Saket Suryesh's Blog, page 10

Fading Concept of Intellectual Morality

Two events have occupied the minds of thinking Indian citizens in the last week. The two would seem way far apart in the terms of the people directly impacted but are connected with one common theme which is the biggest emblem of the times we live in. 
The  raid on a famous Media channel, NDTV, which was the first one to tread into the Television News space once it opened up beyond the state broadcaster and the other event being a hugely violent farmers' stir in the state of Madhya Pradesh, which has been showing spectacular growth, ironically, in agricultural sector. 
The outrage around the latter has started to die down as the shock at the farmers agitating so violently in the relatively prosperous area of India gave way to the emerging details of Congress, a dynastic party which has ruled India for the largest part of our liberated existence and thus is responsible for not only the slow growth, rather also for the inglorious episode of Emergency, now out of power, being in play as direct conspirator of the violence which has left five people dead. 
The difficult part of democracy is that people who have no understanding of India and who have been raised as a an heir to the throne, with supposedly divine right to rule over the natives, often fail to understand that the nature and essence of a successful democracy is its temporal nature. Democracy is like a brook in the mountains, which protects its beauty and purity only if it is not stagnant. They are not able to accept this temporal nature of power, which is the strength and essence of democracy. This is why I always say that Congress out of power is more dangerous for India as a nation than Congress in power. 
Congress had carefully created a well-designed ecosystem which itself together out of selfish interests which criss-crossed across the whole structure, with one part leaning on the other, and vice-versa. The tectonic shift in the Indian polity with the arrival of Narendra Modi by an unread rejection of the incumbents is what Congress was not prepared for. Not then, not now. Instead of playing the party out of power, they decided to take the role of Party of opposition. This desire and this stupid urge for opposition has messed the overall politics of this country which brings me to the question of fading Intellectual morality. Congress would pull the strings, create unrest where there is none, using the IOUs it held with the ecosystem which we now called the Lutyen's cabal. 
The whole approach of opposition has been so cynical that the opposition, made of quintessential Indian politicians, each reeling under the stigma of their own saga of corruption, from Laloo to Mamata to Left to the royal corrupts, looks even to any person new to Indian polity as a collaboration of Crooks. Their entire opposition is something like build out of necessity. This politics is built out of a total dependence of negative politics and total ignorance of positive politics. They forget that Narendra Modi came into power not because he hit strongly on the Congress which was then in power, rather because in comparison to a scam-tainted central government, he presented a relatively clean and progressive Gujarat government, which Congress and the best of the columnists on their payrolls could not wish away. If Rahul Gandhi had camped in Karnataka where Congress still ruled, implemented the recommendations of expert committee for Agricultural sector in Karnataka as an evidence of excellence, they could have hoped some success. But it needed commitment and effort. Such big initiatives cannot be undertaken between quarter of the year long introspection in exotic locales which is Rahul Gandhi's wont to take. 
So attack and opposition became a game, and in the process of attacking Modi, they attacked the country that was attached with Modi, him being in the center as the Prime Minister. Morality is the key essence of democracy. Once morality fails, democracy quickly collapses into the rule of the mob. They did not care. Let us look at the stand the opposition took and I leave it to your own yardstick of morality to measure the correctness of their position.
Action on Black Money : Every political party, no matter how corrupt they were is bound to take a public position against black money and corruption. Narendra Modi came out with demonetization. It was implemented with big difficulties and hardships for the nation. The whole opposition pounced at Modi. Politicians like Arvind Kejriwal, who always positioned themselves as ethical crusader against black money and corruption, stood with Congress, mocking the Government and even threatening riots. 
Church Attack- There were stories of attack on Churches and christian institutions. No sane thinking person in the nation wants riots in the name of religion. People look at leaders to oppose such malicious propaganda and expects them to quell the rumours. To an utter disappointment, all such news (covered extensively, yes, fake news covered extensively by the media longing for the good old days when they held the power of cabinet appointments) turned to be fake. 
Beef Ban- The fact of the matter is there was no new policies of Beef ban imposed by the Modi government. The intellectuals who were supposed to be the moral guardians of the society essentially argued that the illegality which was prevalent in the name of cow-slaughter be allowed to continue unabated. Which essentially meant that the beef ban policies which are derived from the directive principles of the constitution and enacted by earlier Congress government, remain a fake law, never to be applied on the society. In effect, they were again on the side of illegality under the pretext of religious and other rights. The essence of the argument was that, Cow-slaughter was illegal; it took away the life of one animal for satisfying the taste of another and thus immoral; there were laws, but let us assume that there were none. The arguments were flawed in more ways than possible. One was that it was a part of Dalit's staple diet, kind of way-of-life argument. It was primarily because it was cheap. It was cheap because it was illegal, like hooch. Even then how cheap it would be compared to a kg of apple is something to be analysed. Other argument was religious. A ban (well, which never was) was supposed to be trampling on religious beliefs of Muslims. There are two aspects to it. The deserts from where Islam came, it is debatable how effectively they did cattle-raising or dairy farming and therefore how applicable the rules of a desert without much vegetarian alternatives would apply (to my understanding, there is no specific guidelines on the necessity of slaughtering a cow as a proof of being a true follower) to a land with an abundance of greens. Only logic for the Muslims wanting to cut a cow in India would be to rub the nose of a majority religion which revers the animal into dust. In all this debate on Beef ban, the only real thing Modi government did was to pass a notification to eliminate the middle-man and regulate illegal cattle-trafficking after three years in power. Congress responded by publicly slaughtering an Eleven-months old calf. 
Action on Media: The channel has been ranting on the end of democracy since the time Modi came to power. They would create fake news, call the terrorists as social media warrior and create all trouble for not only the central government, but also for the people at large. When pointed out, they would quickly go back at their high chairs of intellectual priesthood, looking down at the masses (oddly consumer and creator of the news). They attacked Modi, true and fake news; reporters would post fake news, fake pictures, and when pointed out by ordinary citizen on Social media, they would take offence and call them trolls. The government did nothing in the way of censoring them. The residence of the founders of NDTV (not the NDTV office, not to check the footage of Barkha Dutt interviews with Burhan Wani) was raided and the heavens came down. The Editors' Guild, the Press Council of India came out with condemnation calling it attack on the media. They had been silent on the broad day murder of a journalist in Bihar (in the line of duty), in UP (for exposing Corruption of local politician), FIR on another rival channel (for covering a riot in Bengal), but the first family of Indian private news is raided, and the whole democracy is under attack. 
In a democracy, the intellectuals hold an important role. They are the guardians of democracy. They articulate well, they are the custodians of printed space, they hold the strings of media, but they stand exposed. They do not stand exposed only because they are speaking now. They stand exposed because they stayed silent earlier. They are not driven by the principles of propriety. They are driven by what they perceive as a personal affront. The worthies like Fali Nariman (whose own son is a SC judge while being a priest and who like an illiterate bigot expressed fear at a man wearing saffron becoming an elected Chief Minister in a country which had a Maulana as the first Education Minister of the country) and Arun Shourie may cry foul at the way things are turning out, but in the process, when they, with disdain, advise the mainstream media to be merciless against common citizen's voice on social media; when they weep for the loss of their invincible positions in the pre-established social hierarchy, I want to only quote from Julius Caesar to them
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings." 
For long we had left our social conscience in the hands of these old men, totally drunk in the sense of an invincible power; now we realize they did not take good care of it. In one matter after other, we find that their well-articulated positions, were always on the side of the wrong, the immoral. They have lost the sense of intellectual morality. They have failed in their duty to the society, which trusted in their wisdom to uphold the ethics. All that their intellect gave them a cynical ruthlessness which they used to create causes to craft a situation to somehow get rid of the changed socio-political equations which they still in their stupor believe to be nothing but bad dream. Soldier, Farmer, liberty - they threw these words with the hope that they will stick on social psyche but they were too empty to hold on. The amazing thing about social media and the speed of it is that you are always watched. The hollow emptiness of these cause-words which are used are no longer hidden from the people. The hollowness of high-sounding words and the bankruptcy of minds which crafts them, gets exposed the moment they are uttered. Words are thrown carelessly to prove the point and if I were to borrow from Nietzsche, this is the wisdom of stagnant waters in which I often hear frogs croak. The charade of character, the malicious lie of morality stands exposed and the intellectuals hate the common-folks for that. What is also very visible that we have largely the right to the tag of intellectual strongly held in the cunning captivity of Television. People like Dinkar, Nirala, Parsai have faded away and have not been replaced. It is a kind of intellectual disaster which has played on our society. Television serves the purpose. It doesn't let you think. 
"The Television is 'real'. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions that your mind hasn't time to protest,'What nonsense!'"                         - Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
That is the reason they fear the written words. They fear anyone who writes from a factual position of strength. They will call them Bhakts, trolls, Internet Hindus, unemployed. That is the only way they have to discredit your narrative, for their own narrative is flawed, primarily because it is selfish and dishonest. They don't have the moral courage or they have too much of personal interest at stake to look inwards and make amends. They avoid debate with ordinary folks, not because they detest them; mostly, it is because they fear they will lose. Just as some people have greatness thrust on them, some do have intellectual position thrust on them. They are the people who have been hounding our moral space. They do not want to lose it. Salinger put it well when he wrote in The Catcher in the Rye - 
"These intellectual guys don't like to have an intellectual conversation with you unless they are running the whole thing."

