Arnab Ray's Blog, page 4

Understanding Trump’s Appeal

In 2016, when Donald Trump descended an escalator, most people in their right as well as their left minds laughed. This was going to be an interesting side-light, they thought, to an otherwise predictable election season where Hillary Clinton was destined to go up against Jeb Bush, billed as the clash of the two great American political dynasties after the Kennedys. The Trump election bid was going to be worth a few laughs, a few late-night comedy routines, a skit on SNL at worst. To an extent, they were not totally wrong as to the seriousness of Trump’s campaign, in its initial phases, as it has emerged subsequently, the “running for President stunt” was Trump’s way of negotiating with NBC, which had sought to replace him as the host of his hit reality show “Apprentice” because they felt he was not relevant any more to a younger crowd.

And then, as it often happens, in life and in history, what begins as dead acquires a life of its own. One by one, Trump took down, no make it obliterated, the strongest Republican set of hopefuls ever assembled, decimating the traditional face of the party (Bush), the new face of the party (Rubio), and the hardline face of the party (Cruz). He was just getting started. Then, he brushed away, without breaking even a sweat, the greatest political juggernaut ever assembled, the Clintons, a campaign that had been decades in the making. The liberal media struggled to explain why Trump had won. They ascribed it to the terrible level of entitlement and arrogance of the Hillary campaign that had taken for granted the electorate, and to the intellectual simplicity of Trump’s message “Make America Great Again”, which was seen to be traditional “patriarchal” “white supremacist” America’s middle finger to changing American values.

The solution, by definition, to the problem of Trump, they said, was simple. Come 2020, put up someone against Trump who would be a repudiation of everything that Trump stood for. That would be the first step. The rest, they were sure, Trump would take care of himself. The man was so unfit to rule, such a hateful nincompoop that he would crash and burn under the weight of his own hateful prejudices, his own greed and his own stupidity.

If there is one thing comforting about Trump, it is his predictability. He indeed went about doing exactly what people said he would do. Trump called Mexicans “rapists”, Trump openly came down on the side of white nationalists, Trump imposed a Muslim ban, Trump refused to acknowledge systemic racism in law enforcement, and Trump consistently baited women. Surely, one would think, that these groups who he had openly allied against, would all remember, gang up on him during elections, and vote him out. Add to it his shameless self-aggrandizement, and his self-absorbed denial of a health crisis that has gotten close to 300,000 Americans killed and counting, and one would think, if one was seduced by the simplicity of the idea, that Trump would be decimated at the elections. People would realize that a clown, even Pennywise, might be entertainment for a while, that he might be giving voice to their anger, but how does that matter when grandpa is dying in a glass chamber, choking for his last breath, which need not have happened if only the President did not keep saying that the Coronavirus will go away “just like that”. And why did he do that? Because the President did not want the stock market to go down, and his financial backers upset, and his own re-election chances jeopardized.

And yet, despite doing everything and perhaps even worse than Trump was supposed to do, none of that came to pass. Trump did crash and burn. Far from it.

Joe Biden, at the time of writing, is close to winning, but not there yet, but whatever happens, Trump has run Joe Biden close. Real close.

This is not Trump, the insurgent, who has come close to triumph, based on a clean slate, but Trump, the incumbent, running on a record.

How could this happen?

Here are the facts. Trump may have lost the election, but he is now the single most powerful political force in the country. The Republican Party, over the past four years, has become a hollow shell of what it was once was, losing all sense of what it stood for, in terms of ideology. A party of fiscal conservatives now keeps on increasing the deficit beyond all levels with not even a squeak. A party of social conservatives now bends their head to a much-married man who pays porn-stars to spank his bare bottom with a magazine of his face. A party that valorized the military has a leader who considers men in uniform who died or were captured as losers. A party that defeated Russia is led by a man who may be in the pay of Russia.

This is not a political party any more, it is a cult of an individual.

This is not hyperbole. In 2016, the pundits had called Trump a parasite on the Republican Party. Now it is the opposite. Republican politicians depend on Trump for survival, roll on their backs for a tweet endorsement. Those who have not gotten with the program, like Mitt Romney and John Kasich, have become irrelevant. Those who have become his butt-slaves have had their political careers soar.

A prime example is Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. A traditional moderate Republican, very popular in DC among Democrats too, he had called Trump “a xenophobic race-baiting bigot”, when Trump was a novelty candidate. But he was smart enough to clutch onto Trump’s coat-tails once he realized the way the wind was blowing, transforming himself into Trump’s hatchet man, getting the highly contentious Brett Kavanaugh through a confirmation process to the Supreme Court. In the process, he burned all the bridges to moderate elements, that he had built up for years. Because he was viewed as one of Trump’s chief enablers, and a turncoat, the Democrats threw everything they had to defeat Lindsay Graham, outspending him 2 to 1 (it is yet another lazy generalization that the Republicans are the party of big money), in a Senate race that saw Presidential levels of money being poured. And yet, Graham, purely because he was seen as a stooge of Trump, comfortably held on to his seat. Data at many places show that Trump draws votes from people who won’t vote Republican for House or Senate but faithfully vote for Trump for President. And given his race baiting xenophobia, to quote Lindsay Graham himself, it is quite amazing that Trump has increased, yes increased, his votes among African Americans and Hispanics in many regions, and his cutting into Miami Dade county, a Democratic stronghold of immigrants, was one reason why he did not lose Florida and get knocked out in the first round.

