteth from the Cambridge Mission to Delhi were around in Simla visiting the Viceroy during Christmas. Making their acquaintance during a meeting with his Lordship's under secretary, Mr Richard Stapleton, I.C.S., James invited them over to dinner at our home. Among them there was a certain Samuel Scott Allnutt, a very tall thin man fired with a dream. A dream that he calls St.Stephen's College, Cashmere Gate, Delhi. Though a dream that hardly ought to be called by that name. For it seems to me that the Rev. Allnutt breathes, thinks, eats, drinks, sleeps and lives that dream as if what seems like a mirage to some of us here is the most immediate, the most passionate, the most intense, and the most interior reality in his mortal existence.

It is to be a college, he informed us over dinner, bending low over his food and peering into our eyes through his black spectacles, that would become one of the finest flowers of British India in the years to come. So loving and so intimate would be the bond between Cambridge and St.Stephen's, he declared in his deep resonating voice, that the umbilical cord between the two would never be severed, and that even after we, the British, have left this fair land of Hindosthan and have departed to the rest of our forefathers, and thousands will have risen from this earth to condemn us for our iniquities and heap infamies over our heads, millions from among the natives would continue to move through its portals into the hallowed corridors of Cambridge, and yet millions of us Englishmen and Englishwomen would continue to view it as the most precious gift that we ever bequeathed to this land of ancient learning.

I looked towards James. There was a gentle smile on his lips. David could hardly conceal his laughter, and abruptly excused himself from the table and rushed into the living room. I felt a sudden surge of anger at his impudence. But there was no time for me to linger on this, for Allnutt went on talking, almost as if he were a teacher speaking to his attentive students.

It was now the Revd.Lefroy's turn to speak. He would teach Psychology and History at the college, the Revd. Carlyon would instruct the natives in Mathematics, and as for Allnutt, it would be Logic and Literature.

Around this time, David returned.

'Sir, if I may make bold to ask, do you really believe in what you have said? The most precious gift? If you shall permit me to use a colloqualism that is making the rounds in London these days, surely you must be joking, Mr. Allnutt?'

'Oh, yes, I am very serious', replied Allnutt, standing up spontaneously, somewhat in the manner of a deeply wounded man who had been cut to the quick. 'Indeed, very serious. Someday if the sun were to set on Her Majesty's Empire, God forbid, but God is no respecter of persons, nay, that He is not, what shall be left of our presence here? St. Stephen's shall outlive us as the living embodiment of our tireless and unceasing efforts to bring a ray of civilization to these benighted natives. St. Stephen's, I assure you, sir, is not to be a mere building of red bricks and black mortar, like just any gaudy and pompous edifice across the street. Somewhat in the manner that an old Scotsman returning from the war sees from afar his house, lovingly named Red Roofs, and feels a gentle peace streaming through his veins, generations of these natives, long after we are dead and long after this very dinner, unrecorded in any newspaper, is forgotten, will continue to return to St. Stephen's to find a home which they never left.'

Somehow that reply seemed to have silenced David.

For the moment, at least. There was now a sombre look on his long face, and he stared at the candle next to him, gently weeping its warm waxy tears.

Around the table, a deathly silence descended upon us. There was only the occasional sound of knives and forks clashing against each other.

I do not know why, but I felt over the dinner table in my very bosom that I had been a witness to the birth-pangs of something truly glorious, truly resplendent, truly inspiring, something to describe which the frail mortal words of a fragile woman are inadequate to the task.

2005-12-23T08:51:00.000Z

November 22, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

I am still recovering. Oh, the horror of it! Every time I remember that fearsome face I wish I could obliterate it from the vacant spaces of my memory into which it comes flooding with no warning. Early last month, James and I had been to the medieval fort where the Queeen of Jhansi had led, not too long ago, the mutinous soldiers against Her Majesty's armies. Oh, the horror, the dear little children and the innocent young women they ravaged like a pack of hungry wolves who had set upon innocent lambs!

I stood on the ramparts towards dusk gazing at the distant horizon just as the sun was setting. There was an unearthly peace in the very air I breathed. A few stars were sparkling in the cold skies above me. I am certain that two of them twinkled at me when I glanced at them.

I was about to fall asleep, so intense was the silence, when I heard a horrific rumbling noise in the green woods across the plains. Thousands and thousands of soldiers draped in bright red and yellow came charging, their horses neighing wildly, their white sabres flashing in the growing dark.

I think I fainted and slumped to the moist earth. When I recovered, a fearful apparition hung low over me. A native woman burdened with regalia was standing beside me, glancing at my face with a cold contempt. Across her face was a thin red line, dripping blood, as if someone had slashed her face with a pointed dagger.

'Foolish woman', she cried to me, 'Do you think that you can escape my cruel fate by living on the other side of the fence? Do you not know that it matters not for us women which land we inhabit, the white, the brown or the black? Here or there, woman is everywhere she who is crucified.'

I did not eat or sleep for several days on end. Her terrible words echo and reecho down the empty verandahs and the hollow corridors of my mind.

So vast indeed are my mindscapes that sometimes I do not know if I am re-inventing myself or if I am re-discovering something buried deep within me every time I write on this diary. What would happen if a later day historian, like our magnificent Carlyle, were to someday sieze upon my diary as an archaeological find stacked away in someone's dusty attic? Would he slash through it like the knife across the Queen of Jhansi's face, trying to extricate the myth from the reality, the fact from the fantasy?

Perhaps so. But perhaps he will not know that it is because I cannot bear the truth of the myth that I am forced to seek refuge in reality, that it is because I live on the border line between the two that my greatest fantasies have become my most wholesome facts.

Perhaps that is rank nonsense. Yes, I can see Uncle Timothy now in my mind's inner eye sadly shaking his head, getting ready to wield the proverbial Occam's razor on what I have just said. That Uncle Timothy is me too.

I am so many people in one life. Perhaps that freedom to choose is my greatest condemnation.

2005-11-20T15:44:00.000Z

September 21, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

I have become a woman of many selves who in search of her-self arrives home either too early or too late, but never in time. Too early when I do not know what the questions are that hover around my mind, and too late when I find that they have already been answered for me. How wonderful it would be when I am at that stage when I can ask my own questions and provide my own answers. And yet, how would I know that they are mine? And not that someone has subtly, unknown to myself, inserted them into my soul?

I must therefore perform the impossible task of erasing whatever I am writing.

To grasp the splintered fragments of my being and bind them together around a unitary centre, ah the effort is so tiring, so frustrating, so riddled with our anxieties, hopes and fears! Even now as I write these very words I can feel myself inflicting a great violence on myself, trying to make them sound coherent to myself, when I know only too well that just below the surface there lies sleeping a desire to attempt the final dissolution of all words, all significance, and all meaning. But in having thus understood my intense wish, have I not defeated my claim that I do not comprehend my inner essence? Ah the conundrums of our existence!
How I remember Uncle Timothy at these times. Yes, he should have been living at this hour in my damp room in the hills of Simla. I would perhaps have sat down beside him, not to speak anything, for I have nothing left to say but to gaze on his gentle face as he smoked his pipe beside the window looking down into the valley. Never has a man taught me so much in my life precisely by adamantly refusing to accept that he had anything to teach me.
Someday I must also write to you about my other Uncle Aaron, God rest his soul, who committed suicide five years ago. Looking back at those times when I spent a month at his decrepit house in Cheltenham, I can

[Editor's note : 'I' has left an absence in between these paragraphs. It is not known whether this silence is deliberate.]
[Meta-Editor's note : [The Editor cannot conceal an impish delight in interpolating these parabolic inscriptions.]]
The older I grow I become convinced that it was the presence of men like Uncle Timothy and Aaron around me when I was a child that injected into the very core of my being a most profound melancholy and at the same time gave me a vision into things that are denied to most men and women around me.

I had a most beautiful dream last night, and the more I think about it the heavier that my heart grows with an inexplicable terror. Oh, am I really growing insane? Was James right after all?
I dreamt that I was on the banks of a lake just before dawn as the early birds were beginning to whisper. The waters were shrouded in semi-darkness as I spotted a mass of white floating in front of me. As I strained my eyes I saw a white swan swimming away from me towards the distant mountains. Slowly and slowly she sank deeper into the darkness until she became a tiny dot on the horizon.
From a great distance the

[Editor's note : 'I' breaks off suddenly at this point.]

[Meta-Editor's note : [The Editor is inflicting a sinister violence on a woman's text by pretending to understand her presences and absences.]]

Suddenly the sun rose into the blue sky, and a ray of warm light came shooting through the distance and pierced the very heart of the white swan. With a cry of the most fearful agony, the swan flapped its wings, rose into the air once, and then collapsed into the waters. I felt that it was not the swan but my own bosom that the ray had shattered into a thousand pieces.

Oh, the horror of the dream! Perhaps I have been listening too much to Sibelius and his Swan of Tuonela. Yes, that must be it.

I need Uncle Timothy today. Only he can understand me, these dilemmas that my pour twisted soul is racked with. Seek nothing else but the highest form of perfection, he once told me, but never forget for one moment that this seeking itself is the greatest futility any man can attempt.

My thoughts are becoming so tortuous every morning. In this agony, perhaps lies my liberation. And yet perhaps the memory of Uncle Aaron tells me that I am damned to be free.

My words are like an asymptotic curve that, at best, never reaches the limiting point it so passionately desires, and, at worst, a degenerate exercise in ironic narcissism. I have no occupation but my preoccupation with myself, and yet it is precisely this act of sinking into myself that, by reminding me of my utter finitude, drags me outwards.

On Monday mornings, I am an atheist despising the masses who bow down to the idols of the marketplace and yet in the evenings, I become a devout Anglican who piously kneels before her Lord, the Redeemer and the Saviour. On Tuesday evenings, I am a great lover of Beethoven and all the French, the Flemish and the Dutch masters, but on Wednesday mornings I wake up to find myself pouring scorn on all lovers of such high art. I spend the Thursdays poring over dusty volumes under whose weight the shelves of my living room groan, and Fridays laughing at the futility of the task I have attempted. Saturdays I sneer at those tiny little people cooped up in their narrow homes drinking tea and honey, but on Sundays I rebuke myself for such cynicism and want to run away to my dear Mama.

Oh, who shall deliver me from this body of contradictions? The truth that I seek I do not will, but the one that I scorn, I find myself running towards.

Let this diary be a record of my growing insanity.

Of my painful realisation that self-reflexivity is the highest blessing and the greatest curse.

Of my nostalgia for an age of unfragmented humanity where perhaps human beings used to live with all their inner tensions reconciled into a most wholesome harmony with the order of Mother Nature.

And above all, above all, a record of how powerful a tool language is, dissolving itself in the very moment of producing itself, embodying a most painful tension that only death can resolve.

And if this be insanity, ah for its blissful torments!

2005-11-16T17:22:00.000Z

September 11, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

Yesterday evening I and James walked down to the Mall where we watched the crimson sun sinking into the distant blue hills setting the parchment of the sky alight with streaks of fiery orange. As I stood there, the cold wind blowing in from the west, my thoughts went back to my Uncle Aaron. It is only today as I grow older and older that I begin to realise how deep an influence, even unknown to myself, my two uncles, Timothy and Aaron, have subtly exercised on myself. About Uncle Timothy I have written about elsewhere on these pages, and is to Uncle Aaron that I turn today.
And yet why do I bother writing about them? I do not really know. Perhaps it is with a sense of gratitude for what they have taught me in the very attempt to unteach me of what I had absorbed. For it is indeed the case that such is the nature of the views of men like Uncle Timothy and Uncle Aaron that they cannot, without contradicting themselves, express their own thoughts in the first person. They need must enlist the help of a third person who shall struggle, even if only to fail in the attempt, to throw some light on minds that are impenetrable, first and foremost to themselves.
Dear Mama was of course devoted to both her elder brothers, but I fancy that it was always towards my eldest Uncle Aaron that she always directed her fondest affections. I remember Uncle Aaron from the four months that he came and lived with us when we were in the East End. He had a face so austere that it seemed to me that it was like a mask that the wind of a thousand years had hewn out of a solid granite cliff. And yet oftentimes when I would talk to him I would feel that that wall was about to dissolve into the thousand pieces out of which it had been painfully wrought.
Uncle Aaron spent almost the whole day reading, starting immediately after breakfast. He started with the newspapers, firstly the London Times and some others which came in from Scotland, and would then move on to the newspapers from Paris and Berlin. There was no shortage of newspapers in my father's house and Uncle Aaron relished the mornings with us meticulously reading each newspaper from the first page to the last in between cups of coffee. He would then pick up books from the bygone ages, starting with the seventeenth century, moving on to the eighteenth and coming down to our own times, to the very decade and the very year. In the evenings, he would go out for his long walks, in the same black coat that he always wore, even when it had started to stink mildly.
Once I was sitting in the living room as he was going out in the evening.
'Victoria', he said in his smile that somehow always reminded me of Uncle Timothy, 'if this whole world is a Text, I am but a reader. In the mornings, I read the Texts of my newspapers and books, and in the evenings the Texts of people's faces, their gestures, their silences, their erasures, and their words.'
Thus he spent his days with us, waking up at the exact hour and going up to bed just as the clock began to strike twelve.
'Efficiency', he once declared to us,'What marks us out, we the British nation, over the other races, is our attention to detail and our craving for order. A handful of British soldiers can rule over a thousand natives. No, not because we have the gunpowder. Even they can buy it from us, if they wanted to. We are superior because we are efficient. But there is something else to be said in this matter, of course. Something much more ominous. Something about how this dream for self-mastery is the perfect illusion that men suffer from.'
That was a habit of Uncle Aaron that always irritated me, breaking off a train of thought just when you thought he was finally reaching at something.

[Editor's note : 'I' abruptly breaks off the narrative at this point.]

2005-11-11T08:52:00.000Z

September 10, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

James made the most preposterous of declarations this morning after breakfast. (Why does everything have to happen just after breakfast?) Oh, the very thought of it sends a shiver down me!

'Victoria, have you been writing on your diary recently?'

'Yes, I have.'

'Well, you know there are times when I fill in my vacant moments by writing a diary myself. But they are not my thoughts. Well, they are, and yet they are not. Though I must say that I do not quite know the difference between these two. I write on my diary pretending to be a woman. It has been an overwhelming experience at times, you know? The more I realise how different I am from you, the deeper it sinks into me how estranged I am from myself.'

I was too startled to speak out for a long time. I must say that I still do not understand what James meant. Say, could I start writing on these pages from tomorrow pretending to be a man? Oh, the arrogant pretence of it! Only a man could rise, or should I say sink, to such shameful depths of megalomania. Are we so malleable, plastic, and unencumbered that we can pick up and throw away ourselves with every passing wind?

And what would it even mean for me to write as a man? Would I have to see the world through a man's eyes, feel it through his heart, and understand it through his mind (and, I must hasten to add, eat the dinner cooked for him through his stomach)?

I find myself going back to St. Augustine once again : Quaestio mihi factus sum. Indeed, I have become a question to myself.

No, I must stop now, for my head seems to swim round and round in circles. I distantly remember my cousin, now Lord Munro, speaking to me on this matter years ago.

'Victoria', he said, when I was asking him about what would happen if I were to reach the end of the sky and put my hand through it, 'A full-scale assault of the human reason on itself, that the Ancients used to call Philosophy. And Philosophy, my dear Victoria, is a skill suitable only for the robust minds of men.'

Perhaps Lord D'Acre was right. Only I wish he would someday read this diary and see for himself how this full-scale assault takes place every day on its pages.

2005-11-09T09:50:00.000Z

September 5, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

James is back. He is very excited about developments in Delhi and plans to go back next Spring. And yet somewhere in the recesses of his mind a nagging doubt lurks. Will I recover from my sudden fits by then? Will I be able to demonstrate my ability as a doctor's wife to the natives?

I was gazing at the late crocuses this morning after breakfast, sitting on my favourite green chair. A gentle apathy slowly swept over me, and I wanted to remain that way for the rest of eternity, allowing the world, its dots, its squares, its circles, its blooming and buzzing confusion, to swarm round my head while I simply took notice of it with no desire of immersing myself in it. I wanted the sun's warm rays to sink into me, welding together the disparate fragments of my innermost being into a rounded whole. And yet, leave me just at the moment when that whole was to be completed. For no, in another sense, I do not want to become whole. This great fear of wholeness, of perfection, and of completeness is perhaps one that I have inherited from my uncle Timothy.

When I was sixteen, my father fell seriously ill, and dear Mama took him to a sanatorium near Lake Como while I was sent away to Uncle Timothy in Aberdeen where he was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University. I spent six months there, a time mixed with confusion, wonder, fear, anxiety, joy, and exultation.

Uncle Timothy lived a rather secluded life, lost in a world that he had created for himself over the years with his books, his encyclopedias, his biographies, and his journals, and he gradually instilled into me as well his deep love for books. Since then books have never been just a dead mass of printed letters on white sheets of paper : books are warm, real, living, glowing entities with hearts that beat, they talk to me, and I talk back to them. I was slowly introduced into a gigantic inter-connected web where each node leads onto another in a never-ending spiral.

I enjoyed a certain freedom when being with Uncle Timothy that I had never experienced at home. For the first month, in fact, he hardly spoke to me, sitting at his table, utterly indifferent to my existence, while I tried to busy myself with various things in the living room. It was only after a few months that I began to realise, much to my horror, that unknown to myself he had been observing me so minutely that he had somehow, in a manner I know not how, assimilated me into his world of books. Every now and then, he would throw at me a casual question or a remark, 'Now this is how you feel in this matter, is it not?', or, 'But then I am sure you would not agree with this aristocratic gentleman, would you?', or 'Yes, of course, you would rightly reject this opinion as old-fashioned nonsense of a bunch of over-fed men', and when I would look into myself I would be stunned to discover that though he had not completely grasped the truth of how I felt or what I believed he had nevertheless come unnervingly close to it.

It was only after those first three months that I felt he was gradually opening himself up to me, and we would often have long conversations after tea. Sometimes we would go out on Sundays for long walks into the countryside just as the first leaves of Spring were appearing on the austere trees. Often, he was very quiet during these walks, but I clearly remember that Sunday morning when he talked a lot about me.

'Silence is the best prelude to all forms of understanding, and not just the prelude, but also the interlude and the postlude, so that after word that has been spoken or written you must attempt the impossible task of hearing the silence that breathes through it.'

Startled by this sudden outburst, I remained silent for a while, wondering if that was what he was asking me to do.

'Have I understood you? God forbid! For why, if indeed I did, there would be nothing left of you. You would be reduced to just a reflection of who I am. Do you know why I was silent during those weeks? Well, I know who you are and where you come from. You inhabit a world that I left a long time ago, but whose subtle traces, disguised echoes, transformed voices, and hidden presences live on within me every day and torment me every night. And yet, you are not just another one of them, are you? You are who you are, and that is how I talk to you. But that demands an initial painful process of self-emptying, so that I might seek to become more aware of whatever views I might hold about you before talking to you, and that is a task that demands a regime of silence.'

A pair of blue birds came floating down from the heavens and sat down on a branch on the tree just in front of us. The North-westerlies swept in from the emptiness of the Highlands and I desperately grasped my scarf fluttering wildly in the wind.

'Perhaps someday where you are in a place far away from here, perhaps in a time when I shall be dead, you shall remember this morning with me. You shall then recount what I am telling you today, perhaps with joy, perhaps with sadness, perhaps with bitterness, perhaps with all of them.'

He stared at the beautiful purple moors stretched out for miles and miles in front of us.

'Victoria, you are not my niece. No, that is not how I see you, nor is that the reason why I accepted your mother's request that you spend some months with me while she looks after your father. You are more than anything else a potential source of a never-ending conversation, and it was to prepare the ground for it that I had to remain silent.'

As I recall these words today after so many years sitting in the utter stilness of my Simla room, so many thousands of miles away from the wild Highlands of ethereal Scotland, I still remember how terribly and vehemently they angered me. I found Uncle Timothy a repulsive hideous creature, bent over double by his age and his bookishness, cold and indifferent, for refusing to acknowledge and accept me as his one and only niece. And yet, how greatly have things changed during the times since then, how much of a transformed woman I myself have become through the experiences that Life (oh, how wonderful You are!) has thrown in my direction! I seem to think today that through his refusal to be my Uncle and his wish instead to be a partner for a mutual conversation, which he hoped would never end, he was pointing the way towards a much more intimate bond than I have shared with any man since then, be it James, David ... or even, yes, even Ralph ...

As the months progressed, I gradually realised in my Uncle Timothy's absent presence a fact of singular importance, one that I have never forgotten since then, that the road to understanding oneself is through understanding another, and that it is only by taking this long and tortuous path through the other that I can hope, someday at least, to come closer to myself. Even if only to realise that at the end of this journey, with all its agonies and ecstasies, I am no longer standing where I had been when I had ventured out on this journey.

And conversely, as it happens to me on the pages of this very diary, the deeper that I go into myself, and the harder that I try to plumb the interior depths of my untouched being, the more that I open myself to the world outside, by including all its voices, some of them real, some of them imagined, even without knowing sometimes the precise difference between these two.

Many years later, two weeks before I was to be married to James, I received this letter from Uncle Timothy.

My dearest Niece,

I am indeed a man of powerful contradictions, for today I cannot help thinking of you as my one and only niece as I picture you in your white bridal dress at the Church (St. Patrick's at Britstol, I am told) standing next to Mr. Elphinstone. He is a fine young lad, so I have heard, and I am sure you will be greatly happy with him in India.

As a matter, of fact, I happen to be going in that direction too, though our paths will perhaps not cross again. I am giving up my Professorship at Aberdeen and going to the heartlands of India in search of God. Why God at this late stage of my life? Have I grown weak in my knees, and need that notorious divine crutch to stand up?

No, my niece, I have finally realised, after so many false starts, that only God can give me that blessed peace, that peace that surpasseth all understanding, that peace that I have hankered for, that peace that sleeps in the very heart of the cauldron of seething anarchy. God, if I may make bold to say so, is Anarchy. For if God is Omniscient, God must know everything. No sooner does God know about one view that God immediately knows its counter-view, and just as immediately the counter to that counter-view, as well as the counter to this last counter-counter-view and so on in an infinite spiral that knows no end. Thus, if God is Infinite, God is at that very moment Anarchy as well, and God's life is one that is riddled by the agonising Anarchy of Thought.