सैनिक का उत्तर- A Soldier's Response

"It is true that the intellect by itself is no virtue....An intellectual person can be a good man but he may easily be a rogue. Similarly an intellectual class may be a band of high-souled persons, ready to help, ready to emancipate erring humanity or it may easily be a gang of crooks.."                            - Dr. B. R. Ambedkar
The problem of too much of intellectualism is that it runs a serious danger of turning narcissistic and base. A strong intellect without a sense of morality will make worse of human beings for they can explain, define and defend basest of their actions and thoughts. Dr. Partha Chatterjee, Professor at Columbia University, has suddenly become a known face all across India by scathing criticism he has heaped on the Chief of Indian Army General Bipin Rawat. He has compared the Army Chief with British General Dyer. It is difficult to understand how the context of Major Gogoi using a Stone-pelter (who also made Shawls) to avoid needless bloodshed to compare General Rawat with General Dyer, who shot dead over 300 citizens in cold blood. General Dyer had also placed a condition for Indians to crawl in a patch of street of around 200 feet, but that is another matter. A good writing is meant to provoke and unfortunately some writers would even a lie to provoke to avoid hard effort of getting down to the ground. Our intellectual world sadly, is at a loss since we do not have Hemingways to go to the front to write about war. A soldier is bound by discipline and cannot reply to crafty, cruel and crude allegations. Therefore, as a citizen, I take it as my duty to respond. 
Here it is. 


सैनिक का उत्तर

पूछते हो प्रश्न तुम, बस मौन है उत्तर मेरा।योद्धा हूँ तो क्यूँ समझते हो हृदयपत्थर मेरा।
जब प्रलय सा मेह बरसा, जलमग्न हुई थी ये धरा,निष्पाप मन से था उपस्थितमैं संतरी बन कर खड़ा।
जिस मनुज के पास होनन्ही सी इक तलवार भी,सहन करता कौन मानवछोटा सा इक प्रहार भी?
पाषाण की बौछार में भीशाँत मेरा शस्त्र था।विश्वास था, उस ओर भीशत्रु नहीं एक मित्र था।
तुम समझते हो कि मैं मानव नहींइक यंत्र हूँ,यज्ञ की इक आहुति हूँ,रामबाण इक मंत्र हूँ।
मैं भी पिता का पुत्र हूँ, माता का इक संबल हूँ मैं,पुत्री का मैं भी तात हूँ, सिन्दूर हूँ, आँचल हूँ मैं।
समय के इस क्रूर समर मेंशाँत शौर्य का धर्म हूँ मैं।राष्ट्र का सूचक हूँ मैंइस मातृभूमि का मर्म हूँ मैं।
शब्दों के कुटिल कवितुमसे मेरा क्या मेल है।मेरे लिये है राष्ट्र गौरवआपको सब खेल है।
शब्दों के निर्लज्ज द्वन्द मेंझुका दोगे भला क्या सर मेरा?मस्तक है यह इस राष्ट्र का,बस मौन है उत्तर मेरा।
      - साकेत

The Necessity of Indian Right Wing

"From Untrue to the TrueFrom Darkness to LightFrom Death to Immortality"
The Right-wing is defined by Oxford Dictionary as a Conservative or reactionary section of a Political Party or System. Merriam-Webster calls it a group of people who support conservative ideas and policies. 
The term came into being during the French revolution of 1789, wherein steep divides in position on various fundamental matters raised such situation that those with opposing views were advised to stick to one side to avoid physical violence. Those who were loyal to the king and religion took to the right side of the chair. This physical division continued till 1793 even after French legislative assembly came into being. 
From seating arrangement, this term became political and by the beginning of 20th century, spread across the globe. The term on both sides was used as some kind of derogatory way of defining the opposition. The Left technically stood for communism, group-think, state welfare, more of state control, less of national identity and progressive thoughts. Right stood for orthodoxy, conservatism, Individual rights and private enterprise. 
But then those are global definitions. When we look at India, things turn on their heads. I was once chatting with a friend of mine from the US. She was bemused as to why I was so much against leftist thought in India. Once we went debating the what Left and right stood for in India, it slowly emerged that in the Indian context, positions have reversed, where the right stood for liberal ideas, Individual emancipation and private enterprise. In fact, it might have reversed globally as well, but possibly the iron curtain was so strong that the west never realized what went on in the USSR, the mother of Leftist communism. The Gulags, executions and torture by an all-powerful state crushing any individual dissent, either never reached the west, or was hidden by the left-leaning intellectuals so as to never reach the people. The west had no real access to Communism. 
Every young man (and woman) is a leftist, but as one grows up, one tends to become rightist or at least a centrist. That is also evident from the fact that when Marxism and communism picked up as a philosophy, it came about as a noble thought of participative democracy. However, once the acceptance of the philosophy reached a certain critical mass, primarily with the desperation of the status-quo and with an interest in any thing except what is present; quickly the following rose. In no time, the people became collective, collectives became mob, and those who controlled the mobs, became absolutists and dictator. The philosophy built on the theoretical and theatrics soon unraveled into presenting us with the most dreaded dictators of this century. Quickly "Freedom of Expression" term used by the Left to gain foothold in a democracy gave way to institutional censorship in all communist nations. The thin ice on which the left stood is evident in in its quick failure. We find the quick rise of communism and the quick fall in the fact that from 30 odd nations we now have 6 nations following communism. 
Neither the Left nor the right is a homogeneous mass of people and the spectrum is wide. While the Right stand for conservatism and past, unlike left which is supposedly more progressive and forward-looking, it mostly is not so. The Right is all about the Individual. So when we look at individual minus the masses or the mob, equality will be a definitive response. The Right recognizes the masses, but ignores the individual. Of course, there will be a meritocratic hierarchy, based on individual capabilities but there will not be committee appointments as in case of a leftist world. Committee appointments are source of power to those who sit on those committees and therefore, are a source of corruption of the people in power who run those committees, which every communist society is plagued with. 
Equality among citizen will eventually pave way for individual respect and create a society accommodating individual differences and will be, in a sense, quite liberal, unlike a leftist world where lowest common denominator defines the chances of survival of any outlier. The left stands of smashing all that we call history and heritage, while the conservative right stands for defending it. The Right respects uniqueness (particularly the Right as we know in India). Let us not, for a moment, confuse the Right in India with some sort of Ku Klux Klan. Indian Right is Hindu Right which accommodates Duality with Uniformity, Spiritual with the Ritual. It celebrates differences, it defends debates. Interest of the the left in liberal thought is a facade, as we see largely violent protest to any thoughts which are not aligned to their own. 
Since Leftism is a relatively newer philosophy, the intellectual minds in the nearest past, when Marx came about as a rage, were in awe of the romantic hope and possibility this new philosophy presented, while the flaws of left were well hidden, possibly not by design, at that time, rather by novelty. As the romantic intellectuals joined in hoards to the new lofty ideology; This has resulted in the following century a complete leftist rule over the intellectual space. By the time, the juvenile hope in the romantic left began fading, the intellectuals realized that they held, by accident, a power too potent in their hands, which they were unwilling to let go. You look at all the places of intellectual world order- colleges, institutes, Press, media, writing and poetic societies; it is abundantly clear. As their cleverly crafted world begin the crumble, crude attempt to block this decline became more and more evident. The left held to its power by fake pretense of justice and an undeserving legitimacy which unquestioned rule over the global kingdom of mind provided. This is also a reason that this is the space which needs to be regained. Few in the Right realize it, most in the left do. The truth which beings in whispers soon rises in such a thunder that it drowns all the lies. That is why the left goes about crushing dissent so aggressively, calling you names, deriding your knowledge, stifling your voice. 
Social media became a great equalizer for the largely disadvantaged Rightist thought in India. It is the child of modern century. It did what type-writer did to the written world in earlier century. While the press, the media, educational institutions and political space is largely grabbed by the remnants of the failed early nineteen century philosophy, the social media, unregulated and ignored, became a platform for the people with views opposing the left. They are not willing to let it go easily. That makes the job of any new thought coming back is difficult. This makes the priests and priestesses of the old world order hate social media. But Social media became a big success. It gave voice to those whose thoughts earlier found no space in public debates. Mainstream media and college societies were intellectual echo-chambers of the Left. The left spoke and the left listened in the silence sipping their well-funded champagne. Their seminars on poor farmers happened in large air-conditioned auditoriums of the capital, and death of every poor man was a proof-point for them, a mere number in a debate with the right they desperately wanted to win.

