Narritivum

Since killing the idea of India wasn't bad enough, the PM-select has taken away my favourite thing. It is an element inferred, like dark matter. As the not-so-subtle teleological principle that permeates the chronicles from Discworld, it let me know that things work out, though not always as we foresee. The only thing us mere mortals need to know about narritivum is that it makes the million to one chance come through.

Yesterday's government has been accused of many things and it appears not even a million to one chance can save it. But its greatest fault, the one most germane to its impending loss, is the failure to recognise the power of a story well told. That is the essence of propaganda. And unlike its country cousin libel, truth is no defence against it.

Dear leader's manifest destiny has come to fruition. The money, hate, cadre, advertisements and salivating NRI techies are each a condition of possibility for the coming Utopia. None however, are a Necessary Condition. Mr. Modi recognises the importance of a story, and how beginnings determine ends. Terryda told me that narrative force is far more powerful than logic. It is here that the Man of Steel covered all his bases. He is both the return to a glorious past as well as the one to take us marching to modernity. He is the authoritarian centre as well as the federalist. He is the vegetarian butcher, the abstinent symbol of virility. In a million to one chance, he is both the million and the one.

Till recently, I thought Narritivum would save us. That when push comes to cliff we are not a people who had decency and open-ness foisted on us by the euro-centric generation of leaders responsible for the constitution. That in some deep part of us we are a decent society. And it is likely that we are.

That is why Mr Modi scares so many of us (most of 'us' are not muslims or christians). Not for what he will do as the head of government, but what he brings out in the people who elected him. Mr. Modi's Idea of India is not new. It is part of the earliest debates about who we are as a people. It is the worst of us - selfish, conservative, materialist and so so many things. An open society is a fragile thing and Mr. Modi's story has shattered it. Like the bile of a boozer long suppressed, the worst of it is on its way.

I hope I am wrong. That enough people still know what this country is and protect it. Or failing that, the next five years are the expectorant our diseased collective consciousness needs. 

Drunken Ramblings - 3 AM.

Have you ever looked at perfect beauty and wondered at its source? I was, and still am, an anthropologist. Not one of those new fangled ass holes studying the effect of video games on teenage brats, a real anthropologist. Magic and medicine men - basket weaving hotties and snot nosed children – that’s what interests me. Sadly, no tribe containing the nascent features I desire seemed to exist in the world. I spent the first 25 years of my life looking, and white men of some ilk or the other had visited everywhere before. Where could I find my source? The origin of something essential to my life as a man? The thing came to me in the most mundane of locations, the dullest of places.  Perhaps I should embellish the circumstances of the origins of my quest to provide an academic narrative the drama of the discovery deserves. Alas, I am not a writer of blockbusters, but a scientist, a mere social scientist at that. And as such must remain true to the facts despite the lack of drama that may ensue. I saw her first in the most obvious of places. Yes, it’s a her, I shall be shoving obviousness down your throats like the bitter cough medicine of pre liberalisation childhoods. The courtyard of a sociology department – a garden filled with exotics in sub-continental proportions – and a girl. She is beauty like I have never seen. At first the remnants of the artist in me is reluctant to talk to her. Why ruin a good thing? Sleeping with subjects has always led to a lack of methodological clarity. But we are not engaged in acts of creation, of fantasy. An engagement with the facts is essential. I talk to her and she smiles. It is no ordinary parting of lips, the teeth that come through are not mere incisors and molars, the eyes shine with an honesty that none of you will ever find anywhere, in anyone. The scientific temper is gone; I am reduced from participant observer to audience. She gives me a name, a mere signifier to this collection of perfection. I vow to find her true name. To know what is already certain, we spend the next few hour together, her listening and me rambling about what I think she might like.  Destiny is not amenable to analysis, but it guides our lives all the same. Perhaps it irks us more than love because unlike the latter it is not reducible to biology. I know now with Cartesian certainty that it was destiny that made her put up with me. There is no other explanation for her continued tolerance of my company.

I know what you’re thinking. A man in love intellectualises the heady drug of his passion for a younger woman. Hold back your cynicism. I attempted methodological neutrality with all my ability as I courted her. I looked at every part of her up close and surveyed her from a distance. I attempted find fault in every word she said and tried to complete every thought she had. And it was not just I. Every man who knew her thought her perfect. As the unreality of her existence dawned on me I realised that the ordinary name she went by was in fact a lie. I began to read, like Gandalf in the libraries of Gondor, I searched for the truth of her origins.  I went through the available texts, by known authors. I began frequenting back alley chatrooms where expelled grad students spouted their drug-addled filth. After months of searching, I found nothing. She was happy in the pretence of an ordinary romance with an older man, to keep up her comfort I had to hide my obsession.

It was in the magic chatroom - part alcoholic anthropologists, part users of psychedelic drugs – where I finally heard the name of the woman I loved. At first it was untranslatable. A series of clicks and whistles from the language before babel, the forgotten sounds of the first men, a language learnt from the birds in the trees and the insects between the blades of grass. Twke%h£!a, my Maswara friend from Botswana translated it as best she could. It was an old legend, never written, but always passed down with a religiosity that would put the best evangelical to shame. It spoke of the origin of Beauty, the first of her kind. Before her, the hunters of the Great Rift Valley knew nothing except the vastness of the sky and the harshness of the swamp. There was no question of her being reborn, she permeated the tribe of the first people like the ubiquitous nose of Rushdie’s Sinais. She was the heritage of all of us. As a scientist, I must share my data and open it to the criticism of my peers. But I cannot bring myself to subject her to your gaze, to make her aware of her own deep significance to our sentience. What I have found in her arms may well alter our notions of who we are. I could tell you how she proves that heredity has as little to with genetics as love has to with sex. Alas, my selfish desire for individual happiness keeps me giving you her false name, a name by which you could recognise her. I give you the translation Twke%h£!a  gave to me, and if you so desire, you may try to find her in the multitudes that you consider beautiful. She is Boo, of the Balu clan, reborn and ever present, immortal in her aspect, both diffused as beauty in mundane objects and particularised in the name I shall not utter. And fellow beings of scientific temper, approach her with caution if you find her, for her splendour belongs to a time before our method and you must be a stalwart of our inhuman neutrality if you wish to escape her spell.

The itch or lack of responsibility

Ever been bullied? An obnoxious punjabi/ jaat taller and broader says 'haath mein khujli ho rahi hai' or some such and proceeds to pummel you into an assorted selections of jams and jellies, for sale in C.R park and Uttarakhand Seva Kendra. An itch, thats what bullies get. An itch, caused by a lack of something.

Ever had an itch? Not a regular physical one, or the bullying one. The deeper metaphorical psychic one. Where to go? What to do? Life isnt this. This is not my home. Not like a physical itch. The physical itch is caused by an irritant. Your scratch is an open declaration of hostilities. A battle easily fought, where the enemy is clear and present. Shirk says the itch. The deeper itch. Get out. You're losing your soul. Fuck the soul. Your losing your intellect. Honed to arrogance with millennia indoctrination. The woman made you happy, run motherfucker run. The job, they scoff at it, you love doing this but the scorn of those you wish to impress, run motherfucker run. Dont like the city, whine bitch whine bitch, get over yourself you little shit. People come here hoping to be able to be poor. Do an honest days work and be happy for it.

Ever been bullied? I wasnt enough.