This God, I readily submit, is one that I have made in my own image, but do we not all do that, do we not all make a God that we like the most? And yet, think not that this God that I have imagined is one whose life is rapt in utter bliss, for the dreadful Anarchy that I speak of, the demoniac Anarchy that torments my mind, constantly driving me to discover counter-arguments to my own arguments before I have even enunciated them, is a most fiendish spirit that gives me no peace. It is this thought that there exists somewhere a God whose spiritual affliction is just like mine, whose transcendent Mind knows no rest, Victoria, my darling, it is indeed this thought that has been the solace of my life, and will be the solace of my death. That God who is Anarchy will be my fellow-sufferer who understands that I understand Him not, and will hopefully forgive me for this very failure.

Your dearest Uncle,

Timothy

The night wind, pregnant with oneiric whispers, now blows in stealthily through the delicately carved arches of the cold verandah. James is asleep.

Outside, a few footsteps, as if the moon has descended to me from her empyrean heights and decided to give me company for the night in the present absence of Uncle Timothy.

2005-11-06T09:11:00.000Z

Under Oriental Skies

September 2, 1875

These pages that I write on, these stretches of vacant whiteness onto which I inscribe some of the deepest thoughts that emanate from the unplumbed reaches of my being, do these pages stop at the margin of my diary? Or do they not rather extend from the edges and pour out onto the world beyond so that my entire life, all the men and the women whom I know, all the experiences I have undergone --- all of these, like my diary itself, is a grand Text? Is this not the reason why we sometimes talk about being able to read a man like a book, because in some sense every individual is himself a text to be dissected, pored upon, investigated, and understood in the very moment of being misunderstood?

Oh, heavens, why do I sometimes release myself into a frenzy of such dire contemplation? Perhaps this is the influence of my grandfather in whose company I spent so much time as a child. He was a Canon at the Cathedral of Ely, and every Sunday he would talk to me about three mediaeval saints, St. Augustine, St. Anselm, and St. Aquinas. I sometimes believe that I owe much more to my dear grandfather than I shall ever be able to acknowledge on these pages. It is his words of wisdom that sustain me as I find myself surrounded by two men, who for all their mutual differences, utterly fail to understand me. James, of course, would stare blankly at me if I were to talk to him about these matters, and with some hasty excuse struggle to return to his medical books.

Nor would David respond warmly to me, for I have never been able to overcome the feeling that there is a deep contempt that he hides within himself for the fairer sex, one that he would never reveal to anyone, believing that our perennial weakness is manifested in our remaining bound to the norms of social existence. Little does he realise, for all his magnaminous flourishes in our direction and his cynical swipes at the world of men, that we women try in our unique ways to confound and the confute the dominance that men seek over us, keeping inviolate to ourselves a part of our being that no man can fathom. If David were to have his way, I think he would wish all women on this planet to abandon all the warmth they have received from their families, and take the final plunge into the abyss of nothingness from the edge of the precipice, while he himself sat pondering at the edge, nagged by bouts of self-doubt, self-hatred, and anxiety over his lack of resolve. No, I dare not point out this contradiction to him, for his response would only irritate me all the more.

And yet, I wonder if this contradiction is more apparent than real. Perhaps, he deliberately behaves in this manner because he wishes to test my acuity in observing his inconsistencies. Oh, how often I have started using the word 'perhaps'!

But to return to my three saints, St. Augustine's immortal words echo in my ears as I sit down today beside my window staring at the falling leaves of the Simla autumn, 'Noverim me, noverim Te'. It was from St. Augustine that I learnt that beyond the phenomenal fears that we mortals live through lies sleeping a most abominable Terror, and that all our fears are just ephemeral manifestations of this Terror. As we pass through the different stages of our life, these fears change their form, their intensity, and their nature, but this Terror, alas, never leaves us. What, then, is this Terror? I think if we are honest to ourselves we all have experienced something of It, and yet, I know not what It is for me.

Yes, indeed I know not. St Augustine believed that this Terror plagues us because we have now been exiled from our true home, the eternal Fatherland where we may hope someday to become one in each other's company, bound eternally by the sweet violence of love.

But what is the Terror that sleeps within me? I cannot say I have been a good Christian all my life. Yes, oftentimes I do read my King James's Bible, and go to Sunday Church when James is around.

I often wonder whether we women and men experience the same emotions when we survey the wonderful Cross. When I look at the broken body of our Saviour clinging from the piece of wood, I feel this tremendous urge to hold and comfort Him, yes, even with my fragile mortal hands to grasp the emaciated frame of eternity, to touch His earthly wounds, and ease, if I could, something of His horrific suffering. I oftentimes wish I could clasp Him so dearly to my heart, so dearly indeed, not letting Him go until I had taken away every iota of pain from His crushed limbs, and wiped away every bitter tear from his eyes filled with the agony of eternity. At such times, I feel sweeping through my heart all the pain and the misery that must have overwhelmed his mother Mary as she knelt at the foot of her son's Cross, forlorn and forsaken.

And men? I cannot help believing that men look at the Cross only to feel empowered to go and crucify their fellow-men, to bring as many as possible under their suzerainty ... And then there are those men who feel overwhelmed by the suffering of our Saviour, but forget the pangs of grief that must have shot through the heart of His mother.

Perhaps that is the way it is. Perhaps if James belongs to the first group, my father and David to the second.

I think I must stop now. These pages seem to grow weightier every day with my own heaviness, and I wonder if my diary can bear this burden of the centuries.

Am I true to myself on these pages? Can I read myself truly here? Is the Victoria who exists outside these pages the same as the one who writes these words? Or, more ominously, though I do not know why this thought suddenly springs from me, am I a man outside them and a woman in here? And if we are indeed not the same inside and outside these pages, how deep are the discontinuities? Have we become two people within the same body, a man for the world and a woman for this diary? If James were to read these pages, would he recognise his wife here?

I do not like writing the last word to anything, but I must stop for today. I can only wish that if some day, God forbid!, someone were to read my diary, he should take every full stop on these pages as a colon, a colon that keeps open the space for a conversation that shall end only with my last breath :

2005-11-05T18:19:00.000Z

September 1, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

Oh, I have been so happy the whole day! James's letter came in just after breakfast as I was savouring the taste of the freshly scrambled eggs.

I am arriving in Simla in two days. The meetings I have had with the honourable members of the Viceroy's Council in Delhi have been very fruitful.

Olivia came in after lunch, and we both sat down at the piano opposite the western window. We sang songs from Puccini, Tallis, and Schubert, and talked and laughed a lot. How cheerful the whole world seemed to be as the autumn's golden sun came streaming in through the western windows!

Towards dinner, I was reading Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing when for some reason that I cannot comprehend I started thinking about my dear father. It has been five years now since he died, and yet it feels oftentimes that it was just the other evening when he invited me to his bedside and stared into my eyes with a look of the most beautiful sadness. It seemed to me at that time that some grand Alchemist had distilled the agony of this entire world and poured it out into the pair of his warm Irish eyes. Perhaps he knew at that time that he would never see me again. He raised his cold right hand, criss-crossed by long rivers of blue veins, and laid it on my cheek.

My father came from a village near Limerick in Ireland, and arriving in London at the young age of twenty-one rose steadily through the legal profession, soon establishing a firm with an English friend in the East End. Five years later, he married my mother, a lady much above his own class, and perhaps from that day, he completely renounced everything Irish about him. Little did we know, as children, how much of a struggle he went through to thoroughly Anglicize himself in every possible way. I remember that when we were growing up we were never told about our paternal grandparents, and it was only after he died that I discovered his true roots. I remember one night when as a young girl I was woken up by some sharp voices in the living room. I carefully trotted up to the door, and peered through the opening to see my father talking to an old woman.

'You must never come here again, mother. I shall keep on sending you money, as I have been doing all these years. But I am not Irish anymore.'

'How can you say that, Euan? Life is not a slate that you can simply rub off and start from scratch. The past is not past, don't you realise, the past is still flowing past you?'

'Yes, indeed, mother, how right you are. I am still groaning under the burden of my past.'

'What have I done to deserve this?'

'Nothing. Nothing, really. And that is just the point. If you had done something, things might have been different.'

'What could I have done?'

'Oh, many things. Many. I do not want to go over all that now.'

The old woman sank down into the nearest chair. Between them, the clock began to strike eleven, one by one. Painfully and slowly.

My father was away from home either at his office or at the Lower Temple most of the time. As I grew older, I began to feel more and more that there were in fact two men housed inside the same body of his. One man was the charming and affectionate father that I adored with all my heart, the father who got me chocolates for Christmas, the father who showered me with toys at my birthdays, the father who had an amazing knack for knowing what I was going to ask even before I opened my mouth, and the father who could on occasion sit down beside me for hours on end without speaking a word. And yet, there was another man inside him, a man so distant that I hardly recognised him as the same father who was so full of warmth and grace towards me at other times, that I did not even know if I should call him my father during those unbearable moments.

But that evening there was something unfamiliar about him, and this was a father who

was different from even the two men I had become so well-acquainted with.

'You know Victoria, I wish I had some more time. I wonder what it is like in Limerick these days. Perhaps the Irish sun is gleaming through the ripe corn fields, and gracing the tall Church spires.'

With a heart heavy with sadness, I was inattentively turning the pages of my book when I saw David come in at the other end of the room, perhaps with another of his Bengali grammars.

I suddenly remembered the dream that I had about Mr. Bose writing his own views and thoughts through me in my diary, and a cold chill once again ran through my spine. An hour later when David walked past me, I blurted out a question to him.

'Do you think there shall really come a time when an native of this land will understand us so completely that his grasp of our thoughts and emotions will equal that of ours?'

A gleam ran through David's eyes, and he stopped in his tracks.

'But do we understand ourselves? Really? Are our thoughts and emotions transparent to ourselves? If a native came up to me and said, 'Mr. Elphinstone, this is what your motive really is', how would I know if he was right or wrong? For how could I be sure what my motive behind any action is? But yes, perhaps that is not what you ask. Perhaps what you want to know is what sort of a native he must be to love our England and to love us as we love ourselves.'

David sat down on the green chair to my right, and remained silent for a long while.

'That native who believes India to be his homeland is just a beginner in this respect. But that native who loves England as his homeland is even below the beginner, for both these natives are, if I may so, just two sides of the same coin. That native for whom this entire world is a foreign land so that his homeless mind feels equally at home in Delhi or Durham, Peru or Perth, only that homeless mind can become domesticated wherever it lives.'

I looked out through the window. It was full moon, and her distant light, so cold and yet so intimate, began to sink into my heavy soul.

2005-11-03T12:35:00.000Z

August 28, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

One of the joys (but does that mean that there are sorrows as well?) of being married to James is that he does not object to my habit of poring over books of which he, being a bibliophile himself, has a ready and liberal supply, ranging from the times of the classical Greeks to the mediaeval Europeans to the Britain of our own times. Thus over the last three years I have frequently returned to my childhood fascination with the great topic of War, and more especially with the question of why it is always men who believe that the spilling of blood is an act of glory and honour to the Nation. I come back time and again to Thermopylae, the Peloponnesian War, the Punic War, the Battle of Actium, Constantinople, Crecy, Xerxes, Alexander the Great, and down to the Afghan War of our own times.

This is a most fascinating question, and I am not sure if my solution to it is the correct one. I must say that I dare not talk about this with anyone, for oftentimes it seems to me, if I may indulge myself for a few moments, that I am a woman ahead of my times and that consequently the men and the women around me shall not understand what I have to tell them. And yet, I wonder if this is a form of self-flattery, for how could any individual extricate oneself from the meshes of history and pretend to have access to the truth that is beyond time?

These are indeed ponderous matters, and I cannot claim that my feminine frailty is strong enough to meet them in their full force. Perhaps it requires the tenacity of an intensely masculine mind to explore its labyrinthine complexities. But no, let me not digress here now. Blood. Yes, blood. What is it about blood that drives men?

If, my diary, you shall be so patient as to listen to me, let me unfold some of the deepest thoughts from my heart. I believe that men have an external relationship with blood, so that for them blood is a source both of horror and of a mysterious charm. But for us women, blood is a much more intimate reality of our monthly, if not daily, existence, and, as a consequence, we do not experience bloodiness the way men do. Unlike men who are driven to opposite poles by the sanguis that flows through our common veins, we women learn, through painful experiences, to make our peace, even if it is but an uneasy truce, with blood.

Thus there are, I seem to believe with a conviction that grows deeper within my bosom every passing day, two kinds of men when it comes to blood to which we women, by some curious whim of old Mother Nature, are so inextricably bound. One type is so terrified of blood that it rejects everything feminine as bloody, messy, polluted, profane, impure, and corrupting and runs away to the transcendent heights of the sacred mountains, giving the name 'religion' to this great denial; and the other is so enamoured of it that wanting to become one with it believes it to be an act of heroism to spill it through murder and violence.

Thus what the writers of the books I have been reading call the attitudes of world-affirmation and world-renunciation are ultimately two orientations that men possess towards our feminine blood : those who hold the former are charmed by it and those who hold the latter are terrified of it.

I must now stop, for how rapidly my heart beats as I write these words!

Reading what I have written above, how hollow they seem to me already. Does it all revolve around blood? Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps I need to talk to James about it. He is a physician, literally a man of blood, and he should know better.

Or perhaps even David. But no. For I seem to think (oh, how easy it is sometimes to predict his moves) that I know how he will react to my question. He will reply : 'Perhaps. Perhaps you are right. No, I must say something more than that. I must indeed thank you for putting my own words into your diary. But then, which type of a man am I myself?' And with an anaemic smile, he will stare at me for a while, like one of his beloved dogs will scrub the ground under his feet with his shoes, and then will slowly walk away into the garden shrouded with mist.

Oh, I must stop now! There seems to be a commotion downstairs. But I shall return to you soon.

2005-11-02T09:40:00.000Z

August 25, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

I spent the morning in the garden with all the fallen leaves strewn around me. There was a deep silence everywhere, one so noisy that it reverberated angrily in the hollow of my ears. I opened a volume of Lord Tennyson's poems, and as the gentle breeze rustled through the thin pages my thoughts went back to my dear grandfather. As a young student, he had lived next door to Lord Tennyson in the Great Court of Trinity College, Cambridge, and it was he who had instilled in me a most passionate love of Tennyson's poetry.

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.

Ah, Lord Tennyson, when I read these words today after so many years, I felt as if there was a vast ocean of grief slumbering within my bosom waiting to burst out from its bounds. You should have been here with me in our Simla garden overlooking the sleeping valley with its primeval woods shedding their summer leaves. How much you would have loved it here! How much, how much indeed!

Me only cruel immortality
Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

I experienced a sudden surge of bitterness against James. How would he ever feel, lost in the dustiness of his medical books, the haunting beauty that Tennyson evokes through these immortal words! No, not just James. I felt that any man in this world who has not drunk deep from the wells of Tennyson's charm must be banished to some farthest corner of the planet and not allowed to return until he has thoroughly soaked himself in his poetry.

Oh, how dearly I wished I was in England this morning! To be in England in Autumn, to breathe the heavy air of the approaching winter, to see the white clouds dot the brilliant sky exclaiming with the radiant joy of the undying sun, to lie down in the brown meadows amidst the blue lilies and the yellow daffodils, to play with the little children near the babbling brooks, to sing to my heart's content the ancient Song of the Rose, and perhaps, just perhaps, to catch a glimpse of Keat's love-lorn Knight roaming through the desolate countryside under a heart-broken sky in an agonised search for La Belle Dame Sans Merci ...

A sudden sorrow overwhelmed me and I burst out in a flood of tears as I saw the faces of dear Mamma, Edwina, Georgina, Pauline, Iris, Christine, ... and Ralph ... flit in and out before my eyes. Ah, Ralph, Ralph, I must stop writing about you on these pages, I simply must!

In the afternoon, I strolled down a few houses down our lane to the monthly meeting of the Simla Englishwomen's Association at Mrs. Montagu's where I found the atmosphere bubbling over with good cheer in every corner of the vast living room. We were to welcome the newly arrived Mrs. Irwin and her three daughters, Irene, Ivy, and Imogen who were still struggling with the ways and the customs of our little British enclaves in the vast expanses of the unexplored hinterlands of India.

A flurry of speeches followed as I seated myself near one of the windows overlooking the valley now covered in thick mist after one of the sudden showers for which Simla is so famous. Mrs. Linlithglow proposed that the embroidery classes for the young English ladies be started once again in November, Mrs. Buchanan cautioned us with some disturbing reports from Madras about the Native ayahs that Englishwomen in this country are fain to employ to look after their little ones, Mrs. McKenzie urged us to contribute more generously to the Viceroy's Fund for the welfare of native women, and Mrs. Lawrence made an appeal that we send more letters to the Simla Gazette requesting the Government to take up more seriously the cause of the education of native women in Behar and Bengal.

'Mrs. Elphinstone, would you like to speak a few words? Perhaps to the newly arrived Mrs. Irwin and these three lovely young ladies?'

I was shaken out of my reverie by these crisp words which seemed to have come floating to my ears from a distance of several thousands of miles away. I hesitatingly rose to my feet but was mercifully spared the effort of having to make a speech when Mrs. Montagu announced from the other end of the room that it was time for tea.

I went back home to find David so deeply immersed in one of his books of Bengali grammar that he did not notice my entrance. I picked up Hernando Pierez's Journeys through the Mystical Lands of the Incas and started reading it somewhere from the middle.

David came up to me after a while with a strange look on his face that seemed to express both an immense emptiness and a profound abundance.

'I say, I must thank Mr. Bose for that speech of his that day. I daresay I now understand the religion of the Hindoos much better. It is not all about the fakirs and that rope trick of theirs, you know? I have been reading this Bengali gentleman, Mr. Gokul Behari Dey, and he explains it all so clearly. The Hindoos have four aims of human existence, Pleasure, Wealth, Religious Duty, and Liberation, and you are supposed to arrive at the mountain peak of the last only after you have traversed the treacherous terrain of the first three.'

'And are you following all these four?'

'Oh no, not at all, not at all. Now don't get me wrong on this. They won't make a Hindoo out of me, no not yet. To their famous quadrangle, I propose my own. Here, according to me, are the four aims of human existence, Gaiety, Sensitivity, Mystery, and Irony, and though Irony is surely the highest of these, you have to move through the first three of them before arriving at Irony's summit.'

'And have you arrived there, at the peak of this Irony that you speak of?'

Perhaps David did not understand my question, and stared at me for a few moments. Then a gentle smile lit up his face, and he burst out uncontrollably into spasms of laughter.

I was startled for that was the first time I have seen David laugh in all the years that I have known him. And yet how many years would that be? Five? No. A hundred. No. Perhaps a million?...

'Have I attained the Holy Grail of Irony? Have I? Oh, how could I possibly answer that question!'

Then he sank back into his chair, and a look of the gravest seriousness descended upon his face. He did not speak a word for the rest of the evening.

I returned to my land of the Incas, and soon disappeared into the mists of a forgotten place and time.

2005-11-01T09:36:00.000Z

Under Oriental Skies

August 21, 1875

It has been more than a week now since James left for Delhi. Oftentimes in the early hours of the morning I throw out my left hand to my side, only to find a vacant coldness there. As the first light of the rising sun streams in through the eastern window, I look out and see the blossoming colours of the falling Autumn.

David came in today after almost a week. I had thought he had left Simla for the winter to the lower Himalayas to meet the fakirs he keeps on talking about so passionately. But I was mistaken. It seems that he has taken Mr. Bose's rebuff to his heart and is now learning Bengali to read some of the books in that tongue. He struggled throughout the day with no thought for breakfast or lunch reading a grammar written by the Serampore missionary William Carey and struggling with the recent issues of the Bangadarshan which David now thinks is even better than our Spectator back at home. Once he looked up from his books, looked towards the silver mirror on the wall, then closed his eyes and read aloud something to himself, as if with a cry of deep anguish : 'Kothay khuje pabo, O' amar moner Manush.'

Though I did not understand those words, there was a strange rhythm in them that reminded me of the summer of '78 when we had been to the Swiss Alps with Grandfather (God bless his dear soul!).

Aunt Fanny came in towards tea with dear Olivia. David immediately closed his books, gathered them together and with a furtive glance in my direction rushed out from the room. Olivia too, quick as ever to notice these minute details, looked towards me and gave me a thin smile with her delicately carved lips. Aunt Fanny did not seem to have even noticed the flurry of movement her entry had caused.

After tea, we sat down in the garden under the tree burdened with yellow leaves. Olivia had suddenly disappeared. I was wondering where she could have gone to when Aunt Fanny broke the uneasy silence.

'Is everything all right between you and James?'

'But of course, Aunt Fanny!'

'You know, if there ever is anything that you want to tell me, I am always there for you.'

'Yes, Aunt Fanny.'

'When I left England last winter your dear mother drew me to her side and said to me, 'Fanny, I hope that you shall watch over my little darling out there.' You will tell me, won't you, if there is anything that is amiss between the two of you?'

'Yes, Aunt Fanny, I shall. Where could Olivia have gone to?'

I walked into the living room and saw her in a green chair half-bent over a thick brown volume. When she saw me enter, she beckoned to me to come closer and we both began to turn through its pages. It was a copy of St. Augustine's Confessions which Olivia had picked up from the shelves. She had started reading at Book 9 where St Augustine writes about his struggles to find his beloved God in the midst of the temptations and the afflictions of the flesh, and when we arrived at the Twenty-seventh chapter of Book Ten, she began to read aloud, softly to herself, but words that echoed in the distant depths of my own heart.

Too late have I loved You, O Beauty so ancient and so new, too late have I loved You.

For see, You were within me and I was without, and I sought You there. Unlovely, I rushed heedlessly among the lovely things You have made. You were with me, but I was not with You. You called and cried aloud to me, and forced open my deafness. You did gleam and shine, and You did chase away my blindness. You did breathe fragrant odours and I drew in my breath; and now I pant for You. I tasted, and now I hunger and thirst. You did touch me, and now I burn for Your peace.
When I come to be united to You with all my being, then there will be no more pain and toil for me, and my life shall be a real life, being wholly filled by You.

David entered the room with another one of his grammar books just as Olivia was reading out these last words. Almost instinctively he uttered to himself, 'Ah, St. Augustine. Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! That is just what the Bauls of Bengal keep on singing about, 'Kothay khuje pabo, O' amar moner Manush!'

Then he stepped out into the garden, but seeing Aunt Fanny seated there started for the opposite direction just in time.

'Say, that did sound Greek to me!', exclaimed Olivia, shaken out of her book.