If left had proof of successes, they could have relied on them to continue their position of intellectual supremacy. But we have the proofs of failure all around. The fall of communism is exposed in both economic and democratic failure. With a devastating chain of death, decay and destruction behind, the leftist philosophy faces existential challenge. As a philosophy, it is not an issue. The essential of any intellectually alive society is constant evolution, with discard of failing ideas. The issue is with the custodians of communism who see their citadels come crumbling down. They do not want to believe that they have failed, and they do not want the world to believe it either. A small electoral win of the left in a University of few thousand students is celebrated much eloquently in the media; while another win of Rightist students in the nearby University with few  Hundred  thousand students is whispered reluctantly . 

So they have to lie, they are forced to. When they talk about aligning with Islam, they forget that in China, basic Islamic practices and now even Muslim names are not allowed. Islam is a religion rapidly expanding. Communists want to cling to it, because left to its own devices, they have no future, as an idea, as a hope to the individual. Biggest enemy of communism is 'I' and this 'I' cannot be wished away, even when it becomes a part of 'We'. We can subjugate self for a higher goal but we cannot remove it from the minds of people. The people are disenchanted. They realize now that starched khaadi  of the Comrades doesn't come cheap and that the dreams of the progress of society with its constituents, the smallest unit, individual denied his and her  intellectual right, in favor of an mob-opinion is flawed and programmed for failure. When the truth is fractured, lying becomes a necessity. Religion and faith is always very private. Islam is a religion of community, of armies. It is not a religion of spiritual quest. Founder of Islam was the founder of an army, an empire. Communism crushes any idea which seeks to establish connection between society and soul.That is precisely what Islam is, connecting politics with the spiritual in some way. That is why it is not comfortable in its own truth; it wants to subsume any other truth that might exist. That is where it inherently contradicts communism. Islam wants religion to be out in open, Communism wants religion to be eradicated. That is how flawed Islamic-left unity is. Islam provides left headcount, brute power; Left provides the idea of Islamist supremacy intellectual legitimacy. So desperate is the left that it even claims literature criticizing a society resembling a Politburo state like George Orwell's 1984 as its own. Some day, they will claim that "We, The Living" of Ayn Rand is also to be about some Rightist majoritarian state. No one has exposed it like Christopher Hitchens when he refers to leftist demi-god Naom Chomsky's (a Leftist writer known for writing open letter for skirmishes in Delhi, but largely remains silent on the killings in kannur or the stupidly intolerant killing of Indians in the US) opposition to Muslim minority in Balkan wars and his support to organization like Al Quaeda and Taliban and writes- 
"If a supposed scholar takes the Christian-Orthodox side when it is the aggressor, and then switches to taking the Muslim side when Muslims commit mass-murder, I think, there is something very nasty going on."
Only hope of Right is to look inwards and be steadfast in its approach. The left comes for the Social media space, calls you Internet Hindu; do not yield this well-earned space. This space not only gives you voice, it also takes away the moral superior position the leftists grabbed for themselves with unforeseen sophistication of thoughts coming from the hitherto unknown Right. Engineers, Doctors, Chartered accountants are now exposing the mediocre scholarship of the leftist journalists, historians, academicians. The Right thrives on celebration of individual mind. Right recognizes society, but it revers individual spirit. 

Hinduism is much close to the Right. Hinduism in essence, is a private, inward-looking, soul-focussed religion. It is therefore anti-thesis of any empire-building, supremacist religion or philosophy. Any supremacist idea always thrives on destruction, of those who do not agree. That is what ISIS is. ISIS is an organization. Before anything becomes an organization, it is always a thought, an idea. It then takes various shapes and forms. Taliban, Lashkar , Wahabism , ISIS- it changes shapes and forms and it kills. Some call it un-Islamic. It is not fair. It rises out of inherent issues with Islam. Quran was written over a period. It begins with the time when the Prophet was young and isolated  individual with a new and revolutionary thought which threatened to obliterate old religion and tribal powers. Quran is about his journey from an unsure ideologue amid hostile detractors to a ruthless military general, building an empire of obedient followers. That is why Quran contradicts itself on various matters. 

Terrorists ignore what Mohammad wrote in his earlier life and build a case for terror and cruelty as means to win wars; apologists use quotes from earlier phase and try defend the terrorists. The Book cannot be questioned. Even liberals will not question it. They will throw one phrase against another, forgetting that until a phrase, not in line with civilized world is contradicted and expunged, you can only continue to hope that one part of the Book will be read and other will not. It is so obvious. When anyone points the issues with the intolerant and violent ideas in Quran, they will always point to the moderate sections (from early life of the Prophet). But they will not have courage to point out that the violent, intolerant parts of Quran are inconsistent with the modern, civilized world and are wrong. 

Anyways, that is another matter of larger significance,  and should be a subject of another debate. Right now, The conniving thievery of the Left is the question- The Left and the lies of the left. India in the term Indian-Muslims trouble s leftists. We have to defend that term. The left is about the idea which is foremost, beyond and above the national identity. That is why the concept of Ummah , the concept of Khilafat suits the left. Khilafat of Muslims is similar to Russian mother-ship of the past for the communists. It gives them a large force, a force whose inherent ideology is diametrically opposite to their idea of atheist existence, but committed, easily excitable and expendable. Sometimes a good acting is all that stands between existence and total decimation like dead leaves of the season gone. Muslims call it Taqiyyah, Communists call it realpolitik. It confounds Hindus for whom religion is Dharma- The Right Path, the moral. 
Matter of critical import for the current subject is that this unholy alliance of the two philosophy which threatens rightists in Indian subcontinent must be argued with. Left is desperate. They do not have with them logic and argument. So having a legal code which is impartial to any religion is communal to them, an effort towards re-distribution of wealth takes away the wind out of the mast of theit sinking ships. The Left is about state-control. The Right is about free spirit. The Right  is inward-looking faith. The Left has a standard game of creating outrage. They will try to bring out your worst and then hold you responsible for it. When wisdom is meager and the words are failing; violence, verbal and otherwise, jumps in. 
 Hindu right is about debate and a kinder pride, a pride in the soul and the mind. We need to regain that pride. Language and education are the bulwark of Hindu right. Be proud, be strong and be patient with those who thrive on your impatience. They will bring your worse out and make it an example to trample on your just annoyance. Stand for what we believe in and what we are. I will not say that opposition to cow-slaughter is ONLY for animal right or nature. That it is. But then that it is also because Hinduism is about animal rights and environment. Let us say that as Hindu we are offended when animals are slaughtered in public view. If you are my friend why would you want to offend me? Why would you want to trample, belittle my faith if you want to coexist with me in harmony? If this is a state I have built, by voting for it, why would it not defend me against deliberate offense. But I will not kill or bash people. That is not me. That is not a religion of spirit. That is not a religion of wisdom. That is a faith of fanaticism. We are much better than that. Let us assume that you mean it when you say you love me as brother; if you do, why aren't you concerned about offending my faith. Left- well, left, as I said, is desperate. Let us take away the fuel which they desperately need. Right is what stands between a world which is precariously tilted between individual and the absolutist scheme of a majoritarian collective. Leftists in India use the term majoritarianism frivolously. Let them not. If you want to look majoritarianism, look at Saudi, Syria and Pakistan. The resurgent Right of India stands in the middle of it. Left is scared of it. India of today is the last bastion of tolerant faith, true intellectual melting-pot of civilizations. This idea of India clashes with a global communist order, and it also stands against ever-growing and world-encompassing Jihadist Khilafat. The rightist idea of India discomforts the left. It also aligns with the idea of national identity. This worries and infuriates the left even further. Noted writer Samuel P Huntington wrote about leftist of the US, which is equally true of the Left in India:
"...(But) there is a problem with the this Left: It is unpatriotic. It repudiates the idea of a national identity and the emotion of a national pride."
Nationalistic pride is one of the defining feature of Right, but where we stand now, the implication of having a right-minded Rightist leader is beyond the implications of India as a nation. We stand at the verge where history could go both way. West also was striving for change, an opportunity to regain its poise. We are fortunate that we have a reasonable, rational and capable leadership, which is not whimsical or fanatic. US too could have given voice to a sane rightist mind. Unfortunately, we all have to live with the choices we make, and sometimes, it is merely chance which decides on the choices which are presented to us. We have thus been lucky. We must not take this responsibility lightly. Read, make your point and teach others. Celebrate our spiritual sagacity and strengthen our national mind, without anger and apology, with pride and prudence. As it says in Gita , in Sanskrit- 
"ना दैन्यं , ना पलायनम " (Not to yield, not to surrender)

गोवध- a Poem on Cow Slaughter

गोवध-

निज पुत्र का भाग तज कर
मनुज पुत्र का पोषण किया।
सम संतुलन सबको दिया
मस्तक पर धरा धारण किया।

रहट खींचा, खेत सींचे,
 धर्म का संबल दिया।
अन्न, प्रेम, सात्विक मित्रता,
सब कुछ तुम्हें निश्छल दिया।

पुत्रवत स्नेह से
तुमने पुकारा पास जब
मातृवत आई मैं दौड़ी
मन में लिये विश्वास तब।

जिह्वा के मिथ्या लोभ में
हा, वध मेरा तुमने किया,
इक मूक पशु को मारकर
मानवता को बस लज्जित किया।

