Generation N of India

Thomas L. Friedman writes “Generation Q” ( NYT October 10, 2007): “I just spent the past week visiting several colleges — Auburn, the University of Mississippi, Lake Forest and Williams — and I can report that the more I am around this generation of college students, the more I am both baffled and impressed.

I am impressed because they are so much more optimistic and idealistic than they should be. I am baffled because they are so much less radical and politically engaged than they need to be…

It’s for all these reasons that I’ve been calling them “Generation Q” — the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad.

But Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country’s own good. When I think of the huge budget deficit, Social Security deficit and ecological deficit that our generation is leaving this generation, if they are not spitting mad, well, then they’re just not paying attention…

…“Courage.” That is what real activism looks like. There is no substitute. ”

I feel the same about Indian university students. They have turned so conformist. Didn’t J Krishnamurti say: “To be young means to be bold”?

I am too young to forget and too old not to have seen Jayaprakash Narayan’s second independence movement, peopled by university students across the country, during 1975-76.

Today’s youth, at least those in public domain, are largely sons, daughters, nephews and nieces of established, wealthy politicians. How can they rebel? They need to be rebelled against!

In another scathing essay “The Fakebook Generation” ( NYT October 6, 2007), ALICE MATHIAS writes: “…Facebook purports to be a place for human connectivity, but it’s made us more wary of real human confrontation…

...For young people, Facebook is yet another form of escapism; we can turn our lives into stage dramas and relationships into comedy routines….”

Generation pretending to be active but essentially numb!


Artist: Perry Barlow The New Yorker 9 October 1948

To Play Prisoner's Dilemma Effectively Deploy Gandhian TIT FOR TAT

The Economist September 29, 2007 says: “A version of the “prisoner's dilemma” may suggest ways to break through the Kyoto impasse.”

What is Prisoner's Dilemma?

“In it, two prisoners accused of the same crime find themselves in separate cells, unable to communicate. Their jailers try to persuade them to implicate one another. If neither goes along with the guards, they will both receive a sentence of just one year. If one accepts the deal and the other keeps quiet, then the turncoat goes free while the patsy gets ten years. And if they both denounce one another, they both get five years.

If the first prisoner is planning to keep quiet, then the second has an incentive to denounce him, and so get off scot-free rather than spend a year in prison. If the first prisoner were planning to betray the second, then the second would still be better off pointing the finger, and so receive a five-year sentence instead of a ten-year one. In other words, a rational, self-interested person would always betray his fellow prisoner. Yet that leaves them both mouldering in jail for five years, when they could have cut their sentences to a year if they had both kept quiet.

Pessimistic souls assume that the international response to climate change will go the way of the prisoner's dilemma. Rational leaders will always neglect the problem, on the grounds that others will either solve it, allowing their country to become a free-rider, or let it fester, making it a doomed cause anyway. So the world is condemned to a slow roasting, even though global warming could be averted if everyone co-operated…”.

I first read about Prisoner's Dilemma in the essay by Douglas R. Hofstadter (now part of his book “Metamagical Themas, Penguin 1985) for Scientific American (May 1983).

It was an eye opener. I learnt you don’t have to be clever and cunning to be effective

A menacing sounding but actually very simple strategy, translated in a computer program called “TIT FOR TAT”, wins against very complex and cunning strategies.

TIT FOR TAT uses a very simple tactic:
Cooperate on move 1;
thereafter , do whatever the other player did the previous move

Today we are talking of Prisoner's Dilemma for climate change, yesterday it was about cold war and nuclear weapons, tomorrow it will about something else.

For the complex global issues and our every day mundane ones let us never forget elegant and effective TIT FOR TAT.

Let us not waste our time like the “clever prisoners” are doing in Alan Dunn's picture below.


Artist: Alan Dunn The New Yorker 6 Nov 1948

Horse is No Longer High but How Terrible is the Deterioration in Myself!

First day of Navratri (this year October 12) kicks off a festival season in Maharashtra that ends only with the wedding of Tulsi (this year Nov 24),long after Diwali.

During my schooldays at Miraj, courtyard of Ambabai temple used to hold annual fair. The most attractive objects for me there were kites and clay figurines of Maratha warriors. Another attraction was the godess herself who would change her carrier every day during the nine day festival.

George Orwell on his schooldays "Such, Such Were The Joys":

"…In a way it is only within the last decade that I have really thought over my schooldays, vividly though their memory has haunted me. Nowadays, I believe, it would make very little impression on me to see the place again, if it still exists. And if I went inside and smelled again the inky, dusty smell of the big schoolroom, the rosiny smell of the chapel, the stagnant smell of the swimming bath and the cold reek of the lavatories, I think I should only feel what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood:
How small everything has grown, and how terrible is the deterioration in myself!"