'Well, it is just as well that he did not hear you. He might literally have started talking to you in Greek.'

It is now late in the evening, and the darts of the early moon streak in and fall on my pale hands. Oh, how pale indeed do they seem in this light! I sometimes feel that You, my diary, is perhaps the Beloved that St. Augustine was searching for. And yet who are You, my diary? For the more that I ask You this question, the more intensely I fall back on myself and ask, Who am I?

I do feel at such times that You have picked up a life of Your own, that You are not anymore a mere extension of me, that You are writing Yourself through me. And yet I do hope that someday I shall know You as deeply as I know myself.

Perhaps that day I shall finally return to myself, and become one with You at that very moment of home-coming.

2005-10-31T08:23:00.000Z

August 15, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

I have just been woken up by a most horrid dream. I look at the silver clock on the frozen mantelpiece and see the hands stand still at thirty minutes past eleven.

But I must first narrate, even if only to myself, some of the events of a most happening day.

I spent the greater part of the morning before breakfast reading the Gospel according to St John just as the church bells were cheerfully ringing out in joy. I have often returned to the Bible for solace in my moments of deep despair, and like a soothing balm its most heavenly words sink into my tired bones, they smoothen out the creases in my curved heart and raise me to realms to describe which I possess no words adequate to the task. I opened the Bible at John 8 : 32, 'You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free', and as I closed my eyes, I could see in my mind's most inward eye a heavenly golden finger patiently etching out these words onto the immense vastness of the vacant spaces that lie untouched and unperturbed within myself.

Towards lunch, David brought in an aspiring lawyer at the Simla Lower Court, Mr. Mohesh Chunder Bose, who immediately after entering the parlour and seeing me reading at the other end made a move as if he was about to bow to me. I was about to stand up, not used to meeting a Native at such close quarters, when David's smooth voice, crisp as ever with its thick irony, rang out clearly though the morning calm.

'Oh, come on, Mr. Bose, having mastered our English tongue, with all its delicate intricacies, you do not now pretend to have picked up our British chivalry as well? Chivalry! Oh, what a most wondrous term with which an Englishman hides his contempt for the womenfolk! Every Englishman harbours a secret wish in the dark depths of his heart that he shall someday come across a damsel in distress so that her misery will give him the opportunity to establish his chivalry before his fellow-men!'

Startled by this sudden outburst, I sat down once again on my chair and returned to my St. John as David took Mr. Bose to a polished brown table beside the window overlooking the garden. For a moment he looked in my direction, and I looked back at him understandingly. I must not tell James that he had invited Mr. Bose into the Englishman's castle, that was what the glance meant. Oh, sometimes I do feel that I need not even use words when talking to David. Why the merest of a glance says it all!

Mr. Bose was hesitant at first, and words were slow in coming forth from him. But soon his voice rose in intensity : 'Some day this country that you have enslaved will become free. We shall be united once again, just the way we were before until a few hundred years ago. We shall govern ourselves by our own laws laid down in the laws of Manu, read once again the sacred texts of our Vedic religion destroyed by the Muhammedan bigots, replace Urdu with Hindi in the United Provinces, strive for the emancipation of our women who have become corrupted by trying to imitate their Western sisters, protect the Cow, our sacred mother, and finally enter into the land of milk and honey which will descend here from the heavens very soon. Why, this very day, August 15 today, I have this strange thought that some day in the future August 15 shall indeed be the very day that a vibrant India, shaking off the British yoke, shall become free!'

I fervently drank in every word that Mr. Bose spoke with his deep voice resonating with a quivering emotion. What would James say, I thought to myself, if he were to know that such opinions were being expressed under his very roof?

As for David himself, he did not sound very pleased though with Mr. Bose's rousing speech.

'So Mr. Elphinstone, what do you have to say about our vision of a new India?'

'Well.'

'Yes?'

'All that is fine, Mr. Bose, what you have said just now. But what about the fakirs in your India?'

'Fakirs? What do you mean by fakirs? Listen Mr. Elphinstone, listen to me very carefully, ok? We have no fakirs in this country! Yes, get that very clear in your mind. I challenge you to travel throughout the length and the breadth of this country, from Cashmere to Ceylon, from Calcutta to Bombay, and fetch me a single fakir. India is a modern country marching every day into the world of science, progress, technology, and rationality, and we are becoming the best, East or West. We have no fakirs here. Fakirdom is a mass of superstition, and if any fakirs are indeed left over, they shall immediately be banished from independent India.'

'But that cannot be possible, Mr. Bose. I have come all the way from England, fed up with its stupidity, searching for the fakirs of India. Why, next Spring, I am going to Afghanistan on a tour with some fakirs from the North West Frontier Province.'

At this stage, Mr. Bose stood up. He gathered his breath and I could feel, even from my distant seat, the blood rushing to his head.

'Mr. Elphinstone, this is the most vile calumny that you have levelled against us Indians. We are a scientific people proud of our traditions of rationality going back to the times of the Vedas. Did you know that the ancient text of our forefathers, the Mahabharata, teaches you how to make aeroplanes? But of course you did not. How would you, believing that India has nothing better to offer than some fakirs! And that when Ravana abducted Sita he took her away on a celestial machine just like the ones your German scientists are struggling to make even today? Am I right, am I right? Did you know that the text of the Vaisesikas, written several thousands of years before John Dalton was born, explains the details of atomic theory whose intricacies you are hardly able to grasp with all the much vaunted sophistication of your so-called Western science?Yes, yes? Tell me, Mr. Elphinstone, let Truth be my judge, and let Her render me speechless if I utter a single word of untruth! And here you come to me all the way from your England to tell me that you are looking for fakirs? Good Heavens, if I may borrow an expression so beloved of your people, Mr. Elphinstone, I think you are no better than your brother, if you will pardon me for saying so. Englishmen like you come to India in the guise of a friend, but in truth you are a wolf in sheep's clothing.'

Mr. Bose rushed out, leaving David staring at the blooming crocuses in the garden outside. He did not speak much for the rest of the day. I could feel that something was churning round and round in the gigantic caverns of his labyrinth-like mind.

I must now recount the fearful dream that shook me to the very bone. I saw Mr. Bose standing in front of a flag surrounded by hundreds and thousands of the Natives who were wildly cheering him.

'Today, August 15, 1947, my dear countrymen, we have finally become free. Let there be rejoicing before we embark on our long task of nation building. We had made a tryst with destiny, and today we are ready to redeem the most ancient pledge.'

And then I saw Mr. Bose entering into our forsaken house, dusty and dilapidated with years of neglect, come into my room, sit down at my desk and start writing on my diary. Yes, on this very diary to which I am confiding my thoughts to now.

'Ah, that English lady thinks that it is she who is writing all these words. Little does she know that it is in fact me who is writing her thoughts on these papers.'

I am still quivering with a most cold dread as I hear those words echo and reecho in my hears. Who am I then, the writer of my diary? Am I simply reflecting the views and the voices of people around me, or are these thoughts genuinely my own? Am I free to pen the words that emerge from the deepest recesses of my heart, or have even those most inward parts of mine come under the gaze of a man's eyes?

What is the truth that St John promises me, and which way lies the freedom that I seek?

Ah, my eyes and my hands are now weary, and such mortal questions I must postpone till another day.

2005-10-30T17:21:00.000Z

Under Oriental Skies

August 14, 1875

It has been three days now since James left for Delhi, and an eerie silence reigns throughout the house. Not quite the silence of absence, for even when James is around he is often too lost in the medical reports from Leipzig, Paris, Bologna, London, and Harvard to talk to me. But it has rather been the silence of presence, as if it is precisely by going away to Delhi that James has come closer to me.

David was around the whole day. He spent the greater part of the morning poring over some of James' books, emitting every now and then a short cry of surprise. I have often pondered in my heart the strange relationship that these two brothers share, perhaps even unknown to each other. James I have known for the last five years now. But David? Well, in a sense I have known him too for just these five years. And yet in another I oftentimes feel that I have always known him, and even been with him for centuries and centuries before I even first set my eyes on him.

Last year I was staring at a giant clock in the gardens with its polished clock hands slowly moving past the four o'clock hour when I started thinking about James and David. James is the man who resolutely lives within the circle, or even at the heart of it at its very centre. And yet, though he would never confess this to me, every now and then he feels suffocated within its boundaries. He, I suspect, harbours a most secret admiration of David, the very David he believes at other times has been an utter failure in his life, for the light-hearted manner in which David lives on the circumference of this circle. And as for David himself? David, I believe, for all his contempt, though this is always kept very carefully disguised by him, for human beings like me who live day in and day out inside this circle, yes, David too suffers at times from momentary pangs of nostalgia for this very life. Why else would he take such an avid interest in the lives of the common-place people that surround him, so much so that he has often startled me with his most intimate knowledge of the affairs of human beings whose existence I did not know he was even aware of?

And yet I know that none of the two brothers will ever admit their hidden fascination for each other's life. James would be horrified if I were even to suggest to him that, unknown to himself, he sometimes approves of David's irreverent and playful attitude towards our untiring efforts to civilise the Natives of this great Empire. And David the bitter iconoclast whose life I seem to think sometimes is an unflagging monomaniacal crusade against anyone or anything that would attempt to bring him within the circle of society, what about him? David, if I were to tell him that at times he too, for all his cynical iconoclasm, yearns for the warmth and the cosiness of a home, I fear that my statement would go so much close to the truth that he would never talk to me again.

Thus these two brothers live on, each passionately hating the other in the very moment of unknowingly loving and respecting each other.

Never have I seen two men who are so closely bound to each other by their irreconciliable differences.

And perhaps it takes the depths of a woman's heart to be able to experience, though somewhat from a distance, something of the elusiveness of such an intangible bond. A bond not so much between two brothers, James and David, but between two fragments that wage a most bitter war with each other in the icy silence of every human soul.

2005-10-28T10:03:00.000+01:00

Under Oriental Skies

August 10, 1875

'Unsex me!', how loudly and forcefully do these words echo and re-echo in my ears now as I write these words. We have just returned from a staging of Macbeth at King George's Hall behind the Mall, and more than the bright lights of Simla, the gaudy dresses from Saville Row and the reeking perfumes from Calcutta, it is these words that keep on reverberating within me.

Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts,

Unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty!

Make thick my blood

Come to my woman's breasts,

And take my milk for gall,

You murdering ministers!

Lady Macbeth was played by Victoria, the Hardinge's youngest daughter and she did rise to the occasion, staring into the cold darknesses in front of her, rooted to the spot as she beckoned to the sinister spirits that lurk in the depths of every man to come and release her from her much-maligned sex, and put steel into her resolve to vanquish King Duncan and become Queen of Scotland. With a voice resonating with fierceness, she resolutely pressed onwards with her brave naked will, a will as cold as the blade of her flashing dagger, to condemn the vacillating Macbeth, her weakling of a husband, for his unmanly cowardice.

Yes, I do wish I could become Lady Macbeth some day. Even if just for once. But who would then be my Macbeth? James? No. He would rather plunge a dagger into a patient's ulcer than one into... Into... I do not know. And who would be King Duncan? David? The white face in the window? The Viceroy himself? Ah no, I must forthwith stop these terrible thoughts. The evil witches are all around me. Hark! I can hear them whispering these poisoned words to me now, dragging me away gently into their demoniac realms.

David was around for a little while after we came back, talking to the mali about his planned expedition to the lower Himalayas next Spring. He came in after we had finished coffee and sat down on his favourite chair beside the dark window as I was beginning to read The Romance of the Shangri La. He seemed rather amused for some reason and kept on smiling at the windows, but when I asked him what was amusing him so much he did not seem to have even heard my question. I returned to my book. Yes, I do think David can be a trifle impolite at times.

James came in with another one of his thick volumes of The Harvard Medical Review. He is going down to Delhi tomorrow for a meeting with Lord Halliday, the Viceroy's personal secretary. I was absorbed in my book when Ramu rushed in and announced that one of the kitchen-maids had been possessed by a witch. James threw a long sneering glance at Ramu but the news electrified David who bolted out of the room along with Ramu. The witches of Macbeth were all around me, and I made a move to follow David when James cast a disapproving look in my direction. I struggled to go back to my Shangri La but I could not. There were reports recently in the local newspapers that there had been an increase in the number of the Natives who had become possessed by evil spirits, and I so terribly wanted to see what happens to these pour souls when the devillish forces that lie sleeping within all of us suddenly break forth onto the surface.

After about fifteen minutes, David came back. For a man so gullible as him, so ready to believe any bizarre story that the gleeful Natives would spin around him, he was surprisingly scientific today : 'Oh, just another case of hysteria. The women around these parts are particularly prone to this.'

He paused for a moment. Then he smiled again at himself and added : 'But then I guess we men must be susceptible to hysteria too. How otherwise would we recognise it in the women around us?'

James spoke for the first time in the evening. With a voice heavy with scorn, he asked : 'And I take it that is your scientific theory? That the doctor must be infected with the same disease that he discovers in his patient?'

'Well, I suppose so. Say, you are a Christian aren't you?'

'I will be damned if I am not.'

A cry of horror rose to my mouth at his words, and I managed just in time to clasp my hands over my lips.

'Ah, pretty good language, James. Wonder what the Reverend Johnston will have to say about this damnation. Now if you are a Christian, surely you believe in the dogma of Original Sin? Surely you know that all human beings are infected with a most debilitating disease that we have inherited from our common parents, Adam and Eve? So there, that is your proof.'

James stroked his beard for a few moments, gave me another cold withering look (I do not know why he never does this to David though), and returned to his medicine. David slumped into his chair once again, and I went back to my Shangri La.

As the clock began to strike eleven, David rose to go.

He came up to me and said : 'By the way, or shall I say, on my way out, I did hear your question earlier about why I was smiling. I was smiling because I wanted to see if you would notice that I was. And when you did, I started smiling all the more.'

The massive brown doors shut softly after him.

A cold wind swept in. The first intimation of the Simla winter.

2005-10-26T09:11:00.000+01:00

Under Oriental Skies

August 2, 1875

James has been distressed the whole day. Perhaps I have been even more so. Last night after he fell asleep with a volume of the British Physiological Review on his shoulders, I was reading Col. Arthur Fitzpatrick's Travels through the Mystical Heartlands of India when for a moment I looked up at the newly painted yellow window in front of me. I am sure that had I but the ability I could draw what I saw to the minutest detail : a shimmering white face with a pair of cold eyes whose intense stare burnt into my warm flesh like a burst of a thousand flaming arrows. My shriek of horror echoed and reechoed through the entire house.

James sprang up from his sleep and seeing me pointing towards the window darted towards it, opened it and looked down into the darkness of the garden.

A few minutes later he was sleeping soundly again.

I went to the desk and took out an old copy of the New Testament that dear uncle Jack (God bless his soul!) had given me when I was fourteen. I opened it at my favourite twenty-third Psalm :

The Lord is my shepherd

I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures

He leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul

He guideth me in straight paths for His name's sake.

Yea, Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death

I will fear no evil

For Thou art with me

Thy rod and thy staff

They comfort me.

James was unusually quiet at breakfast. I could feel something of the weight that was bearing down on his immaculately sculpted shoulders. The wife of an aspiring Surgeon in the Viceroy's office verging on insanity! How dreadful that must be for his reputation!

The Fairbarns came in for tea in the afternoon just as the mists were clearing up after the sudden burst of rain towards lunch. Lady Fairbarn was excited about a farm that they were buying in Rhodesia and methodically kept on complimenting me on my green dress after a precise interval of every five minutes.

'Have you been to the Mall recently? The tastes are definitely deteriorating!'

I was, however, living in a different time and place : the white face from the previous night kept on swimming in and out in front of my eyes.

A face that filled me with a cold dread.

And yet, there was an inexplicable allure in the midst of that very dread.

2005-10-25T09:13:00.000+01:00

Under Oriental Skies

July 29, 1875

I have made a frightful mess of myself today. We were driven up to the Viceregal Lodge in the morning where Her Ladyship Dufferin was due to arrive towards noon. Knowing that I always feel nervous at these public meetings, James had cautioned me to hold my own in front of the dignitaries. I sat down near one of the grand intricately ornamented windows in the Ball Room glancing at the massive vacant spaces on the yellow ceilings, and the glimmering glasses of the chandeliers. There I remained for the greater part of the quiet morning, drinking in the Strauss, the Mozart, and the Beethoven that wafted towards me from somewhere behind the thick heavy red curtains.

I was woken up from my solitary reverie by the hustle and bustle in the courtyard just as the clock was striking twelve. There she was followed by a host of men in heavy polished boots and glittering blue coats. She walked down the aisle, with all the Lords and the Ladies bowing to her and giving her their best smiles.

When she came up to me, however, I felt so overwhelmed for a moment that I forgot all our time-honoured rules of courtesy and instead stared awkwardly at her hat festooned with roses and hibiscuses. Dear God, what a horrible taste in hats Her Ladyship has! It was one of the hats I had seen in '66 when Ralph had taken me to Brighton. Oh, why do I keep on writing about Ralph on these pages? I was standing on the pier when I saw one of these old overfed women from the North sailing away wearing a gigantic green hat whose frills came down to her powdered neck.

A frisson of laughter ran through me and for some reason, I know what, I remembered the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland and blurted out, 'The Mad Hatter!'

Almost as immediately, I excused myself, desperately mumbling something under my breath, and frantically rushed out of the room, followed soon thereafter by James. James was once again very composed. For a few moments, he glared at me and then sat down beside me and stared through the window, slowly shaking his head. There was a vast wall of emptiness between us the whole afternoon.

I have let James down, and I feel horrible about it. This meeting was so vital for his wish to become the Viceroy's personal Surgeon and I have spoilt all his chances. Oh, how utterly stupid I feel now! I feel like wringing my head in despair!

Towards evening, David came in, half-drunk, I seem to think now. He was the last person I wanted to talk to, but I let him go on once again about some faqirs he had met in Gujerat last year. It seems he wants to dress as one of them and travel with them to the mountains of Afghanistan and the cold heights of Tibet.

I was still feeling so frustrated with myself that I blurted out the entire episode in the morning to him. He spoke nothing for almost half an hour. And then with the voice of a man on whose shoulders hung the weight of eternity, he began to speak, steadily and slowly.

'In England, a woman is free only during two stages of her life --- either when she is too young or when she is too old. In the former case, her parents will put up with all her tantrums, tantalise her with gifts and wait upon her demands. Her merest whim becomes their command. And in the latter, she sits down beside the fire and as the great matron pulls the strings of the marriages of the little ones, offers free advice to anyone who seeks it and with the full brunt of her experiences comments on how wayward the youth around her have become. But between childhood and senility, a woman has no independence, she is the unfreest of all beings on this planet : she can only put up a brave face as her husband goes about the ponderous task of his public service to God, King, and Country.'

I listened patiently to him, but did not know what to think or reply. He too remained silent for a long time, as if he had unburdened the unspoken afflictions of the centuries from his agonised heart and was now exhausted by the titanic effort.

After dinner, I sat down at the desk looking at the garden below, bathed in the most beautiful moonlight. How I wished I could talk to dear Mamma for a while! She has this heavenly way of healing me with her slightest touch, closing up the cracks that threaten to open up within myself with the mere sound of her kind voice!

My dear little one,

I hope you are keeping well, and you are safe and away from the heat and the dust of the Indian plains. I have just returned this Monday from Edwina and Robert, and their three beautiful children. Oh, they are three cherubims, these little ones! Their radiant smiles make you feel you are in the bliss of heaven, far away from the toils and the turmoils of miserable sooty-faced London! Oh, dear, how terribly the Thames stinks in summer! Would you believe it, they are thinking of shutting the windows of Parliament this year to keep off the horrible smell?

But let me come back to Edwina and Robert. They are now stationed in Cornwall, and it is frightfully beautiful country out there. They were all sorely missing you and remembering the Spring of '82. Iris sends you her love too, and hopes to see you very soon in Southampton. She is getting engaged this winter to Sir Arthur McIvor, you know? I think it will be an awfully good match, the two dear ones. They are so much in love, heads turn around when they go walking down the road! His grandfather served in India during the Mutiny and was a close friend of my granfather too.

Are you coming to England at all next summer, my little one? James, I know, must be awfully busy trying to get his promotion. Your father is very proud of him, you know. He says that the young man will get to high places that he himself was never able to reach. Your grandfather talks about him all the time too. The Empire needs robust young men like him, he keeps on repeating to himself, sipping his mulled wine near the grand fire in our house whenever he comes to visit us. And then he nods himself to a peaceful sleep.

But what do I care for all this talk of government and politics, of men and their armies, of kings and their battles! Our proper place is inside the home, to raise the next generation that will carry the flag of our brave country into new worlds that are yet untouched by our glories. And above all, what matters to me is that you should be happy, under whatever skies you may live, English or Oriental.

With lots of love,

Your doting Mamma

James came into the room just as I finished writing this letter in my own hand. He looked over my shoulder for a moment, twitched his lips for a brief moment, picked up a massive volume of the British Medical Quarterly and sank into his bed, his eyes riveted on the latest surgical procedures.

'Must you always be writing and reading this womanly stuff?'

Of course, he did not ask me that question. But somehow I knew that he was struggling with himself to keep it within himself.

How hard dear James tries to hide his contempt for me! And how terribly he underestimates the powers of a woman's intuition!

It makes him at once sorely pitiable and dearly lovable!

2005-10-24T09:45:00.000+01:00

Under Oriental Skies

July 25, 1875

I have been feeling edgy and irritable the whole day. It all started during breakfast when Ramu dropped a beautiful china plate which splintered on the polished floor into a thousand bits. A flash of anger ran through me and I felt like hitting out at him. Surprisingly for his temperament, James was very calm. He slowly raised his head from The Simla Mail and stared at the pieces as if he was methodically counting their number while Ramu, having apologised profusely, dashed out frantically and called for Tipu who came in to gather the pieces.

Later in the morning, when we went out into the garden, everything looked haphazardly arranged. The crocuses were in full bloom and they reminded me of the summer of '66 in Somerset House with Ralph and his brothers. And yet nothing seemed to be in the right place today. When the mali came in and started explaining to James why he needed some more money for the new hibiscus seeds, I felt once again an inexplicable anger surge through my body and rack my limbs. I wished I could take every flower in the garden by my hands, uproot it, burn the whole mass into a gigantic pile, and drink the wild smoke until I had become whole again.

