Summer's Redemption

Wish there were orchards and orchards of it. Mango. Come summer. And you find golden, pink, peach tender blossom on Mango trees obscuring its leaves and branches from view. The colour of the blossom depends on sunlight, and the stage of the blossoming – just blossomed, turning into fruit…

The otherwise quiet inconspicuous mango tree suddenly becomes the most special tree.
In an urban surrounding full of glass finished buildings, the lone mango tree seems to assert that ‘this is still India’.
It brings fond memories of your grandmother’s ancestral house, the backyard of which had a mango tree. Essentially. During festivities, when you needed mango leaves to make festoons to embellish the entrance to your home, you didn’t have to go far in search of the mango tree unlike today. You just had to go to your backyard.
Those afternoons spent in its cool shades! You did not count those afternoons. Who knew they were numbered?
You suddenly miss the cuckoo. When you heard its calls as you ambled in the garden, you craned your neck and searched the mango tree’s branches and leaves to see where it was. You returned the call of the cuckoo, trying your best to imitate it, to hear it coo once more, so you could locate it. The thick foliage made it so difficult.
It’s been so long since you heard the call of the cuckoo. Now you will have to travel several miles, away from the city, to find the cuckoo.

The mango tree. It fills you with anticipation. Anticipation of the mango fruit. The flavor, the colour, the taste. Such an exotic fruit. The fruit of summer.
Yes. The fruit is the redemption of summer.

Ah! The untimely rain that destroys mango crop!
Whatever happened to ‘Prakriti Dharma’? We have lost the right to ask that question now.
I pray anyway. May it not rain…not now…

These were pictures taken at work.




These were pictures taken on the way to work. I got down from the cab, took pictures from different angles even as passersby looked at me askance. And then I walked to the nearby bus stop, boarded the bus to office.

Mango Hair Between Molars

You could be talking, you could be reading, you could be writing, travelling, walking or sitting on the couch doing nothing. You could be cooking, listening to music, lying down. You could be concentrating on work on a busy day. You could be doing anything, but all throughout, a part of you remains riveted to that impertinent intruder that came at an inopportune moment without invitation and now refuses to leave. And before you know, beyond your control, your tongue is caressing and stroking him without a moment’s interlude.

That is, if you have a mango hair stuck between your molars.

Your tongue simply does not rest. It attends to that annoying thing between your teeth. It stops tired and begins anew after a while. It pretends to give up but it does not.

You don’t know how and when it got there.

You knew there was a chance of this happening and you still let it happen.

You know you can simply ignore it. It will be gone soon and yet you continue stroking it, caressing it.

You know you can force it out with the stroke of a brush; but you won’t do it.

The mango hair between molars. The lover who does not requite your love but tantalizes.

The fruit that gave you fulfillment glided down your throat – like the lover who reciprocated. The one that got caught between your molars was unrequited love, neither gliding down nor dislodging himself to be spat out. But there to simply enjoy the caresses.
Its not his fault. The connection was surely there. But the context was a cruel act of destiny.

The mango hair between molars. You don’t know how and when it got there.
A wretched moment. Only for a fraction of a second, your eyes met. Not more. But that was all it needed.
How long does it take to die? A moment.
And how long does it take to fall in love? A moment.
How long did it take the mango hair? A moment.

Your life became anchored to him since that moment. As days turned into weeks and weeks into months, a feeble, imperceptible, small love turned into a banyan tree with many deep roots.
You think ‘if only that one wretched moment hadn’t happened…you would be saved’, But then you know, a connection as strong and as fundamental as the umbilical cord would have asserted itself sooner or later. For the connection was surely there. Divine. Only the context was a cruel act of destiny.

The mango hair between molars. You knew there was a chance of this happening and you still let it happen.
You were careless.
When the first time your heart missed a beat, you knew you were standing on the edge of a precipice.
You could have turned around and run to safety. And yet, you jumped.
You could have resolved not to look in his direction again. But you allowed yourself to be carried away. You let your eyes search for him. You let your eyes find him in a crowd.
You let your eyes meet his. You told a tale. In just a moment. He understood. His glance told the same tale. And you understood. The clandestine conversation had begun.
When you take sweet poison, sweetness spreads first. You enjoy it and let it spread further.
Poison comes afterward.

When months later, you did resolve not to look at him, it was too late. All self control was mere ostentatious display; the internal suffering did not stop.

The mango hair between molars. You know you can simply ignore it. It will be gone soon and yet you continue stroking it, caressing it.
You remember what happened last time. You thought you would die. But you didn’t. Life moved on.
It is just a matter of time. Because nothing lasts forever.
And yet, you cannot ignore it. Because this moment is the one that has to be lived now. Relief may come later. But until then, this excruciating pain has to be borne. This love has to be lived.
He is your first waking thought. In fact, he is simply your waking thought. Every minute you are awake he is there in the background of all your thoughts. And as if that’s not enough you see him in your dreams too.

The mango hair between molars. You resolve to give up but you don’t.
You try to get close to him. You burn your fingers. Your ego is hurt. You hate him. You resolve never to try again. And after sometime, after your burns have healed, you are looking in his direction again.

The mango hair between molars. You know you can force it out with the stroke of a brush; but you won’t do it.
For all your determination and power of will, you can remove his thought from your mind like you would a weed. Jolt yourself out of this impossible fantasy. Uproot the banyan tree. But you won’t; because though love is its own punishment, love is also its own reward. You savour it even as it kills you. It is sweetness though it is of poison.

The only consolation is knowing that nothing is forever.
Each time, the relief came unexpectedly. When you had given up or gotten used to the pain of the intruder, he dislodged himself from between your molars, sometimes suddenly, sometimes quietly, and it was over.

Good Work - E F Schumacher

Having read ‘Small Is Beautiful’, it was impossible for me not to read all of this author’s works. This is the second work of his that I read. There is one more of his works “A Guide for the Perplexed’ that I will read in the next few months.
I am putting this up on my blog long after I have read the book. So I had forgotten most of what I had read and only a vague idea remained. The good part however is that I had to go through the whole book once again, and it refreshed my memory.

This is not a book to be reviewed but to be read and reread, digested and imbibed and absorbed. All I have to say is that it served to verify several of my preconceptions and made me feel proud of the fact that my fundamentals are perfect. And I am delighted to know that my thoughts are similar to those of great visionaries such as Schumacher : - )

Good Work is all about the distinction between and good and bad work and the necessity for people, society, nations and the world to make that distinction.
It was written in 1979 and as one reads it becomes obvious that it was written long ago. But the points are as relevant today as they were before. In fact with most of the people today having no education, no clarity about fundamentals at all, this book is most relevant.

Following is notes taken from the book. It is not very well structured as it requires too much effort. These points are in the same order in which they appear in the book.
Read if you have patience and courage. And read if you want a whole new perspective.

Blurb - "In good work, the author addresses a question which is central to most of us and one which is all too often ignored by the economic structure of the western world. He maintains that the purpose of man's work is threefold: to produce necessary, useful goods and services; to enable us to use and perfect our gifts and kills and finally, to collaborate with other people in order to liberate ourselves from inbuilt egocentricity. A job in which one finds no personal satisfaction destroys the soul. With sanity and sensitivity, the author offers important and thought provoking alternatives which point the way to mankind's physical and mental liberation.”

Introduction & Preface - The critical role of technology in economic development was first brought into perspective by Schumacher in a report prepared in 1962 for the government of India.

Tools and equipment deliberately designed to be relatively small, simple, capital saving and environmentally non-violent - That was Schumacher's idea known by the term 'Intermediate Technology'. This book is complied mainly from a series of lectures he gave in the United States during mid-1970's, a tour during which some 60000 people heard him speak, and which culminated in a meeting at the white house with President Carter. 3 chapters are based on earlier written essays: they have been included for their relevance to the subject of good work.

