Arnab Ray's Blog, page 6

Back To Comfortable Numbness

Over the years I have come to care increasingly less for cricket, partly because with the aging of my cells, the very essence of what I am, I have become physically desensitized to things that once aroused great passion like mihidana-sitabhog, Shilpa Shirodhkar in the rains and discussions of why Nayan Mongia played that shot in Chennai, partly because there is always cricket now and games and tournaments have lost any form of meaning or historical context, because there is always the next one.

Except the World Cup.

Maybe because there is some memory of what the game used to mean for me once in those two words “World Cup”, of Dave Houghton as the superman, and Lara surgically cutting through the South African off-side cordon against Symcox, of Akram jagging back into Alan Lamb, Venkatesh Prasad giving Pakistani Punjabi machismo a firm kick in the middle-stump, Sachin Tendulkar sending Akthar over, De Freitas ending the Gavaskar era, Richards’s head tilting up to Madan Lal and Kapil running back and changing the history of independent India, a chain of moments that define not only pinnacle of sport but also fragments of myself through the years, the smiles, the tears, the clenched fists and the urgent need to believe in men once I no longer believed in Gods.

Today’s defeat hit me hard. In the way that defeat in 87 and 96 did. In 2015 we lost in the semis too, but there I was proud of the way India played. On fast Australian tracks, we punched many categories above our weight level, dominating the group stages before we ran into Australia on a juiced up pitch. We had no business going that far but we did, and one could not but feel proud of the team for that. In 2003, we lost too, but there again we did great to get into the finals on surfaces not suited to our game and with Dinesh Mongia, where we lost to a side which was a few light years ahead us and the world in every department of the game. In 2007, we carried an old team and the coach was a mess, and we did exactly as we should have. I was angry, but I wasn’t this sad.

In 87 I was sad. I was sad when against a sub-standard English team, two left-arm spinners, Maninder and the other our current national coach, fed Gooch in the exact zone he was most comfortable in till he had a century against his name, and then with the game still very much in our reach, Kapil Dev went for the bravura shot against Eddie Hemmings and holed out.

In 96 I was sad. I was sad when we took the wrong decision on winning the toss, and then after….well…I don’t need to tell you, if you are reading this, you know what happened, and if you don’t, let me introduce you to the app called Tiktok.

Did I say sad? No scratch that. I was gutted. Because I knew we were so much better than this, that we lost because of ourselves.

And now in 2019. Once again that feeling, a feeling I no longer thought possible. Coming in as favorites to England, and for good reason too, this is the best bowling attack this country has ever had, India’s performance never hit 80% of peak and I am being generous. The game we won were because of one man, Rohit Sharma, and Virat Kohli, greatest batsman of all time for India as he maybe, never really hit his top gear, dialing it in, like Naseeruddin Shah in commercial movies. And we were carrying Dhoni, no matter what his fans would say, and it all come to a head in the first knock-out game of the tournament.

Top 3 number one. Now Top 3 each score one. After that expecting Dinesh Kartik to bail India out would require Soumya Sarkar bowling at both ends, and that not even Amit Shah and Ambani together can manage.

It’s on days like these that the team looks to their captain for inspiration, Kapil after 17/5 and Dhoni in the final, this is where those whose batting number look good on paper make their way into the pages of history books, and Kohli failed. Team India failed. Despite being the better team. In contrast, one only had to look at Williamson to see how things should have been done, both got identical fresh conditions, but then the outcomes diverged. And how.

It’s of course time for introspection. Which means a series with Sri Lanka at home. And going back to cricket by the numbers, the flaccid fizz of franchise T20s, and a state of comfortable numbness.

Mohra Turns Twenty Five

As Indian cities struggle with dwindling supplies of water, prompting even Leonardio Caprio, the man who died from too much water in Titanic to tweet about the dangers of too little, it is worth remembering today the great film Mohra.

Released twenty-five years ago, almost to the day, many scientists blame it for triggering the water crisis that has swept the world. According to legend that was spread over the Whatsapp of the day, during the shooting of “Tip Tip Barsa Paani”, a song featuring Akshay Kumar and Raveena Tandon, entire oceans were drained through the action of drenching reporter Roma Singh played by Raveena Tandon, as she danced on the roof under a deluge that would make Noah keep his ark tethered to the shore, while Akshay Kumar, observed the effect of buyoancy and Bernoulli’s equation in real-life fluid conditions, and then decided to become a Canadian citizen. This song, over the course of twenty five years, has led to much wastage of wetness, and to this day, remains a popular staple of Bhojpuri orchestra performances where water is poured on the dancer to the tune of this song in tepid simulations of the original, with nary a concern for the environment.

But to limit the scope and impact of Mohra to just this one song is like dismissing Sistine Chapel as just a painted ceiling.

Mohra is a cinematic milestone, the kind of movie that not influences a genre but who you choose to become. Released a month before Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, which would irrevocably change the face of Bollywood with chocolate, lime juice and “mausam ka jadoo hain mitwa”, Mohra was the last Elaan-e-Jung of the old Bollywood action potboiler, before the Barjatiyas and the Chopras and the Johars would flood out the genre forever with their pink slush of fraud NRI-nostalgic romantic sugar-water.

Inspired by Death Wish 4, Mohra almost had its thunder taken away by an earlier released inspired by the exact same film. Called Bhookamp (Earthquake) it had the legendary Rahul Roy dancing to “Tum jo mile gulshan khile” with Mamata Kulkarni, but for reasons I shall never understand like how Devang Gandhi never became Don Bradman, it sunk without a trace.

Mohra though was made of sterner stuff. Akshay Kumar, Raveena Tandon who was the real hero of the movie, and the joker of the pack, Sunil Shetty (then without the “e”) ably backed by Paresh Rawal and Naseeruddin Shah, this was 90s cinema at its very best.

Names like Jindal and Tyson. Superhit tunes from the Amit Shah of techno-qawwali, Viju Shah.