So how does this happen? If we believe the comforting narrative of liberal media, how do we reconcile the fact that a race-baiting demagogue is so popular among the races he baits? How is it that someone who is monumentally and demonstrably incompetent, remain so popular, even after people have seen the consequences of his incompetence? There is a comforting rationale provided which runs along the following lines “America is a deeply racist and divided country, and by extending the Overton window, that is the space of allowed discourse by his provocative pronouncements, Trump has legitimized the intrinsic authoritarianism of traditional white Christian nationalists.” If this indeed was the simple reason, David Duke of the once Ku Klux Klan would have become President, and several other Republican hopefuls whose lives were more aligned with fundamentalist Christian beliefs (look no further than Mike Pence) would have been at the top of a ticket.

One cannot be the President once and then come so close to being President again just by being a white nationalist, that too in times that America is becoming much more racially diverse than at any point in history.

There are two ways to understand this seeming dichotomy. The first is to accept that the Buzzfeed version of watered down Marxist theory which is regurgitated in multiple forms in Slate, Huffington Post, and increasingly in the Atlantic and New Yorker, is fundamentally flawed. It is simplistic to the extreme to try to explain history and politics through the lens of struggle between groups; human behavior cannot be explained purely by the intersection of one’s group identities. Whereas Marxist theory posits that history is a sequential assemblage of episodes wherein people fight to establish the ascendancy of their class identities, the worker fights for worker’s rights, women fight for women’s rights, and the racial minority fights for the minority’s right, in actuality, it fails to account for other cognitive processes of the human brain.

We are much more than swarms.

For one, in any country, one minority’s hatred for the other will often be more powerful than their own self-interest. The Hindu-Indian uncle in Houston will cheer for Trump’s Islam-baiting quite shutting out the fact that to Trump and many of his supporters, he is no different; that while he may want to be distinguished from the other minority, the majority clubs them together. In a TV episode, a female Trump supporter refers to Kamala Harris using a slur against Arab-Muslims, even though she is Christian and black, because to that Trump supporter, her Indian-Hindu parentage is conflated with being Arab-Muslim, and, for the ignorant, who cares, they all “terrorists and un-American”. For Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the intellectual standard bearers of what Trumpism is, the primary objective of a Trump presidency is to establish the economic domination of the educated American. This is not conjecture, they have been fairly open about their identification of their biggest enemy, trained and educated immigrants from Asian countries, like India and China. So while Trump’s public posturing has been on illegal immigration, because that is what the Trump’s base cares for, the actual policy changes have been on legal immigration.

The last few years has seen the US administration not just limit legal immigration, but humiliating and inconveniencing, in every possible, legal guest workers in high-skilled industries, based on pure caprice. And yet, and this is where individual behavior bucks group-think, many of these very same people, at the receiving end of the serrated blade-edge of Trump’s vision for the US, show up to Trump rallies and abuse other Indians online who are anti-Trump. Trump’s ceaseless Islamophobia provides the temporary amnesia needed to forget the fact that Trump is also Hinduphobic to the exact same extent. They will say “I oppose Biden because he is anti-India because he is against CAA”, but in the same breath, swear fealty to Trump who calls India a “filthy country” and who would, at a second’s notice, stab Indian interests in the back, if he saw a good business case for building Trump hotels in Lahore, and just because there isn’t, he doesn’t do it, not because he has love for the philosophy of who-he-calls “Viveka-munand”. Sure, he will show up to a Howdy Modi rally, but it’s because of what he is getting out of it, in terms of stroking his sense of ego. He doesn’t care who strokes it, Imran Khan, or North Korea, or Putin or China or Stormy Daniels. With Trump, like everything else, his racism and xenophobia is subject to negotiation.

Combining the “enemy of an enemy is my friend even though he hates me equally” there is what is known as negative solidarity. The Mexican or the Indian immigrant who has “made it” is likely to be that much harder on the newly arrived immigrant–why should they have it better than I did? This is why when he called Mexicans rapists, many of the Mexican immigrants who can vote, do not take it to mean “them”, they disassociate the slur as applicable to those that are just now arriving. Or rather they prioritize other aspects of Trumpism over a slur that targets their ethnic origins. It is the same with Christian puritan conservatives, apparently his sins of the flesh are between him and God, and what can we say, but if it is Bill Clinton, then of course that is what defines him.

So what is it that other aspect of Trumpism that makes people overlook his other follies? That is what we have to understand in order to make any sense of why even today, even after what he has done, he almost became President. No other human being, in history, with his record, could have pulled this up so close.

The “liberals” once again will say that he makes racism and sexism “all right” by giving it his Presidential seal, the presumption being that all Trump supporters are racist and sexist and every other derogatory label that has come out of decades of Marxist humanism departments. While much of Trump’s support base may very well be racist and sexist and Trump as an individual definitely is (to put it mildly), that does not imply everyone who voted for Trump is. As a matter of fact, labeling anyone who finds anything of Trump’s platform attractive as fundamentally sub-human, denies people their individuality. This “everyone who votes for Trump is a fascist racist” is perhaps one of the biggest reasons why people become emotionally invested in endorsing each of Trump’s excesses. Once you associate the worst with someone, what else does that person have left to prove? One of the foundational aspects of any cult is to convince the cult members that the world is against them, and that all they have is each other, and Trump doesn’t even need to do it, the New York Times and Washington Post and Huffington Post does it for him.

So what is it, one may ask, that one can find attractive about Trumpism, without being a terrible person? Well, if you look at his record, he hasn’t governed much different (note governed, I deliberately exclude his public pronouncements and personal peccadillos) from any classic Republican President. While it may be argued that he benefited from Obama-era policies, before Covid, he oversaw a booming economy, and for that he obviously is due credit. While Bernie would wag his finger and say it has done nothing to reduce the wealth disparity in the country, many would say that income equalization cannot be the stated objective of a non-socialist state, and that the very basis of America’s success has been the relentless pursuit of individual wealth.

