Bob Dylan, When Will The Hard Rain Fall?

Sshh my blue eyed son, don't you shed a tear.
The man is no more, the man who evoked fear.
He killed his own they said, he killed his foe
He tortured who he captured and his own demise he did sow
He crossed the fence to the neighbor's house
He started those fires earth's water couldn't douse
If we let him live he would have killed us all my son
Little choice, we had to kill him, my little one.

Sshh my son don't tremble anymore and be afraid
You are in our world, my safe hands like I said
We never kill our foes, leave alone our own
Our captive we forgive and our sins we atone
We don't bomb out cities and we trespass not our neighbors
We make the world more peaceful, ruling it with our sabres.

Hush my baby, the demon's dead once and for all
Look at the heavens - a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

Post Script: I wrote this the same day the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was executed - on live camera. I am no fan of Saddam like I am no fan of either hypocrisy or the act of taking away something that we cannot give back.
Let some rain fall on this parched earth - let it be the rain that brings peace and feeds that little girl in Somalia who doesn't know terror as much as she knows hunger.

Social Clustering

“He has a cross [crucifix] on the chain around his neck but is still a practicing Hindu. When he enters the field he touches the ground in true South Indian style”. I was intrigued to read this kaleidoscopic demographic description in the Times of India recently. It struck me odd how people juxtapose personality traits, especially those that are contrasting, to bring about color in a personality. Obviously there is little fun if a person who wears a crucifix actually goes to Church every Sunday. The description also reminded me of Dr. Amartya Sen, who in his book “Identity and Violence” goes a long way to describe how mindless demographic straitjacketing – especially along religious lines – can lead to serious consequences of mass scale alienation, which in turn can and does lead to identity driven violence. I was also reminded of a delightful article by the late Stephen Jay Gould on how human beings react to being identified at the mean or at the tail of a demographic distribution they may have been fitted to. For example, I may be identified as a resident of Calcutta (incorrect), culturally oriented (correct) Tagore-Ray loving (correct) Bengali intellectual (correct) who is a staunch communist (incorrect) calling for a “bandh” every other month to protest against capitalism (incorrect). The truth is that I do not lie anywhere around the mean. If at all, I would like to consider myself somewhere in the +/- 3 standard deviation region of the distribution. Professor Gould argued that it is this behavior of a cluster that determines how closely knit they are. The closer a clan converges around the mean the more diluted is pluralism in the cluster. “Even at this age he starts his day with Saraswati vandhana on the banks of the Ganges and later goes onto read the Namaaz five times a day” is definitely not a definition of someone who converges to the mean. On the other hand, it is because of such out-of-tail personalities that the world becomes richer – perhaps not in wealth but definitely in enriching human values. David Ricardo, the seventeenth century economist wrote – the produce created by one class is useful only if it is of perceived value to another class producing another set of goods or services. Out of tail personalities extend the Ricardian theory beyond the realms to Economics to Sociology.

Post Script: If you have not figured out the personalities described above – the Hindu chant singing Muslim is the Shehnai Maestro Late Ustad Bismillah Khan. The first personality is more contemporary – Sree Sreesanth, the break dancing entertainer who also plays cricket for the Indian national team.

Emancipating Tagore

The copyright for the works of Rabindranath Tagore was handed over to Vishwa Bharati after Tagore’s death. Vishwa Bharati behaved in a draconian manner and took particular pleasure in letting people know who the boss was when it came to rendering Tagore’s work. Gate-keeping, it was argued, is essential to ensure that the works of the great philosopher-poet were not culturally defaced. Every artiste who wished to publish her rendering of Tagore had to first get a clearance from Vishwa Bharti and people who did not bother towing the line of the gatekeeper found them stranded on the wrong side of the fence. Several artists faced economic crises as fallout but they stoically stood by what Tagore said – “where the mind is without fear and the head is held high”. One such artist, Debabrata Biswas, who besides converting to Christianity also refused to bend backwards to Vishwa Bharati sunk into sheer poverty and Hemant Kumar – another legend – stepped in and arranged a public facilitation to raise money for him.