Roaring action.

Lyrics like “Subaah se lekar shaam tak, shaam se lekar raat tak, rat se lekar subaah tak, subah se phir sham tak, mujhe pyar karo” which depending on your mood could be a soft romantic song or the tag line for Viagra.

Never-saw-that-coming twists like Pankaj Udhas doing the voice of Sunil Shetty.

The most beautiful description of fault tolerant system architectures I have ever encountered in popular cinema in “Ei kaash kahee aisa hota, ke do dil hote seene mein, ek toot bhi jata ishq mein to, taqleef na hotee jeene mein”

The most poetic excuse for an unintentional breaking of wind in “Chalee kaisi yeh pagal pawan main kya karoon”.

But all of this pales in front of the most bizarre ending of the era, something straight out of David Lynch, with Naseeruddin Shah,the villain, who rather than escaping from the clutches of the hero, chooses to waste precious time trying to humiliate him, first by making him get down on his knees, then slap himself and then finally making him take off his pants, while giving live commentary “Pantloon utaar raha hai, Baat accha hai” in the deliriously happy tone of Manjrekar when a player from Mumbai plays well, while all the while Sunil Shetty screams Naheeee naheee, which would inspire years down the road, some of the most iconic sequences of Dhadkan, the last great 90s movie ever made, again starring the two leading heroes of Mohra.

 

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Twenty-five years ago. All of this happened.

Aah how time flies.

Seems just like yesterday, Tu Cheez Badi Hai Mast Mast rocked Superhit Muqabla.

Seems just like yesterday a twenty-something with oversized glasses walked into a single-screen theater elbowing through the crowd steaming with sweat and expectation.

Seems just like yesterday, that watching Hindi films was fun.

 

The Crawl

Champion teams are defined by a story. The 83 team was a group of no-hopers with a team, 87 was a Renaissance for the team, 92 was a back to the wall coming back miraculously and 75,79, 03, 11, 07 and 15 was about domination of the best team.

If India is serious about winning 2019, it needs to decide what its story is going to be. Because right now, after the England game, the narrative is one of bizarre surrender.

Today we saw 2 batsmen, Dhoni and Jadhav, not even trying to win. Not only were they not trying to hit boundaries, but they were first-bumping through it all, as if that was the plan, as if they were satisfied with how things were going.

True only 27 runs had been scored off the first 10 overs, and that in itself was going to put pressure on those coming at the end. But slow starts happen, when the bowling is good and wickets needs to be conserved. There is cricketing logic there, you conserve wickets in the beginning hoping to ride out a good spell. You do not do it at the end.

Scoring 100 odd of 10 overs with 6 wickets in hand should not be, in 2019, cause for a team to give up, that too one with aspirations of being a World Cup champion. The two batsmen gave up, in the way Mongia and Prabhakar did once upon a time, and that represented the nadir of Indian cricket. One can understand two tail-enders batting to reduce the margin of loss, but Dhoni and Jadhav play in the team precisely to finish games in these situations.

Which is why today was such a low. This was a craven, spineless display that made no cricketing sense.

Mind you there is no shame in losing, or losing big, but there is nothing worse than not even trying. It is the very essence of competitive sports, to try one’s best to win and if they don’t, why it’s not a game anymore.

Was this the plan? If it was to eliminate Pakistan it makes no sense, Pakistan are not statistically eliminated and it’s in India’s cricketing interest to play Pakistan in the knock outs rather than England because Pakistan is by far the weaker team. I want to believe this to be not the case, because if it was we would have validated the hate-anchors on Pakistan TV, that in 2019 we even care about Pakistan as a team, when there really is, with all due respects, no cricketing reason to do so.

If this was not the plan but just Dhoni and Jadhav’s incompetence, they deserve to be dropped. Not because they played badly or because the pitch was bad (as Rohit Sharma said in the post-match conference) but because, and a lot of experts who have played the game at the highest level felt the same, that they didn’t even try.

Of course we know that won’t happen. But it needs to, if we are to salvage an iota of self-respect.

Just going on to win the Cup won’t redeem the narrative. Winning the trophy does not make one champions.

The Battle for Bengal

[Image courtesy: Rediff and Reuters]

Hobe Baam, Hobe Baam, Baam Baam Hobe Hobe.

It will be left, will be left, and left and left again. For a generation that grew up hearing this chant, the replacement of Ram with Baam is shocking to say the least, and something we never saw coming, like the ending of Usual Suspects. The decision to vote, and I come back to this again and again, is an emotional one, and there was no way, or that was how it was perceived, that the proud fish-eating Bengali could feel any kind of connection with the aggressive vegetarian-Hindi-mandir-wahin-banayenge culture of the traditional BJP, a connection strong enough to move the finger to its button. For ages, the Left’s khichudi of Marxist tenets and Bengali parochialism was the comfort food of choice, a recipe appropriated by Mamata Banerjee after bowdlerizing the Marxist ingredients but keeping its essence and adding to it her own spices of vote-bank appeasement, and the BJP too had been cognizant of the futility of trying to wean the Gangopadhyays and Mukherjees of the world away from this diet, fielding as it did candidates like PC Sorcar, the magician, and Bappi Lahiri, the Golden Fish Fry, as a testament to its seriousness in being a player in Bengal.

Till now.

I will accept. I got this wrong. One reason is perhaps my being so away from Bengal, my analysis colored by what it had once been, when Debashree Roy presented us the vision of the Kolkattar Rosogolla as the alternative to the joyless naadu, as opposed to what it has become now, the Challenge Nibi Na Sala of TMC returning MP and new-age Uttam Kumar, the magnificent Deb.