And finally Marathi poet B S Mardhekar (बा. सी. मर्ढेकर) on his days bygone:

किती तरी दिवसांत
नाहीं चांदण्यात गेलों;
कितीतरी दिवसांत
नाहीं नदीत डुंबलो.

खुल्या चांदण्याची ओढ़
आहे माझी ही जुनीच;
आणि वाहत्या पाण्याची
शीळ ओळखीची तीच.

केव्हा तरी चांदण्यात
पुन्हा जाईन निर्भय;
गांवाकाठच्या नदीत
होईन मी जलमय.

आज अंतरांत भीती
खुल्या चांदण्याची थोड़ी;
आणि नदीचा प्रवाह
अंगावर कांटा काढी.

बरा म्हणून हा इथें
दिवा पारवा पारयाचा;
बरी तोतरया नळाची
शिरी धार, मुखी ऋचा.

Artist: Whitney Darrow,Jr. The New Yorker 17 July 1948

Shooting a Monk in Mandalay

Paul Theroux wrote in his “The Great Railway Bazaar” (1973)-one of the best books ever-“Nothing happens in Burma, but then nothing is expected to happen.”

Well, a lot is happening there finally.

Mandalay and Burma entered my consciousness very early because the last Mughal, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Subhas Chandra Bose were imprisoned there.

George Orwell wrote one of the greatest essays in English language: “Shooting an Elephant”. It showed what was wrong with the British Empire, its sheer futility.

The shooting incident happened in Moulmein, in lower Burma.

Orwell writes: “…That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes… But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at…”

And then he goes on to shoot the elephant.

Amitav Ghosh wrote “The Glass Palace” (2000) with a backdrop of Burma. Ghosh tries to answer why Indians became hated there, why the British treated Burma very differently from India (answer- abundant, raw natural resources) etc.

The book also tells the tragic story of the last Burmese king (King Thebaw) who was exiled to Ratnagiri, Maharashtra.

Picture Below: Watching shooting of a monk? Unemployed youth in Yangon

Source: Frontline October 19, 2007


Artist: Patrick Chappatte http://www.globecartoon.com/

Uninterrupted Capitalism Always Turns Che Guevara into Bikini Brand

MARC LACEY for NYT (October 9, 2007) says: “In fact, 40 years after his death, Che — born Ernesto Guevara de la Serna — is as much a marketing tool as an international revolutionary icon. Which raises the question of what exactly does the sheer proliferation of his image — the distant gaze, the scraggly beard and the beret adorned with a star — mean in a decidedly capitalist world?”

I read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, translated in Marathi by my father, when I was still in school. I cried when Boxer was taken away to the slaughterhouse. I did not understand that it was a parable for failed Russian revolution.

I still became passionate communist for good part of my college life. Lenin, Che Guevara, Castro, Mao, Ho Chi Minh became heroes. I particularly liked Anil Barve’s Marathi play “Thank you, Mr. Glad” based on the life of a surgeon-turned-Naxalite.

Then I experienced first hand violent labour union movement of Datta Samant at Mukand Iron and Steel, Kalwa from 1983-84 and Animal-Farm-style-pigs-like-union at Nocil (1984-87). (Nocil, a blue chip, was a much bigger company than Reliance Industries then). Later I also read about membership of Lenin and Mao of “Thirty Million Club”.

(Brad DeLong- “Call those political leaders whose followers and supporters have slaughtered more than ten million of their fellow humans "members of the Ten-Million Club.”… The twentieth century has seen perhaps five people join the Ten Million Club: Adolf Hitler, Chiang Kaishek, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao have credentials that may well make them the charter members of the Thirty Million Club as well–perhaps the Fifty Million Club.)

I was disillusioned with communism for life at the age of 27.

Graham Greene’s books gave a new pair of glasses for looking at communism. He says Catholics and communists are never indifferent to you and that is their chief quality.

It was not long before disillusionment came with capitalism too.

Greene has said: “The terrifying weight of this (USA’s) consumer society oppresses me”

Guardian (Chris Petit) reviewed Benjamin R Barber’s book “Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilise Adults and Swallow Citizens Whole” on June 23, 2007.

“…There are 24 million compulsive shoppers in the US. According to a study commissioned by Yahoo!, members of the My Media generation can, by multi-tasking, fit up to 44 hours of activity into one day. With desire propelled in excess of the speed of light anything is possible, hence the growing number of internet addiction disorder clinics in the US. Shopping also functions like pornography, another form of accelerated desire with an emphasis on repetition. For the first time in history, a society has felt its economic survival demands a kind of "controlled regression, a culture that promotes puerility rather than maturation"….