It started raining after lunch, and I sat by the window cursing at it under my breath for having spoilt the afternoon walk. David came in just as dusk was falling, fully drenched. Few people would perhaps be able to guess that the two of David and James are brothers : each believed that the other was a complete failure in his life.

I must assert though that David is a bit eccentric. Or perhaps more than a bit. I asked him once why he never carried an umbrella with himself even when he knew that it was going to rain. For a moment, he smiled to himself. At times like these, I seem to believe that nothing amuses him more than himself.

'Ah, you see, the rain, the rain. For people who are not afraid to take a bath, whence the fear of the rain? For me, the entire sky is a shower, and the whole world is a bathroom.'

James was sitting at the other end of the room, smoking his pipe and reading The British Medical Gazette. He emitted a brief snort, looked in my direction, and then towards David, in an expression of pity, sadly shaking his head.

Nevertheless, talking to David today irritated me all the more. After he came in, he started a long winded conversation in his pathetic broken Hindusthani with Ramu about the Indian rain. Ramu seems to think that there is a lost tribe in the lower Himalayas which knows the secret of healing arthritis with water collected from the first shower of the Eastern Monsoons. David sat down with Ramu on the porch, his eyes filled with the wonder of a child, avidly drinking in every word that Ramu threw at him and wildly gesticulating to him as he searched for the right word in Hindusthani. So much for our Lords and Ladies in the Upper House who deliberate day and night on the superiority of our European race and send Eton-and-Cambridge educated Davids to civilize the Natives!

David was excited about what he had heard from Ramu and was insistent that I hear him out too. I endured him for a few minutes, when I began to feel that excruciating pang of irritation flush through my face all over again. I struggled with myself as something within me wanted to lash out fiercely at him, and something else was trying to find the strength for restraint.

'Can't we talk about something else?'

'You mean, about the failures of Western medicine to cure arthritis?'

'Must you always be this cynical? I daresay James has done more among the sick people here than you have.'

'Ah, back to James, General Surgeon, by the Queen's Appointment. A pair of skilful hands meets a pair of blue eyes. '

'And what is wrong about that?'

'Right? Wrong? Oh, don't ask me all these textbook questions. I know what is right and I know what is wrong. What I really want to know is which rights are more wrong and which wrongs are less right.'

I think the rope snapped somewhere at that stage. I turned my face towards the crocuses outside and stared at the pouring rain with a sullen face.

David left after dinner when the rain finally stopped.

I sat down on the porch staring at the beautiful night sky spangled with shining stars. A cool breeze was blowing through the garden and into the house through the white curtains. I felt a gentle peace sinking into me. The deep storm inside me had subsided, and I felt like a battered ship that having braved a perilous gale on the high seas sails into the safety of an expecting harbour.

For today, at least.

2005-10-21T17:14:00.000+01:00

Under Oriental Skies

Simla : 21 July, 1875

And then it arrived without a warning, indeed, without even a trifling hint of one. We were standing at the edge of the Mall, I, James, Sir Major-General John Malcolm of the Central Provinces, Lord Endsleigh, recently returned from England, his wife, Lady Endsleigh, and her daughter Maud with her ayah Mirsabai, looking down into the abyss of the sleeping valley dotted with the miniscule brown huts of the Natives. A great clasp of black thunder rent the sleepy skies into two and the heavens, brimming over with sorrow, began to pour down upon us torrentially. James dragged me after him towards the new bungalow beside George's Hall and the rest of our company scurried for shelter after us. There I sat down in the large visitors' room warmed by a sprightly log-fire, staring through the afternoon at the gentle mist enveloping the Mall like an ominous beast covering its hapless prey in a vice-like grip.

At the other end, ripples of ribald laughter and snatches of muffled conversation.

'It is a bloody hell of a business in the Provinces. The heat is stifling and does funny things to you. The Natives are rising against the landlords just next door in Berar.'

' I am getting my three month's leave next month. We are going down to Malta for the winter.'

'I am rather worried about leaving Maud with her ayah though. Lady Ronaldshay told me a horrific story just the other day about an ayah and this newly-arrived family in Cawnpore. The Lansdownes, I think, it was.'

'Gladstone seems to be getting rather edgy in Parliament recently. Do you think the Liberals are going the right way in the Sudan?'

'Say, have you read Sir John McKenzie's article on the Doabs in last's weeks The Indian Review?'

I sat numb, partly with the cold and partly with their talk, on my green chair. Those who worry about the physical storms that inflict the body, this tattered fragment that we wear on ourselves, what indeed shall they know about the greater ones that ruffle the oceans that lurk deep within it? James indeed thinks that the heat was sinking into me this terrible summer in Faizabad. 'Getting to my head', that is the phrase that was ever on his lips during those horrible weeks. He is constantly worried that I might contract the Indian disease of fatalism. The miasma of fatalism, he never tires of telling me, floats in the very Indian air, and that the more I breathe it unwaringly the more I might acquire that peculiar Indian laxity and apathy in all matters, moral, physical and spiritual, that has reduced the effeminate Natives to a state of such abject servility.

James is desperate for a promotion in the Viceroy's office as the Viceroy's official Physician, and is trying all means at his hand. Indeed, I am to meet Her Ladyship Dufferin when she comes up to Simla next week. Oh dear, I wonder what poor Mamma must be doing in Cornwall these days. And Iris, and Edwina, and Georgina, and all the children!

I suppose I do not know why I am writing all this sitting down in the middle of this horrible racket. Perhaps, if I were a bit more happy, just a bit more, I would have never felt this impulsive need to write at odd times. I could then just have breathed the air around me, aye, even this air poisoned, according to dear James, with fatalism, and allowed myself to flow downstream until I dissolved into its arms in a passionate frenzy. But unhappiness is not the same as insanity, and the more I sink into the warm embrace of my misery the more determined I become to find some meaning to my existence here, in the great heights of the heart of the Empire.

I wonder too sometimes what the Natives think of me. What about my driver Chotta Ram when he took me and James to the edge of the mountains at Kasauli last week? Perhaps I am unwanted in this place, even despised as one whose hands are steeped in the blood and destruction that the foreign invader has left behind in his trail. And yet, at times when I stand at my window looking at the tired red sun sinking into the heart of the great Himalayas, I wonder if it really makes a difference. I find myself talking to the sky, 'Perhaps I should not be asking the question, 'Should I live in the East or the West?'. No, that is beside the point. What I really need to ask is this, 'Why was I, a woman, born at all?''

Not that I would ever dream of asking James this question. I wonder though what he would say. Perhaps stare at me with a cold horror in his eyes, perhaps distort his upper-lip into that sinister smile when he mocks himself, or perhaps shrug it off with his shoulders. He has this great fear that deep behind my composed face there is a little child that is perennially tottering on the verge of dissolution.

I saw the sunrise this morning. For a moment I felt that I was absolutely alone under the gigantic spaces of the Oriental skies, witnessing the terrible moment of the very birth of the world. For a few moments, a sharp pain ran through my hands as if someone was trying to wring them off my body, as if the very birth-pangs of the universe were searing through me.

Perhaps I fainted. When I woke up, James was peering into my eyes. Behind him, the sun had started his slow ascent into the heart of darkness.

2005-10-16T19:55:00.000+01:00

The Genesis of Civilization (And Related Maladies)

In the days of yore now lost in the mists of time
A horde of brooding males wrote in poetry sublime
Noble words pregnant with a silence eternal
The fruit of centuries of penance transcendental.

Breathing the Himalayas's idyllic peace
Those frigid men in efforts without cease
Mapped the structure of the great universe
By smoothing out every trace of a crease.

Then they taught that the immortal Ariadne's thread
For all those who through this ailing world tread
Is by withdrawing from Woman's seductive charm
The source of all ignorance, of every conceivable harm.

Those who meditate on the rhythmic sacred Utterance
And real-ise the world brimming over with Its resonance
Are liberated at once from the sinister power of Her wiles
No longer are they in the twilight zone of such guiles.

This unfailing talisman to traverse the world of plurality
And ascend unto the ineffable peace of the now lost unity
This inexplicable hold of the allure of such abstract beauty
Surely must be the very El Dorado of universal masculinity.

But alas! in the course of time's destructive sway
And much to their descendants' utter dismay
This message dissolved into the vortices of memory
Like Woman herself, ever so fragile, ever so finicky.

And then there arose from the indomitable East
Like the morning sun's awakening for his feast
On the night's feminine forces of abject darkness
Which he gobbles at a trice with his brightness.

There emerged this fellow in passionate search for divinity
Having indwelt the grieving earth's forsaken misery
Resolved to go straight to the heart of the ponderous matter
And arise from the masses' feminine and inane chatter.

For years he searched but recovered not the light he sought
Found no solace in the arts and sciences he had been taught
With the great eclipse of the human heart he valiantly fought
And yet his Herculean labours all sadly came to nought.

Until one day straying off from the path beaten
He stumbled over a hermitage ancient and earthen
Where an emaciated figure in contemplation reposed
With a saintly face in utter peace blissfully composed.

'Teach me, Light of the World, in Thou I seek refuge!
Of fashionable knowledge I have by now a pastiche
My mind is overcrowded with billion a billboard
But give Thou unto me true knowledge's sword!'

'With that I shall forthwith cut through this hoard!
That groans in my mind, this despicable smorgasbord
And freed from all nagging doubt and devillish delusion
I shall penetrate through this veil of feminine illusion!'

The old man opened an eye and looked upon him
August saints are, after all, allowed such a whim
With a faint smile on his lips broken and chapped
With his arms outstretched towards him beckoned.

And the two became from that auspicious moment
The pair of the obedient child and the benevolent parent
'I have taken you under my wing', he lovingly proclaimed
'Listening to anyone else is hereby strongly condemned!'

Thus the Master started the long surgical process
Of trimming off his disciple's mind the earthly excess
That he had imbibed from the world's pretentious schools
Full of students pragmatically wise, but spiritually fools.

After twelve's arduous years of rigorous instruction
Almost an eternity's duration of spiritual deconstruction
The Master declared in a voice that for a matter so grave
Was not only palpably placid but also strikingly suave.

'Our forefathers established over the inscrutable Chaos
With solemn invocations to the heaven of Deos
In a Language they had received as a divine gift
Laced with metaphors melodious and similies swift.

'The blessed tranquility of the reign of cosmic Order
Though the beneficence of Speech, the divine M/other
Victorious over worldly transgressions which it does smother
Against the looming spectre of Woman, the perennial Other.

'On this great day, my long-suffering and patient disciple
I teach you this : Language is truly a feminine principle
So if it is Her frivolous touch that you seek to conquer
It is this Language that you must definitely master.

'Not knowing this Language, the words of the heavenly gods
Men become Woman-and-Gold seeking servile sods
Drinking life to the lees they lie prostrate on the road-side
Pretending to be cool, they indeed become hollow in-side.

'But you know now my loyal and worthy disciple
Like the ephemeral nature of everything edible
Woman's outer material shell too is frangible
Such is the impermanence of everything tangible.

'But Woman rises above such carnal triviality
To the rarified heights of unsullied spirituality
When she attains the beatific state of Maternity
The nearest she will ever get to touching Divinity.

'Our eminent Indian women in the days before the British
Did not bother whether their complexion was wheatish
To those ephemeral Westerners I hasten to add perforce
Our celestial Language has no synonym for their 'divorce'.

'If as the Mother incarnate you look upon every woman
There shall soon be none left for her plight to bemoan
Though I confess that pushing this argument to its extremity
Will also imply the ultimate disappearance of humanity.

'A veritable model of concord, amity and harmony
That is indeed the bliss of the classical Indian family
With the father the over-fed King, the mother the Queen
And the demure wife as the what-could-have-been'.

That evening the disciple was immersed in reflection
And just as he reached the end of his intense cogitation
He slowly fell into the serene lull of a dreamful sleep
As the frosty stars their warm tears began to weep.

Then through the hazy clouds of the sky aquamarine
He thought he saw the lineaments of a figure feminine
Who from afar mocked him with a smile shimmering
And then launched into a speech bold and blistering.

'Oh, dear deluded disciple, what can I say unto thee?
I know not where to begin and even if I did know not
How to talk to you, you poor little parrot-like swot
How can I liberate you from your self-inflicted misery?

'I am Language, indeed the very one you garrulous men
In a grandiose moment of world-renouncing megalomania
Have appropriated from me through your juvenile dementia
Speak, write, read, or hear my own words now I cannot even.

'When I begin to speak my Language is already stolen
And washed with the blood of your everpresent violence
How can I excavate my forgotten words that express no vehemence?
How can I recover from you my wealth, now so ill-gotten?

'So I cry out to you in these laments that are contrapuntal
That mimic the facile cadences of your elegiac songs
But I subvert them using the very intrument of your wrongs
This Language you have utterly defaced to a state dismal.

'Even when I am nostalgic I have nothing to go back to
There are no pristine origins uncorrupted by your touch
It is your own words that I must use, though they ouch
And subtly dissolve them through my ironic play too.

'It is indeed Language, O' misled disciple, you have been taught
That is the alpha and the omega of every perishing thing
No matter which way the fates of men may swing
It is for the right to speak that revolutions are fought.

'Countless is the number of men who repeat glibly
To their wives and daughters in a solemn beatitude
'You know, I really am doing this for your own good!'
These masters of using Language so patronisingly.

'What an irony, these self-apppointed Lord Protectors
Are viewed by women as veritable Grand Inquisitors
When they indulge in such rhetoric that borders on falsehood
What becomes of this question, 'Whose Language? Which Good?'

'What a tragedy, these self-styled Moral Guardians
Who for 'women's sake' pitifully endure great burdens
Do they know that their task which they take to be cosmic
Appears in fact so plainly risible and absurdly comic?

'Little do they pause to reflect when they declare
"Women need to be saved from their own devices
And cannot walk without men as their crutches"
Who it was who invented this grand imposture!'

When the disciple woke up it was early morning
And all the chirpy yellow birds were just stirring
He saw his ancient master at a distance reading
And breathlessly under his tired breath mumbling.

'You from this day I do earnestly renounce
And all your teachings too do I utterly denounce
Today I set forth into the world I once left
In whose intricate ways I was then so deft.

'But in repudiating you I must by necessity
Abjure much that constitutes my own identity
I cannot henceforth write any longer with a valiant 'I'
And when I speak I must do with a smile wry.'

Thus the disciple came into the world's sight
Rejecting much of his past as a beastly blight
He now emerged as an unmitigated anarchist
To undermine Language, as the transparent ironist.

2005-10-06T21:03:00.000+01:00

The Scent Of Burning Charcoals

When Arijit Ackroyd Ghose went back to Shimla in 1892, having become a Wrangler in Mathematics and then secured a double first in Greek and Latin from Cambridge, he was asked by the principal of his old school St Paul’s, Kasauli, if he would spend that summer teaching philosophy to students in class ten. Ghose hesitated initially for a few days : to ‘educate’ people by telling them what the right things to do were, to ‘instruct’ them regarding the range of beliefs and actions that was forbidden to them, and to ‘normalise’ those who burst through these bounds, would be a betrayal of his deepest anarchist conviction that what went by the hallowed name of ‘education’ was simply a sophisticated mask through which teachers inflicted their Will to Power on their hapless victims.

And yet three months through the experience, he was glad that he had taken up the principal’s offer, not so much because of what he taught the students but because of the trains of thought that a certain ‘problem child’, Vishal, set in motion within the labyrinths of his mind. Vishal spent much of the time in class alternately staring through the windows, pestering those on the benches in front, or throwing chalks at the empty blackboard. One afternoon, just as the low clouds were lifting from the valley shrouded in mist, Arijit met Vishal as he was going down to the Mall. That was the beginning of a series of extended conversations, of which the following are some snatches.

‘Do you know what true power is?’
‘Standing at the top of a mountain and ordering the people below to follow you.’
‘Power that is, yes, but not true power. That is when you stand at the top of a mountain immersed in your own work, look at the people gathered below but just for a fleeting moment, and get back to what you were doing earlier, oblivious of their existence. Indeed, you are even unaware that you are at the top and *for all you care* you could very well be sitting next to the people at the base. The leader who compels others to follow him is, unknown to himself, completely under the sway of those whom he is trying to lead for his existence becomes dependent on theirs. Have you wondered why no matter how badly a master ill treats, starves or beats his slave, he will never actually kill him? That is because the master’s own existence depends on the slave’s, and consequently the master himself unwittingly becomes subservient to his slave. But think of the other figure placed on the mountain top who remains unconcerned which way the wind is blowing, how many people are with whom, or how many of his followers are not moving astray from his command, because such human allegiances of mastery and serfdom do not touch him.’
‘So what is the point of all this?’
‘Well, if you do not like school, as I never did, you have two options. The first is simply to run away from it all, but that won’t work out in the long run. If you meet the Establishment head-on, you will soon realise that it is simply too powerful for one isolated individual like you. It will catch up with you sooner or later, slowly but unerringly squeeze the life out of you, and pack you to a correction-centre where you shall spend the rest of your miserable life. The second option is to do what I myself did : become a part of the Establishment, but this not because you love it but because you hate it, learn all its rules thoroughly, completely absorb and internalize them, and then slowly turn them against it.’
‘How does one do that?’
‘Well, for a start, never allow yourself to get any rank below the first rank. Fight tooth and nail, and with every ounce of energy in your body strain every muscle in it so that you can stay there. Always remain at the top of the game for you will find that there is more room up there, but this not because you adore the game but because you think it is just that --- a game, a game that some people play to pass their time. So when people come up to you and congratulate you on having achieved the first position, it is you who will have the last laugh.’

2005-10-06T16:39:00.000+01:00

Remembrance of Things Present

Many years ago, perhaps when I was in Class 4 or 5, I happened to be at a commemoration service of a literary figure in Assam. Speaking on the occasion, his daughter made a comment to this effect : 'When I got married, my father called me over to his side and said, 'Dearest, I am not giving you just this boy, I am also giving you his entire family.''

I distinctly remember the feeling of uneasiness that crept over me when I heard those words, and telling myself that if this was what marriage entailed, I had to keep it at an arm's length from myself. Over the years, of course, that feeling has hardened into a fanatical conviction and the distance multiplied into several thousand light years' length.

A similar sensation of queasiness came over me when I read these words some weeks ago :

'The ideal woman in India is the mother, the mother first, and the mother last. The word woman calls up to the mind of the Hindu, motherhood; and God is called Mother ... In the West, the woman is wife. The idea of womanhood is concentrated there --- as the wife. To the ordinary man in India, the whole force of womanhood is concentrated in motherhood. In the Western home, the wife rules. In an Indian home, the mother rules.'

'Even I, who never maried, belonging to an Order that never married, would be disgusted if my wife, supposing I had married, dared to displease my mother. I would be disgusted. Why? Do I not worship my mother? Why should not her daughter-in-law? Whom I worship, why not she? She has to wait till her womanhood is fulfilled; and the one thing that fulfills womanhood, that is womanliness in woman, is motherhood ... That, according to the Hindu mind, is the great mission of woman --- to become a mother'.

The writer, or rather the speaker, was Swami Vivekananda : this was at a speech in Pasadena, California on January 18, 1900.

2005-10-05T09:27:00.000+01:00

Notes From The Middle Ground

1. How to live in the world at an angle of forty-five degrees to it.

1.1 It is impossible to live in it when this angle is perfectly zero degrees. One would have to become a mute stone to accomplish this feat, to be swept away by every passing wind.

1.1.1 Living in it at an angle of ninety-degrees is yet another impossibility. Nobody has ever succeeded in doing this, not even the hermit on Kailash who needs to scavenge for herbs and roots and who orients his life in terms of a vision that has been handed over to him by other people.

1.1.1.1. Thus to live on the thin red line that divides the two halves is an expression of the fundamental ambivalence in which the individual is located in the world. For some, it is a sign of wobbly weakness, for some an expression of dark despair, for some the joy of ironic play, and for others, it is simply a constitutive aspect of the human condition.

2. Sanity is a statistical concept.

2.1 If more people inhabit the right half rather than the left, you are rightly sane if you are in the former.

2.1.1 The scarecrow of insanity is ultimately one that threatens to undermine the very foundations of social existence. Which is why social norms are invented to police and discipline any trespassing of this line which, though otherwise fuzzy, is now made to appear rigid and uncrossable.

2.1.1.1. As a matter of fact, however, sanity is not the state of stolidly existing in the right half but an ongoing process of negotiation through which this line is shifted, played around with and criss-crossed in a never-ending dialectical motion.

2.1.1.1.1 Thus one becomes more 'sane' by becoming aware of the depths (or the heights?) of the 'insanity' one can descend into (or ascend towards?). 'Insanity' is the intimate stranger one loves to hate.

2005-10-03T11:10:00.000+01:00

Casual tourist (CT) outside Trinity, Great Gate : Excuse me, is this Trinity College?
Transparent Ironist (TI) : Well, I would hope so!
CT : And you study here?
TI : I certainly try to do so.
CT : Ermm, is this the way you always talk?
TI : You mean the way I am talking to you right now?
CT : Yes, I mean this hypothetical, hesitant, and tentative way of speaking?
TI : Perhaps yes, but why do you allow it to bother you? Say if I stood up there in front of this Great Gate and declared to you, 'X is the Truth, the Way and the Life', what would you do?
CT : Probably laugh it away, probably not pay too much attention to it, probably declare it to be a form of intolerance.
TI : So there! If I told you, 'This is Trinity', you might not take too much note of it either. You might even think that I am some sort of a propagandist on Trinity's behalf, that there is some sinister power-play that I am trying to mask and that you must excavate by going behind the scenes. But if I dress it up a bit more carefully, your ears stand up to take it all in.
CT : Why do you think this is so?
TI : Well, it is all a part of a merry-go-round game that we play, both inside and outside the Academy. Outside, nobody likes the way people talk inside, they complain that people inside the famed ivory-tower are trapped in their webs of language and their theoretical mazes, and yet for all that, they do have a curious fascination for the arcane talk that goes on within. They like to 'problematize' things, to have a 'critical perspective' on matters, and to do a bit of 'deconstructing' every Sunday morning.

CT : And why is that so?

TI : Well, I don't know. But before your tour-guide moves on to St John's, here is a bit of bone to gnaw on. Perhaps we most violently reject in people around us what we most passionately dislike about ourselves.

2005-09-29T18:31:00.000+01:00

Baby to his mother : Mum, when I grow up, I want to be a man.

Mother to her baby : Oh, do stop being silly, dear. You know as well as I do that you can't do both at the same time.