My faith in the eternal ascendancy of Bengali socialism is based my knowledge of Bengali Hindu bhodoloks, by virtue of being one. This phylum of humanity, by and large, do not go to temples much, not as much definitely as their brethren in other parts of the country, and so issues of mandir construction ( Jyoti Basu once called the Ayodhya shilanyas as “eenth-pujo” or worship of bricks) aren’t as close to their heart as might be expected. Add to this, their traditional jealousy of the affluent Marwadis (they celebrate Kali Pujo on the wrong day !) and their elitist mistrust of the chatt-pujo-performing “Hindustanis” (derisively referred to as rikshahwala kaalchar) of Bihar and UP, the considered “base” of the BJP, and any political configuration in Bengal under the banner of the lotus was always doomed.

I am not wrong in my assessment I will claim, Kolkata even in this election, with its preponderance of the bhodrolok culture, still has stayed with Trinamool.

It’s the districts, particularly to the west of the state that the BJP, has made gains. One reason, and this one I did anticipate in my podcast, has been because of the changing population demographics, the influx of Hindi-speaking migrants from the west, and the consequent influence of that on the local Bengali population. This is reflected in no place as dramatic as popular Bengali cinema, specifically in the kind of Bengali that you find there. What was once pure unaccented Bangla has been replaced by a bizarre ear-ringing concoction of hybrid Bangla-Hindi, fultoo and timepass and masti and maahi, and that I believe is not a matter of accident, but of design, reflecting the gradual Hindi-ization of the Bengali tongue. And once the language changes, can BJP be far behind?

The other thing that I had anticipated would work in favor of the BJP was the perception that Mamata Banerjee was pro-Muslim at the cost of Hindus. The origin of this perception was that when Mamata Banerjee came to power, the first big voting block she won over, were the Maulvis and the Madrassas, whose number had grown phenomenally in rural Bengal, due to unchecked migration from Bangladesh, and who, because of the CPIM’s ideological opposition to organized religion, were not reached out to, at least not in the way Mamata Banerjee did with her namaaz and head scarf and all the religious paraphernalia and then with her stipends to Muslim clerics in gratitude for their support.

Despite being a Mamata critic, I will say, that this perception of pro-minorities is wrong and has always been. Mamata Banerjee’s politics is transactional, if you as a group bring votes, she shall roll out sops for you. It doesn’t matter who you are, Hindu, Muslim, the White Walkers, all she wants is zombie-like obedience on election day and your sincere buying in to her megalomania. It is not true, as Amit Shah kept on repeating, that Hindus are afraid to do Durga Pujo under Mamata. The number of Durga Pujos and their scale keeps on increasing, and the TMC government supports these Pujos logistically and financially, since many of their star bahubalis are in the organizational committees.

However as the BJP started gaining ground, the Mamata government and the administration it has co-oped, came down hard on their cadres, denying them rights to events, and detaining their leaders, targeting individuals and families in the worst form of violence. It was not that they hated Hindus, it was they hated opposition, of any sort, be it a professor forwarding a cartoon or a student asking her a question in a townhall. Except the optics of this was now really bad, setting goons on processions in saffron, dead bodies of BJP cadres, there was only one message that could be taken from this.

To counter the narrative, the TMC tried to reach out to Hindus using the language of the BJP, even doing cow distribution ceremonies, and Mamata Banerjee, in a bid to assert her Hindu chops, called out to “Vishnu Mata” (Mother Vishnu and no I do not know what she meant), but it was too little and too late.

All of this I had counted for, but felt would not radically change the fate of the BJP. Sure it would make some gains, greater vote shares even in the cities,  quote Alice in Alice in Wonderland, “you can always have more than nothing” for BJP had pretty much always been nothing in Bengal, but I never thought we would have a 22-18 scoreline, not even after the exit polls came out with that number.

What I missed was the Left vote, that it was still considerable and ripe for the taking. Now I still believe it is naive to just take the numbers and posit that all Left votes went to the BJP. The TMC had consumed sections of the Left years ago in a hostile takeover, and what had been left of the left were a very small core that were either clinging on due to hard-core ideology or because the doors of the TMC were closed to them. The TMC’s bigger opposition was inside the party, those that bowed their heads but did not really want to. Unlike the CPM which had discipline through ideology, which meant that everyone got a share of the pie of power, TMC has concentrated the fruits of power too much to the top, leaving disgruntled elements all over the hinterland. Intimidated  by the power of Mamata Banerjee’s state machinery, they had cowered and hid, because one of the things the TMC had inherited from the CPIM had been their fascist intolerance of opposition and the use of the state to crush all forms of dissent. This explains why so many seats in Panchayat went uncontested, it was not that the opposition did not exist, but people were too afraid of identifying themselves as anything but Trinamool, being strung up on trees or having their huts burned being a rather strong argument against that. Of course, if we had a functioning media, these things would have been highlighted at the national level, the fascism unleashed by Trinamool, but since Bengal falls within Sardesai’s moral compass demagnetization zone, the systemic violence was ignored, because unless there is cow and a New York Times writing assignment on the line, no one cares about fascism and the suppression of democracy.

What Amit Shah-Kailash Vijayvargia did was that they gave the opposition courage to identify as the opposition.  They gave them a cause, the Hindu identity, because there is only so much anti-US imperalism and Marxian doctrine can get you in this day and age, as a mobilizing force. They gave them the assurance that unlike the CPIM, they had a pan-Indian organization working for them, right up to the Prime Minister. And it wasn’t just words, the BJP armed their cadres with symbols and weapons too—tridents and swords. Not that it would help them against the state, after all what’s that against the guns and the law and the strength of the TMC cadre operating with legal immunity, but at least it bound them together, a color, a cause and a slogan, and gave them some semblance of security in the face of total electoral lawlessness that has always been Bengal politics.

Add to it the engineered defection of Mukul Roy, Mamata Banerjee’s once backroom boy and the man in charge of purse-strings and the knowledge of where to get fuel, the front-line work of Roopa Ganguly and Locket Chatterjee and Dilip Ghosh, the Modi factor in a one-on-one takkar with Didi, and the overall coordination with high command through Kailash Vijayvargia, and the BJP had a fully functional organizational machinery, something it had never had before.