As part of establishing the premises for his argument he says that the way humans view work - the less work you can get away with, the better, that money is the sole reason for working - is a fundamentally morbid view.

This book is an exploration of the political, managerial, social, and economic consequences of conventional technology (and values) and of alternatives.

A person's work is undoubtedly one of the most decisive formative influences on his character and personality. It is work which occupies most of the energies of the human race and what people actually do is more important than what they say, what they own, or how they vote.

We need to adapt the work to the needs of the worker rather than demand that the worker adapt himself to the needs of the work-which means of course primarily to the needs of the machine.

The book is organized into six chapters as follows.

The End of an Era:
In this chapter, the author relates the story of oil.

Although the US was richly endowed with oil, due to continuous exploitation, it was necessary to dig deeper and deeper, whereas Middle East oil wells were new and one had only to dig a hole to find oil. So Middle Eastern oil was flowing to the US. But when US put a control on this in order to avoid dependence on the Middle East that was close to Russia, the oil companies had to sell in the European market. There they had to compete with coal and had to lower their prices in order to capture the market.
Previously oil exporting countries had nothing to do with this business that was run by oil companies. In 1960, they set up OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries). By 1965 the exporting countries realized that oil is a diminishing asset. Going by the projection of requirements made by oil consuming countries they would have sold all oil in the next 20-30 years. And after that, they would have nothing to sell!
The Shah of Iran was most greedy to increase oil output.

In Libya, Colonel Qaddafi chucked out the old king and became head of state at 28 and enquired how long the bonanza would last.
He asked the companies to throttle output, marginally. He nationalized these companies so he would have control. The effect of marginally reducing crude oil output in 1970 was a 50% increase in world's level of crude oil prices. The less you produce the richer you become! Because the demand is inelastic; it remains the same!
Colonel Qaddafi became the most hated man in the world and other Arabs and oil producers were reluctant to be in his position as they feared the powerful oil importing countries that were capable of violence.
So they sent the general secretary of OPEC around who went to all oil importing countries making speeches asking them to mitigate their requirements, saying 'What will become of us after we have sold all oil? The fact that you are paying for it does not make a difference and in 25 years we cannot build an alternate livelihood’.

6th October 1973 - 4th Arab Israeli war started.
To the consternation of Washington, the friend of the US, King Faisal (Arab) said 'We will use oil as a political weapon against Israel.
As long as the war goes on we reduce oil output. When the prices went really high, the exporting countries saw what their product was worth and made the hiked price the official price.

US proposed to buy huge quantities of oil to meet its requirements (based on projections). When Yamani, the oil minister of King Faisal, the friend agreeing to expand oil output asked the US how they would pay; the US offered shares or ownership of the American industry. But King Faisal understood how easy it was to expropriate the foreign capitalist (one stroke of pen by Congress) and decided the best course was to leave oil in the ground.

So the 6th October triggered this irreversible lowering of oil output and an increase in price.

From now on, oil will be dearer and scarce. The question to ask is this: during that short and unique period in world history, of cheap and plentiful oil, what happened as a result of cheapness and plenty of oil?
How did it crystallize out in our economic life? all those thing that have happened as a direct result of cheap and plentiful oil now will be in great danger - of collapse or disappearance when that economic base is gradually withdrawn.

The modern system of agriculture, for instance, that consumes a lot of oil; we must find an organic system.

The monster cities of today – that have huge energy requirements and exploit oil.
A big city doesn’t live on itself, it lives on the land, it lives off the land. An inland city lives off the circle of land around it to be provisioned. Cities on seashore could be provisioned by ships…in olden days. Transportation was a concern hence land growing food and city couldn’t be far apart. There was a limit to the size of a city. There had to be small cities surrounded by lands to feed them.
Today with exploitation of fossil fuels, transportation is no longer a concern. And therefore there is no limit to the growth of cities.
This situation in big cities of majority of people living in the cities and a minority on the land made it necessary to have immense increase in productivity.
With the new development of oil (major source of energy) becoming scarce, what is to happen to these cities?

Competition between peoples has resulted in unnecessary transportation and a criminal waste of oil. There are a lot of Japanese cars flitting about in Detroit. These cars have to be transported from Japan to Detroit. England also has Japanese cars.
A huge fleet of Lorries carry biscuits from London to Glasgow. And across the other motorway, an equally huge fleet of Lorries carry biscuits from Glasgow to London. Any impartial observer from another planet looking on would come to the conclusion that biscuits have to be transported at least six hundred miles before they reach their proper quality.
Large scale production, arising from one unit, is the reason behind businessmen wanting to invade faraway markets.

Instead of large scale highly complex and highly capital intensive production, we should have small units that ipso facto wouldn’t be so complex.

Toward a Human scale Technology:

The end products should be persons and not puppets.
Modern industrial society is immensely complicated, immensely involved, making immense claims on man’s time and attention. This is its greatest evil.
The amount of genuine leisure available in a society is generally In inverse proportion to the amount of labour-saving machinery it employs.

Adopt only those things from western industrialism that really facilitate and enrich life while rejecting frills and harmful elaborations.

What is the great bulk of advertising other than stimulation of greed, envy and avarice?
Industrialism in its capitalist form openly employs human feelings of greed, envy and avarice as its very motive force.
Whether these evils are the result of industrialism as such or of the particular capitalist form in which it has made its appearance in the west is debatable.

Basic aim of modern industrialism is not to make work satisfying but to raise productivity and labour saving whereby labour is stamped with the mark of undesirability.

Autocratic management treats men as factors of production instead of responsible human persons in a grave evil leading to innumerable stunted or wasted lives.

Infinite decentralization of authority and responsibility would be good - this requires small structures and not superstructures.

The exhibition of reading matter on most of the bookstalls is the worst indictment of present day society. To claim this is what people want is merely adding insult to injury. It is not what they want but what they are being tempted to demand by their fellow men who will commit any crime of degradation to make a dishonest penny.

To insist that reckless waste of natural resources is crime does not sound cooperative to those who think that the highest possible rate of consumption is the only worthwhile pursuit of mortal man.

Once a process of technological development has been set in motion it proceeds largely by its own momentum, irrespective of the intentions of its originators. Whoever created modern technology, for whatever purpose, these modes of production demand a system that suits it.

Prime minister of Iran – ‘there are many aspects of the west that we particularly wish to avoid in the industrialization of Iran. We seek the west's technology only, not its ideology. What we wish to avoid is the ideological transplant.’
The implicit assumption that you can have a technological transplant without getting at the same time an ideological transplant; that technology is ideologically neutral; that you can acquire the hardware without the software behind; is a bit like saying - I want to import eggs for hatching but I don’t want chicks from them but mice or kangaroos.

Important questions to ask about workers;
How they produce, what they produce?
Where they work? Where they live? Whom they meet?
How they relax or recreate themselves? What they eat, breathe, see?
What they think?

The subdivision of labour is the assassination of a people.

The system we have is the inevitable product of technology.
When you compare different societies with different systems, where they employ the same technology, they act very much the same and become more alike every day. So technology dictates.

Those who want to promote a better society, achieve a better system, must not confine their activities to attempts to change the superstructure - laws, rules, agreements, taxes, welfare, education, health services etc., if there is no change in the base, which is technology, there is unlikely to be any real change in the superstructure.

Initially technology was the outgrowth of science. Today’s its primary derivation is from science. In fact, science is today mainly valued for its technological fruits. What determines the course of science? There is always more that could be studied than can be studied. So how is the choice made?
Interests of scientists? Yes. Interests of big business and governments? Yes. Interests of people? No. Perhaps an entirely different kind of science would really benefit people.