2005-08-29T12:56:00.000+01:00

The Parable Of The Royal Doctor

On the banks of the river Sattvika, there once lived a Buddhist sage called Prajnaparamita who was known throughout the kingdom of Dharmarakshita for his ability to teach noble truths through the means of parables. One morning, after three of his disciples had taken refuge at the feet of the statue of the Great Master, the Sakya Muni, one of them asked Prajnaparamita why in the world outside the hermitage motherhood was regarded as such an exalted state that the followers of the Vedas had, in a fit of anthropomorphic frenzy, even raised the Mother to the status of the Deity.

Prajnaparamita smiled for a moment, as if he had been waiting all these years for one of his disciples to ask him this very question.

'Listen, dear keepers of the noble Dharma', he told them, 'Ignorance, ignorance, and ignorance, that alone is the source of all human suffering. And wisdom, wisdom and wisdom that is gained through the practice of the Dharma, that alone is the means of liberation from it. Men outside our hermitage regard motherhood as a noble state, and indeed they shall, burdened as they are with the pernicious load of aeons and aeons of unreaped karma that casts a veil over their powers of discernment into the nature of reality. Listen, my beloved keepers of the noble Dharma, listen to this story of the great Avalokitesvara.'

Once upon a time, there was a young man called Avalokitesvara who travelled from the holy land of Magadha to the cold plains of Tibet. He travelled through the land for twenty years, during the course of which he saw many an amazing sight. But none, none of them was more intriguing than his encounter with the royal Doctor who lived in the palace of Khorkistan in the kingdom of Turkebiztan. Every morning, the Doctor would cut off the right hand of one of the courtiers and then spend the next three months treating the hapless man. At the end of the year, all the courtiers had their right hands cut off but they survived due to the constant and unfailing treatment given to them by the indefatigable Doctor. Indeed, when they had all recovered, they even praised the Doctor, 'You are the greatest Doctor of all. Doctorhood is indeed the highest state of human existence'. Avalokitesvara asked them, 'But why did you let the royal Doctor cut off your right hand in the first place? Why allow him to increase suffering?', and to this question, they all replied in unison, 'Without suffering there is no happiness. So we had to allow him to first inflict pain on us so that he could later lead us to greater joy.'

Then Prajnaparamita turned to his discplies and spoke : 'Such indeed is the state of our sisters outside out hermitage who have not been enlightened by the teaching of the noble Dharma. Every moment, one of them becomes a mother and even glorifies in her state of motherhood, and gives birth to yet another sentient being that cries, thirsts, hungers, grieves, decays, sorrows, and rots. And when it cries, the sister gives it her warmth, without realising that she is simply behaving like the royal Doctor from Turkebiztan : first increasing suffering, and then desperately trying to remove it. If she cares so much that her baby should not suffer, why bring it into this world where existence itself is suffering?'

At that very moment, a young woman rushed into the hermitage with a dead baby in her hands. She came running towards Prajnaparamita, flung the lifeless body at his feet, and appealed to him : 'I take refuge in you. You who are acclaimed to have removed the suffering of the four heavens with the light of your wisdom, can you not remove the suffering of one poor woman?'

The three disciples immediately stood up and asked the woman to leave the hermitage at once with her baby. However, Prajnaparamita made a slight nodding movement with his head and asked them to leave. Then he slowly raised his old body and asked the young woman to follow her towards the other end of the hermitage where they could see the tired sun setting into the distant hills. A gentle evening breeze was rustling through the yellow autumn leaves. There was a colour of orange in the exquisite sadness that pervaded the air.

Prajnaparamita stood in front of the young woman, looked into her eyes brimming with tears, and then fell down to this knees.

'Dear sister', he painfully whispered under his breath, 'I too once had lost my baby daughter.' And he began to weep uncontrollably.

His sobs echoed into the falling dusk.

2005-08-27T08:24:00.000+01:00

Transforming Language

The origins of the English language predate this sentence that you are reading right now because its syntactical structure is governed by certain grammatical rules that were not conjured up by its writer out of thin air but were inherited by him from the community of English-speakers and English-writers. In this sense, therefore, language always goes ahead of the attempt to articulate anything through its canons which remain more or less stable within one historical epoch and which exhibit certain family resemblances to one another across these epochs (and this allows us to speak of Old English, Middle English, and Contemporary English as three distinct versions of the 'same language'). On the other hand, however, language is never quite a strait-jacket within which one is constricted for one uses language not only to 'reflect' reality but also to 'create' it through various linguistic implements such as metaphor, similie, paradox, model, simulation, and parable. It is possible for individuals to draw upon more or less the same repertoire of words and concepts prevalent in a certain language, but to fashion them in strikingly original ways to coin new terms that become widely accepted by its speakers and writers.

In this manner, a living language has no stable resting-points, it is forever in a state of flux as various speakers and writers continue to drink from its flowing stream and then add something of their own into it.

2005-08-26T15:05:00.000+01:00

Proving A Proverb

2005-08-23T12:01:00.000+01:00

In A Manner Of Speaking

'Hello? Anybody out there?'

'Yes, I guess so.'

'So what are you doing? Talk to me now.'

'Like what?'

'Ummmm, like anything. Like one of your poems?'

'Nah, not them. They aren't as cool as they used to be once.'

'Oh well, I guess I know the feeling. Everyone writes the same stuff these days. Like processing in one giant recycycycycycyclying machine. Put in the words at one end and they come out neatly packaged at the other.'

'Yes, yes, I guess know the feeling too. It's like all these folks around me. They think I am like retarded. You know what I mean? I just try to be like myself, and do my own thing, and hey, come on, I can't help it if that like puts you off! I can't go running and talking to like any weirdo who comes my way? No way!'

'Yes, like these guys who play footie every weekend. They suck!'

'Oh-oh-oh, Footie? Did you just like call me by my real name and say that I suck?'

'Ah well, it's the thing that they call out here. Footie? Like for football? You know what I mean?'

'Okay, okay, you are forgiven this time for something you did not say. But no, to return to the topic. Poetry, you know. It sucks more than football. Like this first year guy I met in Widemore Hall last week. Oh my God, all that horrible stuff he ranted down my poor ears. You call that poetry? Huh? I mean, what the hell! Oh, come on, I am leaving this country by the next plane and hibernating in like Afghanistan until the coming of like Armageddon.'

'Ya, I kinda get what you mean. Do you like want to hear one of my poems?'

'Yes, please.'

'Ok, here goes one. It is called Frozen Anarchy :

Like the war skies over Vietnam

Splattered with the blood of the Ancients

Locked in a mortal combat with the Titans

That blood is now sort of congealed

In the fathomless depths of your heart

That now echoes like so perfectly

In the crevasses of the blue sky.'

(Long pause.)

'Hello? Are you there?'

(Longer pause.)

'Okay, sorry. Bye.'

'No, no, no, no. I am here. It's just that it is too ...'

'Too what?'

'Too awesome. I am still waiting for it to sink in completely. Oh my God, oh my God. I can't believe you wrote that! Have you ever tried publishing your stuff? I could feel the anger in the lines, and a bit of a nostalgia too, for something I couldn't locate. Do you want to hear one of mine now?'

'Yes?'

'Okay, this one is for my grandmother when she was still alive : The Dawn Flower

This is the saddest song of all times

Like every word of it that you now read

Is like reverberating with the sadness

Of the mountains like in cold Tibet

And yet when you kind of feel

You have like absorbed their echoes

You realise what a deep gorge

Separates you from their

Impenetrable Otherness.'

(Pause.)

'Hello? You there? I hope I did not like freak you out or something?'

(No response.)

'Helloooooo? This is getting scary now.'

'Yes, yes, I am here. No worries.'

'I guess it was real aweful, huh?'

'No, I was just trying to figure out something.'

'Like what?'

'Like how long I am supposed to like pause before I reply after like hearing a poem? Does that like make sense?'

'Hey, that's not like even funny.'

'No, no, it's not meant to be. It reminds me of Tibet. Really.'

'Oh, WOW, you actually beeeeen there? Like for real? Serious? You kidding me, huh?'

'No, no. Like we guys from school trekked all the way up from Thimpu.'

'Thimpu? Oops, sorry. I am geographically challenged. Where is Thimpu?'

'Now that you ask me, I guess I am not really sure. It's up there somewhere in the Himalayas. You know?'

'Oh, you mean those mountains near Toronto? The Appalachians? Yes, I sorta get it. Not much fun there though, is it? You got to learn French and all that? Euuurgghhh! That language sucks!'

'Erm, ummm. Well, not Canada, no, not really.'

'Hold on, do you get this weird feeling?'

'Like what?'

'Like someone is eavesdropping on us? Like making up our conversation for us?'

'You mean like instead of us speaking, we are being spoken?'

'Yes, that sort of us sums up the feeling. I tell you what. You ever done philosophy and stuff like that?'

'Nah, that's for intellectuals. Like you know the kind? Sitting pretty around the campus with their horrible cigarettes and like waiting to trap you in their mazes of labyrinthine words the moment you are not paying attention to them.'

'Yes, I felt so too. I did this stuff for one year, and then, I mean hey, come on, I am supposed to read all these dead European males pondering over the futility of their existence? Hah! No way!'

'Yes, that's why I left school and went to Tibet. It's awesome, this Lama I met there?'

'Oh-oh-oh, you talked to a llama? I thought llamas live in Peru?'

'No, not that sort. Not the animal, this is the Buddhist Lama. Old and wizened and with a silver beard. He talked cool. Like emptying the mind of all preconceived notions and abstractions. You really become free when you break down all the conceptual walls that block your entry into reality.'

'Hey, that sounds cool. I once read this guy who said, 'Understanding is the rediscovery of the Thou in the I, and the discovery of the I that is unrecoverable by the Thou'. I read that and said 'WOW!'. That was like cool stuff. Like it reminded me of my parents. They suck, you know what I mean? Everything that is 'orrible about my existence is because of them.'

'Ermm. I like went to my shrink last year and she like asked me when I had talked to my parents the last time. I said, 'Oh, hold on. What makes you think like I have parents?'. And you know like what she replied?'

'Like what? 'Don't paternalise me?' Hahahahaha. Sorry. Wrong call. Haven't had my coffee this morning, and I am not at my best, you know the feeling?''

'She said, 'Yes, I know the feeling. That's like why I became a shrink too. Welcome to the club!'.'

'You know what? I still can't get over this eerie feeling. Like someone is writing our speeches, and we are simply speaking them out.'

'What do you mean? Like someone else is speaking for you?'

'Yes, like people have been reciting this pre-written speech like billions of times over before us, and we are like simply repeating it. Like I don't like it. It sounds 'orrible but that's like really how it sounds. What does your Lama say about this kind of stuff?'

'Well, you know, I am not like in touch with him anymore.'

'Why not?'

'Well, he just joined Harvard's philosophy department. Now that sucks!'

'Oh, WOW, what the hell is a Lama doing at Harvard?'

'Apparently teaching the Christians and the Muslims that there is no hell.'

'You seriously believe that? That there is no hell?'

'I tell you what. When I was like ten years old, I was dragged to this cranky cousin's wedding. And I tell you what, like when I had painfully endured those two days of her wedding, suffocated with all these bizarre uncles and aunts around me, I repeated to myself, 'If there is a hell on earth, this is it, this is it, this is it.' And like these days when these Christians and Muslims come up to me and say, 'Unless you turn to God, you shall rot in hell', I just laugh aloud and tell them, 'Thank you very much. You have like no idea of what hell is.''

'Ermm. That sounds like rather heavy. You got a lot on your mind, huh?'

'Well, actually, I am like mindless. Like what this Lama told me before he got retarded too. That we are all mind-less beings. The mind like doesn't exist. It's just my choice : I do just what I feel like.'

'You know what, I got some like cool friends up there like in South Dakota. They sort of do like your kind of stuff.'

'Like what?'

'Like they have this group called The Order of the Free Spirits. They live together sharing all their property, paying no taxes to the Feds, growing their own food, and spinning their own clothes.'

'Ermm. Sorry. I gotta go, just got a call on my PDA. I like need to rush.'

'Where to?'

'Like this new spa they have built down the road. It's like my appointment for the weekend detox.'

'Oh, well, thanks for sharing your poetry with me, and have a good day.'

'Like you too.'

'Hey, hold on. Did you just say you like me?'

'Like what?'

'Like like, you know? I thought that's what you like just said?'

'No? That would have been like very unlike of me, if I did.'

'Oh, well, like see you around. Take care now.'

2005-08-20T11:22:00.000+01:00

How To Invade Pakistan (The Predictions Revisited)

Three years before he died, the noted political analyst at Harvard Alfred J. Skopuropski wrote in his monumental The Future Of War (Houston : Rice University Press, 1987) that the wars of the future will be 'fought over the head'. Unfortunately, that somewhat cryptic comment rather went above the heads of most of his impetuous critics who accused him of succumbing to the fashionable trend of anti-intellectualism that was then rampant throughout the corridors of Western academia. In 2005, long after Skopuropski's death, the Transparent Ironist (henceforth : TI) happened to read his book in a dusty library, and obtained therefrom a brainwave concerning a preemptive strike on Pakistan, a country that he had believed for a long time to be in dire need of a bit of civilizing. This is how the future course of events will unfold, the Ironist predicts with that unnervingly transparent gaze that is gifted to certain prophetic mortals like him at those rare critical junctures of global history.

23 May, 2005 : The TI meets the top officials of the Mumbai Chamber of Commerce (in Mumbai, where else?), and in particular Mr. Varad Shampoowalla, the Chairman of Hindustan Levers, the company which manufactures the famous shampoo Clinic Plus. He points out to Mr. Shampoowalla that his company faces two major problems so far as the Indian market is concerned. Firstly, the market is pretty much saturated with all kinds of brands produced by other shampoo companies such as Procter and Gamble. Secondly, more and more Indian women are cutting their hair short as a symbolic rejection of a patriarchal age when women were expected to have long, shiny, glossy, silky, and beautiful hair, and this in turn is an ominous sign that not too many Indian women will be buying shampoos ten years hence.

25 May, 2005 : Mr Shampoowalla convenes an Emergency Board Meeting (EBM) of Hindustan Levers which is attended by the company's CEO, the Executive Sales Manager, the Chief Manager for Production, ten shareholders, and the TI himself. At this EBM, various strategies are proposed to meet the projected shortfall in the company's share of the Indian market, and all of them are rejected one by one as being too impractical. Finally, the TI puts forward his earth-shattering plan : he points out that there is a potent market of 10.5 billion women in Pakistan (2001 census statistics) who can be induced to buy the shampoos of Hindustan Lever. There is, however, only one problem : these 10.5 billion women wear at all times the headscarf called the hijab, a relic from a primitive patriarchal era, and this is the major reason why these women do not quite bother to shampoo their hair, even when their husbands cannot stand the putrid stench of their unwashed hair.

28 May, 2005 : The board-members of the Mumbai Chamber of Commerce meet General Rudraveena Ajay Mukherjee of the Indian Army, and inform him that India has finally found a moral cause to invade Pakistan : to liberate Pakistani women (48% of the country's population) from the masculine tyranny of having to cover their heads. They also meet Mr Subhajit Sujay Varshney, Finance Minister, who is advised that the Indian economy stands to gain an estimated figure of 43.5 billion Indian rupees from the sale of shampoos to the Pakistani women who shall soon be liberated by the Indian Peacekeeping Army. Finally, they call upon Mr Vijay Swadesh Deshbandhu, Honorable Prime Minister, and suggest to him that with the next General Elections coming up in 2006 it would be in his best interests to rouse an indignant Indian nation against the ruthless Pakistani men to defend the honour of their brutalised womenfolk.

1 June, 2005 : Three feminists at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, publish a ground-breaking article in the international journal The Sceptical Feminist called 'Can The Subaltern See?' in which they argue that Pakistani women, hegemonically compelled to wear the oppressive hijab, are not allowed to see each other's hair in public, and that this flagrant denial is a direct assault on women's liberty worldwide. Their article is warmly received by the international academic community, and they receive enthusiastic responses from places as far away as Oxford, Harvard, Chicago, and Bonn.

5 June, 2005 : The executives of Procter and Gamble, the fierce rival of Hindustan Levers, suddenly wake up from their commercial slumber with the realisation that their opponents have stolen their thunder from under (or above?) their heads. They issue an urgent appeal to Mr Ashutosh Durgam Mahadevan, External Affairs Minister, that their shampoo products are head and shoulders (no pun intended) above all their competitors in the Indian market, and that they should be given the sole right to enter the Pakistani market after the future liberation. The CEO of Procter and Gamble, Mr Andrew McIntosh, makes an apocalyptic phone-call from San Diego to the American Ambassador in New Delhi, who informs the Indian Prime Minister that India shall not enjoy America's moral support for the planned liberation of Pakistan unless the interests of Procter and Gamble are safeguarded.

10 June, 2005 : In response to newspaper reports that there are some categories of Indian women who wear a head-dress that faintly resembles the Pakistani hijab, the Indian Parliament passes the draconian TAHA act (Terrorism and Anti-Hijab Act), thereby forbidding all Indian women to cover their hair in any manner, either in public or in private.

11 June, 2005 : An intrepid journalist from South India called Ms Chandravati Ray publicly burns a copy of TAHA and claims that it is ridiculous to forbid Indian women from wearing hijab-like headcovers when Indian men are not likewise prohibited from wearing topis, caps, berets, fezs, or hats. Ms Ray is immediately remanded to police custody for 24 hours, after which she is investigated by the Indian intelligence services to ascertain if she has any Pakistani connections.

15 June, 2005 : The anti-TAHA movement assumes alarming proportions as thousands of women are incarcerated throughout India and a radical journal even runs a column with the title : 'Why Should Indian Wo/Men Not Cover Their Hair?' Meanwhile, the Home Ministry launches an extravagant series of flashy advertisements, to be put up on gigantic billboards, in order to enlist support for the imminent liberation of Pakistani women. In particular, one of these shows the Hindu goddess, Mother Durga, standing beside a yellow tiger with a handful of long, silky, smooth, and glossy hair, and slicing into two a horrendous black demon with a sharp silver lance. There is a small caption on the body of the slain demon which says 'Pakistani Man' and a note above Mother Durga's head declares 'O Woman, Be Proud Of Your Sacred Hair'.

18 June, 2005 : The following interview between an anonymous Pakistani woman in Rawalpindi and a daring Indian journalist appears on the morning edition of The Times Of India, an interview which sends shockwaves throughout the subcontinent.

Indian journalist, Mr Dhamaka Pratap Singh (DPS) : How would you describe your life in Pakistan?

Pakistani woman (who cannot be named for legal reasons, or more simply, who cannot be named in the absence of her husband; yes, things are really that bad in our neighbouring country) : Can I speak to you under conditions of strict anonymity?

DPS : Sure.

Pakistani woman : Frankly speaking, things are horrible here. I so much wish I could show off my shiny hair to people when I go out shopping, but I have to wear this burdensome hijab. And because I cannot display my hair, I have also lost all interest in washing it, so that I now shampoo it only once a month.

DPS : How often do your friends shampoo their hair?

Pakistani woman : I would suppose at the same frequency. Maybe once a month. Maybe once in two months. Who knows?

DPS : How do you view the proposed liberation of Pakistani women by the Indian armed forces?

Pakistani woman : It is the dream of every Pakistani woman. I was watching New Delhi TV the other night, and there was this shampoo advertisement where one Indian woman says to another : 'How is her hair glossier than mine?' When I saw that ad, oh my, I could have died, you know? I really mean it. I said to myself : To be freed at the hands of these brave Indians, live in a country where I can shampoo my hair every night and show it to all the men the next morning, that would be the closest thing to Paradise on this earth for me.

DPS : Which shampoo would you buy after the Indian liberation?

Pakistani woman : Oh, some Indian shampoo, of course! I mean that will be the least that I shall be able to do for the Indians for what they will have done for us, won't it be? How else will I ever be able to thank them?

25 June, 2005 : Two Indian sociologists at the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Geneva publish a communique, 'Women's Hair And Hygiene : The Case Of Pakistan', in which they state their results on the basis of a five-year long study of Pakistani women from a number of middle-class and upper-class families in Multan, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Karachi, and Islamabad. The analysts claim that the primary reason for the deteriorating health of Pakistani women is that they are unable to think clearly, logically, and coherently, and this is not surprising, so they argue, given the paucity of shampoos in the country. Unable to get rid of lice and all sorts of unnameable entities in the profuse masses of their dense hair, women in Pakistan are driven to higher levels of exasperation, nervousness, and irritation than women in Western countries.

28 June, 2005 : The Pakistani goverment, which had been lying rather low all this while, finally strikes back at its detractors. The Information Ministry publishes a report by a panel of four Pakistani intellectuals (three of them with Princeton Ph.D.s) which states that the hijab has to do not with oppression but with expression; far from feeling oppressed, Pakistani women who don the hijab feel liberated to express themselves in public without having men staring at their silky hair. This ingenious riposte takes much wind out of the Indian sails, but as if this was not enough for the beleaguered Indians, a conglomerate of Pakistani entrepreneurs launches a drive to produce indigenous shampoos for Pakistani women. With its brilliant motto Pakistani shampoo for Pakistani hair they plan to wean away potential Pakistani buyers of Indian shampoos such as the anonymous woman mentioned in the interview published in the Times of India.

1 July, 2005 : The Pakistani cricket team cancels its forthcoming test and one-day series with India, and its captain launches a particularly vicious attack on the Sikh players in the Indian team. How can we be sure, he demands, that the Sikhs keep their hair properly shampoo-ed under their massive turbans?

4 July, 2005 : Mortally wounded by these dazzling (and entirely unexpected) replies, and also troubled with the anti-TAHA fires still raging throughout the country, the Indian Government, after a series of consultations with industrial magnates and army officers, decides to let off a bit of the heat that it had been putting on Pakistan. The final word on this sordid (and hair-raising) saga perhaps belongs to Ms Nazma Azmi, a young Pakistani scholar at the University of Heidelberg who is investigating into certain aspects of the Sufi musical traditions of Mediaeval India. She publishes a glittering article in the Washington Post on 4 July entitled, 'Pakistani Women's Hair : A Weapon Of Mass Distraction?', in which she cogently argues that this episode is emblematic of how governments on either side of the India-Pakistan divide have an inveterate tendency of obscuring genuine issues by puerile talk over war, progress, civilisation, and liberation, and thereby of routinely distracting everyone's attention from the ground issues that are crying out for attention.