मैं तो तुम्हारे स्वाद पर,
मिथ्या दंभ पर अर्पित हुई
इस पाशविक बलिवेदि पर
मनुजता ही तो बस लज्जित हुई।

माता रही मैं शिव-पुत्र मानव
तुझसे मेरा क्या द्वेष था,
शत्रु बनाया मुझको अपना
यह देखना बस शेष था।

जिस देश पर बनता था सदियों
पहला ग्रास मेरे नाम पर।
मेरे ही भक्षण को है आतुर
वह राष्ट्र है संग्राम पर।

कौड़ियाँ फेंकी हैं किसने
जीत की और हार की।
युद्ध है यह धर्म का
या प्रेरणा संहार की।

कहता है जो पशुवध
राष्ट्र का अधिकार है,
स्वातंत्र्य है अभिशाप उसका,
उस मनुष्य पर धिक्कार है।



      - साकेत

Resurrecting Hinduism- Without Embarrassment

I have been pondering about the sense of despondency, the sense of shame which has been imposed on the Hindu thoughts in Indian society. Every act of faith has to be explained, justified. When partition happened, Muslims fought and obtained an independent Nation, while the other large chunk of population, which, in spite of numerical supremacy, was subjugated for centuries, got India. In line with inherent openness and flexibility of Hinduism, India became a secular nation. This is a matter of pride, since it acknowledged the basic secular nature of Sanatan Dharm. However, as things would evolve, vested political interests considered India as unfinished agenda standing in the path of a religious empire being built world-wide. Through a well-calculated intellectual conspiracy of neglect and vilification, it came to a stage that modern Hindus where embarrassed of their religion and apologetic of their faith. This neglect also resulted in the religion being left to the guardianship of unworthy people, who gained power through rogue ritualistic society, which was totally inconsistent with Hinduism. We are not the people of the book, we are the people of intellect, who are to write new books for newer times. This fluidity, this ability to re-invent ourselves is a matter of our pride. Ours is a nation built on rational thought and intense intellect.We cannot allow ourselves to be either fanatic or apologetic. Let us be a proud scholar. That is what Hindutva is. When every matter of our faith is being questioned, every ritual being trampled for political reasons, we need to rise above mockery and regain the moral position which once belonged to us. As a religion to restrict itself to answering inner, existential question in stead of being a tool of polity, when we prayed environment, the water, the trees, the animals. We are the nation of Adi Yogi, the Pashupati, the ArdhNarishwar. Animal Rights, secularism and feminism is essence of Hinduism and are not foreign concepts. Let us once again be proud of it. Here is my poem. Hope you will like it. Faith is always internal, fanaticism is always external. Faith wins by being steadfast and unapologetic; fanaticism wins by defeating competing faiths. 
मैं हिन्द का हिन्दू बच्चा हूँ
मैं हिन्द का हिन्दू बच्चा हूँ 
मैं शांत हूँ किन्तु सच्चा हूँ 
ये देश मेरा, सब लोग मेरे 
पर संकोची सा रहता हूँ 
छुप छुप के मंदिर जाता हूँ 
'हे राम' भी मन में कहता हूँ। 

इस देश के बौद्धिक लोगों ने 
वो शर्म सिखाई हैं मुझको 
सदियों का गौरव मिटा दिया 
वो हार पढ़ायी है मुझको। 

जो घंटों की झंकार तले 
 हर शाम को दीप जलाता है,
जो लाल सिंदूरी पत्थर पर 
श्रध्दा से शीश नवाता है। 

मैं ज्ञान का प्यासा भिक्षुक हूँ 
मैं घाट भोर की कासी का ,
मैं बस्तर का गणपति-भक्त, मित्र 
मैं अक्षुण दर्प बनवासी का। 

मैं केरल से आया शंकर हूँ 
मैं अटल, अटूट, निरंतर हूँ। 
मैं महाकाल की मस्ती हूँ 
जो उजड़ बसी वह बस्ती हूँ। 

संस्कृत का स्मरण नहीं मुझको 
अंग्रेज़ी ने मुझे अपनाया नहीं। 
तुम शब्द-वीर, मैं सरल सत्य 
मैं सत्ता केंद्र में आया नहीं। 

संपादक का स्नेह नहीं मुझको साहित्य में मेरा स्थान नहीं। वह धर्म जो सदियों रहा अमर उस धर्म का मुझे ही ज्ञान नहीं। 
एक मूक बधिर कोलाहल हूँ एक लज्जित सा इतिहास हूँ मैं। केशव का गीता सार हूँ मैं या अनवरत राम - वनवास हूँ मैं। 
सिंह- मित्र बाल भरत  हूँ मैं या भूला हुआ दुष्यंत हूँ मैं। भारतवर्ष का नव-आरम्भ हूँ मैं या आर्यव्रत का अंत हूँ मैं। 
यह मौन कभी जो मुखर हुआ यह मलिन कभी जो प्रखर हुआ यह तुमसे मुझसे पूछेगा क्यों खुद पे तुम शर्मिंदा हो एक बार तो कह दो ज़िंदा हो। 
(c) Saket Suryesh

Decoding Destination - The Sense of An Ending- Julian Barnes

Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Knopf
Pages: 163
Genre: Literary Fiction
Published: August, 2011
Rating: Makings of a Classic




















Excerpt:"...What is history? Any thoughts, Webster? 
'History is the lies of the victors' I replied a little too quickly.

'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. Simpson?'

Colin was more prepared than me. 'History is a raw onion sandwich, Sir.'

'For what reason?'

'It just repeats, Sir. It burps. We've seen it again and against this year. The same story, same old oscillation between tyranny and rebellion, war and peace, prosperity and impoverishment.'

'Rather a lot for a sandwich to contain, would you say?'

We laughed far more than was required, with an end-of-term hysteria. 

'Finn?'

' History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.'"

Review: 


Like most Indian readers without a strong background in literature, I usually get intimidated a language which is still threateningly foreign to me, even when I write and  work in it. Most English writing of our times I read, is cliched and if I may say propaganda-driven. Before you pick a book, you know what you will encounter. Do not get me wrong. I like to read a good story. I like two things in a story- One, it should not intimidate me needlessly, hound me for lack of education; Two, it should tell me something beyond the story- an angle cleverly hidden behind the story- something subtle and sublime. Then, it is about the way a story is told, I love a story which is told with affection, care and passion. I like the style of story-telling which is unhurried and non-mercenary in approach. Readers in today's world are much in rush, inundated with data deluge. Writer's rush should not compound reader's rush. 
A good writer should manage to slow down the reader, hold his hand and make him sit next like a long-lost friend meeting after a very long time. And I do hate the story written as a formula, with a given number of affairs, heartaches, break-ups, social causes and few sexual interludes. Flaubert's Parrot (Read Review Here) was the first novel of Julian Barne I had ever read. What a magnificent piece of writing it was!! It met all the criteria I have for liking a book- glorious prose, engaging story, unhurried and unconventional. That book gave me the courage of picking The Sense of An Ending. Barnes doesn't disappoint. 
The story is different from the run-of-the-mills affair. There is no love story, no immigrant, no LGBT or feminist angle- in short, there is no cause holding the story at ransom. It is a plain and charming story well-told, and profound. The beauty of the story is the philosophy it contains. This touch of philosophy to an ordinary story of ordinary people, told extraordinarily well, is what makes the book stand out. 
Collapsing moral structures in modern lives bring a sense of ambivalence, a floating arbitrariness to life, a sense of lack of conclusion. Any philosophical sense of worthiness associated with life, is slowly chipping away as life becomes a chain of foolish festivity of frustrating futility. There is nothing of value to fight for, to protect, to defend, to nurture, it seems. Is life nothing but a chase towards death? Where are we going? Is death a destination or is life merely an avoidance of death? Are we running on a treadmill going nowhere, getting nowhere?
This is by no means a bleak novel, like say, a Dostoevsky. It is light, witty but no, it does not invite you to laugh at a fat man falling off the banana peal. This is the story of Anthony Webster and three of his public school pals. All four a bright students, intellectually aware. One friend of theirs, Adrian Finn, the one who defined History in above excerpt, is exceptionally talented and fatalistically aware. The story has moments of philosophical dance in between, but it never loses the pace. The balance between interest and intellect is carefully and delicately managed by Mr. Barnes. 
Tony is not a fighter, he is rather a status-quoist. He calls himself 'peaceable' on that account and Victoria calls him cowardly. When he is asked by Victoria as to where he thinks their relationship was heading, he answers- 
'Does it have to head somewhere?'
'Isn't that what relationships do?'
'I don't know. I haven't been in enough of them.'
When pushed further by Victoria, as she confronts him with
'Look, Tony,' She said, 'I don't stagnate.'
Our boy responds with
'Isn't there something between stagnation and heading somewhere?'
The whole story builds on this inherent ambivalence of Anthony. Adrian commits suicide. The boys, fanboys of intellectual excellence of their friend, are stupefied and in a way, feel short-changed. They are not troubled with suicide per-se. They are confounded with the lack of evident logic behind it. Here is what Tony thinks.
"It had seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person's right: a logical act when faced with terminal illness or senility; a heroic one when faced with torture or the avoidable deaths of others; a glamorous one in the fury of disappointed love. None of this applied in case of Robson's squalidly mediocre action. Nor did it apply to Adrian."