The numbers now begin to make sense. Not just in the seats won, but in the increasing trend of vote-share even in urban areas.

The ground realities have now changed. The opposition is now emboldened enough to stand up as opposition and be counted.

And this is something Mamata Banerjee has never had to deal with. She has always been the opposition, and once she became the ruler, there was none.

Till now.

So what next?

All of this portends polarization. And that’s the BJP’s favorite ground.

The TMC is now going to un-apologetically for the Muslim vote bank. As Mamata Banerjee said post-elections “Je goru dudh dey tar lathio khete howe” (The cow that gives milk, you need to take its kicks also), in the context of appeasing the Muslim vote-bank, clearly showing her hand, that she will reward those who stood by her, and the Muslim votebank did, in the face of the BJP onslaught. Intemperate to the extreme this statement, it strengthens the BJP immediately, reinforcing their narrative of Mamata Banerjee of pandering to only one vote-bank. Without a binding ideology other than soft Bengali parochialism, and a leader with strong Khaleesi syndrome, clear fascist tendencies and the specter of post-poll retributory violence unleashed on those who betrayed Didi at the ballot box , the polarization and deepening of fault lines shall continue.

Hobe Ram, hobe Ram, Ram Ram hobe hobe?

Let’s see.

 

 

 

 

 

Thumos and the Indian Elections

Plato, that ancient Greek philosopher considered to be the father of Western thought, posited that our behavior, is driven by three main impulses—epithumia or desires, nous or intellect/reason and thumos or the desire to be recognized and respected. Subsequent political philosophers, notably Francis Fukuyama, have extended the concept of thumos, to define as the innate human desire not just for individual recognition like being awarded “employee of the month” at work, but recognition as part of a larger whole, with which the individual has certain shared characteristics. It is why I feel very good when Kolkata Knight Riders win a game in the IPL, and severely dejected when they do not, even though my nous or intellect tells me that KKR’s victory or defeat has no impact on my epithumia or desires, I don’t make money when they win, nor lose money when they lose. Yet I feel a sense of vindication when Russell slams RCB to a pulp, and still remember the humiliation of being the worst team in the franchise once upon a time, even though my intellect says that Kolkata Knight Riders has little to do with my home city except holding a license to its name, and that even my association with it based on shared characteristics is very tenuous, but that’s the power of thumos, it overrides self-interest and logical thought to touch a seemingly irrational core that we all carry.

Of course irrational though it seems, we wouldn’t have been here without thumos. It is this thumos, political philosophers say, that allowed humans to form societies, to sublimate their individual desires to that of what would benefit their group. It led to the formation of identities, on the basis of collectives like tribes which became nations, and shared beliefs which became religion. It is also what led to strife and conflict. Purely rational men would perhaps have realized the futility of war, or that war materially satisfies the epithumia of a handful of very powerful people who have the least skin in the game, but then it was not nous that was driving these forces of history but thumos, the desire to increase the collective’s prestige and respect at the cost of those considered “other”, by conquering, subjugating and in many cases assimilating those that do not share the group characteristics. So that even when you die, or what can be considered the absolute zero point of epithumia, you attain infinite thumos or glory. Which makes it worth it.

As Indian elections approach, the only way to analyze is through the lens of thumos. When it comes to nous, or rational thought, there is very little of that in democratic elections, people do not vote based on GDP numbers, promises made vs promises fulfilled, your local MP’s attendance in Parliament or the number of questions he raised or the criminal cases pending against him or the policies he espouses . It may seem that some of the voting behavior comes from epithumia or desires, a guaranteed income of 6000 rupees per month or reservations based on one’s caste or loan waivers definitely drives people to vote, but rational thought, if it was exercised in this context, would have told those voting on these issues that given the past record of the political class, it is unlikely that they would realize the full benefits of what has been promised, even if it gets to them, it will come with riders and terms and conditions, if at all it ever comes to them that is.

Which brings us again to thumos. It is why Indian elections have always been and will always be decided by identities of caste and religion and language and statehood. My vote goes to the person on the ticket with whom I share a characteristic, and here caste is a more exclusive determinant than the Hindu religion,  and my vote shall pretty much never go to the person who I perceive as furthering the interests of the “others”. The Samajwadi Party polls Yadavs, the BSP polls Dalits, irrespective of the candidates they put up, and between them they split the Muslim vote. The BJP gets the upper caste votes, and so when BSP and Samajwadi Party join forces in constituencies where Yadav-Dalit-Muslim population goes above 50%, election results have an air of inevitability, and nothing else matters.

Politicians across the spectrum know this. This is why political communication is exclusively an appeal to thumos, or the self-respect of the group. It’s why Amit Shah says that Durga Pujo is under threat in Bengal, or Mamata Banerjee increases allowance to imaams or her party peddles a form of Bengali nationalism opposed intrinsically to the imperial vegetarianism of the BJP, or that Samajwadi Party announces a plan to impose a 2% tax on upper caste families  or that Mayawati builds statues of herself or that Modi thunders against Pakistan or that influential sections of the media push a narrative of  targeted “intolerance”. The trick here is to make you feel endangered or aggrieved as a group, to convince you that your self-respect has been diminished, and the promise of the candidate, often exclusively through his membership of the group, is to make things right. Needless to say none of this would stand up to rational thought—for instance, if the Gandhi family has not been able to make them feel good all these years, what has changed now?

Once in a while though, in 2014 and before that in 1984, an overarching electoral narrative comes up that upends all of this though. People still vote on emotion though, but there a temporary group identity supplanting traditional group identities like caste and religion became dominant. In 1984, it was the sympathy for Rajiv Gandhi, in 2014 it was absolute disgust with UPA2 and a corresponding faith in the personality of Modi (not BJP, but Modi). But these happen once a few generations, and thunder already stuck in 2014 and it is unlikely to strike again this time, despite Vivek Oberoi’s best, or rather, worst efforts to revive the overarching narrative of 2014.