Tagore’s copyright went away in 2001 (after a suspicious 10 year extension). Nothing thereafter has suggested that people are now creating Tagore re-mixes or overlaying heavy percussion atop a soothing song so it can be played at the local sinful discotheque. If at all things have improved. His written works, for which people earlier had to get on a wait-list to buy, are available off the shelf (in fact I have it all on a CD-ROM). People are experimenting with his music, creating compilations and private recordings are now widely available. Tagore’s work is being translated into other Indian languages making him the true Vishwa-Kobi (Poet of the World) that he wanted to be. Economic freedom has emancipated a cultural bondage that was wrongfully thrust on a public-good. His book of songs “Geetabitan” celebrated 75 years of its first edition last week. Today you can get a song sung by Rabindranath Tagore himself followed by one rendered by a Malayali by name Manoj Murali Nair in the same album. Like the poet himself said “Vishwa veena rabe, vishwa jana mohiche” (people of the world are mesmerized by the music of the world)…

Bhoole Toh Nehi?

Power corrupts – absolute power corrupts absolutely. What is not said here is what happens if someone absolutely corrupted is put through strenuous self-inflicted rehabilitation. Perhaps the turnaround is as quick as the corruption was. There is little doubt that it was absolute power that made Saurav Ganguly go corrupt and lose everything he ever stood for – transparency, performance, lead-from-the-front and that single minded desire to succeed. All that remained was his aggression, which in isolation resembled empty arrogance. Rightly, he was dropped from the national squad and quickly slipped into cricketing oblivion. Then something happened and Maharaj went back to where he was after the 1992 dumping. It is said he even took low-cost airline flights to play cricket for Bengal and worked his heart (and flab) out to make it back to the team. He did make it back – not so much by choice than by the TINA factor – but he did get his toe in the door for sure. Then came something that shows how his rehabilitation may have made a man out of a brat. Saurav took a flight from Kolkata to Mumbai and from there flew nine hours to reach Johannesburg. Instead of checking in to the hotel and working off his jet lag, he drove two hours to Potchefstroom where the rest of the team was at practice. A whole lot has been written about the luke-warm response he got even from people who must thank “dada” for their careers but that is not the point here. Where there is an iron will to perform and the desire to hitch rides on the winding and dusty track there possibly awaits a pot of gold at the end of the road. Saurav Ganguly may not make it in his second coming but it certainly will not be for want of trying.

A Tale Told by an Idiot

William Dalrymple’s “The Age of Kali” makes for good reading only in patches– something in the lines of Mark Tully’s “No full stops in India”. I picked it up to prepare myself to read his magnum opus – “The Last Mughal”. Leafing through it I wondered why is it that only foreigners write about India (the only exception must be Bengalis, who both travel widely and write even wider). Perhaps the Indian experience for them is so overwhelming that it compels them to pen things down and give us sometimes impressive sometimes irrelevant travelogues. That brings me to the question why Indians, who travel widely in foreign shores, seldom write about foreign countries. I have traveled widely in Africa and remember jotting down at least three writing plots on an airlines napkin on flight from Addis Ababa to Harare. Never got to write anything though. So it maybe we are plain lazy while foreigners are not. By the way, Tully gives a much more balanced view of India – Dalrymple’s account of the country suffers from the same bias as I would have if I wrote about African societies. Superficial in nature, colorful in presentation – essentially “…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

At the Corner of All Action

There are a whole lot of things wrong about Bangalore. A common answer I often encounter is the city’s inability to suddenly scale up to the blistering growth that came its way. I agree – and nothing embodies it more than the city’s cops. When I first came to Bangalore it was their hats that caught my fancy. They had a neat touch with one side of the brim turned over. If that looked good and smart, any reference to those adjectives in their demeanor was quickly dispensed away. I am not very aware of the cops’ skills in fighting organized crime but it is the traffic police that I find vacillating between ridiculous and comic. They lack the basic knowledge that street crossings are meant to be controlled with unidirectional traffic. I have found the cops asking (on the verge of imploring) vehicles from all roads to come for a quick team-India like huddle at the intersection. This must obviously be the cops’ performance objective because once this is done he quietly recedes to the most obscure corner away from the intersection. Sometimes he just stands there chatting with other cops or just sweeping a curious eye on his magnificent creation that is trying its best to untangle, mostly using blaring horns, abuses (in truly cosmopolitan tongues) and maneuvers that you’d expect only to see on an F1 track. My favorite policeman is the one who mans the Wheeler Road-Asaye Road crossing at Cox Town. On several occasions I have actually seen him helping himself to nariel paani from a vendor after he has achieved his daily target. At most intersections you will see the cop standing at an obscure corner controlling traffic with nothing more than microscopic movements of his hands. It becomes sinister after dark because you have a dim chance of even locating the cop given that their once-white shirts compete with their never-white complexion to provide camouflage cover in their operations. It is said that every city deserves the cops they get. What did Bangalore do wrong?