New technologies are developed only when people of power and wealth back the development. New technologies will be in the image of the system that brings them forth and they will reinforce the system.

US: 5-6% of world population uses something like 35% of world’s output of raw materials! As of 1979.

Three important questions need to be asked about technological development.
What does it do in terms of resource usage? What does it do to the environment? What is its socio-political relevance?

Effect of modern technology on the pattern of human settlement - a monstrous and a highly pathological polarization of the pattern of settlements. In the US they have coined the term megalopolis - Bowash - Boston to Washington, Chicpitts - Chicago to Pittsburgh, Sansan – San Francisco to San Diego
More than half the area (central US) is grossly under populated and large parts of the other half are madly congested.

It’s not enough to know about making shoes. You also have to know about feet. The shoe made for the big fellow does not fit the foot of the little fellow. Small foot needs a different shoe; not an inferior one, but one of the right size. Modern technology makes good shoes only for big fellows.

If you want to create technologies that fit the given conditions of development areas, people accuse you of wanting to take them back into middle ages. The problem with these ideas is they sound revivalist (going back to ancient times) and anachronistic and not progressive. the challenge is to make it sound progressive.

Technology has taken a wrong turn in 4 directions.
1. It is becoming bigger and bigger.

2. It is becoming more and more complex. The ingenuity invested in quite bumble things is fantastic
A tube of toothpaste - you squeeze it and toothpaste comes out in three different luscious colours. So clever, they don’t even get mixed up; it’s like a flag coming out.
Another example; so that you may not be subjected to the indignity of having to turn a handle to wind the car window up or down they have invented a button which you simply press.

When they find something that can actually be done, no matter how futile or dangerous it may be, such as Concorde, they just do it.

3. It is capital-intensive. More and more people are excluded.

4. It is becoming violent. (You have to widen the concept of violence beyond human warfare) They are dumping poisons in ever increasing quantities.

Take medicine. The whole direction is wrong - curative medicine is more and more researched, complex, and expensive. Preventive medicine is virtually neglected. Instead of producing more skilled dentists, can we ask, why are our teeth so rotten?

Not all things can be done on a smaller scale (Boeing, for example) but all those regarding basic human requirements can be.

Any 3rd rate engineer can make a complicated apparatus but it takes a touch of genius to find one’s way back to basic principles. Which are normally fairly simple.

We need to distinguish what is essential and what are almost cancerous growths.

We must learn to distinguish between tool and machine tool. A tool is operated by a man, a machine is operated by a mindless mechanism.

Smallness, simplicity, capital cheapness, non-violence are key.

Author illustrates with an example of the problem in Zambia, how ludicrous big businesses and technologies can get and how he worked around the problem to find a solution in intermediate technology.

To solve the problem of malnutrition of protein gap, Zambian government came up with a program with a slogan “one egg a day for every Zambian’. While egg production was successful, the supply of egg trays coming from South Africa, Britain and America had stopped for some reason. Without packaging material in which to take these to the market, the eggs were rotting.
Schumacher said “why don’t you make egg trays in Zambia?
Nobody there knew how to do it. They investigated and found out that virtually all egg trays in the world were made by one multinational company.
When the company was contacted, they first agreed to build a factory in Lusaka, but refused later because the quantity required there (a million a year) was much less than the capacity of the smallest machine (a million a month). The MNC demanded that they organize an all African common market for egg trays, build roads for lorries all coming out of Lusaka to distribute egg trays to rural areas…., but this was the opposite of development - to refer them to foreign trade, to import…’Our engineers say, small units are uneconomic’, came the response.
So the author and team got a fellow to redesign the egg tray which was badly designed by the MNC. This job was taken to Royal College of Art in London and within six weeks, they had the perfect design.
The second thing to do was to create a mini plant - done with the engineering department of the University of Reading. They found a small manufacturer.
The plant has 2% of capacity of hitherto smallest plant and 2% of capital cost.

As I have already discerned from Small Is Beautiful, Schumacher is a Gandhi fan.
He mentions in this book too - ‘Gandhi came to England in 1930. He disembarked in Southampton and on the gangway he was already overwhelmed by journalists asking questions. One of them asked ‘What do you think of modern civilization?’ and he replied ‘That would be a good idea’. Schumacher says, the time has come to implement the good idea.

With modern agriculture, fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides (to kill weeds) man has lost knowledge of traditional farming. How to cooperate with soil - is largely lost.

A Viable Future Visible in the Present:
Where you have lots of small businesses fitting all sorts of demands, the best organization for them is private enterprise. Where the person (the employer) who is responsible for the assets is identified, there is a real existential relationship between man and matter, material.
Socializing or nationalizing such small businesses doesn’t work.

In case of huge companies/factories, private ownership is a pretense. The owner has no relationship with the assets. State ownership too isn’t an alternative because government and businesses do not mix. But that doesn’t mean one can’t bring a social interest in. Schumacher further explains how this can be done using an example where he describes concepts such as a board, trustees, etc. which are all well known by now.

The best administration adheres to what I call negative theory of administration; strive to find structures which need minimum administration. Very Small structures administer themselves.
Schumacher gives the example of a man holding a hundred strings with a balloon at the end of each string. Each balloon has its own buoyancy and is limited. That’s the ideal structure in a large organization. The one holding it all together is not a star at the top but a man underneath.

Simply to break up and decentralize is not an option, you should find out what activities can be separated out without paralyzing things.

Schumacher was involved with the soil association - organize training for organic farmers, set up a marketing company to market organic produce, organize organic farmers’ cooperative.

There is the example of a certain body (Scott Bader) that imposed self denying ordinances on itself - we will not knowingly sell any of our products if we have reason to believe it will be used for armaments. A sort of parliament of workers is the sovereign body and not the board of directors. We have settled the maximum spread between the highest paid and the lowest paid. We are determined not to grow beyond the size of four hundred. The primary concern is to keep the human touch.

In 1965, Schumacher started the Intermediate Technology Development Group. Wholly owned by the Charitable organization works with commercial discipline.

If one wants to maintain a sort of non-commercial virginity, one cannot become really fertile.

One of the machines developed under guidance was the walking mini-tractor. It was meaningless to send a two ton expensive tractor back and forth on a field, compacting soil and making life troublesome for the soil bacteria. They can’t breathe properly. All this for pulling a curved knife called the plough. The machine designed as a result was called the Snail - to suit the problem in developing countries of 3, 5, 7 acre farms for which the tractor is a nuisance. Tractor may suit fast ploughing on a 2000 acre farm in the US. Snail had a fuel cost and capital cost that was 1/100 that of tractor.

Before we publish an invention, we must study its social acceptability. Here, he tells the story of the horse coach introduced to carry mail in Burma. The British authorities agreed to pay the coachman partial costs asking him to recover the remaining by escorting passengers who were on foot or slow oxcarts along that route in plenty. It didn’t work. Why? Coach is convenient, plenty of people, price is reasonable… when they asked the consumer, he said “horses shouldn’t be pulling a coach, they should be grazing. We should not demean ourselves to travel behind horses that are so ill kept. We’d rather walk.”

The appropriate technology development association in India is in Lucknow.

On appropriate forms of ownership and action:
An illusion against all laws of nature is that infinite growth in a finite environment is possible.
By a strange law of nature, there is an unlimited supply of people who are prepared to do mindless repetitive work for modest remuneration.
The third illusion is that, science can solve all problems.
But as it solves one problem, it creates a whole host of new problems.

One type of economics says, “You must not produce anything unless you are quite sure you couldn’t buy it cheaper from outside.”
In Puerto Rico, a luscious island, carrots were imported from Texas.
The Chinese, who went through miraculous transformation, turned this around “You mustn’t buy anything from outside unless you are quite sure you can’t make it yourself”
In the former case, you impede development. In the latter case, economically speaking, everybody is challenged, everybody is busy.