It would therefore seem that it is Prof. Skopuropski who shall be entitled to the last laugh over his critics : Yes, the battles of the future shall indeed be fought over the head.

2005-08-19T13:31:00.000+01:00

Pascalian Meditations

The first time I read Blaise Pascal was when a Brother in my school gave me a copy of Pascal's Pensees. Though I cannot participate in the warmth of Pascal's religious passion, some of his beliefs rather neatly summarise the set of disconnected views that I express (in my ironic oblique fashion) every now and then in this blog. Here are some :

(1) "Most of the evils of life arise from man's being unable to sit still in a room".

(2) "I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short".

(3) "Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness".

(4) "Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature; but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapor, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows nothing of this".

2005-08-16T15:15:00.000+01:00

How To Survive A Cambridge Ph.D.

How does one survive the rigours (British spelling, not American) of a Cambridge Ph.D.? Well, it depends on which subject you have been blessed with and what your relationship with your supervisor (American concept, not British) is like. So, then, here is some free advice if you are a student of :

(a) History : Try to ensure that you yourself do not become a piece of history. The rest, as they say, will become history anyway.

(b) Geography : Find out as soon as possible your location in the academic hierarchy. Always give your supervisor enough space to breathe.

(d) Sociology : Don't despair if you are not socially integrated into the community. After all, none of the people in your field-work is.

(e) Philosophy : No point in being philosophical about it. Just analyse yourself.

(f) Physics : You would do well to step back before things get physical.

(g) Chemistry : As long as the chemistry lasts, nothing can hold you back.

(h) Economics : Choose a style that is economical and seek an audience that is global.

(i) Medicine : Sometimes you just have to swallow the bitter pill.

(j) Languages : Mind your language!

(k) Classics : What is so classical? Your thesis or your looks?

(l) Engineering : Well, if nothing works out, data can always be engineered.

(m) Biology : Aw, come on, go get a life!

(n) Education : Excuse me? Who is educating whom?

(o) Environmental Science : I tell you what, you make me green with envy.

(p) Law : (No comments)

(q) Management : And you can't even manage yourself. What a loser!

(r) Epidemiology : Make sure you don't infect your supervisor.

(s) Music : Well, what can I say? Just be prepared to face the music.

And finally :

(T) Theology : Don't worry --- you are simply too divine to be reading all this.

2005-08-14T08:15:00.000+01:00

How To Be Happy

I went to a Roman Catholic school, and as things have turned out I have now spent seven years immersing myself in a veritable ocean of texts from Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity. One thing that has made an indelible impression on me is the fact that all the Catholic monks (a.k.a. Brothers) whom I have personally known are some of the most cheerful beings I have ever met. (Which, incidentally, is far from the stereotypical image of them as dour, morose, guilt-ridden, and gloomy creatures.)
Over the last ten years, I have realised that I myself am much happier than most people around me; rarely do I experience the whole gamut of 'negative emotions' that wrack and twist the human soul, and never do I have the proverbial 'mood-swings'. As I have pondered on this matter at length, I have come to understand that my happiness (more of a skill than a state) ultimately stems from Eight Rules that I have unselfconsciously made my own. (The Buddha propounded an Eight-fold Path to Nirvana; the following is my Eight-fold Rule to Happiness.) Some of these rules bear an uncanny similarity to ones that my Catholic Brothers (and Sisters) themselves follow (though in a very different context and for very different theological reasons), but some of the other ones (especially Rule No 1) would probably strike them with horror!

How To Be Happy

(1) Rule No 1 : Make Hedonism the central motto of your existence. Live for pleasure. Try to crowd in as many pleasures into the short span of your life as possible : music, cinema, dance, sex, alcohol, travelling, painting, reading, poetry, cycling, skiing, rafting, and so on and so forth. If you are ever feeling 'low' just think of the next pleasure round the corner and then 'go for it'.
(2) Rule No 2 : Never be attached to food or any culinary techniques. Be prepared at all times of your life to survive on bread, water, soup, and cornflakes.
(3) Rule No 3 : Never be attached to clothes or styles of attire. Have three sets of garments, remembering that this is already excessive. Travel as light as possible, and in the ideal case (never to be attained) your body should become the only luggage you own. Never buy anything (including books) which you cannot throw away into the dustbin at thirty seconds' notice.
(4) Rule No 4 : Never be attached to your biological parents. At best, maintain a cool indifference towards them, and, if the need arises, pay for their medical insurance.
(5) Rule No 5 : Never get bogged down with biological children. Adopted children, though, are a very different kettle of fish : you are encouraged, nay urged, to adopt one of the billions of homeless street-children from anywhere in the world who is starving to death even as you are reading this sentence.
(6) Rule No 6 : Be satisfied with a few close friendships. You don't need to make the whole neighbourhood aware of your existence. Never try to 'impress' every second lad or lass who comes walking down your way. What other people think of you is their business, not yours. If you ever feel overwhelmed by the 'world', look outwards into the farthest horizon and silently meditate on these lines :

Lord,

My heart

Is filled with your footprints.
(7) Rule No 7 : Spend (as much as possible of) your life discussing, analysing, developing, and practising ideas. If you don't know anything on something, keep your mouth shut. If you know something, try to prove your point but never try to establish it beyond any doubt. Never try to 'win an argument' : only boxers and soldiers treat the world as their personal battle-field. If others do not take your point, don't get stuck there : simply move on to the next point, and repeat this process ad infinitum until your last dying breath.
(8) Rule No 8 : Before you die, leave a will giving away all your wealth and property to the homeless people roaming through the streets. Don't ask to be buried. Ask to be cremated and your ashes to be scattered in the wind. Go away from this world without leaving any trace (read genes) behind.

2005-08-07T09:24:00.000+01:00

The Gospel According To The Transparent Ironist

Now that it is Sunday, the chapel clock strikes fifteen to nine and it is time for a Cambridge story. Not to worry, it will be over just in time for high tea and the Ashes at Lord's.

A fresh graduate from the mediaeval (British spelling, not American) university of Cambridge, with a diploma in Social Anthropology, breathing the air of the so-called heady idealism of youth, once voyaged into the dark hinterlands of Africa to study a distant tribe called the Bakarazande. He spent five years in their midst in the course of which he learnt a couple of the most amazing beliefs, tricks, and practices that had hitherto remained unknown to the civilising gaze of the Western Man. He became so intimate with the tribals that after a while it was quite impossible for them to distinguish between him and them : not only did he speak their dialects consummately, he often participated in their festivals and eagerly celebrated their religious ceremonies.

Indeed, one night at the camp-fire the Old Man of the tribe stood up before everyone and spoke thus to the congregration, in a voice quivering with emotion : 'This White Eye has now become one of us. I think we should formally accept him into our community through a great celebration this Spring when the rains flow down to us from the bounties of the Great Spirit.'

The next morning, however, the Cambridge graduate was nowhere to be seen. The tribals scoured the brown hills and the barren plains for miles around but not a trace of him remained anywhere. In the meantime, the graduate moved on to another tribe called the Yarobu who lived five hundred miles up the river Zarokho, settled down with them, learnt a handful of their dialects, and mingled into their midst so intimately that they could hardly think of him as someone from another place. One evening in the orange autumn, when the yellow leaves were falling thick in the exhausted late summer wind, the village chief came up to him and offered his daughter's hand(s) in marriage to him. Flummoxed by the offer, he asked the chief what that word 'marriage' meant in the local dialect, and received the reply that the entire tribe would join in a public celebration before the mists of winter set in.

The next morning, the Cambridge graduate was (by now, predictably) nowhere to be seen. He moved yet higher up this time and arrived at the fearsome gorge of the river Mikimakoo at sunset. There he sat down upon a rock and began to contemplate, somewhat in the style of an armchair anthropologist cosily ensconced in Neville's Court, Trinity.

'I have been trained as a social anthropologist by my stiff upper-lipped peers in Cambridge, many of whom have never ventured one inch outside their Junior Parlours. Everytime I go to study to a tribe I must not be a mere observer, I must also be a participator. That is why I learn their languaes so thoroughly, speak the same way that they do, listen to their stories, eat their food, sing their songs, laugh with them (though some of their jokes are rather sick), and cry with them (though some of their women are a bit too sentimental). And yet, what prevents me from actually becoming one of them? Why can't I, to use the currently fashionable Britishism, go native?'

The graduate received so answer to this question of cosmic proportions (if not implications) that sunset. The next morning, however, he arrived at the outskirts of a small village in the valley of the Sukitukamikaloo where he saw two little girls carrying a heavy load on their arched backs. He went up to them and asked them who they were and where they were going to.

'We are going to receive education', they said.

'But why are you carrying a sack on your backs?'

'Those are our text-books.'

'Why don't you just throw them away to the winds and run to the fields and play the whole day long?'

'Oh, we dare not do that! Our parents will punish us severely for that. The other night my sister Zooniya wanted to watch Simpsons but my father was enraged that she was not doing her sums, and a whack! was what she received.'

This rather surreal (and admittedly Americanised) conversation in an African village had a profound impact on the graduate's mind, and he slowly walked away from them pondering over the reply that he had heard. That evening, he entered a ramshackle pub, The African Grape, to replenish his stock of white wine when he overheard a young teary-eyed woman complaining to an old woman who had lots of grey hair on a head that nodded so vigorously that the graduate feared it might fall off any moment.

'I want to get married to Hirantouroo from across the distant hills of Kolimazoo, but he belongs to a different tribe than ours. Now my parents are compelling me to marry some stranger I have never even seen.'

'But why can't you just throw your parents to the winds and run away to Hirantouroo?'

'Well, I have thought of doing that at times but I really can't. I feel this strange bond with my parents.'

'You stupid woman! Can't you see that this bond you speak of is simply genetic? All women feel this biological connection with their parents, but do you seriously want to remain enslaved to your genes all your life? Consider men, on the other hand. The family is entirely dispensable and a prodigal waste of time for men (that is, those men, if any of such exist [Editor's note : The Transparent Ironist is an incurable optimist], who have not already been brainwashed by the family), and how rightly so! Unless we women learn to give up the family we shall never become free from the primordial tyranny of men.'

'Is that the reason why in the parables of our sacred scriptures only sons are allowed to be prodigal?'

'Precisely so! A daughter who dared to be prodigal (God forbid!) would at once be reformed within two days, normalised within three, civilised within four, married off within five, and institutionalised within six.'

The Cambridge graduate filled up his sack with three bottles of vintage white wine and slowly moved out from the pub. The words of the old woman were reverberating in his ears as he watched the sun setting over the ancient Banalooka hills. There were layers upon layers of grey clouds that had accumulated over the horizon, the women were busy gathering their half-dried clothes, the children were playing a raucous game, and some of the men were trying to light their Marlboros that they had smuggled across the (non-existent) border. The graduate paid no heed to them but started walking towards the hills when suddenly he heard a massive thunderclap in the skies and it began to rain dogs and (their) cats. There was a burst of brilliant light in the foreground and he could see the vague outlines of an old man with his back turned towards him.

'Who are you?'

'I am who I am, and I am who shall be. But then, I can't really give you my true Name.'

'So what do we do?'

'-----------------'

'All right, fair enough. Now what do you want from me?'

'I want you to go forth into the world and spread my lost Gospel!'

'But I cannot. I am a man of unclean lips. I fear that I shall not be able to bear the weight of the task that you have marked me out for. I crumble to the ground in dust and ashes. Please choose someone else from this world and spare me!'

'Go forth! I shall be your guide, your strength, and your comforter until the end of this world.'

'What is this secret Gospel that I shall take forth into the world?'

'Thus it has been said by many sages of yore : the family is a haven of peace, joy, and warmth. But I say unto thee : the family is a sinister instrument invented by men (and subsequently assimilated by women) for punishing children and dominating women. So all ye who live in families, the Lord's Day of Wrath is now at hand : repent and run away from the family as if you had accidentally stepped on a poisonous snake!'

The Cambridge graduate could not speak or see anything for three days on end after this climactic (and admittedly a tad vituperative for his British sensitivities) encounter with the Lord of Judgement who had spoken to him through the clouds of darkness. Finally, on the third morning, however, he began to regain his vision and started walking down from the heights of Mount Gozoonami in the Banalooka hills.But he could not understand how he would go about accomplishing the Herculean task of spreading this Gospel in a world where almost everyone around him seemed --- at worst --- to be attached to their families and --- at best --- to be indifferent towards them.

At the foot of the mountains, however, he saw a tiny girl trying to draw something on the parched earth with a little brown twig. She was drawing rings of concentric circles emerging outwards from a point and touching these circles there were tangents flying off in all possible directions.

'What are these tangents doing here?'

'Well, you know it is a bit hard on me. Give me a break, will you?'

'What is hard on you?'

'I mean what you are doing to me right now. You have deliberately put me in this place so that you can use my replies for your blog, haven't you? I mean, come on. A five year old girl wouldn't even know what a damned tangent is, for Christ's sake! For all your high-talk about men dominating women in their families and all that shit, can't you see that this is what you are doing to me right now? Dominating me by using my imaginary replies for your readers?'

'Hmmmm. But does this mean that whenever I blog I can only speak tangentially?'

The girl picked up her twig from the ground, and made a menacing little circle above her head.

'Oh, well, life sucks anyway. Whateva. I think it's in your best interest to keep out of this. It's a chic(k)-thing, you know?'

'Hey, where are you going up there into the hills? Don't you have family and stuff like that?'

'Hah! Now look who's talking!'

And now it is Sunday again, and the chapel clock strikes fifteen to eleven. Another Cambridge graduate allows himself the luxury of a smile over the very existence of the English language. After all, it is this that has enabled him to disguise his great prejudice so beguilingly in the form of a most fanciful, extremely surreal, and crudely hyperbolic fairy-tale that lost in its labyrinthine mazes his readers are still trying to answer the question : So was this 'really' The Gospel According To The Transparent Ironist? That the Family is a redundant legacy from the barbarism of a feudal age, and that it must now be consigned to the dustbin of history?

2005-08-01T15:18:00.000+01:00

'Those who know do not write.
Those who write do not know.'
(Has he contradicted himself (once again)?)

2005-07-28T16:50:00.000+01:00

The Cambridge Cinderella

Once upon a time (not quite long ago) there used to live a (not quite little) girl called Cinderella in a (not quite sleepy) village called Cambridge. A Ph.D. scholar at the University with a habit of adding 'not quite' at end of almost every sentence she (m)uttered, she led a solemn bookish life which, according to her two younger sassy sisters, was --- at best ---- pretty uncool and --- at worst --- plain shit. Every evening when her two sisters would go down to the local pubs to drink with the chic lads who would descend in droves from the nearby Highlands, she would sit down at her dusty corner and Stoically pore over her books in the candle light. ('There are higher forms of intoxication, you know?' is what she would tell her sisters.)

One day, she came to know that another Ph.D. scholar had invited her two sisters to an Annual Ball at Trinity's famous green gardens where Newton had narrowly escaped the disaster of another gravitating apple falling on his already over-burdened head. Rather than read the latest article in The International Journal of Trans-Galactic Eschatology, she decided to stroll down to the gardens and find out what the fuss was about. There she spotted her two sisters ambling under a tree, sipping glasses of wine with Swiss cheese and demurely staring at the boats sailing down the Cam.

Cinderella was rather thrilled by the surroundings. Instead of pondering the metaphysics of trans-galactic existence she had, for a change (of almost cosmic proportions), been brought down to earth by the carnivalesque atmosphere around her. And then the Ph.D. scholar who had invited everyone to the Ball rose up to the wooden platform at the other end of the garden. The scholar spluttered briefly and then began to speak : 'Ladies and (their?) Gentlemen, I request you to take the pleasure of walking on the exquisite grass of Trinity's lawns. Grass, as you know, is the most expensive commodity in Cambridge. Could you all please take off your shoes and boots and things of that sort? If we can't smoke the grass, we shall weed it out.'

And that is what they all did. All but Cinderella. After a while, the scholar who was examining the shoes of the guests at the Ball came to Cinderella and saw her brown shoes still on her feet. Determined to find out what was afoot, the scholar asked her why she had not removed her shoes.

'Well, there is definitely something fishy about this thing.'

'Like what?'

'Wait, wait, wait. Don't give me that 'like what?' please, ty.'

'Ty?'

'Yes, Ty. Thank you.'

'But of course. So why won't you take off your shoes?'

'Hmm, don't really know. Hang on, are you Indian by any chance?'

'So what if I am?'

'Well, it would fit my theory.'

'So now you have a theory?'

'Yes, why not? That's what we are here for? To spew out theories at the world out there?'

'Ok, then, so what's the theory?'

'Indians have this thing about women's feet.'

'Like what? ... Oh no... sorry.'

'Like this. Like in the Ramayana where Sita's feet are compared to the petals of a lotus flower. Ouuuchhh. Now that sucks. Really.'

'Hmmm.'

'I know.'

'No, you don't. This is really bizarre. I wonder how you guessed.'

'Oh no, don't tell me ...'

'Yes, you got it right. Beats me. Like totally freaks me out.'

'You mean that is the topic of your Ph.D.? Representations of women's feet in classical Sanskrit literature?'

'I am not saying anything now.'

'But hang on. Just a reality check, ok?'

'Ok?'

'Is this conversation for real? Or are we just putting this thing up?'

'I guess someone will have to write about us to make it real. Nobody is going to believe this thing otherwise.'

'Do you think there is someone out there as crazy as us writing about us right now as we speak?'

'Well, you know the story about the monkey, a typewriter and infinite time to waste. Given these three, even a monkey can become an ironist some day, sooner or latter.'

'The sooner, the better.'

At that moment, the proverbial English rains began to pour down from the heavens, and everyone rushed into the austere shelter of Neville's Court.

'But hang on. One last question before I go on to examine the other shoes.'

'Shoot.'

'The ancient Indians praised women's feet with poetry, the ancient (and not quite ancient) Chinese bound them with rope. Which is the better deal for them?'

'Hey, hey, hold on. So now we get to make deals over our feet, huh? Heard of a company called Footloose?'

'Sigh, whatever. I don't know what to say anymore. Anyways, this is getting just too bizarre. Shall we call it a day then?'

'A day to what?'

'Nothing. I am walking out on you now.'

'You do that. I think you have lost your footing and can't admit it. Looosah!'

2005-07-17T10:41:00.000+01:00

Of Mice and (Wo)/Men

New Delhi, Indira Gandhi International Airport.

Two school buddies, Prashant and Amit, bump into each other.

'Prashant? I knew it was you when I saw you at Immigrations. You haven't changed one bit!'

'Neither have you. So what's up? Anything new? Still with Morgan Stanley and Sisters?'

'Brothers, not Sisters. But no, me flying for an executive meeting in Geneva tomorrow evening. Where are you based now? I heard you got a great deal from that Italian chain?'

'Oh, that was a long time back. These days I do the odd bit flying in between Delhi and Singapore. Two weeks in Delhi, and then two weeks in S'pore. Today I am flying to Toronto though. We are trying for a collaboration with a French oil company drilling in the North Sea. Let's see if we can buy them out.'

'Listen, I am in a bit of a rush right now. Why don't we sit down for lunch the next time we are in Delhi? Or maybe coffee and biscuits or that sort of thing? Maybe we can even do some tying up between our companies?'

'That will be really cool. You have my cell number? Just give me a buzz when you are around.'

East Berlin, somewhere in the Western Sector

Two college buddies (?), Priyanka and Amala, (wives of Prashant and Amit), walk into each other.

'Priyankaaaaaaaa! Oh my gosh! What the hell are you doing in Berlin?'

'Well, you know what Prashant always keeps on saying everytime he is shunted off by his Spanish bosses from New York to Berlin.'

'Prashant? You are married? You never told me?'

'How could I when I am meeting you after ten years?'

'Well, I know. *Sigh*. Things change so fast these days. So what does Prashant say?'

'He complains that the Wall Street may be going up in New York but the Wall is forever down in Berlin.' (She rolls her eyes to indicate the upward versus the downward movement of the Walls.)

'Ha-hah-haah.'

'No, no, no, don't try to laugh. Don't even try. Please. That's just what Prashant is like. Always throwing sick jokes at people.'

'No, no, no, that's not sick at all. That's actually rather cute. Really.'

'Anyways, whatever. So what about you, Amala? What are you doing in Berlin?'

'I am trying to exhibit my art at the Indian Embassy gallery on Mozartstrasse. It's a sort of mix between indigenous Bengali rural art and contemporary modes of French iconoclasm. Are you into that sort of thing?'

'You mean art? Oh, come on, pleaaaase. You should just come and see our house one of these days. I don't mean the one in Chicago, the one in Casablanca that we bought the last summer. It is cluttered with el Grecos, Rembrandts, Goyas, and Matisses right upto the doorstep. But what do you do when you are not with your art?'

'Well, Shreya demands so much attention these days. And Amit is rarely in, his bosses are always driving him to the wall and always burying him there with piles of work. And as for myself, *sigh*, I hardly have any time left to myself. And tell you what. If that is not enough, my in-laws are coming over next month. Eeeeks! Aaaaargh!'

'Shreya? Is that your daughter? Oh my gosh, why didn't you tell me that you have a daughter?'

'Here we go again. You know what, I think we need to do some serious catching up. What about meeting up for dinner tonight?'

'Ok, cool. But I will need to ask Prashant first.'

'Whatever for?'

'Well, you know. He gets rather angry when I just go off like that without first taking his permission.'

'Priyaaaankaaa! What the hell are you talking about? Are you serious or you just kidding me, huh? You need to take his permission?'

'*Sigh*. Perhaps we all have our little prisons hidden away somewhere.'

2005-07-16T17:30:00.000+01:00

On Indian English

Consider this state of affairs. A man works under a landlord for a period of ten years, during which time he learns to speak his master's language and picks up several of his (rather tiresome) mannerisms. Thereafter the master dies but his slave passes on these to his children so that it so happens that several generations down the line his great-grandchildren now speak the language of the landlord of their dead ancestor.

This, in fact, is the condition of Indians today who speak English : they speak a language that was passed on to their (immediate) ancestors by their colonial masters, the British. The question, however, that is really intriguing can be put in a rather abrupt manner : 'So what?'

Indeed, I often put this question to myself since English happens to be the only language that I am fluent in. But, to repeat my earlier question, so what? So what if English was the language that was once transmitted down the echelons of power by the imperial rulers in Delhi and Calcutta to produce rows of government clerks with Indian blood but British habits? Has this historical origin stained the English language so deeply that any Indian who now uses it (not to mention revels in it) is consequently stigmatised by the accusation of complicity with neo-colonialism?