Which means, in 2019 we are most likely to get a fractured mandate, where factitious state, caste and religious identities will drive voting patterns and ultimately results, where everyone will win, and yet no one will.

 

The RockStar Engineer: A Political Short Story

Once upon a time, there was a Rockstar Engineer.  The market was dominated by a family firm which had occupied number one market-share for ages, by virtue of being the only game in town.

So Rockstar Engineer and his friend, the Big Ideas man got together and formed a company to take on the family firm.

Rockstar Engineer was a brilliant mind. He developed the core technological platform, and the little company kept out rolling product after product. The Big Family company kept losing customers, and Rockstar Engineer’s company became bigger, they went public, their share prices rose, the company exploded in size and revenue.

The Big Ideas guy became CEO and the Rockstar Engineer the Senior Vice President of product. They did it because it worked the best.

The Rockstar Engineer now started hiring people to do the kind of work he didnt like to do—write boilerplate code, test scripts, manage petty quarrels between employees, do Excel sheets and bring coffee. He chose these people not because he respected their intelligence, but because he needed people who would do what he asked without question and without opinion, so that he could do what he liked—design algorithms, optimize code, and decide on which features to keep and which to destroy.

And so it went on for a while.  Rockstar Engineer started getting older, technical obsolescence started setting in, he delegated more and more of the core technology to others, leaving himself to move on to what he believed he deserved.

The CEO-ship. The Big Ideas guy was going to retire, and he felt that this was now his time.

But once Rockstar Engineer became CEO, his customers and colleagues found out pretty quickly, that he was not a good Big Ideas guy. He had little understanding of the mind of the customer or the state of the market, all he had were grand pie-in-the-sky technical schemes, whose implementation details he didn’t care to specify, because he felt it was no longer his job, and also because he could no longer do it as he once could.

He had, to put it simply, lost his touch.

The men he had once had hired had also now become Senior Vice Presidents. Rockstar Engineer as the CEO made no secret of the fact that he thought that these SVPs were paid more and had more influence than they were worth. He and some of his old friends on the development team would stand at the water cooler and laugh over the decisions made by the Senior Vice Presidents, all of whom had once been testers and maintenance engineers on his team.

One day, one of these VPs came to his office. The Board, he said, had decided to ask Rockstar Engineer to step down from the CEO-ship. The numbers were bad, the family business had clawed back their market share, and the Board felt a change of leadership was needed. They were offering him to become part of a newly constituted Technical Advisory Committee, where he could sit along with some of the other old engineers who had been with the company from almost the start.

Rockstar Engineer knew what this was, a gilded demotion, because the Advisory Committee had no executive authority, but he took it, because there was nothing he could do. “So who is the new CEO?” he asked, to which the man who had delivered the letter, softly said, “That will be me.”

Rockstar Engineer looked at the new CEO. He had been once his most trusted subordinate, he had hired the man himself, fought to get him promoted, and now here he was, taking over from him.

So Rockstar Engineer stayed on, but kept grumbling to whoever would listen as to the wrong direction the company was taking.The old engineers on the Technical Advisory Committee,who were as pissed off at their demotion as the Rockstar Engineer was, took it further. Some of them left the company, some of them stopped coming to work, some of them became contractors for the family owned business.

RockStar Engineer stayed on. He was confident that the Board would come back to him, after all he had built the company, after all he had hired everyone, after all the world owed it to him. He had only to wait out till the downturn came, and he would be back.

But then one day, one of the VPs comes to his office, and tells him that he will have to vacate the role immediately, and that his corner office has been reassigned to one of his once-proteges.

An hour later, the VP comes to check if the Rockstar Engineer had left.

He had. His room, the one he had occupied for decades, was empty.

Except for one thing on the large wooden table.

A statue. Of a man standing tall in a chariot.

 

What I Learned From Shelter Dogs

I have never been a dog person. Quite the opposite as a matter of fact. Not that I am a particularly social animal, but I have consciously avoided going to homes with dogs, where I face the prospect of feigning acquiescence through clenched teeth, when I am barked at or licked and pawed, afraid of being bitten, but even more afraid of being judged by the host. The fear of a dog bite is not purely paranoia in the theoretical.  I was inside the main door of the apartment complex in College Park, I saw an elderly lady struggling to walk outside, and I opened the door to help her, when from behind the door, her miniature poodle jumped up and dug her teeth into my leg. And this was not, by any stretch, my only unpleasant canine experience. I have been chased by a posse of Indian street dogs once when I used to jog and they were the reason I gave up the exercise, and last time I was in India, late at night, I found myself surrounded by a pack of snarling street dogs, snapping at me outside the main gate of my house. I never quite understood the obsession with dogs as pets, slotting it as yet another delusion like believing there are men and women in the sky who can propitiated by your worship. It was to me what Bengalis call “adhikhyeta” loosely translated as “excessive indulgence”, why people seemed to care more about dogs than they do for human beings, and why urban Kolkata families would spend so much time feeding already well-fed dogs while human children lay hungry, ten feet away outside the gate.

Over the years my active disinterest in dogs was the way it has stayed. Last year, though it changed.  I began reading about dogs. Not so much about dog breeds, though I did do that later once my interest had deepened, but about individual dogs, dogs and their stories.

Dogs at shelters. Dogs rescued from puppy mills, factories were dogs are kept in small coops, made to produce litters and then killed once no more able to produce puppies for sale. Dogs bred for dog fighting. Dogs used as bait for dog fighting. Dogs thrown out of moving cars by their owners. Dogs abandoned on the road. Dogs shot at by arrows, their ears cut off, dunked in tar, gratuitously mutilated for the pleasure of someone.

Stories. Many stories.