Chinese have worked out that it takes thirty peasant work-years to keep a young person at university for one year. Instead of going to a fashionable district in Shanghai, he should go to a remote village and give something back to the peasants out of what he has learned. But what the guy had learnt at the university was totally irrelevant to the peasant so the young guy had nothing to give. This had effect on the curriculum.
The next step was to work and study together - in accordance with Mao’s teaching that the manager or the intellectual has to go and learn from the workers. And from that learning, he should make a theory and that should be taught.

To all people who dismiss alternate systems/technologies calling them uneconomic, Schumacher says “We need to make up our minds whether we want to die economically or survive uneconomically“.

Education for Good Work:
In this chapter Schumacher discusses questions like what is man, what is his purpose, what is good work, and therefore, what is good education.
He says - there are 3 things healthy people most need to do and education ought to prepare them for these things.
1. To act as spiritual beings, in accordance with their moral impulses - man as a divine being.
2. To act as neighbours, to render service to his fellows - man as a social being
3. To act as persons, as autonomous centres of power and responsibility, that is, to be creatively engaged, using and developing the gifts that we have been blessed with - man himself and herself.
In the fulfillment of these 3 basic needs lies his happiness.

Schumacher comes back to what he said in his introduction “The purpose of man's work is threefold: to produce necessary, useful goods and services; to enable us to use and perfect our gifts and kills and, finally, to collaborate with other people in order to liberate ourselves from inbuilt egocentricity.” and education must teach him to do this.

Current education system is not education for work but education for leisure.
There can be no joy of life without the joy of work. A thinker said, if you get too many useful machines you will get too many useful people.

How do we prepare young people for the future world of work?
We should prepare them to be able to distinguish between good work and bad work and encourage them not to accept the latter. They should be encouraged to reject meaningless, boring, stultifying, nerve racking work in which man or woman is made servant of a machine or a system.

Industry without art is brutality, said Ananda Coomaraswammry, because it damages the soul and spirit of the worker. It is not as if the artist were a special kind of man. Every man is a special kind of artist. That’s the metaphysics of good work. Materialistic metaphysics or the metaphysics of the doctrine of mindless evolution does not attribute reality to anything but the physical body. It recognizes that work is an unpleasant fact and automation will soon abolish it.

To have education for good work, we should have to alter the metaphysical basis from which we proceed. (Figs cannot grow on thistles. Good work cannot grow out of bad metaphysics) If we teach that human being is nothing but the outcome of a mindless, meaningless, purposeless process of evolution, a process of selection for survival, that is to say, the outcome of nothing but utilitarianism, we only come to a utilitarian idea of work; that work is nothing but an unpleasant necessity, the less the better.
We only create an apparent conflict between science and religion causing untold confusion.

Education for good work should begin with a systematic study of traditional wisdom - where answers are to be found for questions like - what is man, where does he come from, his purpose in life, goal to be reached and path to that goal.
The only skills worth acquiring in modern days are those which the system demands, and they are worthless outside the system. They have no survival value outside the system and therefore do not even confer the spirit of self reliance. What does a machine winder do when energy shortage stops his machine or a computer programmer without a computer?

The most urgent need of our time is and remains the need for metaphysical reconstruction.

The Party’s Over:
The concept of GNP - gross national product means nothing at all. As a measurement of any kind of achievement it is meaningless, because it’s a purely quantitative concept. Statistics don’t have to be accurate, they have to be significant. Figures don’t mean anything if you can’t make them sing. How can anyone assert that growth is a good thing? ‘If my children grow, it is good. If I suddenly start growing, it would be a disaster’ he says. Therefore qualitative discrimination is the main thing.

Is there another pattern that would make life really worth living? A distinction between two categories of goods is - ephemeral goods and eternal goods. In all real cultures, eternal goods were outside economic cultures.

The moment we allow economic calculus to invade everything, then nothing becomes worthwhile anymore.

There are 3 ways to develop a new intermediate technology.
1. Take the existing very low level technology and upgrade it with no capital investment. Upward.
2. Downgrade to fit it into the condition of the developing country.
3. Conceive it anew, lay on design studies after conceiving the right question

Survey the world and see what already exists, evaluate it, test it - Filipinos have some absolutely excellent very simple equipment for rice culture and so have the Japanese. If it is suitable for other conditions, make it available.

The word, the concept which is merely a label attached to some intuition, some knowledge, then becomes the thing itself. The Buddhists have a nice expression, that Buddhism is the finger pointing at the moon. The moon is the thing, Buddhism simply directs your attention to it. So a phrase like ‘appropriate technology’ or ‘intermediate technology’ is simply a finger pointing at the moon. The moon can’t be fully described. It can be pointed out in terms of specific situations.

Don’t be misled by the marvellous things we do; do the necessary things.

Build underground rainwater tanks all over instead of one desalination plant in one place.

Efficient oxcarts ought to have wheels with steel rims. For that we go to big machines in Pittsburgh and Sheffield. We have forgotten how to do this in rural community. They found an ingenious tool in a French village, more than 200 years old, brilliantly conceived, clumsily made. They took it to the national college of agricultural engineering in England to upgrade it. The smallest instrument to do this bending job in the modern world would cost 700 pounds, outside power and electricity. This tool can now be made by the village blacksmith at 7 pounds and doesn’t require electricity.

Thomas Aquinas said “Justice, untempered by mercy is brutality. Mercy, uncontrolled by justice is the mother of dissolution.

Everything is just a matter of the carrying capacity of this earth.

Fanaticism has been defined as redoubling one’s efforts when one knows one is on the wrong track.

For all his prophecies about oil lasting the next 30 years, hazards of nuclear energy, technological advancement coming to an end and all, I think we are doing quite OK today. I mean, the doom hasn’t come yet, as it did seem certain to Schumacher then. I really hope we figure out a way out of this mess we have gotten into.

Innocuous Encroachment. An Inch At A Time.

I do multiple assignments for multiple teams. One of the teams takes care of business processes and the clients are all from America only. Recently I was on a conference call with the onshore coordinator who works in Washington. While taking stock of where certain assignments stood, their status and dates of completion, she laid out before us her plan for the next day. I told her at once that the next day was a holiday on account of the Dasara festival and no one was working.
To which she said that this particular team would be working. As all the clients were American, the team did not go by Indian holidays but had a separate holiday list which was the same as the American holidays.

I told her however that I was not planning to work that day. As I was working for this team only part time, I could take such liberty. She did not raise an objection. So I had my holiday.

But this brief but close encounter with Americanization left me feeling disturbed for a while.

Working in night shifts, taking on pseudonyms to put the American callers at comfort and speaking in a foreign accent and all were the lot of the far and distant BPO's and call centres that had only been the subject of my armchair analysis.

But this time, how close it had come to me.
It was just a brush, but I recoiled.

This agitation is not so much about a holiday denied.
It is alarm at the Americanization of such a personal matter as festivals and holidays.

It is anger and dismay at how thousands of people have to forgo very personal things of cultural value (just a few days a year to begin with) and adapt to foreign ways without as much as making a fuss.
It is indignation at the domination of a foreign culture over ours through the backdoor.
It is disappointment about how we let this happen for the sake of lucre.

It is the struggle of life being uprooted from one soil to be planted in another soil.

The tragedy of the whole thing is most of us don’t even realize what is happening. And worse, even if we realize, we don’t care.

We invent words like ‘flexibility’ and ‘adaptability’ and such noble sounding terms to make our helplessness seem like a meritorious virtue.