This brings us to the single biggest reason why so many lean towards Trump.

It is because of what he is not. He is definitely not a progressive, socialist Democrat. That we can be sure of.

As the US moves towards an extremist philosophy of socialism, fuelled by the cult of AOC and Bernie and Ilhan Omar, Trump, the extremist, is seen as the biggest and most steadfast agent who can be expected to stand against this drastic change. In Miami Dade county, immigrants from socialist countries voted en masse for Trump, because as a colleague of my who had grown up in Communist Poland had told me, “No one who has ever seen a Communist country can ever want to be part of it voluntarily.” While it is also true that Bernie and AOC are still a distance away from Communism, the speed at which they are moving towards what is euphemistically called a “progressive agenda” gives many people in the US, cutting across lines of gender and race, room for pause. The response of the extreme AOC group will be to say “It gives you pause because you are racist, sexist, fascist. etc etc.”. This is not a new technique. In decades gone by, those that thought different were dubbed “enemies of the people” and “counter-revolutionaries” and “collaborators” by the predecessors of the ‘wokes”, now the labels may have undergone some change in order to make them fit in a tweet, but not the accompanying damnation. By refusing to acknowledge, in true Communist purge style, heterodoxy of opinion, without judging someone’s moral values, is precisely where they push people even further into the nether regions of Trumpism.

This has led to, what I had called, in my podcast, the centrifuge effect, extremist philosophies accentuating each other, pushing more and more people to the extremes. It is not a coincidence that this aligns with the explosive growth of social media as the primary tool for humans to connect. Take the example of Bernie Sanders. Around 2014, he was no one, a cranky old politician who never treated seriously, a permanent guest, because he didn’t have much to do, on talk shows like Bill Maher, pulling applause lines from audiences, but otherwise an absolutely marginal figure in Washington DC. By 2016, he had taken out Hillary Clinton, and would have become the Democratic candidate had not the Democrat party pulled off some shameful shenanigans. By 2020, he is an American legend.

And the person who has benefited—Donald Trump.

The post George Floyd riots, when the Democrats could not bring themselves to condemn looting of stores, was one of the biggest reasons, I believe, why so many otherwise-undecideds voted for Trump. Not only was there a lack of condemnation by Democrats, there was overt endorsement, when the wounds are so deep, trashing a Neiman Marcus is trivial by comparison. This may be a valid opinion, but the thing is there are many in the country who aren’t buying it, and that does not make them racist. There are people for whom the sight of Seattle being taken over by mobs with police in retreat, automatically makes them vote for Trump, regardless of all the terrible things they know Trump has done. Now one could say, with some logic, that for those so concerned about looting of luxury stores should perhaps be equally or more concerned about the looting of natural resources by oil companies that would leave lasting damage on this planet, in comparison to some handbags, or by corporate welfare that transfers wealth to billionaires from the tables of single mothers, and this is all very fine, except that people don’t think like that, the image of looting and policemen being spit in their faces and that being legitimized, is a line many that consider law and order sacrosanct just cannot accept. Of course Trump stoked and exacerbated those fears, in the way that extremist demagogues do, but it’s not that he was working off nothing.

And this is not all. After Obama was elected, one of the standard talking points for liberal Democrats became the objective to create a new political alliance that short-circuits the traditional Republican base, taking advantage of changing demographics of the country. Of course a lightning rod topic like that was then amplified by Fox News, and criminalize it how much as you want, but if you hear of new political alliances being created, one in which you by virtue of a class you belong to, cannot be a part of, your reaction will be to gravitate to someone who promises to maintain your relevance. If you hear “defund the police”, you are not going to listen to “But hey this doesn’t exactly mean what it says,” the provocative three words are enough to drive you into the arms of the “law and order” President, even though the President himself is so “law and order” that he has been found to be skimming off his own charity. You might believe in climate change and be seized of the need to drastically cut emissions, but when you read AOC’s Green New Deal vision, which frames environmentalism in the context of income redistribution, you are more likely to vote for the person who believes that global warming is a China hoax, just so to keep away the people who want to tax you to pay off someone else’s student loans.

Which brings me to why Trump lost. Barely, but he lost.

It was because he was up against him Joe Biden. Joe Biden represents the last generation of centrist Democrats, who has kept himself out of culture and political wars. His critics among progressives would say that he is but a kinder version of Trump, in that he represents the same old traditional “white male” identity and has a problematic history with women, not just the personal accusations against him, but also his behavior during the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearing. Be Joe as it may, if Trump was up against a Bernie or a Warren, he would have won this in a canter. Sure. the progressives would have mobilized masses, but they would have been mobilized in California and New York, which in the US’s electoral system does not matter (the progressives want to change that obviously by junking the electoral college), but there would have been horde migration to the Trump platform in the swing states, purely based on who he was running against.

In the end, he would have won. Comfortably.

If there is anything that history has taught us, from Robespierre and the Reign of Terror to Trump 2020, is that the way to defeat extremism is not extremism. Quite the opposite in fact. It is to eschew the ideological purity that extremists demand in favor of workability, the art of the deal ironically, to compromise, to go to the center, to realize that just like people, nations are flawed, but that does not make them bad or irredeemable, that cancel culture is nothing more than the power of the mob to silence, that people need to be engaged with rather than be asked to step back and shut up, that men and women are not merely dumb elements of a set but a complex juxtaposition of personal histories and group memberships.