…Benjamin Barber fears that this process of infantilisation, combined with the associated practices of branding and privatisation, threatens democracy. Privatisation has merely privatised corruption and inequality without providing more adequate supplies or even turning much of a profit.”

Petit agrees but warns: “If capitalism continues uninterrupted, then the cure of self-restraint will become another commercial facet of consumerism, like weight-watching or dieting or healthy eating - just another giant business in its own right. “

Capitalism will simply swallow its proposed cure. We have to interrupt capitalism. How?


The New Yorker

Now Fallen Sperm Count May Trigger Next Mahabharat

Times of India reported on October 8, 2007:”A new study by researchers at the University of Sheffield suggests that people having an elder brother are more likely to have reduced fertility, as compared to individuals having an elder sister."

My reaction. Oh no, another reason for brothers to fight.

Hindus keep making noises about Bhagavad-Gita and Ramayana but the book they follow most is Mahabharat. (Or is that the book follows them?)

If one wants to understand India, she must understand Mahabharat.

Excellent commentaries on Mahabharat are available in Marathi – Vyasaparva by Durga Bhagwat दुर्गा भागवत and Yuganta (also available in English) by Iravati Karve.

Columnist and writer Gurcharan Das of late has often resorted to the epic to press home his point. He recommends editions of University Of Chicago Press and Clay Sanskrit Library from Oxford University .

Mahabharat at its heart is a story of feuding brothers and cousins. In Marathi, there is a word for this conflict-‘Bhaubandki’. I feel Indian Y chromosome is not programmed to coexist with its kind!

For example, just see what is happening in business empires of Ambani’s; Bajaj’s, soap operas, movies, dominant political families etc. Indian history (of both Hindus and Muslims) is replete with many examples.(I was shocked to read in John Keay’s “India” that the great Harsha-Vardhana had had a hand in his brother Rajya-Vardhana’s ‘imminent removal’.)

I don’t see this ‘feuding brothers’ a dominant theme in Western Civilization.

On October 4, 2007, world celebrated launch of Sputnik 50 years ago. A hurting Indian brother may not mind sending his sibling along!


Artist: Charles Addams The New Yorker Jan 6, 1951

Francis Ford Coppola Discovers Yayati

The greatest English film I ever watched and keep watching is “Coppola's The Godfather” (1972). It’s like reading Mahabharat.

A O Scott, dependable film critic of NYT reports on September 9, 2007: “YOUTH Without Youth,” Francis Ford Coppola’s first film in 10 years, is about Dominic Matei, an elderly Romanian professor of linguistics who, after being struck by lightning, becomes young again. Though Matei, played by Tim Roth, retains a septuagenarian’s memories and experiences, his body, restored to 30-year-old fighting trim, is mysteriously immune to the effects of time…

Mr. Coppola’s movie is a complex, symbol-laden meditation on the nature of chronology, language and human identity — but it also speaks to a familiar and widespread longing. What if, without losing the hard-won wisdom of age, you could go back and start again? What if you could reverse and arrest the process of growing old, securing the double blessing of a full past and a limitless future?”

This reminded me of Indian mythological story of Yayati.

“Yayati was a man of amorous disposition, and his infidelity to Devayani, his wife, brought upon him the curse of old age and infirmity from her father, Sukra. This curse Sukra consented to transfer to any one of his sons who would consent to bear it. All refused except Puru, who undertook to resign his youth in his father's favour. Yayati, after a thousand years spent in sensual pleasures, renounced sensuality, restored his vigour to Puru, and made him his successor.”

Yayati is a fascinating story and needs to be told by as good a director as Coppola.

Marathi writer V S Khandekar wrote an award (Jnanpith Award 1974) winning novel on the subject but for my taste, it’s a bad work. (By the way along with Vijay Tendulkar, Khandekar is the most popular Marathi writer outside Maharashtra. At IIT Madras, in early 1980’s, my Tamil speaking friend told me that they had a good writer in Tamil called Khandekar!)

Medicines like Viagra and the scalpel of a plastic surgeon have changed the definition of youth now.

BENEDICT CAREY reported for NYT on August 22, 2007 “Most Americans remain sexually active into their 60s, and nearly half continue to have sex regularly into their early 70s……”

Today’s male Yayati is likely to be all pharmacy and female Yayati all surgery!


Artist: William Hamilton The New Yorker May 15, 2000

Watch Your Expression While Talking to Pet Donkey!

On October 4, 2007, Asian Age quoted from Maneka Gandhi’s speech delivered at the opening ceremony of the Donkey Sanctuary in India on January 12, 2000.