What stands in contrast is that while these intelligent minds deliberated on the meaninglessness of their friend's self-inflicted death, they are totally oblivious to the meaninglessness of their own lives. Tony is almost resigned to his ordinariness, almost proud of it. He floats and exists, sustaining his rather meaningless life in contrast to an equally meaningless death of Finn. As a sixty year old man, retired and divorced, he looks back at life; it gives a vantage point to us- a benefit of hindsight, if we may call it so. 
This is a story which makes us pause and ponder. The story does it without overwhelming us with philosophy. The wit of the writer is extraordinary, primarily because it is so honest. No wonder, this book was awarded Man Booker of the Year in 2011. Do reach out to read if life is bothering you with questions which seems to be floating in the air, like arrows looking for you. This book may not give you answers, but it will certainly prompt you to find your own answers. No other answers carry any value, anyways. This is a short book, but as Liesl Schillinger mentions in her New York Times review, it is not a slight book. Underlying philosophical journey in the story renders it the timelessness of a classic- a classic written in our times. It will stay on your conscience for many a nights, and if one is lucky, one of those nights will have a full moon. 
Amazon Link of the Book (Click Here )

The Necessity of Solitude in a Writer's Life

Solitude is an essential part of writing life. Writing is a lonely profession. One ought to step on this path if one is able to survive through the long, voluntary spells of solitude. We must not confuse loneliness with solitude. Loneliness throws one down the dark abyss; solitude is the pair of wings that intellect provides to lift the soul out of those depths. 
The best of the art emerges out of a certain tranquility of mind, a quietude of being. It borrows wisdom from market-places, it derives truth from the people, but the truth which is visible to the writer, is often not visible to the very people from whose life he derives and distills it. What separates the characters of a story and its writer is the ability of the writer to pull himself back from life, to stand away and apart, to have a distinct vantage points, to watch it with an odd sense of detached empathy. The difference in this vantage point, from one writer to another is the reason stories written about the same things often carry different meaning. The vantage point that a writer creates for himself with respect to an event, an incident or even a life is unique to the writer. 
It is very important for the writer to pull himself or herself away, to immerse in solitude. To let the agitated waves which surrounds him, which torments his overly sensitive soul, takes time to settle down and give way to a truth which come from within the writer but is beyond the writer. Only such writing will survive the writer beyond his being. It is such literature which creates a legacy. Kafka explains this process of settling down and the emergence of the profound magic well when he writes-
"Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait. Just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
If one reads classics, the most amazing aspect about them is their unhurried nature. They are written with a definite slowness of pace, even when they run, they never lose their beauty; they never gasp for breath. When they pace, they pace at a speed which comes naturally to them as if they want the reader to run along with them. The do not run because they know where they want to reach, the writer is often in search of the end as much as the reader. Only he knows the path, the next step, but never the destination. There is a great sense of companionship a writer establishes with the reader when he writes thus. 
Good writing is not always about talent. It is as much about honesty of the soul. This honesty unravels itself in our moments of solitude, the moments when we unlearn all that our years in society has taught us. Great literature happens when we are able to escape our education. Goethe says- 
"Talent is nurtured in solitude. A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself. It is a child of solitude." 
It is some sort of meditation in the midst of madness which the author needs to get into. To sit down and think, not to judge, not to evaluate, merely to observe; And the noises settle down, words mellow into whispers; And then, slowly the truth begins to open itself like the petals of a lotus opening up to the morning sun. 
We live in an extremely commercialized world. Whenever, Money rules the roost, art is the casualty. We have little time. When we try to do things in a hurry, we fall back on rules. Rules are always binding and in the long run, suffocating, if you are on an artistic pursuit. We all write to be read. Rules tell us that to be read, you need to market your art, hawk your wares. Fine rule, but then market is a crafty criminal. Commerce enters your writing place as a guest, apologetic and awkward and then in no time, throws art out. 
Social media nibbles first at the edges of your artistic solitude, then suddenly grows into a green dragon which engulfs you along with your pen. The currents of social media are strong and unforgiving and to stay afloat is constant struggle. We create platform, write about writing. We need to come out, catch breath. Trust me, in an ocean of opinion, no one notices when you go missing. It is important to go missing some times. Those who come looking will be worth the keeps, regarding the rest, well, find solace in the fact that Social in social media is misleading. Most writers enter in the Social media to create a platform, to have followers who would hopefully become his readers, propagate his thoughts and ideas. But the deluge quickly overwhelms, one is left chasing the waves. If there is no writing, what is the point? Writing about writing is not writing. It is pretense of writing. 
Rilke wrote-
"Come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the uncommon beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience, wait for the hour when a new clarity is born."
Do not be perturbed with the writings which hound the public space. Not very uncommon to find the top ten books these days largely occupied with celebrity writing, nudging all the literary writing to shelves in the corner of the bookstore, away from the eyes of casual visitor. Don't be discouraged, Schopenhauer sold 32 copies of his first book, but his writings still show path to many today. Don't go broader, go deeper into your soul. Do not offer a story to your reader, offer your soul to your reader. That is how a life-long romance begins- a romance which travels from one generation of readers to another, from one century to another. A decade from now, a century from now, cerebral writing will survive, will hang on the dark nights like the northern star, showing way to those struggling through their own darkness. That my friends, is purpose of art. 