This is what we should take away from all of this.

Existentialism and Jeetendra

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[Since RTDM turns 16, here is an old style post.]

Existentialism was one of the most influential philosophical movements of the last century. With its origins in the works of Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, it became a global intellectual revolution post World War II, with Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre, two French philosophers, being its most recognizable proponents. In gentler times, the purpose of life was thought to be attainment of God, and we were presumed to be born into a moral order, a world where God had decided right and wrong, that justice was establishment of the will of God. As science made God irrelevant in the cosmic scheme, and the ravages of World War II made many people in Europe lose their faith, man began to realize that there is no preordained purpose to their life, no deliverance at the very end, no universal “good life” to lead, that his actions aren’t constrained by some divine law, that the purpose of existence is one that one chooses. This led to what philosophers of the age referred to as existential angst, the anxiety of being born in a world where there is, in a way, too much freedom, in terms of the path one takes, that what your parents tell you is just an opinion, so is what the church, and no one really knows the truth, because there is no truth.

Which brings me to Jeetendra. There is no actor who better captures existential angst better than him, a man whose very name implies victory over one’s senses.

Camus said that the purpose of existence is in sensual pleasures, and it is this purpose that prevents us from killing ourselves. In the Myth of Sisyphus, Camus described the absurd condition of life, the fact that there really is no meaning, something akin to watching a clown act, and the actor as the “absurd man”.

Sisyphus if you remember was a Greek demigod cursed to push a rock up a mountain in Tartarus, the hell of hells, and once the rock reached the top it would fall down again keeping Sisyphus in an eternal loop of absurd work.

Jeetendra represents that absurd man, the Sisyphus of Hindi movies. Sometimes he is literally chasing lemons down a mountain slope with Meenakshi Sheshadri in Hoshiyar, in a homage to Camus, and most of the time he is seeking meaning through endless iterations of sensual suhaagraats, looking for his reason to exist in assorted crevices and curves.

But throughout that embracing of absurdity he cannot get rid of  that existential angst, the anxiety of a world where one is free to do what one wants, where there are consequences for actions, but no absolute moral authority that defines what is right and wrong in the clear sense that a divine universal does, whether one should fall in love with the elder sister (Jaya Prada) in Tohfa or the younger sister (Sridevi), and this is reflected in Jeetendra’s face, struggling as he does to fill the God sized hole in his heart with the purple pleasure of the moment.

But to no avail.

Or to put it in the way Jeetendra did—-Mamma Mia Pom Pom.

What Dhoni Means To Me

I know when someone retires you are supposed to write a post dripping with emotion and nostalgia, but I can’t lie.

Dhoni is not a cricketer I feel emotionally attached to, at least not in the way I was to Sachin or Sourav or Azharuddin. That’s because they played their cricket when I was in my years of romance and hope—Kajol dancing in the rain, Shahrukh Khan arms outstretched, Mithunda rising from the pyre, Sachin hitting Dyson over his head, Dada threading the offside with precision cuts, Glichrist pirouetting on the pull, Akram swerving left and right, and Azhar, twirling his blade like a samurai. These are things that I will never forget, etched as they are in my mind, like memories of college fresher’s and sitting on the green fields of Jadavpur, watching the sun set and dreaming of a world where things would be perfect.

I am sure there is a whole generation for whom Dhoni captures their imagination  and when they see him, they are reminded of themselves. In the way old games on Youtube make me feel, when I see Dada destroying Pakistan in Toronto or Sachin in Chennai, I don’t see the game as much as I see myself in the past seeing the game, oversized glasses, cotton shirt and giant T-square.

While my heart may be beyond Dhoni, because of the age in which he plied his trade, my head is not.

He is not the fantasy of a schoolboy, but an inspiration for an adult, a supremely well-rounded individual who, more than anyone else I can recall, understood what success is, and often more tellingly, what success is not.

Let me explain.

As a cricketer, I found his batting too muscular, too brute-force for my liking. In defense he prodded around like Miandad, and his attacking shots had the subtlety of a gunda breaking windows. As for his keeping, he lacked the delicate grace of a Dujon or a Wriddhiman Saha, his glove work was never subtle, and his stumping, while quick and effective, never did have the drama of a Sadandand Viswanath, that katana blade like whoosh through the air, and maybe I am remembering this all wrong, but that’s my truth, and I am sticking to it.

But where Dhoni was head and shoulders over anyone in any sport that I have seen, was his sense of precise balance. When to go for the third umpire, when to pull out the helicopter shot, when to run down to third man—-there was a clinical detachment to his decisions, it seemed as if there was a mathematical model of supreme precision running in his head, making algorithmic trades in the market of cricketing risks. It was exasperating watching him dead-bat with the asking rate going to twelve, but he knew that the numbers still were not in his favor, the deeper he took the chase, the more the odds will turn for him, with 30 to get in 2 overs, the bowler may make a mistake, Dhoni will then send him out of the park, and then the bowler will get flustered then, and the odds of the bowler making another mistake increases, which increases Dhoni’s chance of sending the next ball to the boundary.

Much was made of Dhoni in his later days, when he could not finish in the way he once could, a meme contrasting him hitting a six to finish World Cup 2011 being put aside of him leaving a ball in a similar chase intending to show him as lesser than he was, but even there one could see the Dhoni in it. The older, more mature, Dhoni calculated his odds were better letting that ball go, what with a chronically failing back, the chances were that he would hurt himself and get out, so it was better to just raise the bat away. An younger Dhoni would have used the same risk calculation function and decided to swing for the fences.