And yet despite the random cruelty of existence, dogs do not lose faith in the good. Brutalized dogs wag their tail and lick the hands of their rescuers. Subject to abandonment and physical abuse, they forget what they have endured and learn to trust humans again. It’s not though that they do it easy, dogs aren’t plants, they have memory. They suffer from post-traumatic-stress-disorder, they wake up at night yelping and shaking from nightmares, they die from heartbreak, and yet they trust. They might be staying years in a shelter, if they had been lucky not to have been euthanized, but every time a prospective adopter comes to the front of their cage, they rush out, ears flopping, tails wagging, with a smile on their face, and then the man moves past his cage, and they come back again and sit down and hopes again.

After watching so many of these videos and reading their stories, I have come to the conclusion that a vast majority of dogs seem to realize something we humans cannot, that every new interaction with the world brings up new possibilities, that just because things have gone bad before does not necessarily mean they will go bad again, and that the very purpose of life, if such a thing exists, is to be able to reset one’s expectations and start again, to mimic the randomness of the universe in our own perception of it.

Note my use of “a vast majority of dogs”. What’s fascinating is that not all dogs can forget. Or forgive. Some never totally never trust people with a certain characteristic or of a certain gender. Some sit back in their shelter cages bereft of hope, staring sadly at humans walking by. Some violently turn on their masters and children, yes that happens despite what you may have read to the contrary, and often without any trigger. Which makes them all the more fascinating. Unlike trees, whose non-reactive behavior is independent of its “self”, the behavior of dogs is a matter of  conscious choice. They are not all pre-programmed to behave the way they do, but overwhelmingly, they choose the path to forgiveness, they choose the path of hope, they choose the path of being grateful for whatever it is they can get, a little biscuit or a pat on the head or a romp in the yard.

Of course I know I can never be like that. I am human after all, I cannot but parse the future with the grammar of the past, I cannot but expect the comforting causality of good following from good, and bad from bad, of having expectations of fairness and justice from the universe, while knowing all along that is not the way things work, and yet choosing not to believe, and all that I can change, in my forties, is to become a huge dog-person, which I now am.

I may not able to change but that does not prevent me from marveling at the stories of shelter and rescue dogs, illuminating and uplifting and finally transformative, of dogs that find happy homes and those that do not, those that lie down on plush rugs and doze away to the rainbow land and those that go yelping and twisting away, peeing on themselves in terror, to the death chamber of a shelter. While we can never control where we end or the blows we receive on the way, or figure out what we did to deserve it, we do have the choice to not ask those questions whose answers we do not know, and instead accept unflinchingly the little random belly rubs of life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Legend of Kader Khan

While not speaking poorly of the dead may be considered a custom more honored in its breach than its observance, one would hope that at least twenty-four hours would elapse before one starts pulling down the legacy of a much-loved  artist, after all if you have nothing good to say about someone better not to say anything, at least for a few days. Alas we live in difficult times, and no sooner had the death of Kader Khan, or as he is known Kader-sahaab, had sunk in, that we get to see the words “cheap roles”, “eminently forgettable” in an article in one of the vanguards of Indian web journalism.

The irony behind those who ask people to recognize their privilege and check it at the door is that they are unable to do it themselves. Kader Khan did not write nor perform for the perfumed patricians that constitute the Hindi film industry’s core audience, because only they are privileged to be able to afford the steep entrance and popcorn costs of today’s multiplexes, whose frame of references are Netflix-HBO, American-tropes-inspired stand-up comedy routines, the wisdom of memes, accessible and affordable broadband, and the concomitant benefits of a post-liberalization lifestyle.

Kader Khan existed in a different time, and his crowd were the subaltern, the unwashed, the factory workers and the wage laborers . And as this crowd was gradually pushed away to the periphery, because the business of Bollywood changed, so was Kader Khan. He ended the last few of his years on the fringes, mostly forgotten, recognized sporadically based on his appearances in some old movie playing on Zee Gold, recognized by throw-away “Hey isn’t that the guy from….”, his legacy largely unrecognized, if not scoffed at.

So here is a bit of throwback.

Once upon a time, just as there are music tracks, there used to be dialogue tracks, sold in conjunction and sometimes separately from the music track. Performers performed these dialogues in front of crowds mimicking the mannerisms of the actor who had delivered it in the original film, a commercially viable form of entertainment at a time when one just couldn’t go to Youtube to watch a favorite sequence or superpose themselves in it through a Tiktok video.

Dialogue was king and Kader Khan was the king of dialogue.

After Salim and Javed broke up, Kader Khan pretty much wrote all the dialogues for Amitabh Bachchan, the theater-thumping chawanni-phenking lines that firmly established the angry young man in the Indian psyche.

Amar Akbar Anthony. Muqaddar ka Sikander. Naseeb. Suhaag. Do Aur Do Paanch. Lawaaris. Coolie. Satte Pe Satta. And did I forget anything? Yes. Agneepath.

And if being the voice of Amitabh was not enough to retire on, then Kader Khan went ahead and became the voice of the single-screen phenomenon of the 90s.

Govinda Ahuja.

Kader Khan’s style was street. In days when censor boards were more intrusive, and one just could not string together gaalis as they do now on Netflix or Amazon Prime, Kader crystallized the essence of “tapori shaanabaazi”, filtered it through his deep knowledge of Urdu,  and created a cinematic lingo that was uniquely distinctive– long sentences of adjectives one after another, short crisp take-downs, intelligent wordplay, and these dialogs when delivered by a generation of actors who knew how to deliver, the Bachchans and the Govindas and the Mithuns, created the experience of what single-screen cinema was, audience participation through whistles and the ceaseless clatter of coins, and clinging to this, a cottage industry of dialogue cassettes and mohalla duplicate shows.

Which brings me to Kader Khan, the performer. The man could not just write, but also dish it out too. His comic chemistry with Govinda, at its acme in the sensational Dulhe Raja, was a vital part of the legend of Govinda, and that is attested to by the fact that once Govinda and David Dhawan tried moving beyond the Kader Khans and Shakti Kapoors, they lost the essence of what had once made them successful. Kader Khan wasn’t just a reliable second fiddle, he could carry it off himself too, and two of my favorite roles of his, in very different genres, which shows he was also not one-note when it came to onscreen presence, was his larger-than-life villainous turn, in the criminally underappreciated Angaar, and, perhaps his most successful independent role, as one half of a father-son conman duo, in the riotously low-brow funny Baap Numbri Beta Dus Numbri.