I just finished reading Arnold Toynbee's (a great British scholar) lectures and essays on the encounters between different civilizations where he points out that it is not possible to take one aspect of a foreign culture without taking another aspect of it. 'One thing leads to another' until you have accepted the foreign culture whole and soul.

He illustrates this phenomenon using the examples of non western countries taking to western technology during early 20th century.
Russia, Japan, Turkey had to learn western technology for the political purpose of protecting their frontiers and once they adopted western technology and warfare, other aspects of western civilization - culture, lifestyle, ideas, ideology etc. also entered these nations inevitably.

Technology does not exist separately from religion and culture.
Most of the non western cultures that had initially resisted attacks from western cultures took to western technology later, thinking they would stop at that. But there was no stopping. They were not aware of this truth that fragments that we perceive are an illusion of our own creation. In reality, everything exists as a whole.

E F Schumacher makes the same point in his “Good Work”.
‘…Prime minister of Iran said – “There are many aspects of the west that we particularly wish to avoid in the industrialization of Iran. We seek the west's technology only, not its ideology. What we wish to avoid is the ideological transplant.”
The implicit assumption that you can have a technological transplant without getting at the same time an ideological transplant; that technology is ideologically neutral; that you can acquire the hardware without the software behind; is a bit like saying - I want to import eggs for hatching but I don’t want chicks from them but mice or kangaroos...’

So you cannot adopt the western ways at work without adopting other aspects of the west. Gradually 'one thing leads to another'(as Toynbee puts it), and what innocuously entered our society as an employment opportunity salvaging the millions of jobless, eventually starts eating the very roots of our culture.

Now that I find myself on this subject, I will recount a related incident of three years ago that happened in my previous organization, although it is a slight digression.

I used to contribute to this quarterly newsletter.

I have grown up studying British English at school and I am scandalised by the way American slang and colloquial have diluted our language standards. I treasure my worn out Oxford dictionary because the newer editions have included most of the popular slang and sms lingo while excluding many obsolete English words.

So I spell my words the British way.
When MS word (stupid software) underlines in red the word c-o-l-o-u-r in my documents and suggests c-o-l-o-r, I right click the word and add it to my dictionary.

I tried to change the settings by selecting 'English UK' and not 'English US' and it still continued to underline c-o-l-o-u-r(stupid software), until I added it to my dictionary, that is.

So when I submitted my articles to the editor, I received the reviewed copy where all my spellings had been changed to American.

The fact that the editor was an Indian brought up in America for most part of her life (she called herself Indian perhaps because it sounded fashionable), made things bad enough.

Her argument was that we worked for an American company.
I explained to her that it did not make a difference for the purpose of the newsletter. Only our product documentation had to be in American English since we get paid for it. But our newsletter was our creative work for which we did not get paid by Americans.

She argued that "Still, we are an American company". She was a chicken brained woman who did not have too many arguments.

I did not want to waste my time so I asked her to remove my name from the article or to put her own name if she wanted or to leave it anonymous otherwise and never to ask me to write any more articles for her. I would not have my name associated with American spellings.

The whole thing was not so much about English spellings. English is not even my mother tongue.

It was a question of having to let go of my present ground for appeasing someone.

How easily we Indians let go our ground and not even lament it!
How submissive we are. How practically non-existent is our self respect! How keen we are to appease!

I mean, for years, for decades we speak a certain tongue; and the minute Americans throw dollars at us, we are ready to forget that tongue and take to another tongue in order to appease the one throwing lucre at us!
(Keep aside for a while, the fact that, British English is correct English and of the highest standard and when we have chosen to keep English, we might as well keep the purest of it)

Is this not why we were dominated by the British, by the French, the Portuguese, the Mughals and others?
WE have a low self esteem problem.

Returning to the subject of slow and inevitable encroachment…
Yes. Toynbee said it was a universal phenomenon, a natural law. But I have hope. Whenever we have encountered other peoples in the past, we have assimilated them. They went through metamorphosis to become one among us. Or there was a synthesis between two cultures.
But one thing is for sure, we never lost ourselves completely; no one was able to wipe us out.

But today, with our own people rolling the red carpet for our obliteration, cooperating in the transplant, reveling in self deprecatory talk, I am not sure.
As diverse cultures with their distinct nuances are now tending towards a nuance-less homogeneity - of the all pervading shopping malls, multiplexes and software profession, I am not sure.
Already, in many places, I see that only the superstructure of our culture remains while the insides are moth eaten. Only the external symbols have been picked for ostentatious display while the soul of the culture is gradually dying.

But fortunately, there are other places, where I see a ‘going back to the roots’. And that’s my only consolation.

I hope and pray that we will prove an exception to the law that Toynbee has proved to be universal.

Unfolding. One Day At A Time. Where Life Is A Worship

Kole Basava.
Oxen decorated with colourful cloth and bells are walked from house to house by men playing the Shehnai. Women and children come out of their houses to look at the oxen. And to give alms. A Rupee or two. Sometimes a fistful of rice. May be a chapatti. Plantains for the oxen. Whatever is given is given with both hands symbolizing whole hearted giving.

I wake up to the music of Shehnai and the tinkling of the oxen’s bells on certain days.











Where everything from mountains to rivers to cows to rats to snakes to elephants to plants to planets is held in religious sanctity…
The Bhoomi puja performed before laying the foundation stone of a building is an offering of gratitude to earth.
The Shiva Linga in the sanctum-sanctorum of temples is the phallus.
The walls of temples are adorned with sculptures depicting the union of man and woman.
A book is Saraswati. So is the veena. So are all musical instruments.
The flute is Lord Krishna’s.
Implements are worshipped during the Ayudha Pooja. Spade, sickle, plough, tractor, automobiles, computers and laptops…
The Tulasi is a plant. So is the peepal tree.

The Navagraha Pooja is where the nine planets are worshipped.
Sun is worshipped. So are fire, water and the other elements.

‘Vaidyo Narayano Harihi’ one says before taking medicines.

That apartment building I pass on my way to work is called ‘Maya Indraprastha’ (maya and not maaya). And who was Maya? The celestial architect who built Indraprastha for The Pandavas.

The Rangoli powder with which women decorate their thresholds and the front of their houses is a kind of earth.

The food we eat is worshipped.
“Anaapoorne sadapoorne shankara praanavallabhe
Jnana vairagya siddyartham bhiksham dhehim cha parvathi”

‘Yatra Narya Poojyante’
Where women are worshipped

In this country, it is difficult to find something that is not worshipped, that is not divine, that is not held in religious sanctity.

Where everything from mountains to rivers to cows to rats to snakes to elephants to plants to planets is held in religious sanctity…

Love the Hindu religion for all that it is.

Blink - Malcolm Gladwell

This is one of the most interesting and unputdownable books I have read so far; every page has an example, an analogy, an experiment, covering diverse domains and subjects ranging from painting to sculpture, to marriage, dating, war, presidential candidate, car selling, food tasting, police operations and more…

A smart book, I must say - tells you something you already know while making you feel or believe that you are learning something you never knew before, for the 1st time.

The author first convinces you, using an example, that first impressions are correct whereas the results of detailed analysis are not. After the reader is convinced and assured, the author presents examples where first impressions proved completely misleading. Leaving the reader convincing but wondering. And then the author explains how you can train yourself to form correct first impressions.
It is something all of us know and have experienced. Isn’t it? At times, our judgment was correct. We said, ‘I knew’. At other times, we were so mistaken. And as we have grown, our first impressions are more often than before, correct, as a result of all the lessons learnt earlier.

But whatever that may be, this is a work of excellence – for the number of facts it presents, for the amount of research and travel the author has undertaken to gather information, for the way it is structured, for the way it makes you think seriously about something you hadn’t really pondered before… and more.

Blink is a book about the first 2 seconds.