When I had compared to him to a great fund manager in an old post on my blog, I was not kidding, that’s how he played his cricket, calculating odds on the micro and the macro level, and taking cold calculated risk based decisions every time. And once you see the present captain, running around like a ten year old boy who has first discovered the joys of adult abuses and smutty magazines, with his emotions absolutely in control of himself, you realize what a big thing this is.

The state of being Dhoni.

But it was not just what he was on-field that appealed to the adult in me, but what he was off it. His career was always something that was a tool to achieve what he wanted in life. But it never became his life. Be it taking time off for going to the military or partying with movie stars when he was young and playing with daughter when older, Dhoni was someone who captured that balance many of us adults find tough to maintain, where we blur the lines between work and happiness, and try, without success, to let success at work fill the hole in our heart, except that it never happens. The promotions may come, just never the fulfilment.

It’s not that Dhoni did not enjoy what he did for his living, nor was a zen sadhu to the trappings of success. After all one could claim, he hung around, like most Indian greats, a few years beyond his optimum sell-by date, but there was never a time when you felt he was obsessed by attaining success in the game. This often came off as callousness, some former cricketers commented on it that Dhoni never seems devastated when he loses, forgetting he is neither very animated when he wins. But that’s because he is truly never in it, the game is not the end in itself, but a means only, for he knows that triumph and disaster are both fleeting imposters. And which is why he has a trophy cabinet fuller than anyone in contemporary cricket, and a bank balance fuller than anyone too. because he never took work personal.

There will be many images of Dhoni we shall leave with—for some, it will be that shot into the night sky in 2011, for some it will be some moment in that last over of the T20 World Cup final, but for me it will be Dhoni playing with his daughter, his back turned to his team while they celebrate a trophy.

The day is done, the game is over, and the singular man is alone in his little world, eschewing that which is but fleeting, the kinetic joy of attainment, for that which is permanent, true happiness.

That I shall remember.

On August 5 and Ram Mandir

I am sorry but you can’t be for Americans taking down statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and also be opposed to the tearing down of the Babri Masjid which was constructed over a Hindu temple, whose only significance, given that it was not even being used as a mosque, was that it stood for many who had been subjugated once as a symbol of their subjugation exactly as Confederate statues do in the US.

Personally, I believe history cannot and should not be altered by breaking monuments, that one should recognize and learn from the past, but not try to change, because history can’t be changed, or buried, or pulled down, just because the symbol is gone doesn’t mean the past is too, and all you end up doing by tearing down buildings and monuments is creating bad history to get rid of bad history. But I also acknowledge that there are people who don’t think like me.

Unlike those with opeds in Indian express who think they won’t find Ram in this Ram temple, there are millions who will, for whom this is not about yet another temple for Ram, but about an assertion of their identity. For centuries, Hindus have been conditioned to think of their faith as a faith only and not an identity, and in a world where this is a privilege afforded to everyone else, without judgement, one can’t expect Hindus at large to stay different.

I personally, being an agnostic and not observant and also because of the way I was brought up, do not consider Hinduism as my primary overarching identity, I cling to my Indian and Bengali pride more than my Hindu one, and Ram to me is a lead character in a great epic but not someone I can get emotional on, but as a liberal, I do recognize that not everyone is obliged to think like I do.

The core of liberalism is understanding that your world view is one of many and accept, if not agree with, other views and realize that what is not emotive or important for you does not imply that it has to be the truth for everyone

On Mental Health

This is a post about mental health. I don’t claim to be an expert on the topic, the only experience I have with mental health or the lack of it is having been a sufferer for as long as I can remember. I do not use the word “depression” henceforth in this post for I am told it’s a clinical term, like diabetes, and I haven’t been diagnosed with it ever. Formally.

So here is what I find works and doesn’t work for me.

1. Sharing on social media: I am moderately open on social media about my failures and insecurities. I do this not because it helps me a lot (perhaps a bit) but because I find the insincerity of happiness projection on social media stiflingly oppressive (I am not saying I don’t do this myself, this projection). I have been advised against griping on Facebook because it gives me enemies satisfaction, and it’s true it does, but I still think it’s worth it, if only to let those that don’t share their failed dreams so openly know that they are not alone.

Here’s the thing. The unending collage of success that is your friend feed is made up of people giving you only a curated slice of their life. If they were more honest about their checkins, for instance into the waiting room at Sealdah station as they were about their checkin into Emirates first class lounge, social media might end up cooling us down rather than inflaming us further.

Is sharing your failures attention seeking? Maybe it is, but isn’t that true for all social media behavior?

2. Talking to friends doesn’t work for me. What usually happens to me is that I am told things that make me feel even worse, and since I sought that person out, I need to stay silent and bear it. Either that or I wind up listening to that person’s problems all the while thinking “which turn did I take to reach here?”

Yes it’s obvious I don’t have many friends.

3. Getting professional help. In other words, you pay so that they don’t tell you their problems.

My own experience. This has been an unmitigated disaster. Part of it has been my terrible experience with psychiatrists in Calcutta when I was in college and was in therapy for let’s just say years. Not one, but with two (one made house calls) psychiatrists. Besides the medication, which made me sleepy and made me put on weight and made me lose my metabolic balance for good but did nothing to give any sort of peace, I would sit and get shouted at by them. Yes you heard that right. Shouted at.