Performer. Writer. A maker of stars. That’s how I shall remember him.

Khuda hafiz, Kader-sahaab.

 

 

 

On The Heartland State Election Results

Now that the BJP has tasted defeat, and a pretty comprehensive one at that, sections of the media inimical to the BJP and what they are considered to represent, are now free to let it all out. Serves them right, we are being told by our media mavens on television, their politics of intolerance and majoritarianism has been roundly rejected by the Indian voter, come 2019 this will continue, and then candybars will reign from the sky, the boy Prince come-of-age shall come to power, the evil majoritarian identity voters shall be sent back to the dark lands from whence they came, and then, only then, will the soul of the “idea of India”, suppressed since 2014, find utterance.

All this is well and good, and wish-fulfillment literature makes for good fantasy writing, but alas for poor election analysis. One can excuse Indians writing for foreign outlets for oversimplification and gross generalization, in the way that Indian restaurants spice down Indian food for the saheb palate. For others pundits on TV though, there is little by means of an excuse. (Actual print is so much better)

So here are the things I heard on my telly, and this then drained out into social media and came back, wrapped as conversations on my Whatsapp groups. Yogi Adityanath lost BJP the elections. So did Modi’s personal attacks on the Nehru-Gandhi family, much loved as they are by the common man, so jarring and uncouth were his words that “uri baba uff”. Also blamed was Rafale, demonetization, GST, Hindu identity as a political mobilizer, and, of course, Modi and Shah as individuals, apparently even Modi’s refusal to give media interviews. Yes the voter in Chattisgarh voted for Congress because Modi will not sit down with a cabal of entitled patricians for interviews.

Apparently.

Now, again, I am not an expert, but in my humble opinion, the Indian electorate, the ones who vote that is and not necessarily share statuses on Facebook, react to language and violence and corruption in a way that does not align with the way they are interpreted in air-conditioned studios.

First of all, language. Actually politicians nowadays are very careful of what words they use to attack their opponents, because they know they are being recorded. Always. In golden days, they could say whatever they could and deny it, and that is why people came to election rallies, to enjoy the verbal fireworks. So no, language and personal attacks, do not lose elections. They are part of the fun.

Which brings me to violence.

Violence is so pervasive in India, from road rage to lynching a thief, that the average Indian voter only makes it an election issue if the violence is an existential threat. If he is alive (and hence voting), violence has not touched him, at least strongly enough to influence his voting choice. This is not a moral choice but a pragmatic one. One would expect the Indian electorate to vote on violence, only if it reached genocide level, and apart from a few people in Delhi holding long-stemmed champagne glasses, and those that are influenced by their opinions, no one on the ground realistically believes that we are Nazi Germany 1938 level.

Corruption is its own kettle of fish. The Indian electorate looks at government as a perpetual motion machine of magical munificence, or as the scientific name goes, “the mai-baap sarkar”. The relationship with the state is transactional , everyone is entitled to take from it, the politicians and the bureaucrats and the police, in the proportion of their influence and power. The Indian voter recognizes he is powerless as an individual, but he asserts his right as a member of a collective, caste or religion or profession or some voting block, to be able to drink from the trough.

The problem arises if this contract is disturbed. The UPA2 broke the contract by taking too much, beyond what it could claim as a right. And now the BJP finds itself also on the wrong side of the covenant. Not because it has crossed the line with Rafale, as our TV anchor will like to tell you, it is an electoral non-issue, but it has been perceived, in the states that went to election, as not giving back enough, where are the reservations, where are the loan writeoffs, where is the black money from abroad that was supposed to be brought back, where are the jobs for the boys, Nirav Modi and Mallaya run away, but we are left holding our bills and standing in line for demonetization. This was the core of the Congress messaging, done through Whatsapp, the only social media that counts (sorry Jack), and it hit home where it hurt, the perceived breaking of the contract. Na khayoonga na khaane doonga may be good electoral sloganeering, but the real message is “sab mil baithke khayenge”, and that’s what gets you the votes.

Which brings us to the core problem. Double-incumbency. Not just incumbency, as political pundits were telling you, but the dreaded double. With the BJP being in power at both Center and State, the eternal game of the Center blaming the State and the State blaming the Center for non-fulfillment of promises just does not work. Shivraj Singh Chouhan could have been in power in Madhya Pradesh since 2005, but, for most of the time, he had the advantage of the Congress at the center. Growing up in a state where the CPI(M) ruled for three decades, I have seen it first-hand. Why are there no industries? Step-motherly treatment of Center. Why are mills closing? Step-motherly treatment of Center. Why are there no jobs? Step-motherly..oh wait…American imperialism. Incumbency never touched the CPI(M) because they had victimhood down pat, the Center would never be Communist, and if that failed there was the World Bank and America and other sinister shadowy figures to take the fall.

The BJP is now paying the price for its success. And for its promises that realistically they were never going to keep. As a noted BJP politician said, we never thought we would win. The BJP could still have owned the narrative as they did during demonetization, you feel the pain but the big fish feel it more, schadenfreude is a good vote-catcher. But then the BJP let the UPA2 masterminds walk free, and they failed to scalp even one of the big-name crooks. Not one.

This is when the collective mind went to the promises, the “everyone is getting, why not me”.

The business class, the BJP core base, felt the pain of GST, and none of the surrounding feel-good of “taking one for the team”. The salaried middle class wondered why they were not getting tax relief. Demonetization came back as a talking point, but not in a good way. So did reservations and loan waivers. They came back not as issues by themselves, but in the context of how little BJP had done on corruption in terms of putting the heads of the corrupts on metaphorical spikes and parading them through the city. BJP supporters may point to numbers like how many more people have come into the income tax under the NDA, but no one votes on citations, footnotes and Excel files.