Avenging Our Martyrs

“ Too proud art thou to kill these sweet-tooths. But take care lest it be thy fate to suffer their poisonous injustice!... ..Because thou art gentle and of upright character, thou sayest: “Blameless are they for their small existence.” But their circumscribed souls think: “Blamable is all great existence.” … …Thy neighbours will always be poisonous flies; what is great in thee- that itself must make them more poisonous, and always more fly-like. Flee my friend into thy solitude- and thither, where a rough strong breeze bloweth. It is not thy lot to be a flyswatter. ” 
– Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
When politics fails to find answer, philosophy offers the way. A noise in the aftermath of a disgusting crime is unavoidable. However, too much of noise has its own problem. It drowns saner thoughts and it falls on its own head. Two soldiers have been martyred and beheaded on the border. Pakistan’s infamous BAT division infiltrated, attacked, killed and mutilated the bodies of two Indian soldiers in Poonch of Jammu and Kashmir. This was not the first time. In the year, Pakistan Army assisted HuJI terrorists led by Ilyas Kashmiri, killed and beheaded an Indian soldie, Bhausaheb Talekar. This was followed by similar mutilation of the bodies of Lance Naik Hemraj and Lance Naik Sudhakar Singh. Captt. Saurav Kalia was martyred and his body was also received in mutilated condition during Kargil war, in which Pakistan first attacked, then denied being part of it, and having lost the war, refused to take the bodies of its fallen soldiers. Captt. Kalia’s father is fighting a lonely fight for the dignity of his martyr son, while Government refuses to be party in raising the matter in International Courts of Justice.
I was much moved by the sad incident of the beheading of Lance Naik Hemraj and Sudhakar Singh which became my story “The Death of a Soldier” in “The Rude Tenderness of Our Hearts”. It is easy to reject an argument by converting it into a ridicule. If one is of saner mind and understand the fall-out of war, one can easily find this in TV debates. There is always a human cost in war which can neither be predicted nor measured. 
The outraged souls are getting silent, the nerves are getting numb. This has been happening repetitively and routinely on our North-western borders. Such cruelty is not alien to the culture to which the west ceded to when it refused to be a part of secular India, in 1947. We find it in Battle of Badr, we find in the bloodiest of battles for supremacy till the fourth Caliph. We also find it in the aftermath of Afghan and Mughal invasion. We cannot wish this away, not until Pakistan walks into the modern world. 
When it happened last time, Indian Army attacked into Pakistan territory in what we called surgical strike. Congress claimed this was earlier also done but to quote them, they never went chest-thumping about it. A just war has glory linked with it, an unjust war is unholy and one perpetrating it carries it always it always as a stigma. By not owning the earlier strikes, if they did happen, the then Government had left Army to live with a lonely stigma. The line between courage and cruelty, bravery and brutality is very thin. Shame it the indicator of justice attached to an act. By not acknowledging and owning the act then, UPA government had made a conscientious Indian Army, known and respected the world-over for impeccable credentials of gentlemanly conduct, equal to the rogue army of a failed nation. The NDA- Government on the other hand, by owning the surgical strike gave the Army action a great legitimacy.
After a brief breather, now again the attack happened, which left us with a shattered nation, a battered spirit, a grieving family and headless bodies of two brave martyrs. There is one very important differentiation between Indian and Pakistani population. The intellectuals there invariably side with the Government. On Indian side the divide is wide. We have strident voice urging for stiff and urgent retribution, on the other hand, immediately after every attack, military or otherwise, from Pakistan, rises in India a voice which cautions any action and  almost apologetic about our existence.
Those who do not want action, want to quickly move back to business as usual. For them two dead soldiers is nothing but a number. Much like what Pakistani soldiers are to Pakistan. We have seen the state abandoning the Pakistani soldiers earlier in 1971 and later in Kargil. But they are very wise. By faulting military action, position as war-hating peaceniks they obtain a moral higher ground and use it to abandon any action.
Military action is not a response to Pakistan. It will meet not result. This we have seen with earlier much touted surgical strike. Those of saner minds would know that and are not even asking for it. Military actions have an inherent tendency of spilling out of control quickly. The futility of it is evident in the latest act of brutality after previous strike. Those who want Pakistan to get away with this crime, are the quickest to convert this demand for action into demand for Military action.
Military action is not a substitute for diplomatic action and political will. When Military action happens without the civil establishment moving in consort with it, it seems that the nation has almost disown the military. It makes Army appear like bad boy of the family, who somehow brings bad name to the family. This is unfair on the part of Political establishment.
Every time, we engage with Pakistan, we lift the sham of the nation upwards. We allow for hyphenation, we allow the world to look at us as Indo-Pak. There is no such thing as Indo-Pak. We have carried this absurd baggage of common origin from Partition for far too long. Pakistan was carved “out of” India in 1947. It is absurd to believe that the two came into being in 1947. India is an ancient civilization, even though Macaulay-descendants would want to make us believe otherwise. India is world’s largest democracy, a civilized present with a civilized past, while Pakistan is a failed nation which travelled from one military dictator to another; India houses a religion as majority which does not dream of setting the rule of temple across the world; Pakistan is hotbed of Jihad; India is world’s third-largest economy of more than Trillian Dollars, Pakistan is a geography with GDP of around USD 230 Bn; India is known worldwide for intellectual prowess, Pakistan is known worldwide as fountainhead of terrorism. There is no equivalence.
This continued dialogue, continued surrender of India into a hyphenated situation emboldens Pakistan to consider itself as an equal to a nation which is many times larger than Pakistan in all respects. If anyone was to listen to me, Military should be given a free hand to respond to the Pakistani misadventure, but then for Pakistan, where Army sells Kirana and harbors international terrorists like Osama Bin Laden, and where hundreds get killed by their local terrorists in suicide bombings, the life of soldier means little. It would be naïve to believe that a nation whose sense of pride has been numbed and badgered over four lost battles would be ashamed and shocked to desist from acting dishonorably in the future.
Many veterans might come on TV and talk about avenging two heads with ten, some with twenty, depending on their anger and frustration. It makes for a good fiery debate, but then international relations are not same as defense relations; latter only form a part of it. They talk about what we should do with Pakistan, but they talk about what we should do with Pakistan militarily. Army action should not be used as a safety valve to release the pressure of citizens’ anguish. It must not relieve the civil leadership from taking necessary non-military actions. Without which, it is just a guess as to what would be the right number of heads to be taken as revenge which could deter Pakistan for such future misadventure. I am not a political analyst nor a military expert. But I look at things dispassionately and find that only thing that gives Pakistan courage to keep on hitting above its weight is the fact that we treat them as our equal in political discourse. 
We must therefore:- Scrap MFN (Most Favored Nation):  Some people tell me that we cannot do so because we are part of WTO Agreement. That argument is so flimsy. US is a member of UN and considered to be important inspector to control Arms across the world. It does not restricts US from trampling over other nation’s sovereignty and Bomb them with impunity. We are merely digressing from a global trade treaty with respect to a nation which is a declared enemy nation, and who has on its part not reciprocated the MFN. Now don’t tell me that MFN is binding on us and not on Pakistan. Some say, MFN is just notional and means nothing to trade. If it means nothing, why Pakistan has not reciprocated it? That is because, to my mind, Pakistan leaders use it to prove to their people (who moved from India to Pakistan out of distrust and hatred towards their then-fellow citizens in undivided India in 1947) that their hatred and enmity towards India cannot be countered by some global treaty. Indian political leaders should scrap it for the same purpose- to reciprocate the hatred, which Pakistan demonstrate by not granting MFN to India.
- Exploit the Indus Water Treaty:  I do not advocate India to come equal to Pakistan in barbarism and inhumane behavior, but we must make use of what it justly ours. If that troubles Pakistan, so be it. If they want to go to international fora crying, let them. They do it anyways.
- Abrogate Article 370- There is no reason for Kashmir to have special status. Dr. Ambedkar who gave us the constitution and behind whose name the leftist and break-India campaigners hide, was dead against it, so much so that he refused to draft it. It was drafted under the presumption and with insistence of Kashmiri Jawaharlal Nehru to give time to Kashmir to decide to join Indian Union, even when then King of J&K had acceded to India while under attack from Pakistan attempting to forcefully acquire the territory in 1948. Seventy years is enough time for the locals to think it over, and in these 70 years we have lost major Part of Kashmir to both Pakistan and China. Whatever is left with us, we are losing to Islamic Jihad. We must scrap 370, break J&K in three divisions as Ambedkar had suggested and isolate the valley, before the disease spread. It has already spread miles away to places like JNU in Delhi. We must end 370 to stop the narrative where Kashmiri leaders what India to win their hearts and minds. They never say that they want center to win them over, they want India to win them over, as if the small valley was an independent nation, not an Indian state. When they defend status-quo on Article 370, they quote Constitution of which Article 370 is a part and they forget Kashmir’s constitution which says Kashmir which is integral part of India. We must ensure that post division, the central resources are spent proportionately in each of the division, instead of valley hogging it all like the pampered, errant child.
- Reduce Diplomatic engagement to bare minimum. Send the Pakistan High-Commission staff back, shut down the Pakistan High Commission. We must call be Indian ambassador. The world will be shocked, or will pretend to be. This world doesn’t get shocked over missile attack by the US in Syria, nor does it get shocked by the dropping of Mother of All Bombs in Afghanistan. The world is not left with any moral standards. Dropping diplomatic relationship with Pakistan will be the most humane response India can offer to Pakistan for its inhuman enmity towards the nation from which it was carved out. Wipe that smirk of Basit’s face.
- Seal the borders, end trade with Pakistan. No people to people contact is needed. We need to stop pretending that India and Pakistan are partitioned like East and West Germany. Their division was ideological, philosophical. Our partition is religion, it is red with blood. Let their hatred cool down. Let us stop struggling between Good people, bad Army. It is their problem. Let them sort it out internal before we engage with them, again.
- Seek International intervention on the matters like barbarianism towards Indian soldiers. The argument that seeking international intervention will allow Pakistan to raise bi-lateral matters like Kashmir internationally is flawed and useless. Not going to International Court of Justice has not prevented Pakistan to raise Kashmir at the UN, nor did it prevent the Islamist Caliph Erdogen from advising India on Multilateral intervention to resolve Kashmir. Since our inaction on honor of soldiers is not dissuading Pakistan from internationalizing bi-lateral issues, why not bloody-well stand for once for our fallen.

As you would see, none of the steps which I propose are Military. However, there are paid interest groups, who would not want these non-military actions to be taken. They would therefore turn any demand for action into a demand for armed action and thereby defeat the demand by siding with peace against war-mongers, latter in reality, fictional invention of the liberals. I do not advocate war with Pakistan. I advocate shutting down of sense towards Pakistan. I advocate that India should treat Pakistan as a non-entity, as a black-hole of uncivilized barbarians on the borders, with whom even if we share the language, we must not share a word. We must drown them with our abominable apathy, our incessant ignore, our rigid disregard. Let us break the Indo-Pak hyphen and throw back Pakistan into the irrelevance it richly deserves as an Eighteenth-century nation in a Twenty-First century world. There are people who keep on advocating dialogue. There is a whole industry built around it. This industry will dry up once we erase this rogue nation from our national conscience. Our problem is we talk too much. When words are superfluous, silences carry the messages. As I said, when politics fails, philosophy answers. It is not for the great nation of ours to be a flyswatter, as Nietzsche said.

