Death of a city

CITIES and Thrones and Powers

Stand in Time's eye,

Almost as long as flowers,

Which daily die:

Rudyard Kipling

Cities die, and cities die rather soon. They stand in Time’s eye only as long flowers, or so the poet thinks. But when does a city die, and how? Does it have to suffer a catastrophic disaster to die? Does it have to mysteriously fall out of the map of human civilization like Harappa or Mohenjodaro, does it have to be inundated by volcanic lava like Pompeii, or does it have to be devastated by atomic bombs like Hiroshima or Nagasaki? Does it really have to be physically destroyed for it to die? Can we say a city has died when it loses its soul, when the human values that it embodied are lost from its public life though it may grow physically by gobbling up more or the countryside around it, by constructing more of swanky malls and apartment complexes?

The city I want to subject to these questions is Calcutta, or Kolkata as we always knew it in Bangla. In our childhood it was a city inhabited by compassionate human beings. In public transport, at stations, on the roads, in shops and markets, anywhere you had a problem, needed any help, ten people would gather around you and pleasantly confuse you with at least five different solutions. Helping hands would particularly be extended towards women traveling alone or with small children. `aaste ladies’ (slow down, there are lady passengers) was an oft heard phrase that the bus conductors shouted to the drivers. A couple of times I encountered a particularly sophisticated one when I was around ten. He would shout in chaste Bangla ‘mohila’ (lady) or ‘shishu-saho mohila’ (lady with a child). On such occasions the driver would spend an extra minute or two at the stop to ensure that the lady or ladies in question, invariably in their sarees, have boarded or alighted safely. And this generated no impatience in the other passengers in the bus. 

An unwritten rule was to give up one’s seat for an elderly or otherwise needy passenger. I recall an incident when we were teenagers. A group of us were traveling by bus when one of us gave up a seat for an elderly gentleman. Suddenly, a much younger person, acting rather smart, tried to squeeze his way through the crowd to that seat. I still remember the dressing down he got from us. 

Another incident that I still fondly remember is when we kept a tram waiting for a good five minutes and made the passengers search for a comforter (what we lovingly call a muffler)! I must have been around five or six around that time. I went out with my aunt. After a good day’s outing we were going back to her place. By that time the offices had gotten over, and the buses and trams were crowded. We had to change trams at Dharmatala or Esplanade. After we got down from the first tram, and it was about to continue its journey, I realized that I had dropped my comforter inside. I mentioned this to my aunt rather sheepishly, not quite knowing what her reactions would be. Instead of showing even an iota of displeasure with me, she promptly asked the conductor to stop the tram, and it did stop. She then told the passengers standing near the gate that her nephew had dropped his comforter inside the tram and that they should find it for him. I did not expect this at all. As the passengers got busy looking for my comforter, I got busy convincing my aunt that I have another one, and that it is not so important to find it out from inside the tram. I also had a vested interest in not finding the comforter. For, as I said, I had two of them. The one, inside the tram, was woolen, and coarse, and warm, and always gave me an itch on my neck. The other, that I had at home, was silken, and was soft and was kinder to my skin. Therefore, I wanted the tram to leave, now that I had managed to drop the woolen comforter inside it, so that I never had to endure the torment again. But my aunt did not know that secret, and would not let the tram leave without its passengers finding it for me. Did they find it? Yes, they did, to my utter disappointment. 

When I look back at the incident today, I get amazed by the compassion, the empathy, the patience people had for each other. And today? I think the following experience I had a few years ago would suffice. My wife and I boarded a bus and took a double seat. All the seats marked for ladies were occupied when a middle aged woman boarded the bus. She approached a couple of young girls in their twenties sitting in the ‘ladies’ seats and requested them to give her one seat since she had had an operation and found it difficult to stand for too long. To our utter disbelief, the girls refused. The woman was practically pleading with them, but nothing had any effect. Finally we vacated our seats for her.

I am not even getting into the recent events of rape and molestation and all that goes on in Kolkata on a daily basis. I am not talking about the criminal elements in the society who are having a field day in the prevailing atmosphere of political and administrative inaction if not encouragement. I am talking of ordinary middle class people. They have lost their empathy, compassion, patience for fellow travelers and fellow citizens. Kolkata has lost its soul. If that is not the death of a city, what is?

Thoughts on vocational education

Einstein once said, 

It is not enough to teach a man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise he—with his specialized knowledge—more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person.