Suppose we say 'Yes' and try to choose an appropriate Indian language instead. The problem with this search for an originary language that is not corrupted by some allegation of violence is that there was trouble even in paradise. For suppose that we replace English with Sanskrit : there will be a huge section of the Indian population which will protest that it is precisely users of Sanskrit who have been oppressing them since time immemorial. (And Sanskrit is not a very gender-sensitive language either, purusa and prakrti and all that.) Let us then plump for Hindi instead : even this will not quite do for vast swathes in the Southern belt of India will remind us how the northerners have tried to impose this language upon them in a 'colonial' fashion. The same problem, of course, will immediately dog us if we choose any other regional language : there will be no dearth of groups who will vehemently object to the violence that its users have historically inflicted on them who do not speak it.

In short, then, to claim that English is forever tainted by its colonial associations is indeed a very interesting (and substantially correct) statement but it goes nowhere towards answering the question that I have put above : So what? Does all of this, however, mean that we can go on using English simply by ignoring these associations? In matters such as these, it is good to remember that we human beings can develop the capacity for self-reflexivity, that is, to bend over backwards to some extent and cast a critical sideways glance at ourselves. A good example in this connection is Nehru, whatever his faults otherwise as a political strategist or an economic planner were. A consummate master of the English language, the language of his imperialist antagonists, and yet nobody, I take it, would accuse Nehru of not being 'nationalist' enough!

2005-07-15T21:31:00.000+01:00

Animals And Us

Whether or not one loves animals is, I guess, largely determined by how many of these lovable creatures one has around oneself during childhood. Growing up as I did with a pack of snappy dogs, one Labrador and two Spitzes, I have long harboured the secret prejudice that people who do not love dogs should be sent away to a 'correction centre' where the love of dogs will be carefully infused into them. At the same time, however, I have also struggled with a certain view called 'anti-species-ism', usually held in ecological circles, according to which human beings do not have any special status with respect to animals. Such ecologists believe that those who are 'species-ists' will justify the mistreatment of, and even extreme cruelty towards, animals with 'ideological' appeals to human 'needs' and 'reasons'.

Though I share with the 'anti-species-ists' their fears and concerns in this connection, I do believe that there are distinctive features that we human beings have that are absent in animals. In saying that there is a 'gap' between the human world and the animal world, however, we need not think of our distinctive cognitive or moral capacities as something that has descended upon us from high. Indeed, we should think of animals and ourselves as more or less contiguous points on an evolutionary spectrum. Nevertheless, there are certain characteristics --- such as the ability to use language in ever-new ways, self-reflexivity, awareness of mortality, and possession of a vast range of (inherited) skills --- that are specific to human beings.

This leads me sometimes towards a thought-experiment. If tomorrow an international panel of 10 doctors were to assure me that the only way ahead to find a cure for (human) cancer was by carrying out a live experiment on my dog Toffee, would I agree to it?

I do not think there is any easy answer to questions such as these. Though today my answer to this question would be 'No, I would not agree', I am aware that this would be largely influenced by the fact that I have personally never known any friend dying of cancer. If, on the other hand, I were to have spent a year caring for someone who was agonisingly wasted away from within by cancer, I just might agree to allow the doctors to go ahead with that experiment. In other words, there is a certain sense in which I am indeed a 'species-ist' : in border-line cases such as these, forced to choose between the removal of human suffering and the affliction of a loved dog, I would, albeit hesitatingly, choose the former.

2005-07-10T17:44:00.000+01:00

Are You A 'Fundamentalist'?

I feel rather uneasy at the glib manner in which some people, especially those who are within the portals of the Academy, throw the label 'Fundamentalism' at anyone whose views they may happen to disapprove of, when they should know better, with the greater benefits and resources of historical scholarship at their disposal, that there are not too many human beings on this planet, with the possible exception of a handful of hermits trapped inside a Himalayan cave, who do not have any strongly-held convictions.

In other words, if what you mean by 'Fundamentalism' is a loyalty, of varying and variable intensity and strength, to certain basic beliefs, values, or commitments, most human beings are 'Fundamentalists' anyway. Many contemporary biologists are neo-Darwinian 'Fundamentalists', while some American political theorists are neo-conservative 'Fundamentalists'. This, however, does not mean that these are necessarily life-and-death issues for these people : I take it that if a neo-Darwinist were forced at gunpoint to renounce her commitment to neo-Darwinism, she would, especially in the interests of 'the survival of the fittest' if not the survival of her own theory, do so without too much agonising over her 'authenticity'. Nothing of earth-shaking significance is either gained or lost by her pretending that she has ceased to be a neo-Darwinist for a few minutes.

'Fundamentalism', therefore, cannot be readily equated with 'holding basic commitments' for all sorts of people ranging from half-starved sadhus, calculating City bankers, academics belonging to their distinctive 'schools', to the proverbial proletariat toiling for a better day have lived with and continue to struggle with such commitments.

Neither can 'Fundamentalism', to carry on, be equated in a straightforward manner with narrow-mindedness, a perfect example of which is my own concerning the nature of the human family. I hold that the family is a penitentiary institution that was devised by men to punish children and to dominate women, and while I know only too well that this is an extremely narrow-minded view in that there are billions of families on this planet which will not live up to this description (or may be they will?), there are also plenty of equally (if not more?) narrow-minded people who hold the opposite view, that is the view that the family is a sacrosanct oasis of transcendental peace in this desert-like world which has nothing to do with the starkness of domestic violence. Indeed, on this definition of 'Fundamentalism' as 'being narrow-minded', one shudders to think (and count) how many 'Fundamentalists' lie hiding behind the walls of the universities of Oxbridge, Chicago, Delhi, Chennai, Yale, and Stanford.

So far, then, we have severed 'Fundamentalism' from any straightforward equation with 'espousal of basic beliefs' and 'narrow-mindedness'. Nor is 'Fundamentalism' always a question of forcing your own views upon people. Indeed, if this were to accepted as a definition of 'Fundamentalism', the greatest 'Fundamentalists' in history will turn out to be parents and school-teachers who earn their social status and salaries by telling little impressionable creatures entrusted to their care what the 'right' thing to do is, and punishing them without compunction when they beg to disagree.

Who, then, is a 'Fundamentalist'? Here is what we sometimes call a 'working definition' : A 'Fundamentalist' is a person who believes that every word of a sacred text is true in the most literal sense, and that this text prescribes a uniform socio-religious framework and identity which is to be accepted by everyone in the community centred around it. This 'Fundamentalism' is therefore a form of idolatry, the idolatry of the text which is given a semi-divine status and which is believed to lift up human beings at one stroke from all the anxieties, ambiguities, and ambivalences that are necessarily associated with historical existence. Consequently, a group of 'Fundamentalists' has to construct an organised system of threats and punishments which will police the boundaries of possible meanings that individuals may draw out of the text, carefully ensuring that in this process, where it is allowed at all, nobody transgresses those boundaries laid down unambiguously. That is, the words of the sacred text must be venerated as hallowed things, frozen for all eternity, and their purity must be maintained against the ravages of time, if necessary through violent means.

Though historically speaking, both Christianity and Islam have been prone to chronic bursts of 'Fundamentalisms', the reasons for these periodic outbursts have been very context-specific. Not a scholar of Islam myself, but a student of Christianity, the latter has, I believe, sufficient internal resources for combating from the within this malaise. Two examples shall suffice in this connection.

(A) Consider first this lament :

"'Meaningless! Meaningless!' says the Teacher.

Utterly meaningless!

Everything is meaningless.'
What do human beings gain from all their labor

at which they toil under the sun?
Generations come and generations go,

but the earth remains forever."

At first glance, it sounds suspiciously like the morose complaints of a retarded half-drunk Existentialist : as a matter of fact, however, it comes from the Old Testament which is suffused with images of homelessness, exile, and tribulation endured by the Jewish people, and also replete with stern warnings of God's wrath on those who forget that whatever stability they might have secured has come to them not through their self-striving alone but as a divine gift to be cherished and nurtured.

(B) "Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known."

This verse from 1 Corinthians in the New Testament is, in fact, one of the many texts that can be used against the view that each and every word in the Bible, down to the precise semicolon and fullstop, is the word of God. Rather, the text of the Bible is the mediating vehicle for the divine revelation and is not to be exhaustively equated with or viewed as comprehensively encapsulating the latter.

2005-07-06T08:35:00.000+01:00

The Caverns Of Being

I used to wonder sometimes what it would be like to have all of one's senses suddenly sucked away from oneself into the unbounded heart of a giant Void. How would that state, if I may call it so, be different from utter non-existence? And yet, that is just how I felt last night in my dream, that I was immersed in that fathomless Void where I could see, hear, and feel nothing, not even the sheer absence of my own presence.

And then, all of a sudden, I began to regain my lost senses, one by one. First, my touch, and I could feel my fingers caressing the cold sweaty palms of my right hand. And then, I heard the distant echoes of women chanting some songs somewhere far away from me. Finally, I could see a thin warm ray of comforting light flowing towards me along what looked like a long corridor.

I frantically struggled to get up on my feet and began to walk towards the light. As I peered into the forbidding semi-darkness, staring at the strange marble figures on the walls and looking up at the high vaults above me, the realisation slowly dawned upon me that I was in the massive Mediaeval Cathedral at Lyons where my mother had once taken me to as a young boy of 9.

'There', she had exclaimed, pointing out the cold Cross behind the sparse altar, 'There hangs crucified on a tree the Son of Man who gave his life for you, my dear. And there beside him, my little one, is his own mother Mary who so loved her Son and yet gave him up for the world.'

An old man in a black gown walked up to us and said, 'Ah, it is you Madeleine. We haven't seen you in these parts for a long time now. And this is your son, I presume? Is he going to become one of us some day?'

'I don't know but I wish so, Father.'

'Yes, but for that you need to have the calling, my daughter, a calling as fierce as a torrential stream in the summer rain. A mighty calling it indeed is that leads a woman to so hate her father, her mother, her brothers, and her sisters that she gives up everything in this world for the sake of that crucified Man on the altar.'

All these images came flooding back to me in my dream as I slowly walked down the corridor, one step after the other. I even smiled to myself once, and wondered what anyone who was looking at my face then would think I was dreaming about.

Finally, I was standing before the altar, once again after 45 years, an unrepentant atheist. I was surveying the wondrous Cross when something made me turned around. The pews were dark, there was nobody around in the Cathedral, the echoing voices had fallen silent, and not a whisper did I hear. And yet, I had that uncanny feeling that were was someone around me, behind me, and in front of me, enveloping me from all around. Suddenly, I heard a gentle voice, 'I am the Void in which you are submerged but which you do not recognise. Even now.'

I woke up this morning to see the warm sun streaming into my parched eyes. I looked straight into the effulgent disc of the tireless sun and was blinded for a few moments by its brilliant darkness. I looked down from my window and realised that there had been a thunderstorm the night before. There were broken branches and scattered leaves all over the wet streets where a few bedraggled beggars stood at its corners, with primordial sorrows too deep for earthly complaints.

Later that afternoon, I walked around the periphery of the University Church, trying to read the epitaphs in its graveyard. The wooden Cross at the top of the spire had been toppled over during the night's gale and was now lying down limply at the base of the chapel. In its place there was the full glory of the risen sun pouring out the loving warmth of its patient heart onto the hardened depths of the unreedemed earth.

As I stared once again into the sun, the Void began to grow ominously around me, threatening to dissolve me once again into its vast caverns from which there is no return. And yet, when I began to shiver in a great terror in front of the advancing Void, a gentle peace too descended upon me.

For a moment, but sadly only for a moment, I felt that I had been granted a fleeting foretaste of a coming future when the brokenness of the pitiless world would be overcome.

2005-06-22T08:26:00.000+01:00

The Circle Of Hope

Think of a silent wooden stage that is shrouded in darkness but at whose centre there falls a stream of bright light forming a perfect circle.

At its centre there sits a young girl furiously stitching away, her body nimbly arched over her work.

She is engaged in her favourite hobby, embroidering her pillow-cases with yellow, green, and mauve flowers.

Every now and then, the ominous darkness threatens to come into the circle.

Her attention distracted, she now silently peers into the darkness beyond as she feels a warm melancholy deliciously overpowering her, gently sinking into her bones, and soothingly becoming one with her blood-stream.

But somehow she manages, this time at least, to overcome it and gets back to her embroidering.

She feels peaceful for an hour, and manages to get done four of her pillow-cases when the menacing darkness begins to pester her again.

Soon it comes flooding back into the light, and the titanic struggle resumes all over again.

As she goes through this routine day in, day out, she sometimes pauses in the midst of her stitching and wonders why she goes through it at all.

Why not just throw up her hands in despair and throw herself to the winds?

At such moments, however, a strange voice within her, perhaps an echo from forgotten times, begins to make itself heard in the vast caverns of her bottomless mind :

Who or What is projecting this light on me?

2005-06-20T18:49:00.000+01:00

You cannot grasp the meaning of this sentence until you reach the final word in it.
(And, perhaps, not even then.)

2005-06-18T18:04:00.000+01:00

Ironic Txts

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

2005-06-16T14:25:00.000+01:00

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.

2005-06-16T09:59:00.000+01:00

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.

2005-06-15T18:42:00.000+01:00

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''.

2005-06-14T18:38:00.000+01:00

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.''

2005-06-13T19:04:00.000+01:00

"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.'

2005-06-12T19:59:00.000+01:00

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.

2005-06-12T09:58:00.000+01:00

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?)

2005-06-12T09:46:00.000+01:00

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?

2005-06-09T15:50:00.000+01:00

The Great Victorians

The Victorians don't get a good press nowadays : stinking, smelly, retarded, fanatical, depressed, repressed, imperialistic, and patriarchal bastards. However, one Victorian whose works I have read quite extensively, Leslie Stephen, was someone whom you couldn't easily fit into any one of these 'types'. (Incidentally, Stephen was the father of the feminist (?) Virginia Woolf. Though whether Woolf recognised him as her father is, of course, another matter.)

A book that I am reading these days has the following to say about Stephen :

'A man, rugged and uncompromising, yet sensitive and diffident, pure-hearted, single-minded, melancholy in temper yet capable of high spirits and irony, inveterately industrious, a stubborn climber of Alps as well as mental peaks ... In him, the passion for salvation had been transmuted into the quest for truth and intellectual deliverance, so that instead of 'What shall I do to be saved?', the question had become, 'What shall I think to be honest?'. Till the end of his life, he was continuously engaged in a mental fight, in strenuous grapplings with the riddle of the painful earth, and in bearing, as best as he might, the 'heavy and the weary weight of this unintelligible world'. It is hard to believe, from the tone of his writings, that he found much joy or consolation in what he wrote, but he was by nature a Spartan, and he did not look for such things. George Eliot's phrase about the need to do 'without opium', and 'to live through all our pain with conscious, clear-eyed endurance', seems to me applicable to him.'

2005-06-09T12:32:00.000+01:00

Implications

I often reflect on the (unintended?) implications of what we say and how we behave. Here is one, for example. When I was in St Stephen's (Delhi), I was once solving one of those differential equations that pester you if you take a course in Imaginary Numbers (not to be confused with 'imaginative numbers', that's another kettle of fish). One of my classmates was reading a novel, probably one of Marquez's, and another one was browsing through the newspaper.

The first looked up from his book and said to the latter : 'Can you look up the word 'trite' in the dictionary?', and the second complied.

Three years after this happened, I was sitting in a bus one day when this incident flashed through my mind, and I began to ponder on the implication of his asking the question, 'Can you look up the word 'trite' in the dictionary?' before asking the more charitable one, 'Do you know the meaning of the word 'trite''?

Was he then (unintendedly?) implying that his other friend would necessarily not know the meaning of the word 'trite', or that he had a poor vocabulary?

2005-06-08T14:14:00.000+01:00

The Ironic Imperative

What leads to the evolution of a human being into an ironist (assuming, of course, that we are not 'born as ironists')? Every ironist must speak for herself on this one; in the following, the one writing this post reflects on himself.

He has to write, and not merely write but also live, as an ironist for there are two absolute principles governing his existence which being equally absolute are locked into a mortal combat with each other, a combat for which there can be no temporal resolution.

Principle 1 : 'I am human, and nothing that is human do I consider alien to myself'.
This Principle explains his antipathy for what he has elsewhere on this blog denounced as Tribalism, irrespective of whether this is the inward-looking Tribalism of the Family, of Society, of Language, of the Academy, of Culture, or of Nationalism.

Principle 2 : 'To remain human I must, sooner or later, take sides, and this will not only lead me to associate myself with some groups more spontaneously and more closely than the others, but, on occasion, even to reject the company of some human beings. I must, that is, operate with a working-definition of what configurations of views, beliefs, and practices I consider to be non-human, or even anti-human, and this might sometimes constitute a violation of Principle 1.'

For example, he would rather be with a mob of foul-smelling left-wing pyromaniacs than with a coterie of clean-shaven right-wing demagogues, while being aware that this solidarity is, from one perspective, just another Tribalism; again, more often with hot-tempered anti-Establishment anarchists than with intellectually-redoubtable pro-Establishment constructivists, knowing only too well that anarchists too have a lamentable tendency of setting up their own parochial (micro-)Tribalisms.

Thus, he must always write and live in the broken middle which is the shifting arena and the grey zone between these two warring principles. Consequently, beneath the cadences of his ironic prose there lie seething an anarchy of the mind and a turmoil of the heart that are seeking to find some rest in that ever-mobile in-between space between the two principles. Some of his readers, however, might want to 'pick up' on Principle 2 and argue as follows : 'But why take sides? Why do you not just float around breezing through life, not bothering to find out who/what is right and who/what is wrong?', and to this, he makes the following reply : 'It is impossible in principle not to have any views, explicit or implicit, of what constitutes the 'Good Life'. And these views, whatever they are, will set up some gradation, latent or expressed, of what is right and what is wrong in the light of that postulated Good which is hoped to be achieved, either in the present or in the future'.

Irony, therefore, becomes, on this blog at least, a mode of passionate engagement with the world that he shall call 'stragetic optimism'. It is strategic because it is pervaded by a deep sense of the fragility of goodness and is aware of how we must work in and through the irreducibly tragic dimensions of our existence, but it is optimistic because it never loses sight of the fragility of goodness and seeks to keep alive the conversation between all those who are united in a search for this goodness, at once manifest and elusive.

In conclusion, therefore, to be true to Principle 1 and Principle 2, he has the following note for his readers : 'The Transparent Ironist would wish to have many followers, but all his followers should first iron themselves out.'

2005-06-07T07:55:00.000+01:00

The Final Word

The Ironist is not a special kind of a human being.

But.

But every human being is a special kind of an ironist.

2005-06-06T21:28:00.000+01:00

Being Gay Is Anarchic

Pope Benedict has condemned, yet again, same-sex unions as fake and expressions of 'anarchic freedom' (such a delicious phrase!), claiming that these threaten the future of the family. But as if that was not bad enough, he goes on to declare : 'Matrimony and the family are not, in reality, a casual sociological construction or the fruit of specific historic and economic situations.'

I could hardly disagree more.

2005-06-06T12:09:00.000+01:00

Just a quick note about the change in the tag-line for my blog under The Anarchy of Thought (see above). For a long time now, I have heard people voicing anti-Establishment sentiments from a variety of standpoints and for a variety of reasons. Excellent, for in my own ironic ways, I am for the solidarity of the shaken.

However. However, I believe that this struggle must begin with ourselves and with people in our most immediate vicinity for otherwise it degenerates rapidly into a masquerade for our power-seeking, individual as well as collective.

Hence.

Charity begins at home. Perhaps. But then so does the long revolution against the Establishment.

2005-06-06T07:30:00.000+01:00

An Algorithmic Cross-Section Of The Ironist's Mind

2005-06-05T21:25:00.000+01:00

The College

To walk down the corridors stinking of cologne and after-shave just before dinner as people rush into the bathroom for a quick shower after basketball.

To roam through the hallways as a bunch of over-fed people mill around the Principal's noticeboard discussing the state of the nation and formulating policies for steering it through the world-market.

To stand on the dark grass courts, lightly covered with the winter's first dew, staring at the blinking stars behind the tower of The College.

To wait until the clock strikes 2 : 00 am to go to the dhaba for a tryst with hot tea and a bread-omelette while the rest of the world sleeps.

To wake up in the morning to the distant gongs for breakfast and feed oneself on toast, strawberry jam, scrambled eggs, and cold coffee.

To arrive just in time for the 8: 45 class and sleep through it trying to understand how there could possibly be a 8:45 in a world full of God's mercy.

To laze around in the cafe after lunch, drinking nimbu-pani with a spot of black salt and complaining how the dhaba crowd was spoiling the college's intellectual atmosphere.

To watch the shady day scholars trying to polish their speeches for Shakespeare Society's annual production.

To stroll around the chapel and read the epitaph of the forgotten Cambridge man who started it all.

And to keep on coming back to The College in more ways than one years after it happened, and keep on writing about it in ways both direct and devious, even while knowing that those who have never been there will probably not have the faintest clue as to what this post is about.

2005-06-05T13:05:00.000+01:00

Vedanta For Beginners

The following non-localised and undated conversation between the Transparent Ironist (TI) and his aunt Anondomoyi (AA) took place at the level of the Super-Mind. (It is non-localised and undated because this level is beyond spatio-temporal limitations.)

AA : Over the last two years, I have gradually come to lose all interest in this world of mice and men. I therefore deliver myself to your feet so that I may drink therefrom the ambrosia of the celestial message of the eternal Vedanta.

TI : As for the men, I can understand. Pretty nasty creatures, those miserable thingies. Indeed, I am surprised that it took you 48 years to lose your interest in men. But why the mice? How do they come into the picture?

AA : Ah, you don't know what havoc mice can wreak on the harvest. Last month, they ate up all the wheat and the rice we had stocked up in the barn on our family estate in the countryside. I am now fed up of all these worldly concerns. I seek the bliss and the tranquility that you speak of in your texts of the timeless Vedanta.

TI : Yes, Mother.

AA : Mother? I am not your mother!

TI : Indeed, you are not. You see, when we speak to each other, we cannot make a distinction between the lower case and the upper case, can we? I have called you Mother, not mother.

AA : You mean Mother?

TI : Yes, indeed, Mother. Mother with the upper case 'm'.