She said: “…But, I happen to have a special place in my heart for the donkey. Just look how beautiful his eyes are. You can learn many social skills from him. Have you noticed that a donkey is never a loner? Even a child-donkey is able to make many friends. He shares his secrets with his friends. He cries if you separate him from them. When we mistreat him and overload him for hauling dirt and hundreds of other materials, he is only able to complain to his friends. The friends console him and assure him that there are better days ahead.”

It’s very moving like many of her other writings on the subject of animals.

I too find donkeys very interesting. But I don’t comprehend what to make of their habit of taking out their considerable penis and running at full tilt!

Business Line, staid ‘Madrasi’ Indian business newspaper, reported on August 20, 2007: “Killed by an amorous camel”.

“An Australian woman was killed by a pet camel given to her as a 60th birthday present after the animal apparently tried to have sex, police said Sunday.

The woman, whose name was not released, was killed Saturday at her family's sheep and cattle ranch near Mitchell, 350 miles west of the Queensland state capital Brisbane, state police Detective Senior Constable Craig Gregory said.
The 10-month-old male camel — weighing about 330 pounds — knocked the woman to the ground, lay on top of her, then exhibited what police suspect was mating behavior, Gregory said.

"I'd say it's probably been playing, or it may be even a sexual sort of thing," Gregory said, adding the camel almost suffocated the family's pet goat by straddling it on several occasions.

Camel expert Chris Hill said he had no doubt the camel's behavior was sexual.
Hill, who has offered camel rides to tourists for 20 years, said young camels are not aggressive, but can be dangerous if treated as pets without discipline.

The fate of the camel was not known.

The woman was given the camel in March as a birthday present from her husband and daughter. "She had a love of exotic pets," Gregory said.”

Thanks to my neighbourhood at Miraj, I knew all lewd expressions in Marathi and Urdu before I reached IIT, Madras. But one of the first things I learnt there was hump also meant something other than “Arch one's back”!

Now will this camel in the picture understand that 'Hump day' is a synonym for Wednesday?


Artist: Bruce Eric Kaplan The New Yorker October 2007

Highly Competitive Marion Jones is Not an East German or Russian

Some people who read this blog may not even have read about Marion Jones before today. She is the wnner of five medals at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia.

She was big, very big in US. As big as Sachin Tendulkar in India. She was a sprinting rock star. Delight of her sponsors. Inviting pictures, accentuating her selective anatomy, used to appear in media very frequently all over the world, including India. Like Sania Mirza's do in Indian newspapers today.

Jones, who won three gold and two bronzes medals in Sydney, pleaded guilty in a New York district court on Friday October 5, 2007 to lying to federal investigators when she originally told them she had never used performance-enhancing drugs.

I have seen Americans, including even fair guys like The Simpsons, making fun of East Germansand Russians athletes, alluding to their possible use of performance enhancing drugs.

What goes around comes around.

International sports are under cloud everywhere.

Earlier this year, "cleanliness" of Tour De France was debated hotly. (see cartoon below)

Today’s NYT (October 7, 2007) carries Harold Pinter’s, winner of Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005, interview. He says: “The whole brunt of the media and the government is to encourage people to be highly competitive and totally selfish and uncaring of others.”


Artist: Patrick Chappatte http://www.globecartoon.com/

The Most Extreme Mom of South Asia- Mahatma Gandhi

Last night I watched the film "The Most Extreme Mom” on Animal Planet channel. The most extreme of them all is Sea Louse. She makes the ultimate sacrifice for her family.

Her babies kill and eat her.

Marathi speaking poet-saints call Vitthal, a male deity, mother “Vithai”. Vithai makes all kinds of sacrifices for her sons and daughters. Bhakti literature is awash with those stories.

Like Vitthal, Mahatma Gandhi too was mother to South Asians although Indians now call him the father of the nation.

William Dalrymple reviewed few of the books, released to coincide sixtieth anniversary of India’s independence, for FT (Aug 18, 2007).

He says: “…Partition brought on a sectarian Armageddon that left 14.5 million uprooted and more than half a million dead in inter-religious massacres… Gandhi’s ideal of an India of village republics remained the enthusiasm of a minority, along with his spinning wheels, friction baths and saline enemas. But thanks to the way he died, India remained the pluralistic democracy he had always fought for, and the Hindu extremists he so disapproved of were marginalised for the next 40 years.”

And mother, after her death, managed to leave a “clean smell” even for a skeptic like George Orwell, for who the stench of all other political personalities of 20th century was unbearable.

Orwell wrote in January 1949 :”… And if, as may happen, India and Britain finally settle down into a decent and friendly relationship, will this be partly because Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and without hatred, disinfected the political air? ……regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind! “




Artist: Dana Fradon The New Yorker February 17, 1968