The book is organized into 8 interesting chapters each of which has an intriguing title.
Each chapter takes up a story and vividly illustrates how our mind works. The book is full of experiments conducted by various people, their outcomes, examples from history etc.

In short, this is an interesting book of case studies.
Every chapter begins with an incredible story which is simply told and left there. And then the author explains how our mind works, aspects of our psychology, experiments, their results and establishes the concepts. And then using these concepts, he explains the story told earlier and completes the chapter.
A very good approach which keeps the reader hooked to the chapter till the end.

Let’s understand what point the author is trying to make and how he makes it by looking at each chapter.

The statue that didn’t look right:
Among other stories, one (the first one) is about an antique statue owned by an art dealer that a museum contemplated buying. The first impression of some art experts who saw the statue was that it wasn’t right. But after many months of careful study and several tests, the museum found the results convincing. But it turned out later that the statue was a fake.
When the art experts felt an intuitive repulsion upon looking at the statue, they were absolutely right.
In the first 2 seconds (in a single glance), they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team was able 2 understand after 14 months of study, analysis and calculation.

You don’t know why you know. But you know. You figure it out before you realize you have figured it out.

The author presents the notion off 'the adaptive unconscious' (not the unconscious described by Sigmund Freud). It is a kind of a giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.
We have a decision making apparatus that makes very quick judgments based on very little information.

First point of Blink: Decision made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.
Second point: Our unconscious is a powerful force but it is fallible. Our instinctive reactions often have to compete with all kinds of other interests and emotions and sentiments.
Third point: Our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled. We can teach ourselves to make better snap judgments.

The theory of thin slices: how a little bit of knowledge goes a long way:
A psychologist video tapes a husband and wife in conversation. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking he can predict with 95% accuracy whether that couple will still be married 15 years later. This he does by using a code for every second of the couple's conversation - assigning a number representing the specific emotion of the individuals.
If he watches a couple for 15 minutes his success rate is around 90%. Further if they looked at only 3 minutes of a couple talking, they could still predict with accuracy who was going to get divorced and who would make it.
The truth of a marriage can be understood in a much shorter time than anyone ever imagined. All marriages have a distinctive pattern, a kind of marital DNA that surfaces in any kind of meaningful interaction.

A critical part of rapid cognition known as ‘thin slicing’ refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behaviour based on very narrow slices of experience.
When we leap to a decision or have a hunch, our unconscious is sifting through the situation in front of us, throwing out all that is irrelevant while we zero in on what really matters.

By looking at someone's room you can tell what they are. You needn’t talk to them or interact with them. (I disagree here)

The Locked Door: The secret life of snap decisions:
In this chapter, using a series of examples, cases and experiments the author shows how a lot of people who know, do not know how they know, sometimes to their own amazement.

Vic Braden can predict by reading the way a tennis player serves whether he is going to double fault.
Ted Williams could explain with confidence how to hit a baseball but his explanation did not match his actions.

Mary's explanation for what she wanted in a man did not necessarily match who she was attracted to in the moment, while speed dating. We have, a story telling problem. We are a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.

Then the author talks about something called 'priming'; something similar to brainwashing indirectly in order to affect the behaviour or judgment of people. Several priming experiments have been mentioned.
The suggestion is that, what we think of as free will is largely an illusion. Much of the time we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment, are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

The Warren Harding Error: Why we fall for tall, dark and handsome men:
Americans elected Warren Harding as their president simply because he was great looking; he served 2 years before dying unexpectedly of a stroke. He was, most historians agree, one of the worst presidents in American history.

This is the dark side of rapid cognition.
Sometimes a good deal of prejudice and discrimination determine what we think in the first 2 seconds; which is why we still associate blacks with negative qualities; also why we have tall CEO's most of the time.

Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment; which means we can change our first impressions - we can alter the way we thin slice - by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.
It requires more than a simple commitment to equality -to stop being racists, to stop preferring good looks. It requires that you change your life so you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture...

Paul Van Riper's big victory: creating structure for spontaneity:
Paul Van Riper had fought the Vietnam War.

In a war game planned by the Pentagon and costing millions, Paul Van Riper was cast as an anti American rogue commander.
To everyone’s surprise, Paul dealt a blow to the American defense without access to any of the sophisticated systems that American defense had had.
And this was attributed to Paul’s correct snap judgments.

A study of nurses, intensive care units, firefighters and other people who make decisions under pressure reveals that when experts make decisions, they don’t logically and systematically compare all available options.
Detailed analysis is the way people are taught to make decisions but in real life it is much too slow. Experts size up a situation and almost immediately act, drawing on experience and intuition and a kind of rough mental simulation.

Author uses improvisation comedy as an example to illustrate the kind of thinking blink is all about. Improvisation comedy involves people making very sophisticated decisions on the spur of the moment without the benefit of any kind of script or plot. They take a random suggestion from the audience and then without so much as a moment's consultation make up a thirty minute play from the scratch.

Lesson - spontaneity isn’t random. How good people's decisions are under the fast moving, high stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal they have already undergone.

Perils of introspection - Paralysis of analysis.
When you write down your thoughts, your chances of having the flash of insight you need in order to come up with a solution are significantly impaired. Describing a face - in words or sketching it - will make you unable to pick it out of a police lineup.

Insight is not a light bulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.

It is assumed that the more information decision makers have, the better off they are. The truth is the opposite. All the extra information isn’t actually an advantage, in fact, you need to know very little to find the underlying signature of a complex phenomenon.

Truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.
In good decision making, frugality matters - reduce a complex problem to its simplest elements.

When we talk about analytic versus intuitive decision making, neither is good or bad. What is bad is if you use either of them in an inappropriate circumstance.

Kenna's Dilemma: The Right - And Wrong - Way to ask people what they want:
Rock musician Kenna : when his music was played on the radio as a test before recording companies invested in them, people did not like his music. But when experts - people who truly know music heard him, they loved his music.

Dick Morris who would go on to become advisor to President - was bringing into the world of politics the very same notions that guide the business world; to learn what people wanted through polling.
And polling reveals a lot about the kind of snap judgments people make.

When marketers ask consumers to give them their reactions to something - to explain whether they liked a song that was just played or a movie they just saw or a politician they just heard, how much trust should be placed in their answers?
Several examples have been given to show how people make choices without fully understanding the options before them and what motivates their choices.

1. The taste tests conducted by Pepsi titled Pepsi challenge gave results that alarmed Coke. They changed their age old formula to make Coke a little lighter and sweeter. But, the new coke failed in the market in spite of its success during the taste tests.

The sip test is not a true test but the home use test is. The result of the home use test can be the opposite of the result of sip test. In a sip test, the sweeter product will win but if taken home and taken in large quantities, the sweetness can be cloying and people would want the lesser sweeter option that they had rejected during the sip test.

Sensation transference – people transfer sensations or impressions that they have about the packaging of the product to the product itself.
Most of us don’t make a distinction - unconsciously - between the package and the product.

2. Margarine is a white looking substitute for butter - When white in colour it wasn’t popular among people. When coloured yellow, and people were served yellow margarine (without their knowledge), people thought it was just fine.

3. Further when covered in foil, people say it tastes better than another product not covered in foil, because unconsciously people associate foil with higher quality

4. Two brands of brandy - same in quality performed differently in the market because one brand used a better looking, ornate bottle for packaging.

5. Peaches sell better in a glass container than in tin cans – ‘something like my grandmother used to make’ people said.

What happens when asked why, is that we come up with a plausible sounding reason for why we might like or dislike something and then we adjust our true preference to be in line with that plausible sounding reason.

The snap judgments of ordinary people are different from the snap judgments of experts. The gift of their expertise is that it allows them to have a much better understanding of what goes behind the locked door of their unconscious.