Bahubali 2- The Conclusion- Movie Review

We are living in an extremely cause-heavy world where causes - real and imagined cloud our minds. I saw this in the case of the movie - Beauty and The Beast. There the quarrel of the social commentators was that it explored the gay angle of one of the characters only briefly, only fleetingly. There can be nothing more absurd than that. You are demanding more from an artist than possibly he can offer. Art is a profession of lonely persuasion, and it serves the purpose its creator desires it to serve. Nothing more and nothing less. It is sad and unfortunates that the liberals, which in Indian context largely translates to Leftists, insists that art is nothing but a vehicle that should be provided to them for their political agendas and narratives to ride on. It is like insisting that the reference to the Negroes in the "The Great Gatsby" should have been expanded to cover racism in detail. The brief episode was merely to substantiate the character and nothing more. Just as creative freedom lies in writing about social causes, it also lies in the desire of the writer/ painter/ movie-maker not to write about them, or write about the causes he wants to write about. Beauty and the Beast, for instance was about intellectually aware and alive female protagonist, who is able to survive the threatening and menacing presence of the beast because of it and see the beauty of his soul. It was not about gay rights, as much as you sulk about it. 
The world around the leftist elite is in churn, the Earth under their feet is shifting and they do not like it a bit. There is a difference between period drama, historical fiction and documentary. Whenever a story is written, a cause is propagated. That is unavoidable. The writer of the story will have that cause in the back of his mind. It is this cause which prompts and prods him to write. So it will be there, even in the weirdest and the funniest (or the filthiest, for that matter) of the stories. But the causes will not always be of your liking. This insistence and urge to appropriate every work of art is annoying the liberals with Bahubali-2. 
Hindustan Times celebrates the movie, the visual extravaganza that the movie is, but then, in his review (Read here) Dipanjan Sinha in the end laments that the feminist cause is not properly supported, that female characters continue to disappoint, and they turn in to someone who needs to be 'tamed' and protected. While to my mind, Devsena , the female protagonist and the consort and later, wife of Amarendra Bahubali, the father, remains untamed till the very end. She is getting protected, mostly because Bahubali, as created in the story is a better fighter, the best of his times. But she does not bow down, not to Bahubali the husband, nor to her mother-in-law, the Rajmata Sivagami, nor to the imposingly large kingdom of Mahishmati which she says is grand only in name but have a small heart. She remains a fighter. Not that she has to. She could be been most fickle and feeble character of the story and that would be a writer's prerogative altogether. Watching the movie of course, would have been my prerogative as a viewer. But you cannot fault the art because it does not fit into the narrative. The movie is strong on Feminism in my view as the whole story would not have come into play, if the Sivagami representing the state of Mahishmati had not decided to treat Devasena as an object to be given to her older son, BhallalDev. One only needs to take off those critical, cause-stained, colored glasses that understand the whole movie is an outcome of the failure of the basic tenets of Gender equality, just as Mahabharata was for Draupadi. It makes a case for respecting a woman's wishes, and it also tells that how once a woman is in power, she runs the threat of being appropriated by a masculine state. Sivagami is a woman annexed by the masculine state, where  she begins thinking, behaving and acting like a man. This is a problem which one too often finds. Even women would agree if they honestly evaluate the world around them. The women in power often become more man then the men around them. That is their biggest truth and sorriest failure.
However, in this case, the movie represents much of what India of the past was, something which has been largely erased from our history by vested interests. So we have a very matriarchal society, the rule of Mahishmati is the wish of Rajmata Sivagami, Devsena embodies a warrior-woman who wants to make her own choices and as the movie tells us- is entitled to. Unlike Bahubali-1, the Gods prayed to are not fictional, rather their is Shiv and Krishn being prayed and celebrated in the movie. This is another reason many leftist liberals scoffed at the movie. Newslaundry report has the quarrel with what Deepanjana Pal calls Hindu bent of the movie (Read Here). She has a problem with men playing with Bulls and Cows, which goes against the beef-eating liberal mind, the mind which celebrates beef as a sign of secularism and while crying buckets over dogs and horses, considers cow-slaughter flag of freedom, ignoring that the same is illegal in most states in line with the spirit of Indian constitution, which gave a consideration to majority sensibilities which were largely ignored and thrashed by rulers over the centuries. That an agrarian society was likely to have sports built around cattle they raised, even if it looks like Kambala escapes her. She even is saddened by the fact that "There is not a single non-hindu culture in this film." Judge the movie, not the context please, I would say. She must brace herself since a movie on King Richards is about to be released and most likely this movie on British history will not have any Sikhs. Have heart, Deepanjana, this is fiction and it should be true to the times of which the story belongs. This is very unfortunate that we live in the time, where a work of fiction needs to explain historical validity while an Assistant Professor, Audrey Truschke passes off her fiction on Aurangzeb as history. 

LiveMint in its review (Read Here)  laments that there are casteist connotations to valor in the movie. At several places the character talks about Kshatriya warrior ethics. This being a period movie, it refers to Kshatriya as a warrior clan. While the movie is not a historic documentary, it by all references talk of the times gone by and represents to the mores and morals of those time. Even then, it does not talk about caste as per birth, rather warrior class. Even if it were a caste, it does not looks down at other castes. There are movies in English celebrating Gentlemen code of conduct, based in middle age. Even if a character did, it is because that is what the character thinks and wants to do. These characters represent their times which is the success of the movie. So cows are important aspect of a life seeped into agricultural world, and Gau Rakshaks or not, Kshatriyas or not, the cattle-raisers are pressed into military service when Devsena's small kingdom is attacked. There are subtle attacks at caste by birth, as Bahubali calls common citizen to join a just fight, there are subtle statements, equally on women emancipation in the character of both Devsena and Sivagami. This was never meant to be a story of social reform, it is a movie of a Son's revenge for his wronged father, and it stays that. The story borrows the theme from Mahabharat - the great Indian Epic, which leftist would call, Hindu epic. 

This movie celebrates the mythical -historical greatness of India.We do not know how much of it is true. No one can know how true the history is. Every moment which will soon gather dust over its face and sleep into obscurity, and one day become history, holds greatness and baseness in its being. Each moment in the past, just as every moment in the past is made up of bravery and cowardice; frustrating failures and spectacular successes. That is what makes history, that is what makes a nation. A nation which has, in spite of having numerical supremacy, been ruled for close to seven hundred years by invaders much different and disparaging then those who were ruled, runs the risk of having all its moment of glories erased from public memory. This is a part of the nefarious design of intellectual colonialists who want your minds to forever be subservient slaves. So the Aryabhattas, the Bhaskaracharyas, the Kalidasas go out of the windows and when an expectant nation looks at past through fictions and fables, all one finds is the bitterness and the taste left in one's mouth is the dust of past failures. This absurdity has gone for such long that a nation whose spirit has been broken over the centuries was even deprived of its the right to its historic existence when Historians claimed that there was no country as India before it was invaded (and by implication civilized) by invaders and colonialists. That the India which, while as early as 7th century (around the time Prophet Mohammad was waking up to revelations which was to unite the Arab world across tribes and set up an empire), was known to have around 80 kingdoms; they were a part of two large major kingdoms, and the external world looked at India as India- the whole, the Chinese would call it a Yin-tu India as early as 2nd century BC,as a nation with five units, from Afghanistan to Assam and Kashmir to Cape Cameroon, . Our history has largely been erased, and we are offered only those parts where we failed as a nation. 

Bahubali 2 celebrates that nation, it resurrects national confidence without being patriotic saga. It talks about the national spirit of India which always celebrated and worshiped the woman before the invaders walked in and left us with dishonest intellectuals and their alternative readings when they left. The success of India lies in the hunger of Indians as a nation to its lost glory and greatness. What do the intellectuals, so out of touch with reality know about it? It is evident in the way almost the entire theater stand up in attention to honor national anthem, while our celebrity intellectuals deride it. People not only stand up, they also sing it. Those are the people who go out and watch Bahubali 2. It is not a magical script. It is not a brilliant acting, the enlarged eyes of Sivagami haunts you beyond a point, dialogues dubbed in Hindi aren't subtle or articulate.
Beyond excellent screen presence of the actors, acting largely is mediocre. 

 But the message which is not the story, the belief in the great nation that once we were, before being trampled over, is too pronounced to be missed. The beauty of a bucolic, agrarian society with its moorings and morality, which we love in Switzerland but laugh at in India, being too Hindu for modernistic tastes, is what holds the movie and interest of the viewer. Each frame is perfect and each scene is spectacular. The visual glamour of the movie holds you to each frame right from the grand entry of Amarendra Bahubali warding off the elephant charging at the Queen Mother, amid whistles and claps. Towards the end the movies goes over the top with Ironman kind of stunts, the turns of story are predictable, with all its "Why Katappa killed Bahubali?" marketing overdrive. While the main protagonists are perfect-fit for the roles they portray, the dialogues are superficial, the script is weak, movie is too long and gravity-defying stunts become too much (but we never complained about Fast and Furious or X-Men much). Violence is too gory at times, with heads severed from the body. But then these unbelievable stunts have long been part of south-Indian movies and one ought to go prepared for them.

Still there is something lingering which stays with you once you walk out of the theater. It is the sense of grandeur, the belief in greatness in the Bharat, that is India, as the constitution mentions it. This movie is celebration of Bharat. That is where the movie wins, in spite of all its flaws. Do watch for the grand visual spectacle that this movie is. I would rate it 3.5 out of 5. 