What will happen to my parents, what a terrible person I am for thinking like this (it should be obvious by now why I was there) and that I should “man” up. Yeah that bad. Overall these two succeeded in making me feel terrible and miserable, even more that I was, which when you think about it, was quite the achievement. And so it went on till either I cried (“man” up) or I sat stone faced and waited for the session to end. I was 21 then. For those who have read Yatrik, that story about the teacher and the boy who paints was told to me to by a person in the waiting room of the psychiatrist. The one that didn’t make house calls. The one that was the worst. There is a bit of this in Mahabharata Murders too.

4. What works for me is going to sleep. Nothing is better than rebooting the threads in your brain.

5. Maybe it’s me but I don’t think talking per se solves problems. For me reading does. I read a lot about philosophy, analytically trying to deconstruct why I feel what I feel and what I can do. I mean what can someone tell me that I haven’t already thought about myself?

6. Some toxicity in life you can’t walk away from, you own it. But some, surprisingly more than you think, you can. I walked away from Indian publishers and agents because it was pushing me to a place I knew I won’t be able to come back from. Do I miss writing? Yes I do. But it’s definitely worth what I have gained. Being sane.

And yes someday when reading habits change I will be back. Terminator style.

7. Just because you really want something the world won’t conspire to make it happen. It did for Paulo Coelho though because people bought into that shit. Just because you put your phone number in the comments of Disha Patani’s Insta account every day without fail and with full sincerity does not mean she will call you back. Recognize the boats that have sailed. And raise your hat and wave goodbye.

8. No matter how terrible you may think life is, there will be good moments, and they will come to you unannounced, the laughter of your daughter, a humming bird on a flower, a good movie, a rerun of Gunda, a great book, a perfect bite of a kabab, a kind word, being mistaken for Arnab Goswami on Twitter, and when they do happen, out of the blue, remember that moment.

Life is surprising, in bad ways of course but good too. Even if you are 9 wickets down, bat out the overs. There will be some wides, the world will overstep in your favor and who knows, it just might rain.

9. Take care of yourself, and be thankful, even if you sometimes forget what for.

Gulabo Sitabo—the Review

[Has spoilers]

In a way I am glad that Gulabo Sitabo released on Amazon Prime, if people had paid five hundred rupees for the cinema experience, and then seen it, I am sure it would have gotten far more social media vitriol than it has been getting. Gulabo Sitabo is not for everyone, things don’t move in the frenetic way that Indian mainstream audiences are used to, the humor is subtle, and the story is made subordinate to characters, and the characters subordinate to the world, and what it says about the human condition it leaves unsaid, none of which particularly engender it to easy digestion over popcorn, or in this covid world, whatever it is you have at home.

So what is Gulabo Sitabo about? Gulabo Sitabo, a puppeteer’s tale of two wives warring for the attention of their husband is a perfect metaphor for the two men; played by Amitabh Bachchan and Ayushmann Khurana, both suitors for control of a dilapidated once-great mansion, one who wants to own it and stay forever, and the other who wants to keep paying the existing rent of thirty rupees forever. As it is when two people fight for the attention of someone else, it is a relationship of toxicity. Here the love is not for a person, but for a place, not so much the place itself, because the “mahal” in itself is a filthy, musty, wet, cobweb and human excreta-strewn nightmare with a foundation as unloveable as a house can be, but love for the inertia of their existences.

The character played by Ayushmann Khurana, Baankey Rastogi, runs a little flour grinding factory, drives a two-wheeler, has a microwave, and should be able to afford a place far better than the one he stays in, except he doesn’t, because he pays thirty rupees for it, and even though he complains about the terrible condition of the house, he fights to stay in it, to the point that the fight becomes an obsession: as he schemes and colludes and lies, all so he can continue to stay in that state of terrible stasis. While his sisters show signs of mobility, working towards their education, Baankey Rastogi has no desire for any self-improvement, no will to ascend, his obsession with staying as he is makes him first lose his girl-friend and then finally the house itself, and yet even after that, he is unable to move on, till the very last shot, wandering about like a ghost in a house that has evicted him, caught like a fly in the cobweb of comforting mediocrity.

Exactly like Baankey Rastogi is the other lover of the house, Chunnan Mirza Nawab. This might be Amitabh Bachchan’s greatest performance, because for the first time in his life, the very first time, he plays a total “loser”, not hero, not a villain, but someone fundamentally unlikeable, a dilapidated man with not a trace of heroism, as UnBachchan as a Bachchan character can be, who steals trinkets from his own house when he thinks no one is looking, tries to con his own wife into selling the house, bilious and complaining and scheming, and worst of all, not particularly bright. Bachchan gets everything right about the character, the gait, the way he looks at people, the mumbling and while the prosthetic nose does sometimes look too obviously prosthetic, it effectively hides the man behind the character, and the legacy he carries with him in every frame.

Mirza dreams of money, and not a lot of money by the standards of the day because he too like Baankey, is caught in the trap of his obsession, the idea of money more than its value, and every time the way Bachchan crumples when someone brings up a sum of money, almost orgasming with passion, is not just hilarious, but reflective of who he is and what the house means to him. Mirza married a much older woman, the Begum, the owner of what this house once had been, a grand mansion, landed old-world Lucknowi royalty, purely for the house, and while over the years, it would have been obvious to most, that he would never inherit the house for a substantial amount of time to enjoy the fruits of ownership, stuck as he in an obsession for the building, he is too blind with love to see that. The begum is above ninety, and he is above seventy, and yet he schemes and plots and potters about, scarcely seeing the futility of his efforts, because his love for the place, like most loves, is blind, blind to his own age, blind to the reality of his situation. Like Baankey, Mirza too has stopped growing.