Seven seconds in the Bronx: The delicate art of mind reading:
The most important forms of rapid cognition are the judgments we make and impressions we form of other people. It’s a classic case of thin slicing.
But sometimes mind reading can go terribly awry. An example given is that of police cops in 1999 who shot the wrong guy.

There is the detailed account of an experiment concerning facial expression, muscles and related emotions, the result of which proves that we are mistaken in thinking that face is the residue of emotion, that we first experience an emotion and then express it.
The process works in the opposite direction as well. Emotion can also start on the face. Facial expressions can determine emotions.

When we lose the ability for mind reading, we have the condition of autism. The ‘first impression’ apparatus is fundamentally disabled. They have difficulty interpreting non verbal cues such as gestures and facial expressions or putting themselves inside someone else’s head or drawing understanding from anything other than the literal meaning of words.

The author suggests that temporary autism could be the reason why people make wrong judgments about other people, like the policemen who fired at the wrong person.

Body reacts to extreme stress in a certain way: extreme visual clarity, tunnel vision, diminished sound and the sense that time is slowing down. Our mind when faced with a life threatening situation drastically limits the range and amount of information that we have to deal with. Sound and memory and broader social understanding are sacrificed in favour of heightened awareness of the threat directly in front of us.
Basket ball superstar Larry bird used to say that at critical moments in the game, the court would go quiet and the players would seem to be moving in slow motion.
The same effect is produced when people have no time or very little time but have to act.

Our unconscious thinking in one critical aspect is no different from our conscious thinking – in both, we are able to develop our rapid decision making with training and experience.

Conclusion: Listening with your eyes: the lessons of Blink:
During a screened audition of trombone players, the judges after selection were shocked to know that the one playing the music was a female and not a male. They had a strong perception that a woman could not play the trombone.
During another screened audition, an applicant who qualified as the best turned out to be Japanese which was a surprise to all who had the strong perception that a Japanese could not play with any soul or fidelity, music composed by a European.

Orchestras began to hire women as new rules of auditioning were put in place to ensure fairness. That’s when they realized how corrupted their snap judgments had been.
Because judges would unconsciously judge by appearance of the participant. They would go by confidence and body posture and all that. When screens were placed between them and the participants, the results were, needless to say, quite different.

There is a dissonance between what you see and hear.

We are often careless with our powers of rapid cognition. We don’t know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean so we don’t always appreciate their fragility. Taking our powers of rapid cognition seriously means we have to acknowledge the subtle influences that can alter or undermine or bias the products of our unconscious. The power of unconscious is something that we can protect and control and educate.

We can take charge of the first two seconds.

Walking The Talk. Take Law Into Your Hands

Recently a colleague and I decided to watch a movie. Considering all the movies showing at various theatres, their show timings, proximity of the theatre to our place of work, and then our mutual interest, one movie seemed more suitable than all others.

Dabang. Starring salman khan.

For some reason, I was not too keen but said ok.
A few hours before we had planned to leave office, my colleague received a huge workload and apologized for having to cancel the plan.

He need not have apologized, for I was not upset. It actually came to me as a relief. I would not have to infringe my principles and later feel uncomfortable about it.

A few years ago, when salman khan in a state of drunkenness ran his car over a footpath in Bombay, killed half a dozen people and falsely implicated his driver in the crime while escaping himself, I was furious. I am sure many were.
When sanjay dutt went to bed with dawood ibrahim or some gangster from the underworld who masterminded the Bombay blasts in which many people died, I was enraged. Many were.

When shiny ahuja raped his maid, when fardeen khan was caught smuggling drugs, I was disgusted at how much filth was hidden behind those designer decked polished glamorous surfaces. Many were.

Thanks to the judiciary in this country, salman got away scot free to continue doing his movies, to hunt down species on the verge of extinction for his pleasure and to drink and kill more people on the road. sanjay dutt is not yet behind the bars after all these years with the blood of hundreds of fellow Bombay-ites on his hands.
Talk show hosts sympathize with him, ask him how he coped with those difficult days of court trials and make the police look like criminals for harassing a saint like him.

And what about public anger?

People fret and fume for a while.

And then go back to the cinema halls to applaud the rogues – Sanjay Dutt disguised as a disciple of Gandhi, salman khan disguised as a dutiful son worshipping his parents.

People adorn their bedroom walls with huge posters of these hooligans.

They watch Zoom TV to find out what these guys eat, what they wear and who they sleep with.

Like dogs pouncing on people and licking, they run to these crooks and beg for autographs and have pictures taken with them.

Anger and Indigntion : What could have been and what should have been the potent weapons with which to punish these criminals has been reduced to impotent mewing and barking.

And how do people justify their complacency, their indifference?
We are very clever. Anything under the Sun can be justified and we know just how to do it.

“That’s his personal life. We only like him as an actor. We should be able to differentiate between different roles played by people and not get mixed up.”

If each one of us in this country resolved never to watch a salman khan movie again, would that not punish him enough for his crime?

If each one of us resolved never to watch a sanjay dutt movie ever again, would that not be the end of his career? Would there be a greater punishment for him? Would that not recompense the murder of hundreds of innocent people who died in the blast?

If these offenders are getting away scot free with their crime and are merrymaking with one hit movie after another, is it not because of us?

Is the court alone responsible for dispensing justice? And who is the court doing justice for? For itself? For the sake of law?
NO. It’s for our sake. It’s for the sake of people, for the sake of society. For you and me. What’s the point of the court doing justice if you and I, for whom justice is being dispensed continue to embrace the guilty?
Are we not defeating our own purpose?
When at a personal level, we don’t care about justice, do we even have the right to expect the courts to carry out their duty?

We don’t even want to consider these uncomfortable questions. All we care about is our weekend entertainment. Society, people and country may go up in flames. As long as we enjoy our movie and songs…

To suit our convenience we coin new ideas that don’t make sense.
We create a ‘Personal life, professional life, public life, political life and social life and other lives’ and such fragments for people around us so we can stylishly criticize all the wrong with them like dutiful and aware citizens and yet not have to sacrifice the benefits we get from their association. How convenient!

People exist in their entirety. People exist as wholesome beings. Everything in nature exists as a whole. There are no fragments.
We create fragments of them for our convenience.

Agree all those in the world of glamour have skeletons in their cupboard, like all politicians do. Only degree of depravity varies. If people were to be idealistic, they should not watch movies at all nor should they vote. That’s not what I am asking for.
What I am saying is that we will have to draw a line between idealism and apathy. And each one has to draw that line for himself.

Some introspection needed…
It is rightly said that a society deserves the system it gets. It remains for us to ask ourselves if we deserve to be killed by a drunkard in our sleep, if we deserve to be ripped apart in a bomb blast.

Empowerment does not merely means having access to internet. Empowerment also means realizing that we have the power to make a real difference. And exercising that power.
Through action. And through inaction.

A generalization of this problem is the one that involves the two extremes of idealism and apathy. Being totally idealistic makes living in this world impossible. But being apathetic will soon eliminate the necessity for idealism as there will be no life left on this planet!
Therefore, what we need is a balance between the two and like I said, each one has to draw the line for himself.
But not asking ourselves the uncomfortable questions at all, being indifferent and apathetic to the issues of our society, being individualistic as opposed to being collectivistic, not having a strong community sense… are the things that bother me and make me write; hoping that at least a few people will read, understand and become inspired to change the way they live.

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This post is a part of a series that I started a few months ago and forgot for a while. You may want to read the first of this series.

Walking The Talk

Unfolding. One Day At A Time. Beneath Manifestations

Surely, I enjoyed the show.
There were times when I thought it was not real and camera tricks had been used. Did they have bones or were they all blood and flesh? Were they shadows upon whom gravity did not act? Didn’t it hurt? How much practice it must have taken them to perform those feats! How malleable the human body is! The steps and moves were unbelievable.