It is this ability to produce human beings, who are something more than beasts through their understanding of values, their sense of beauty and moral good, for which education should be valued. However, in this late stage of global industrial civilization we have successfully reduced every aspect of human life into commodities that can be sold and bought at the market place. Values and moral good are passé in this age of pragmatism bordering on opportunism. Even our deep personal emotions can be sold at a premium on reality TV or displayed on Facebook. We have silently accepted it as a norm that price of anything and everything will be determined by the logic of demand and supply in the marketplace. Finally, we are placing education in the same basket by reducing its meaning to a mere accumulation of degrees and skills to earn a livelihood. 

This predicament is inherent in the dominant values prevalent in our times. Man is not viewed as an agent capable of critical thought, capable of bringing about social change, capable of making history and capable of building new institutions. Rather man is reduced to the ignominy of a consuming animal. Greater the level of consumption, greater is one’s value in the society. In this competition of vulgar consumerism, along with the consumers, also needed is an army of laborers, who make themselves up the broad base of the pyramid of consumers, to produce consumable goods. An education system overemphasizing vocational training caters to the need of the marketplace to produce this army of laborers. 

It is undeniable that we all need to learn skills that are socially useful and that help us make a living. Precisely for this reason it is easy to be convinced that vocational training will make our students more `employable’. But it is important to emphasize that an education system putting undue emphasis on vocational training does not build a healthy society. After all, healthy societies are built on things that are to a large extent intangible and not on the logic of marketplace. 

I quote journalist Chris Hedges on what he had to say about the American education system and society in 2009 [1]:

``We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories (emphasis mine) that produce corporate drones and chase after ... grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered. Our press ... confuses bread and circus with news and refuses to give a voice to critics ... We kneel before a self elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty. ... Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification.’’

It is time to stand back and ask the broad questions about what should be an  education policy in our concrete social context that produces harmoniously developed human beings who are also socially productive rather than corporate drones.

Reference:

[1] Chris Hedges, ``America is in Need of a Moral Bailout,’’ truthdig.com, March 23, 2009. 

March towards mobocracy

Photo from deepwarriors.com

Over the past 63 years of our experimentation (I would not call it existence) with liberal democracy in India, we have been slowly but surely moving away from those ideals and moving towards, what I like to call, a mobocracy. It's a situation where democratic institutions become defunct, and any dispute is settled by brute force. The more raw power a group has, the powerful they are in the society. Our exercise of franchise has also been moving in that direction, overtly and covertly. Overtly in the sense that political parties try to use their muscle power to garner support; covertly in the sense that political parties try to appease groups and communities, hoping to get their votes, by either directly supporting, or ignoring acts of goondaism by elements of that group.

The last point brings me to the case of the Kerala lecturer T. J. Joseph, who was recently removed from his job for hurting religious sentiments of a particular community. I do not know what exactly he asked in the Malayalam question paper which hurt the sentiments of some people. But that is not very relevant here. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that he did ask a question that hurt some people. What would be a civilized way to deal with that? One could go to some grievance redressal body in the college concerned, or to a court or ... Instead, what happened put us at par with the most barbaric societies on the earth. Some memebrs of the Popular Front of India chopped off his hand. The police believes that some 49 people were involved, and it was a well-organized crime. What happened after this was even more shocking: No reaction from any political party condemning the attack.


As if there is no end to how bizzare things can get. In an absolute chocker (or is it, really? Should we prepare ourselves for more?) the New Man College dismissed Joseph from his job for hurting religious sentiments. Questions that arise are:

1. Is the punishment commensurate with the crime committed (assuimg it was committed)?
   
2. What made the college authorities think that they can arrogate themselves to such positions?

The college's rejoinder with that decision is perhaps potently the most dangerous aspect of the whole episode. They have said that Joseph can be reinstated only if he is pardoned by the leaders of the community whose sentiments have been hurt. Firstly, goons attack someone, then you punish the victim, finally you leave him to the mercy of the so-called leaders of those goons. Justice indeed!

Unfortunately, this incident shows a trend in the country (or may be the world): one of grave intolerance, complete disregard for democratic institutions and mechanisms, and a culture where anything goes if there is gain at the end (votes in our political terms).

Long live Indian mobocracy.

Living with Nature

Our ancient civilization, or all traditional civilizations, I believe, see man as a part of nature. Usually, all ancient traditions teach us to conduct our lives so as not to destroy the balance in Nature and not to imperil our own existence. Some go so far as to nurture orphaned babies of wild animals, as this Bishnoi woman is seen doing.