Also stuck in the stasis is the Begum. Years ago, she had eloped with the man of her dreams, and then realized, as she expresses in the letter at the end, that she valued her palace, her standing more than she valued the love of a human being. Which led her to marry Mirza, knowing fully well, that Mirza was as much in love with the palace as she was, that he would, like her, never leave. She had borne the loveless nature of their marriage as her compromise, the cost of staying the person she was, till finally, when Mirza tries to con her into signing away the palace, she has an epiphany, beautifully expressed in the last letter she writes to explain her “elopement” with the man she had once loved. the epiphany being that she has to break free of her own toxic relationship with the place and with Mirza, and she does that, and leaves. It comes very late for her, this realization, but it does happen. But the two men cannot still see that fact, maybe because they are not that wise, and maybe because their love is deeper.

There is a beautiful shot, late into the movie, of Mirza walking away from what once used to be his home, stealing a balloon, a trinket of a love for that which no longer was, a broken man with a memento of a broken house, the frame capturing in the way only great film can, an unforgettable picture of human folly.

Highly, highly recommended

Jamai Ador

It’s time to talk about Shatabdi Roy, TMC MP and once actress. She was in the news recently, not for this amazing sense of color coordination, but for angrily exclaiming that migrants returning to Bengal due to covid shutdowns shouldn’t be expecting VIP treatment, which to Bengalis of a certain age, is referred to as “jamai ador”, the premium treatment reserved for the son in law, in that he gets dibs on the fish piece with least needles, the fleshiest part of the mango and the Proline T-shirt of the same color that Ravi Shastri wears.

As a politician she has been in the news several times over the past few years: for openly declaring that as a MP her first priority would be people who voted for her, and not those who didn’t, and that her value as a MP was that she appeared for free in events, and that was a value proposition for her constituents, cause they got to see a superstar in real life without paying for the privilege.

These are remarkably honest statements and why I believe she is an amazing politician, touching as she does, with precision and economy of expression, why celebrities are MPs under Didi regime and the attitude of this most “liberal” government to those who don’t agree with them.

For those who don’t know, Shatabdi Roy was the reigning queen of Tollygunje (Bengali film industry minus Satyajit Ray) once upon a time, locked in battle for supremacy with Debasree Roy (known to rest of India as Satyavati in Mahabharata). If Debasree Roy did Kolkatar Rosogolla in Rakte Lekha, Shatabdi Roy did the identically choreographed O Dadu Samle Cholo (Grandpa, watch where you are going) in Lal Pan Bibi (which would be a great name for a Jyoti Basu biopic with the theme song O Dadu Samle Cholo ) cementing the epic rivalry between the two.

To be honest, their markets were different, if Debasree Roy was the urban diva, spoiled and privileged, playing piano while covered in gold, as around her adorable little boys ran around in baba suits (the sign of high living in Jyoti Basu Bengal), Shatabdi Roy was the demure middle class lady in salwar kameez and cotton saris silently pining for Victor Banerjee (in the days when he was a heartthrob of the intellectual Bongololona from JU Ingliss, and not what he has become now, a brand ambassador for hospitals where you go when your heart throbs) in the song “Tomari cholar pothe”, mandatorily sung last day of class in high school, to signify unrequited “prem”. Together with Chiranjeet (also a TMC politician) and referred to in Anandalok ( local Bengali film magazine) as Banglar Stallone in the same way Stallone was called the Italian Stallion, she ruled the mofussil, the place in Bengal that’s not Calcutta or Darjeeling, and when men wistfully looked out of the window while being squeezed in to Budgebudge local, stuck between armpit sweat and vendors selling muri logenze, it was said that Shatabdi Express was all they had in mind.

Of course Shatabdi Roy came in for criticism for her latest statement, but I criticize those who criticize her, surely her supreme achievements in the cultural realm, her domination of the mind space of Bengali men who are now uncles, should count for something in terms of defining her legacy, so what if she makes an insensitive statement once in a while.

YoYa

Who is the Kim Kardashian of India?

My answer will surprise you. It’s Yogendra Yadav.

No one knows what he is famous for. He is supposed to be an expert in predicting elections but is typically outperformed by a parrot in a cage by the name of Meethu. For some time, he became part of AAP’s band of revolutionaries, but there is only so much holier than thou posturing even Kejriwal can tolerate, and he found himself like Robin Uthappa let go by his franchise, for the very same reason: swinging his bat too much without making a connection.

He now is found in every discussion on NDTV, wearing a costume last seen being worn by Nana Patekar in Ghulam e Mustafa, standing in front of a banner of a party called Swaraj Party, a party whose only member is himself, the political equivalent of a male engineering student’s romantic circle. His voice is very soft and buttery, like a compounder telling you the tetanus shot won’t hurt, and he peddles solutions which can be summed up as “Let’s tax the middle class more” and the government should spend more and that this country is intolerant.

In a recent declaration (he and his fellow intellectuals love declarations and manifestos, more than someone with project manager certification loves making project plans) penned with worthies that include India’s premier Nehru family fan fiction writer, he went full Mao and proposed that the government be given the right to take over private property in a post covid world . This seemed like a honest mistake of being honest, a galti se Freudian slip, which he corrected by rephrasing it as government should look at revenue streams other than taxation, which to be honest, isn’t much different, given that you already revealed what your true intent was.

But I give him this. He was possibly not referring to coming over and taking your money. His sights were higher. He was talking about forcibly grabbing away things his ilk want to be grabbed away: temple funds which the government does have control over, corporate profits made by those he thinks finance BJP, sapping their capitalist mojo through the instrument of nationalization ( these guys hate nationalism but love nationalization in the way I hate Manish Tewari but love Manisha Koirala), and by doing this, taking away the power of those he considers the “enemies of the people”.