That was my experience of watching ‘Step Up’, a movie that was all about dance.

While I was awestruck by the performances and admired the actors for achieving what seemed impossible, I also thought for the first time of the contrast between eastern and western dance forms.

I haven’t learnt dance and haven’t studied all forms of eastern and western dance. But from what I have seen, I thought the following.

The objective of the eastern dance forms is to delight the audience by depicting a story and usually has a message, a moral, a value to take home.
The movements are usually simple and facial expressions play an important role. Every move has to have a meaning and a purpose. The style is natural and simple. All the nava rasas are illustrated as and when the performance requires. Since there is always a story, dance provides glimpses of the lives of people of a land in an era, their thoughts and their ways of life.
Dancing is an instrument, a means to convey a message, a story. It’s a tribute paid to a God, a deity, or lofty ideals.

In western dance, the emphasis seems to be completely on showing individual prowess – twisting, turning, bending the body, dancing at breakneck speeds, performing fancy feats, outdoing the most complex move known hitherto, believing that the more complicated, the better.
There is no meaning associated with a step, nor story nor moral and dancing is for the sake of dancing itself. Dancing is not an instrument but an objective in itself. It’s a tribute to the self.

This difference, as Tagore has pointed out in one of his essays where he compares the literature of the western and eastern worlds, is not just a difference between two dance forms.

You may add to my understanding...

Cost Of Three Lemons - Part 1

There is much comic relief to be derived from the predicaments of other people. The sight of a guy stumbling and falling down, a drunken guy getting thrown in a lock up for knocking down a policeman while driving - having mistaken the policeman for a stray dog, a fat man being chased by a mongrel and then bitten by it and yet another boy being rewarded with a slap for sending a love letter to a girl, are all matters of jest.
You actually don’t realize it’s a tragedy until it has happened to you.

There is some such amusement for everyone in the corporate world too.
This is quite ironical since more efforts are made in the corporate world than elsewhere to protect the dirty secrets of people. There are ‘policies’ to ensure that the skeleton in the cupboard remains there. They make you take the oath of confidentiality, oath of secrecy, privacy and what not.
You are even made to sign documents stating that you will keep mum about almost everything – your salary, your appraisal, your incentive etc. etc.

Notwithstanding these efforts of the lawmakers to ensure what they call ‘confidentiality’ in the firm, eventually the only law that prevails is the law of ‘transparency’. Everybody comes to know everything about everyone. This fact in itself is very amusing.

Of all the matters worthy of gossip and entertainment, the matter of those who travel to the US of A is undoubtedly the winner – for several reasons. There are three stages of such an episode: the visit to the consulate for a VISA, the journey on the plane and the short encounter with the immigration department after landing. In each stage, there is sufficient room for accidents and untoward incidents and consequently for entertainment.

Consider the first stage. Nobody so far has been able to solve the mystery of VISA rejection. Candidates carry documents, certificates, passports, photographs, etc.
The paraphernalia varies depending on the type of VISA you wish to apply for – H1, B1, L1, and so on…

Outside the consulate office in Chennai, one can find a motley mix of people. Applicants, their parents, grandparents, cousins, friends…

Notwithstanding the detailed instruction given to the candidates – DO NOT – talk too much or too little, smile too cheerfully or too cheerlessly, be too confident or too diffident, appear too eager or too nonchalant, dress too formally or too casually, talk too softly or too loudly, too fast or too slow………, some applicants have to return dejectedly from the consulate, having been told that their VISA is rejected.

For all your speculation about what might have gone wrong, the white (or black) guy behind the counter had probably had a fight with his harlot. Or the famous Chennai weather (hot, hotter or hottest) dictated his temper that noon. Or he was still suffering the aftermath of a misadventure that followed the previous day’s meal from Saravana Bhavan, when he decided to try this South Indian dish for the first time and the restaurant waiter taking the order bungled up and committed the dangerous omission of the ‘No’ from the ‘No spicy’ instruction… and you had to bear the brunt of it all. Who knows?

The journey to the US of A itself is preceded by extensive consultation with all those people in one’s first circle and second circle, who have visited the US of A, who have set one foot in the US of A but no more (since they were returned from immigration upon landing due to suspicion, whims, fancies and caprices of the immigration officer), those who have as much as dreamt of going to the US of A, the family astrologer, backstreet palmist and so on.

One such colleague in office consulted a well wishing friend at work just a few cubicles away from him.
Now in IT offices, people communicate with the fellow occupying their neighbouring cubicle through telephone, email, chat service, tele/video conferencing – any means except the obvious and easiest method of turning around, tapping on the shoulder and exchanging sentences over a few minutes.
If this well wisher had given his valuable advice orally over a cup of coffee in the cafeteria, then our colleague’s story would have a happy ending; but then all of us in office would have been deprived of much laughter and amusement on account of what was to happen later.
So fortunately(for us gossip lovers), this well wisher wrote a detailed email to our colleague, advising him to take caution about a very specific aspect of US travel – a secret he thought no one except him knew.

Now when you land in the US, you go through immigration, the first checkpoint where occasional filtering happens. As with the VISA rejection at the consulate, the rejection at immigration too is a mystery.
It is most dreaded by all travelers who stand in the queue trembling as if they were being taken to a slaughterhouse.
Because being rejected at immigration is the worst thing that can happen to a traveler. You are put on the next plane back to India without being allowed to take as much as a peek into the US of A after 30-40 hours of long journey and you return home from the US of A having seen nothing more than one airport.

There are several lines with an immigration officer in each line. Usually you can choose which line you want to enter.
So the well wisher advised our colleague to try and avoid a line having a white immigration officer and to enter a line with a black immigration officer instead. Apparently, the chances of getting through were easier that way.
What the calculation behind the expectation of lenience was, I am not sure of.
Probably a feeling of brotherhood due to the closeness of the blacks’ skin colour to ours than to the whites’. Probably our kinship with Mahatma Gandhi who fought to salvage them in South Africa. Perhaps the commonality of the presence of elephants in both our land and theirs? Or the commonality of people having size zero figure in both Somalia and Bihar? Or perhaps a common game of cricket played in both countries?

Our colleague not only read the instructions, but printed the email and carried it with him on the plane to memorize the thing in transit.

The plane landed and he set his foot (right foot) in the US of A at last.

Sure, the guy went to a black immigration officer and along with his passport, the I-92 form, return ticket, documents and all, he submitted to the officer, the printed copy of the email as well! It remains to be found out whether he did it carelessly or intentionally in order to please the black man by letting him know how privileged he was to be the chosen one for all travelers from our part of the world.

But to his misfortune, the black man was neither amused nor impressed. He was offended by the notion of folks such as our rookie who dared assume that the blacks were liberal with suspicious immigrants. Were they insinuating that the blacks were less patriotic than the whites?
Neither our rookie nor his colleague in India had foreseen such a creative and ingenious interpretation of their simple calculation.

The rookie was put on the first plane flying back to Bangalore and whether he murdered his well wishing friend upon landing for giving him the advice that he did, is unknown. But who cares as long as we are having fun?

In yet another episode, a guy was asked by his immigration officer what his opinion on terrorism was. No one in his first or second circle had warned him of such a question before. The guy could have given one of those beauty contest winning answers and finished it off but his strategy was to be cleverer than that.
He decided to not just get away with passing marks, not even a distinction but to give an answer no one had given before and to receive a standing ovation from the entire immigration department… he wore a very innocent expression on his face just like a baby and asked the officer “What is terrorism?”

Within a few hours he was flying back to India. With the lesson ‘Playing dumb does not work!’

To be continued…