Bishnoi woman feeding her baby and
an orphaned cinkara. Photo taken from Rediff.com

This reminds me of my childhood. The government did have the meteorological department, but given their capabilities now in terms of weather prediction, one can easily imagine what it could have been some 35-40 years ago. So, during the rainy season, if my mother had to take me somewhere, and was worried that it might rain, she would go to my aunt and ask, "Do you think it may rain?" Of course, this did not mean if it would rain the next five minutes, but rather if it would rain in the next 10-12 hours, a much more difficult question to answer. My aunt would look at the sky and the clouds (and remember, in those days in a suburban town, there were no apartment buildings and nothing hindering your view of the sky in any direction), and come up with her prediction. I do not have a statistics to show how often she was right. But we can assume that she was right a good fraction of time, otherwise my mother would not trust her.

I definitely do not have the ability to predict rain by looking at the sky. My son hardly ever looks at the sky. Somewhere, our civilizational progress is taking us away from our Natural roots!

Say No to Caste

The government has ultimately decided to go ahead with including caste in the
current census. Some of the castist parties are still unhappy with the
modalities. But I want to use this platform to launch a protest against
inclusion of caste in the census.

There is no denying that caste is one of the deep, almost defining
realities of the Indian society. I do not believe or hope that caste will
naturally wither away if we simply avoid talking about it, or do not include
it in the census. And I also believe that the issue of caste deserves a much
more nuanced debate, at political and academic levels, to make any headway
in removing this atrocious institution.

But, the political reality is that all mention of caste is with an aim of
perpetuating this horrible social crime. How else can you explain why
caste should be basis of admission in higher education, while millions
of children, naturally mostly from lower castes, do not have access to school
education? The Congress Party has already said they do not want to be on
wrong side of the caste divide this time (unlike 1990 Mandal issue). This
clearly reveals that the eye is on the votes, and everything else is an
excuse.

So, if you believe that caste census is another strategy in the game of
vote-bank politics, and want to see a caste-less India sometime, say NONE
to caste during census. Spread the word.

Let's make a beginning.

A close shave

As if the horrible train crash at Sainthia on Monday and decoupling of the Rajdhani Express engine were not enough, another train accident was averted in Bihar. Mahananda Express got onto the same track on which a goods train was already standing.

Where are we going? While all public service systems are going down the drain, our leaders are busy throwing flowerpots.

Journey to Hell

There was a time when ministers used to resign, owning up moral responsibility, even for a single rail accident. That Lal Bahadur Shastri did it is well known and much spoken about. If my memory is not betraying me badly, I remember the same principle being followed till 1980. But not any more, of course. Like everything else, the railways has become an arena of petty politics, and not an institution of public service.

It was 1976, and I was traveling from Bombay (it was not Mumbai) to Calcutta by the Bombay-Howrah Mail via Allahabad. On the second evening, when the train was entering Allahabad Jn station, we were served dinner. It was a deliciously hot mutton-curry and rice, served on fine china plates, brought on trays along with knives and forks. During mid-90s I traveled extensively all over India by train, many times by sleeper class. Though the grandeur of china, knife and fork were missing, the food served was something that would fill you.

Fast forward to 2009. I was traveling from Delhi to Allahabad by the North-East Exp. The lunch served was a couple of rubbery puris and and aloo sabji with a lot of curry and very few peices of aloo. Imagine if you have to travel all the way to Guwahati! Then 2010. I was traveling again from Delhi-Allahabad by the Kalka Mail. The lunch consisted of few grains of chana-daal, very poor quality rice, rubbery puri, and exactly three thin slices of parwal as an excuse of sabji.


Well, you can still survive without food for a day. But how about accidents? The kinds of which happened with Jnaneswari Exp and at Sainthia, to name just the most recent ones? The message coming out of the government is none is responsible. Ex-ministers are busy lambasting Mamata-Didi while their own records are nothing much to show off. The Congress party is busy guarding its precious ally, the TMC. Pranab-babu is on record saying `No one can predict accidents, that is why they are accidents'.

Well, Pranab-babu, most Indians could do without this profound wisdom of yours. They have a little more intelligence than what you believe. What we are talking about is not predicting accidents, but preventing them. Do you or your wise political colleagues have any idea how to do that? Or do you think our lives are worth nothing more than a few lakh rupees, and these junk statements of your ilk?

Now as enraged as we are about your callous attitude and statements, two more shockers were on the way. The railway declared (1) none fell ill in the Mumbai-Howrah Duranto Express a couple of days ago. (News channels showed angry passengers complaining about falling ill after eating stale food that also contained cockroaches); (2) coupling between the engine and the coaches detachted twice in the Delhi-Patna Rajdhani Exp. The first one shows that the Railway considers all those who complained about falling ill to be liars!!! Not just apathy, but ignominy to follow that.

Surely, the journey by Indian Raiways have become a journey to Hell.