MCD Polls and Arvind Kejriwal's Fall into Ignominy

Sometimes truth is so simple that it escapes the eyes of the clever. Clever people are naturally inclined to search the subtle, to investigate the infinite. Unfortunately they oftentimes end up being victim of their own ability. This we saw in wise people declaring 98 percent and no less possibility of Hillary Clinton becoming the US president. Closer home, we saw the wise predicting the same in UP, in Punjab and in Goa. The municipal elections of Delhi have concluded and the results are out. The results of the election are as under:
Total seats contested: 279The tally Party-wise is:BJP: 181AAP: 48 Congress: 30Others: 20To be honest, past MCDs ruled by BJP have dismal record of performance with ghost employees, ghost schemes and absolutely disheartening corruption. The common sense and sense of the wise political analysts predicted rout for BJP and either a spectacular victory for Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party or a return of Congress. The results have amazed everyone. The pundits have been breaking heads on TV studios through the day trying to decipher the results. The inferences are generally vague. Most are blaming the fact that Arvind Kejriwal ran away to promote the party in Goa and Punjab is something which disenchanted the voters. Most AAP supporters on channels, since AAP cleverly never sends their spokespersons to TV to communicate to people in their times of fall and send instead ‘supporters’ to studios so that they can easy escape out of the situation when things get too difficult to handle, credit the BJP wins to all odd things- EVM tampering to less love of masses as compared to more love of the masses for Modi.
These analyses are too simplistic. It exonerates everyone, gives vent to everyone and does not help anyway in educating anyone. AAP, looked at in neutrality, has done well for their first MCD election. In neutrality and in isolation, this is a good result. Only, this is not a result in isolation. It is based on the history of AAP. The extent to which this result is damaging for AAP can be measured if we bring referential points in to picture. The key referential points are:
- AAP claimed to be majority seats in Goa. They got a cipher and their Chief ministerial candidate lost his deposit. - AAP made entry in Punjab with 20 seats but there again what went against them was ballistic claims of forming the government. - AAP supremo, Arvind Kejriwal, himself turned this election into a referendum for his government.
One cannot dispute Arvind for making this election into referendum for his own acceptability for the simple reason that having lost the possibility of forming the government anywhere outside Delhi (in any full state, to be fair), he had to make it a referendum, proving his strength as a politician to leverage himself once again for out of Delhi initiatives. He was left with Delhi and with 67 out of 70 seats of assembly with him of near-absolute majority, he was sure of making himself visible as a strong alternative to Narendra Modi in the center of Delhi. Always a media darling, almost a creation of media, he must have counted on a sure win, irrespective of AAP contestant losing deposit in Rajouri Garden Bye-poll which AAP considered an aberration, to resurrect his position and giant-killer against Modi, latter absolutely detested to the priests of Lutyen’s Delhi. Arvind Kejriwal in 2015 Delhi election, decimating not only Congress, also BJP which was still not over its spectacular LS win, was for the media-haters of Modi a David to kill the Goliath with. Arvind wanted to regain that position after defeats in state elections, and what better place than Delhi. So up came the hoardings claiming Arvind Kejriwal versus Vijender Gupta.
To be fair, both Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal are the outcome of India’s desperation with dynastic, corrupt government. Both were created out of absolute disenchantment of people with the politics as it was with Congress- the eternal ruler and the BJP as a congress which was a little less congress. Both were the result of frustration of people who had been silent for long. Kejriwal’s initial target was Congress which after a string of scams was seen as mother of all corruption. In that sense, both BJP under Modi and AAP under Kejriwal had common enemies. The IAC had a strong RW support. RW anger against the way things were largely toothless as every election Congress would work out cunning electoral strategy, splitting Hindu votes on caste and class, and consolidating Muslim votes with appeasement and hoax of BJP as anti-Muslim dispensation. The RW support for IAC get shifter to AAP as the initial campaign went with Modi in Centre and Kejriwal in Delhi. What a wonderful team it could have turned out to be!
Kejriwal and AAP was similar to a new startup. Lateral entries came in. Everyone was appointed as the director. These people who got the top roles in return of media management, shrewd, clinical and base electoral politics had no respect for people or their mandate. As in any small IT company, we found booming after Y2K, each with an ambition of becoming another Microsoft, AAP wanted to be biggest party in the nation and therein lies its fault. A party which came into being with strong RW support, translating from the anti-corruption anger, quickly went the Congress way, with 42nd amendment (brought in by Congress against the wishes of authors of constitution during Emergency) terms of Socialism and Secularism as their ticket to power. Kejriwal came back to power with a recorded apology massage for abandoning power in 49 days in the earlier sting, actually took people for fools and over-estimated the sway he had over the electorate as an anti-corruption crusader. In politics, there are clean people, but no one can be so clean that they can clean other people without getting dirt on themselves. Kejriwal believed he was. He had seen Anna vouching for the honesty of people and masses believing him. Anna had the advantage of lack of ambition on his side. You cannot be ambitious and still claim to be treated as a saint. This could have been at the advice of reporters like Ashish Khetan and his ilk who made their career out of attacking Modi, thereby drawing some sort of adversarial equivalence that the target for Kejriwal moved from BJP to Congress. So instead of fighting against the party which was linked to all major scams in recent past, on the promise of fighting which Kejriwal came to Power, he began attacking the other candidate who represented hope for people against all the ills of Congress- like Muslim appeasement, Leftist bent, and propagandist politics. The space which is now filled by Yogi Adityanath as able lieutenant of Narendra Modi, was ceded by Kejriwal as he colluded with the corrupts like Laloo Yadav and anti-nationals like JNU brigade openly. This was clearly the case of a politician who does not know his constituency. If he had the wisdom to anticipate the leftist sway on the larger masses, instead of himself being foolishly misguided by the leftist sway on the media (from where he draws majority of his advisors), which was made abundantly clear by left getting 51 votes (not seats) in the elections. Media has seen the politics from studios where the left forms most influential group, while real-politik gets played in the dusty lanes of the less-developed India, where majority RW ignored out of national narrative for long calls the shots, if not on anything else, at least on numerical strength. By taking a visible anti-RW stance, counting on the loud protests and street strength of left (which oftentimes do not go to vote) Kejriwal reversed his initial politics and this election is a big referendum on that. What makes it a referendum is that apart from his own fooling arrogance as mentioned earlier, Delhi MCD takes into account the same constituency which gave him brute majority in assembly polls two years back. Failure in this constituency is the testimony of the fact that the same people who elected him no longer favor him. AAP sympathizers quote Bihar debacle of BJP and mention that no one asked Modi’s resignation post that. The argument is flawed a very basic level. The mandate Modi enjoys does not come from one state of Bihar. Bihar failure does not mean that he should resign disrespecting trust other states continue to place on him. On the other hand, Kejriwal is CM on the basis of the mandate given by the same electorate two years back which today has rejected him. This is a fit case for Right to Recall.
Arvind Kejriwal’s mild-mannered technocrat image was carefully crafted with pens in the pocket, oversized shirts, and worn-out slippers. Inside the pretentious image was hidden a megalomaniac, over-ambitious man. We cannot blame his failures on his coterie. He is the man who made this coterie carefully. He needed to surround himself with people smaller than him in political stature, being a novice, and make huge arrogant noises to prove his stature. Head of a state which in effect, nothing but a municipality, he not only kept hitting above his weight by attacking the PM on matters of national and international importance for which CMs of much larger states kept silent. He, the man who came to politics on the promise of transparent and accountable governance was much closer to the Russian model of communism, which talks about equality but punishes anyone who dares to question to Gulag. It was fortunate for the citizens that the second candidate our democracy created out of desperation from decades of mis-governance, emerged into more powerful figure with more sincere intentions and the position between Modi and Kejriwal was not reverse. Arvind Kejriwal, being entrusted with small constituency with small scope decided to take no responsibility and made attacking the Prime Minister his full time occupation. Kejriwal has mediocre talent around him who are equally ambitious. Having seen that Kejriwal wants to offer no real tangible thing to people, nor has what it takes to offer people anything good, apart from promises to appeal to greed of the corrupt and illegal, sought their pound of flesh for having created a demi-god out of a base man. They were appointed to committees, un-elected given cabinet rank, free hand to indulge in corruption. So one MLA’s father gets caught in rape case, another gets arrested in fake degree, yet another in sex scam, and instead of showing bit of remorse, our man arrogantly keeps attacking a man who has little substantiated charges against him, who keeps working tirelessly changing the landscape of the nation. With his Naxal colleagues, we find Kejriwal standing with the corrupt, nation-breakers, throwing public money to further his ambitions, with nation-wide advertisements and compensation to people merely on the basis of the possibility to attack Modi. If one takes the history of last two years, you would find Kejriwal standing with all things immoral and illegal- take black money and demonetization, take cow-slaughter.

The results which should have been humbling event calling for introspection among AAP cadres, found them attacking not only democratic institution like election commission, rather also attacking the voters, the same people to who they will again be going in assembly elections. It is at one level satisfying since it guarantees eradication of this bane on Indian democracy called Kejriwal in the next election. Greed has its limits, you cannot keep appealing to the greed of people especially if you have failed on your earlier promises. This bribing of voters cannot replace governance. People do realize that freebies is only for them, while governance is for their future generations. Anyone who has had a child would know, the hardships for present are easily bearable if they come with the assurance of better tomorrow. That is what story of human survival is all about. Only a short-sighted politician will not understand that. As Confucius said, “ If your conduct is determined solely by consideration of profits you will arouse great resentment.” This is not the case of absence of love towards AAP, it is the case of abomination towards AAP. Kejriwal’s colleague from media might have told him that vulture politics over deaths make good story, but nobody seems to have told him that it does not make a good politics. People do not only not love Arvind Kejriwal, they deplore him.