They vote on emotion.

And self-interest. Which brings me to Shivraj Chouhan and the loan-waiver. The BJP’s performance on infrastructure development has been solid. While obviously not perfect, because government rarely is, they can claim some pride in their record on electrification, sanitation, constructing roads and providing cooking gas. The problem with infrastructure development is that the electoral bump is temporary, unless you can time it perfect, it wears off, and what you have becomes the norm, something that is taken for granted. Far better in terms of getting votes are schemes that pay out regularly, guaranteed employment, or regular cash transfers, or summary loan-write-offs. Rahul Gandhi’s promise to write off loans within ten days actually led to farmers in Madhya Pradesh holding off selling their produce, if they sold before elections the money they would get from government procurement schemes would go to pay off their loan, if they wait for after the elections, it comes to them. Shivraj Chouhan did nothing for loan-write-offs, claimed they were not an issue [link], except that it always is. And lest BJP supporters appropriate the moral high ground of Shivraj Chouhan’s fiscal responsibility here, it does good to remember that Yogi Adityanath led the way in making electoral promises of loan waiving and reaping the benefit of that.

Except that loan waivers do not work. They do buy votes in the short term but little beyond. Like credit card offers, there is always the fine print, and payouts are never what people expect them to. And people who get themselves out of debt through write-offs find themselves pulled into more immediately, because the problem is much more deep-rooted, rising productivity, faster transport and less product loss, demand staying constant, and hence poor prices for the farmer. As someone pointed out, during the Congress era, onions were too expensive, now they are not expensive enough. But then again, elections are rarely about solving problems.

They are, and I have said this before, about emotion.

And, because this is good old heartland politics, about caste. In Chattisgarh, you would think that Ajit Jogi, Congress’s brand ambassador ever since the state was created, leaving the Congress would hurt Congress’s chances, bringing as he does a sizeable SC/ST vote to the hand. Except that the opposite happened. Ajit Jogi took some of the SC/ST vote with him true, but BJP did not get it, and what the Congress lost in terms of SC/ST votes, was made up through OBC votes, primarily from the Sahus and the Kurmis, who had never found themselves welcome at Congress with Ajit Jogi in power. The Congress, under Digvijay Singh protege and now Chief Minister, Bhupesh Baghel made key appointments to Sahus and Kurmis, and cut solidly into BJP’s support-base.

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Rajasthan, which swings one side to another every election, which possibly led to this wholly inappropriate graphic, had always had a delicate caste balance and political alignment, with the Rajputs and the Gujjars leaning BJP, and the Jats and the Meenas leaning Congress. And this time, Vasundhara Raje faced unrest from the Rajput support base  for a litany of reasons, of which one of them was the government’s perceived lack of outrage over Padmavat, which possibly makes it the most influential movie of the year.

Sorry Andha Dhun.

None of this should overtly bother the BJP. Caste is a game two can play, and more, and BJP has smart people who can handle the real-politik on the ground. Apparently, the central government is contemplating large-scale write-offs for farmers, which shows the lessons are being learned,  and that the socialist welfare state has struck back.  And the paradox of losing states is that you no longer have to labor under double-incumbency, and Congress can now be held accountable, they have skin in the game again, something that was not the case when it was in power nowhere.

But it is imperative for BJP to go beyond the denial stage of grief, and not bring up vote-share as Democrats do for Trump and our “liberal” media do to undermine the mandate of Modi in 2014, or blame NOTA, or try to brush it off as a “blip on the radar.” While the election went on a knife edge in Rajasthan, and BJP did not do as badly as some exit polls prophesied in Rajasthan, there is no denying that the Congress has gained significantly, and that if the objective was a Congress-mukt Bharat, that has been turned on its head. The eco-system is energized, the walls have been breached, there is blood in the water, and 2019 has swung wide open.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Danse Macabre

In the closing scene of  Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal, which happens to be one of my favorite movies of all time, one of the characters, the travelling minstrel, has a vision.

I see them! Over there against the stormy sky. They are all there. The smith and Lisa, the knight, Raval, Jöns, and Skat. And the strict master Death bids them dance. He wants them to hold hands and to tread the dance in a long line. At the head goes the strict master with the scythe and hourglass. But the Fool brings up the rear with his lute. They move away from the dawn in a solemn dance towards the dark lands while the rain cleanses their cheeks from the salt of their bitter tears.

The Seventh Seal is about man’s pursuit for meaning. A knight, back from fighting the Crusades, tries to understand his place in God’s plan, but instead of the answers he seeks, he finds the Grim Reaper, misery, and the silence of the great beyond. God, if he exists, does not care for human suffering. The only truth is Death, the inevitable end to everything, and religion, love, and faith are nothing but feverish convulsions of the human mind.

But this post is not about the symbolism and the imagery of the Seventh Seal, one can write a book on that.

It is about the Dance. The Danse Macabre.

There is a duality in dance.

When you are in possession of your own agency, there are few greater expressions of joy, rhythm, and independence than dance.

And when someone else makes you dance, it becomes a perversion of exactly these things.

Like frogs strung out on copper wire and animated by bolts of electricity, you shake your legs and move your hands, at the bidding of a power to whom you have surrendered.

In Seventh Seal, it is death who has dominion over souls. So he does not just make them walk. He makes them dance.

But death is not the only invariant. So is money.

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There is something mythically terrifying watching some of the most powerful men and women of the world dance at the Ambani wedding, Because while we may never see Death, or at least an anthropomorphism of him, outside film, in real life we may get to see Money.

For death may make us dance in death, but Money makes us dance in life.

There is no feeling superior here. We all dance.

Hillary, Kerry, Salman, Shahrukh.

Me and you.

All that changes is how much it takes, the price we put on our agency.

Because at the end, as it is in the beginning, and all the way throughout, the strict master bids them dance.