The tragedy is not what Yadav feels, after all everyone is entitled to their opinions, their prejudices, and in his case his fantasies. The tragedy is that this man is consistently provided a platform. And that itself grants him the validation he needs to continue as a public intellectual, the mutually recursive authority argument: he is famous because he is on TV and he is on TV because he is famous.

Paatal Lok—the Review

If you have ever watched porn, not that I ever have, you will find that it is a genre that is more a slave to trope than most others: the pizza man rings, and then the actors go through assorted physical configurations, choreographed in roughly the same sequence video after video, culminating in a climax, where the only point of divergence in the experiencing of the genre is whether the audience outlasts the actors or vise versa. This is precisely why porn is uninteresting, for most people above the age of twenty, because this never really looks like life, not because the individual acts shown are not performed by regular people, they definitely are, but that they do not occur with this intensity and robotic certainty in reality, and never all of them together.

Paatal Lok, Amazon Prime’s latest “This country has gone to the dogs thanks to Brahminical Hindus” suffers from much of the same limitations, being the kind of “liberal porn” that OTT platforms have realized matches the ideological slant of most of their paid subscribers. All of its incidents are true, to counter the “Are you saying these things don’t happen in India?” but the way they are put together to paint a hellish vision of “Brahmanism”, beef-lynchings, Pakistan and ISI-sponsored-violence being used a false flag, CBI-as-peddlers-of-untruth, marauding crowds of Jai Shri Rams, caste violence, sexual violence, micro and macro aggression against minorities, the innocence of the perpetrators and the guilt of the victims, one after another, in a “all together now” panorama, there is that feeling that much of it is done to satiate the audience, to confirm their world view, to pack everything into 9 episodes, breathlessly frenetic but ultimately too engineered.

Like porn.

Not that I have ever seen porn myself.

Where Paatal Lok diverges from your garden variety porn, and what makes it definitely worth the watch, is the fact that it has terrific performances, an intriguing set-up, brilliant cinematography, and a poignant, immensely human, end, which I believe says that in a world of unrelenting butchery, small acts of empathy are the only salvation available. Based on the Roop Ki Rani Choron Ka Raja-level literary misfire that was “The Story of My Assassins”, written by the once-blue-eyed-boy of the political persuasion to whom this web-series is targeted to, Tarun Tejpal, a fact that is weirdly not credited anywhere, possibly to avoid the backlash from the same crowd (most of whom haven’t read the original to cotton onto the similarities), Paatal Lok is a polished re-draft, cutting through some of the Booker-bait flab that characterized the literary exertions of Tejpal, to make a leaner, meaner, more impactful and accessible version of the original.

Jaideep Ahlawat as Inspector Hathi Ram Chowdhury is immensely watchable, a well-etched character with a well-etched character arc. This is again where Paatal Lok shines, it has character arcs, for all the principal characters, be it Neeraj Kabi’s news anchor or each of the “assassins” character arcs building the story arc, in a way that you rarely see done so perfectly in the Indian web-series space. (Ozark and Succession are examples of complete mastery of this dual-arc development).

It is difficult nowadays in the age of woke, to separate the traditional perspectives of story, progression and denouement from the politics, our progressives would say that unless it says the right things (or rather the left), it,  should not be considered art and, those that made it, should not even be provided a platform. Without going into this controversy, for there is no end to it, I will give my recommendation to Paatal Lok for how it says what it says, rather than what it says for the most part.

Coping With Losing Your Job

As news of massive layoffs is drowning out even the fake positivity of Linkedin, I thought I would make some observations on getting laid-off.

First of all, our generation needs to move away from the assumption that we grew up with—that jobs are for life, that you only get fired if you suck at your job or if you are crooked. This was our parent’s mindset, it should not be ours. While it is never a great feeling to be told you are not needed and to be asked to clear up your desk, the worst thing you can do is to take it as a call on your significance in the greater scheme of things—you are so much more than a company-issued ID badge.

Second, it is no one’s fault really. Not the guy who is giving you your dismissal letter, not the guy who signed it, they are all cogs in the wheel of capitalism. And trust me, the other option is communism, where when they are terminating you, they are really terminating you, so this is the best you have to work with. Whatever it be, it is not your fault. And we are in a society now, where no one thinks it is yours, and the ones who do don’t matter.

There is nothing to hide in a lay-off from a career perspective. When you are asked in your next interview why you left, say “I was laid off”, that is a answer much more reassuring to hiring managers than other non-answers like “I was not challenged enough.” or “I wanted to do something different”, which makes people think “How long before this person starts feeling the same about this role?”

How do you protect yourself against a lay-off? By telling yourself, repeatedly, that there is nothing permanent about your permanent job. We are like Uber drivers on a call, only we don’t need how long the drive will take. Keep your skills upgraded, have savings to last 6 months of no work, always be prepared for an interview even when you have a job, have a resume current, and always be open for conversations with recruiters even if you have no intention of leaving your current place of employment. Those recruiters are going to be your first contacts when you lose your job.

Keep your desk clean at work, don’t have anything that won’t fit in a box when you have to carry it out, don’t react at all when they give you the letter, no anger, no tears no “Please don’t do this”, remember this is not people you are dealing with, but a system, and once they give you your letter, go home, sleep it out, do not do anything for 48 hours. Let the emotion drain right out.

Finally, a layoff is a good time to ask yourself questions. Often the inertia of motion of a regular job prevents us from asking the question of whether we are happy doing what we are doing. And remember, always remember, just because they took the role away, doesn’t mean the actor has to die with it.