AA : But why call me Mother?

TI : Because you have passed the first test, and you are well on your way to crossing the next hurdle before you attain the supreme, undecaying, and unchanging bliss of enlightenment.

AA : What is the first hurdle? And which is the last one?

TI : The first one is this world of misery, this veritable jungle of a thousand desires that lead you astray. No woman who has become so exhausted of the pleasures of this world that the very thought of these pleasures fills her mind with disgust can come to the school of the heavenly Vedanta. By becoming a mother, that is, a woman who has given life to finite beings, you have crossed the initial ford. Now you shall become a Mother by withdrawing into yourself the life that you have given out, and thereby shall attain the ultimate truth that you are hankering after.

AA : You mean, once I was a mother, and now I shall become a Mother.

TI : Yes, once as a mother you gave life, but now as a Mother, you shall become Life Itself.

AA : But there are still so many questions that remain unexplained in my mind, clamouring for an answer.

TI : Fear not, O Mother, to speak them out to me!

AA : When my husband died a year ago, why did I endure so much grief?

TI : Such O Mother is the fate of all ignorant beings.

AA : Ignorant?

TI : A woman who sees only plurality in this world goes from death to death. But she who sees, underlying all these men around her, nothing but Life Itself will not seek to grasp one of them, nor when she is dissatisfied with him, another one, and so on in a never-ending frenzy of acquisitiveness. Rather, she will freely give up all attachment that she might have to any of these men, miserable thingies anyway, and become Life Itself.

AA : So I, in my ignorance, thought that my husband had died, not knowing that he, in his deepest essence, is Life Itself and is therefore beyond death?

TI : Indeed, O Mother, at this rate you won't need me to give you this discourse on the secret of the Vedanta.

AA : But do you mean to say that all these men around me do not exist?

TI : They do, O Mother, but only at the lower level of plurality. Ignorant beings that they are, they repeat the same cycle in their lives, running after one woman after the other, and even then their thirst is not slaked. But those men who see nothing in these manifold diversities of women but Life Itself are able to overcome this evanescent realm of transience and attain the highest level.

AA : And what is there at this highest level?

TI : That O Mother, I dare not speak of! My tongue is not equal to the task of describing to you the bliss that one attains there. What great beauty, infinite glory, and unspeakable joy!

AA : But now I have a question for you.

TI : Fear not O Mother, to speak out to me!

AA : How do you know all of this? You have not attained that level, have you?

TI : Indeed, I have not. That's why I am an Ironist, you see. I can only obliquely direct you towards what lies there. Do not mistake my finger for the moon that the finger points to.

AA : But how do you know that the moon that you speak of is 'out there'?

TI : Oh Mother, how much you ignorant beings love to go round and round in riddles! The moon you speak of is not out there, it is in here.

AA : In here?

TI : Yes, whatever is in here is also out there.

AA : So when I am established at that level, can I come back and check on you to tell you whether you were right or wrong?

TI : Ah Mother, when you attain that level, there won't be any 'you' left to do the reporting!

AA : But how do I know that what you are telling me right now is true?

TI : You don't. But, you see, neither do I know whether what I am telling you is the truth of the matter. You simply have to take it on trust from me, and hope for the best!

At that moment, aunt Anondomoyi's teenage daughter barges in, throws her school-bag on the sofa, and switches on MTV playing Guns and Roses. The long strains of 'November Rain' fill up the room, and the Transparent Ironist closes his eyes and pricks up his ears to listen to his *all-time* Fav rock song.

Aunt Anondomoyi watches him, awe written all over her face, loudly exclaims : 'My, this little boy is truly on his way to enlightenment. Fancy that, a teacher of the Vedanta in our own family that is going to hell day by day! Who would have guessed that that we possess such a bright star of our dynasty? He must have been born through the cosmic penance of some great sadhu', and then shouts to her daughter at the other end of the room : 'Ankita! Just come here! He is so unlike you! No attachment at all to your American MTV, or to your stupid Runs and Goses! I wish you could be at least one iota like him!'

2005-06-04T06:13:00.000+01:00

Futility

'Don't forget to buy some milk and sugar for tomorrow's breakfast. And yes, if you pass by the library, drop in at the tailor to ask if the children's trousers are ready.'

He came in a few hours later with a vacant look on his face, deeply absorbed in some vagrant world of his the centre of which was nowhere and the circumference everywhere.

'Did you?', she asked, hoping against hope.

'Did I what?', he replied quizzically.

She didn't say anything.

She went out into the terrace and saw the orange sun gently setting over the hills like a drop of blue water deliciously dissolving into the fathomless ocean.

'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity', an old preacher had once proclaimed. She wondered how she had become so vain as to presume that a man would be able to understand her.

2005-06-03T11:20:00.000+01:00

Weaving Circles

Trapped in the circle of meaning
My words do not understand themselves
They are but an instrument
Of my mind.

Trapped in the circle of my mind
I do not understand myself
I am but an instrument
Of my readers.

2005-06-02T18:26:00.000+01:00

A Mid-Week Fairy Tale

Here is another one of my trade-mark mid-week fairy tales. Like all others, feel free to 'read' this as historical, mythical, farcical, ironical, or simply as literal, all to literal.

A man who is attached to his mother is a veritable time-bomb for others (especially women) who might come near the periphery of his circle. The reason for this is quite complex, it would seem. Because a mother cannot exercise authority over her husband (she is not allowed this control by patriarchal madates), she soon discovers that her son is a readily available victim over whom to establish her unquestioned control. So she brings up her son in a manner that will drive home to him, every day and every night, how much he is dependent on her and how greatly he owes his life and his existence to her.
Later when the daughter-in-law comes in, the mother feels overwhelmed by very ambivalent emotions. On the one hand, she desperately wants grandchildren to propagate her genes and to carry on her family-line (hence the daughter-in-law as an instrument for maintaining the line). But on the other hand, she also fears her erstwhile absolute authority over her son being challenged from within. Hence a titanic civil war starts between two women over one man, a war that is much beloved of Hollywood and Bollywood.
Now this process is repeated when the daughter-in-law has a son in return; the son grows up and gets married; and so on and on ad infinitum.

The Hindus have a name for this : it is called Samsara which is said to be beginningless (anadi). Some even go on to say that there is a way out of it (moksa); others, of course, know better.

2005-06-01T08:20:00.000+01:00

Proleptic Meditations

[The year is 2035, and the Transparent Ironist returns to browse through the blog of his forgotten youth.]

For a few agonising moments, there was an uneasy silence between us, perhaps the noisy silence between two bursts of thunder in the middle of a monsoon shower.

'So do you still go around in your fast cars?'

'Fast cars?'

'Yes? You used to drive in and out of town in one of those Toyotas?'

'Ah, fast cars, fast cars, fast cars. You see, my mind does not work as fast as it used to during those days. No, I don't go around in fast cars.'

'And all those dead horses? Plato, Aquinas, Kant, Mill, Hegel, Heidegger, Russell, Sartre, Nagel, Putnam, Dummett, Churchland, and Searle? Do you still read all these people?'

'Well, yes, now and then. After all, we must all pay our homage to the dead. Each of us, in our own way.'

'And what about your theories?'

'Theories? I never had any!'

'Of course you did! All those arguments over babies that we had until the sun came down. And sometimes, even until it rose above us again the next morning.'

'Yes? Like what?'

'This one, for example. Like how every pattern of education, at home or at school, is an implicit or explicit form of violence, and if we do not wish to commit violence on children, we should not have babies in the first place.'

'Ah, yes. In the first place. I used to love that phrase in those days.'

'And then how you used to smile sadly at all those teenagers shouting at the top of their voices in front of the American Embassy that global poverty must come to an end. And how you told me that poverty and hunger would never become history as long as human beings kept on producing babies. And also how some of these teenagers would go on to have babies whom they would then shower with medicines from Glaxo, diapers from Candida, and milk from Nestle, the very MNCs that they had been fighting against just a few months ago!'

'Yes, but those were different days. I am an old man now, the fire is lost from my words, from my voice, and from anything I could write today. Indeed, I think I was old, very old, even in my youth. Perhaps, when I was young, I missed my youth.'

'But why didn't you ever tell others about these theories that you kept to yourself?'

'I didn't? Why do you think I started that blog a long time back you used to comment on every now and then?'

'Well, yes. But why not speak in a direct and clear first-person voice?'

'Because I did not want to get entangled in pointless disputes over the meaning of words.'

'What do you mean?'

'Misanthropy, for example. Some would say that I am a misanthropist, that because I am indifferent towards babies, I hate the Human Race. Others would say that because I would rather be around women who share my indifference towards babies and carefully avoid those who do not, I am a misogynist. Yet others would say that because I have no plans, no visions, and no goals for how to make the world a better place, I am a status quoist. Finally, some would say that because the gradual disappearance of the Human Race from the face of this earth does not bother me in the least, I am a pessimist. And instead of debating the fundamental question, Should or should we not have babies?, we would get embroiled in endless debates over the meaning of words such as 'misanthropy', 'misogynist', 'status quoist', and 'pessimist''.

'Is that why you hid yourself behind the thick cloak of your irony?'

'Perhaps.'

A little yellow bird flew down from the grey skies and sat down on the wet ground in between us.

'You know, he often asked about you during his last days.'

'Yes, I know. I tried to reach his house the other evening. I was told he had died in the morning.'

'Yes.'

'But perhaps that is the way things are. Those who are alive always reach home a bit too late. It is only the dead who arrive bang on time.'

The yellow flapped its wings twice, struggled to rise into the air, and flew away.

I walked away from the benches, with a few dry branches crackling under my feet. I looked back at her. She was still as beautiful as always : ever so ancient, ever so new.

I reached my old Toyota, slumped into the front seat, and banged the partly-damaged door shut. In front of me, I could hear the Sunday choir singing from the cathedral. I looked up at the sooty Mediaeval spire.

Yes, the little yellow bird was now sitting right at the top of it. And behind it, the faint glimmerings of a rainbow in the horizon.

2005-05-31T07:32:00.000+01:00

Nostalgia

'I am not sure that I agree with what you have to say about women in classical India. I think you display a consistent 'Western bias' in whatever you believe about the 'Indian context'. Women in those bygone days were much freer than women in contemporary India and even in the so-called 'liberal West' today'.

'And what makes you say that?'

'Well, women then enjoyed as many powers and liberties that men possessed.'

'Ah, but there is a subtle point.'

'What is that?'

'Women enjoyed only as many powers and liberties as men declared were suitable for women!'

2005-05-31T07:15:00.000+01:00

Perversity

'Tell me one thing. I have always wondered why a woman changes her surname to that of her husband's when she gets married.'

'Well, I don't think you would understand it.'

'Well, you know, you are the academic type. You live in the cold impersonal world of your books and journal articles. You types don't get one fundamental thing about life.'

'And what is that one thing?'

'Sacrifice, my dear, sacrifice. You don't understand the meaning of sacrifice. When a woman loves a man, she is willing to make these little sacrifices for his sake. Like changing her surname.'

'Hmm. That's interesting. Would you say that in this case the man loves the woman too?'

'Yes, probably.'

'So why can't he make this sacrifice and change his surname to that of his wife's? Why do women have to make these 'little sacrifices' all the time if not for the reason that they are trained from their childhood to look at the world as a sacrificial Crusade? It is almost as if every woman is out on a mission to declare to other women, 'My sacrifice is greater than yours!''

2005-05-31T06:20:00.000+01:00

Hell

'There is something I wanted to talk to you about.'

'Wait, your tea is getting cold.'

'Ah, don't worry about my tea. There are far more important things than that.'

'Like what?'

'Like these proposals that I have been receiving through the post.'

'What type of proposals?'

'Don't be silly, for your marriage, of course.'

'But how could that be possible when I never asked for any?'

'Well, mother and I put up this matrimonial last month. We thought it was in your best interests not to tell you.'

'But how do you dare to know what my best interests are?'

'Well, I am your father, and a father always knows what is for the best for his daughter. So are you going to look through these?'

'No, I am not.'

'Very well, I thought as much. But if you are planning to go for a fling with one of those college friends of yours, here is something you should remember. He must be a non-Catholic, a non-Protestant, a non-Sikh, a non-Muslim, a non-Buddhist, a non-Jaina, a non-Taoist, a non-Rastafarian, a non-Shintoist, and a non-Confucianist. And as for Hindus, he must be a non-Shaivite.'

'Sigh. This so reminds me of that idiot I knew when I was at school. He used to throw these one-liners at people, with a supreme nonchalance as if he did not care if anyone was listening to him.'

'And what did he say?'

'That for a girl to remain close to her father is the highest compliment she can pay to patriarchy.'

2005-05-31T06:00:00.000+01:00

Purgatory

'You should go out more often with your friends. If you have any, that is.'

'So should you. I mean, just look at you! You sit at home the whole day, drinking coffee, and watching people through the window.'

'Well, I don't have anything else to do, do I? But look at you. You are 35, and haven't yet managed to find a husband. Makes me wonder if you ever shall. At your age, I had two grown-up daughters to look after, and you are yet to start.'

'Oh, please don't start that all over again. I just am not going to listen to this right now.'

'When will you though? Does anything of what I say ever pass through your thick head?'

'Well, he was right after all then.'

'And who is this he?'

'Well, it is that he, that gloomy figure I used to know during my college days. He once told me that a woman does not need a man to oppress her. Her mother is enough for this purpose.'

2005-05-30T19:52:00.000+01:00

'Hello!'
'Hello?'
'Mum!'
'Is that you Kathy?'
'Yes. There is something I want to tell you.'
'What is it this time?'
'I am pregnant.'
'Ah, well.'
'What?'
'I mean not everyone is perfect.'
'Whaaaaaaah?'
'You heard what I said.'
'But I don't understand what you mean.'
'Perhaps neither do I. There is something I haven't told you.'
'What is that?'
'You were adopted.'

2005-05-30T07:44:00.000+01:00

The Rhyme Of The Post-Modern Ironist
(A Cryptic Summary Of His 'World-View')

A sad loser, yes that's what I am
For I never quite know what to say
My replies, yes they are as mobile
As the ever-shifting winds of May.

First comes along an old friend
To announce the gospel heaven-sent :
'Life is a beauty and you, my dear
You must live for the moment!'

And while I ponder there struts in
Another friend clearly in great torment :
'Fiery hell awaits you, my dear fellow
Unless you turn to Allah and repent!'

So I sit on my old Ironist's couch
And meditate on which way to blow
But try hard to decide as I might
I just don't know which way to go!

And then it all lights up abruptly
Why should it be a matter of choice
When I can combine both at once
And sit back quietly and rejoice?

I open the window of my room
And my sudden wisdom, noble and mellow
I shout at the top of my hoary voice
To all the masses gathered below :

"Hear Ye O my People, hear this clear
Over right and wrong worry no more
I have now found just the right formula
That all of Ye been patiently waiting for!"

"Enjoy the world and with great gusto
Immerse yourself in rampant revelry
But when that's over and done with
Turn to Allah and say, 'Please forgive me!'"

2005-05-29T08:20:00.000+01:00

What is Religion?

(a) The world we live in is a collection of a bewildering plurality of games, and you have (already!) been born into one of them (congratulations!). Therefore, when you arrive on the scene, you find yourself immersed in the middle of a game that has already commenced and that has probably been played on for hundreds of years. You grow up learning and assimilating the rules of your home-game, and you try to play (in the beginning, at least) that game according to these rules. What we call 'education' is, largely speaking, the process of the internalisation of these rules.

(b) This does not mean, however, that you shall always play only one game. (Though, to be sure, many people do precisely that.) Indeed, many of us have to become highly skilled, because of various social, cultural, or economic necessities, in playing more than one game in different fields or locales of our life. Some of us play two games quite proficiently, and there are also some who undergo specialised training in order to be able to play as many as five or six games at different times in different contexts.

(c) What this implies, in turn, is that there are certain areas of mutual overlap across these games for otherwise we would all remain hopelessly trapped and insulated within our indigenous game. We can make sense of at least some of the rules of those games that we ourselves do not play (or even wish not to play or believe should not be played by anybody at all).

(d) That game which is most important to us in the sense that it provides a normative framework within which we play out the various dimensions of our existence is called Religion. This game is quite often the one that we are born into, though sometimes we can glide away, like an enterprising spider from one net to another attached net, from the native game into a foreign game, assimilating ourselves to the latter and indigenising the latter into ourselves.

(e) There is, in other words, a certain degree of flexibility regarding the rules of most of these games. In some of them, however, any violation of these would be immediately rewarded with severe punishment so that people who are within those games would normally not wish to play around (no pun intended) with the rules. However, many other games have developed internal mechanisms of coping with, tolerating, or even supporting conscious opposition to these time-honoured rules, so that these rules are not simply regarded as timeless verities but also as temporal constructions that are being contested, challenged, and reformed with every generation.

(f) This does not, however, mean that every human being has to have a Religion. There may be some people who simply refuse to play any game at all (though the heated debate over whether the refusal-to-play-any-game is itself another disguised game will never cease!), some who relentlessly keep on shifting between ten different quite disconnected games in the course of a single day, or some who view the rules of their native game only with the barest minimum of an ironic indifference.

(g) Now whenever there is a conflict of play between the master-game that we have called Religion and the other micro-games that are encompassed by it, we can adopt various means of conflict-resolution. For some people, the rules of Religion will have over-riding veto power over all other rules stemming from the micro-contexts; for others, a long and patient process of negotiation between the respective rules might become necessary; and for others, the rules of the autochthonous Religion game will be jettisoned and those of a foreign Religion game will be adopted, even if only hesitatingly at first.

(h) There are therefore what might be called Degrees of Religosity : not everyone within the same Religion game plays by the ground-rules with equal intensity and passion, or even for identical reasons. Consequently, the Religion game can be inward- or outward-looking : sometimes the players may deliberately raise the barriers that separate themselves from the surrounding games in the environment and focus more on the explicitation of their native rules for their fellow-players; sometimes, however, they may also wish to raise the portcullis and try to understand the rules of the people in the contiguous games.

2005-05-29T05:53:00.000+01:00

"A few weeks ago I was rummaging through The Observer 's archive for 1983 in search of a piece about Saul Bellow, when I noticed an article by a woman called Linda Taylor, who was justifying her decision, at 34, to have a baby on her own. No, I was surprised not so much by Taylor's frank piece as by the letters it occasioned in the following week's paper.

My particular favourite was written by the anonymous 'PJ' from Virginia Water in Surrey, who spluttered: 'It is better to see if you can handle a permanent relationship with another adult before the irrevocable step of trying it out on a child.'

I'm glad that the world is growing more comfortable with the idea that families come in many different forms, and that there are hundreds of thousands of children in this country being lovingly and conscientiously brought up by single parents, or by people who are not their biological parents. I suspect the man who claimed he would rather have had a bad father than no father had never actually spoken to anyone who did live with a bad father. Above all, I'm glad my son is growing up in a society where no one will call him a bastard - at least, not until he's had the chance to deserve it through his own actions".

'Real', by Stephanie Merritt, is published by Faber on 9 June.

2005-05-28T20:34:00.000+01:00

One of the most distasteful aspects of social life, in my (dis)taste, concerns brothers and sisters taking recourse to legal means for the division, distribution, or acquisition of property, wealth, and land. Consider, for example, a 'typical' Indian family with 2 sisters and 3 brothers whose parents draw up a 'will' dividing the family land and property among them.

What does the act of drawing up such a legal document reveal? Is it not the truth that deep down under their skins the brothers and the sisters suspect one another of being thieves, crooks, or robbers, craftily waiting to take advantage of those among themselves who are not watching out?

In this connection, the Indian mystic Ramakrishna Paramahangsa once wrote :

'God laughs when two brothers draw a dividing line on their farmland and say : 'This side is mine, that side is yours''.

2005-05-28T16:24:00.000+01:00

The Pakistani Patient

I was then a young boy of 19, on the run from the war in the North, who had found an unexpected patron in an old wiry Khan Saheb who had apparently known my grandfather during the turmoil of the Afghan Wars. One morning, the Khan Saheb barged into my room when I was still enfulged by sleep and told me that there was an old woman I would have to attend to from that morning. He took me to Peshawar's Military Hospital even as the 8 o'clock army siren was piercing through the morning sky.

She was wrapped up in the purest white linen and was staring at the distant lake through the brown window. When we stepped closer to her, she raised her frail right hand slowly and tried to reach for me. The Khan Saheb whispered to me to move nearer to her. She gently touched my right cheek with her fragile fingers and slowly let them run down to my chin.

'Ah, Qasim ... Qasim ... Qasim', she softly sighed to herself, and looked out through the window again.

I was there with her during the last three months of her life. When she found out that I could write Urdu, she asked me if I would write down her autobiography as she dictated it to me. For ten weeks, she spoke, in a tirelessly ferocious stream, of various things, events, and people, as I desperately struggled with my pen to keep up with the pace of her narrative.

The day before she died, however, she told me to keep my papers away. She asked me to come closer to her and began to whisper in my ears.

'There is something that I want to say, but when I speak this to you, you must pretend that you are not in this room, that you are not hearing what I am going to say, that it is as if I am talking to those blank walls in front of me. I speak because I want some human being to know this truth before I am dead.'

I silently nodded my head.

'You can burn all those pages that you have written. Some historian might someday find them interesting, but they tell nothing about me, about who I really was. My entire life was nothing but a long never-ending attempt to escape from the dark prison of the family. What did I not do to earn and safeguard my freedom? First, I got attached to this band of wandering Sufis in Iran. And then, yes, I even joined the Communists in the United Provinces. Hah, can you believe that? Me, this old bag of bones, struggling with the reds? And finally, I joined the Muslim League in Lahore and listened to the Quaid-e-Azam's speeches. People would sometimes come up to me and say, 'How noble of you! How generous of you!'. Bah! If only they knew why I was always running away from one place to another!'

After the Partition, I went to the University of Islamabad where I became a student of the Islamic philosophy of Ibn Rushd, Ibn Sinna, and Al-Ghazzali. It was then that I first became aware of how elusive the 'I' is, how the 'I' is but a fragmented entity that is constantly being built out of our own stories and the stories of those around us.

Even today, however, I do not know whether I am the first-person who speaks in the posts on this blog or whether I am just the collection of the disconnected third-person voices through which I try to hide myself.

Perhaps I shall never know in my life-time.

Perhaps it is only after I am dead that the Transparent Ironist will reveal who I was when I was alive.