Mess of a Leader...संपादकीयाचा राडा

Zhou Enlai (1898-1976), the first Premier of the People's Republic of China,  on the success of the 1789 French Revolution:


"It's too early to tell." 

The Economist, Special Holiday Double Issue, December 17 2011:

"Modern society tends to regard itself as somehow better than previous ones, and technological advance reinforces that sense of superiority. But history teaches us that there is nothing new under the sun. Robert Darnton, an historian at Harvard University, who has studied information-sharing networks in pre-revolutionary France, argues that “the marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the internet.” Social media are not unprecedented: rather, they are the continuation of a long tradition. Modern digital networks may be able to do it more quickly, but even 500 years ago the sharing of media could play a supporting role in precipitating a revolution. Today’s social-media systems do not just connect us to each other: they also link us to the past."

Nicholas Taleb:

"....journalism may be the greatest plague we face today- as the world becomes more and more complicated and our minds are trained for more and more simplification...

...To be competent, a journalist should view matters like a historian, and play down the value of information he is providing…Not only is it difficult for the journalist to think more like a historian, but it is, alas, the historian who is becoming more like the journalist.”




Francis Fukuyama, WSJ, June 28 2013:

"The new middle class is not just a challenge for authoritarian regimes or new democracies. No established democracy should believe it can rest on its laurels, simply because it holds elections and has leaders who do well in opinion polls. The technologically empowered middle class will be highly demanding of their politicians across the board"



This refers to the leader in Marathi daily Loksatta (लोकसत्ता) on July 4 2013. If you read Marathi, read it here.

 I read it twice to make some sense out of it. I could not.

My confusion first started with the word used in the title: 'रिअ‍ॅक्शनरावांचा राडा' (Mess of Messrs Reactions)

I did not know there was a word like 'रिअ‍ॅक्शनराव' (Reaction-rao) in English/ Marathi. Was it 'रिअ‍ॅक्शनीराव' (Reactionary-rao)? When I saw the web address, it reads  "mess of reactionaries". So it indeed was 'रिअ‍ॅक्शनरीरावांचा राडा'!.

I feel there is a lot of difference between  'रिअ‍ॅक्शनराव' (Messrs Reactions) and 'रिअ‍ॅक्शनरीराव'  (Messrs Reactionaries). The former would refer to the people who react and the latter to the people who are reactionary.

( Btw- I also wonder why Marathi word for reactionary- प्रतिगामी- not used.  If it were, it would read 'प्रतिगामीरावांचा राडा')


Let me now turn to the contents of the piece. It confused me more even after replacing 'reactions' with 'reactionaries'.

The leader starts with :

"राजकीय व्यवस्थेत सामील न होता तिच्याविषयी घृणा बाळगत ट्विटर, फेसबुक आदी माध्यमांव्दारे बदलाची अपेक्षा ठेवणारा वर्ग ठोस पर्यायही देत नाही हे धोकादायक आहे. व्यवस्थेचा फायदा घेत ती झीडकारण्याची भाषा करणाऱ्या रिअ‍ॅक्शनरावांना कोणतेही राजकीय अधिष्ठान नाही हेच जगभरातील अलीकडच्या उठावांचे समान सूत्र आहे."

(It's dangerous that a class, without offering a solid alternative, expects a change in  the political system it hates without participating in it, using media such as Twitter and Facebook. The recent uprisings across the world have the same thread: 'Messrs Reactionaries' who while exploiting the system use the language of discarding it have no political base.)

Is it an attack on the mostly middle-class people who think they can usher in a revolution or an alternative system using tools like Twitter and Facebook? Is it also an attack on recent uprisings and such movements? Does the newspaper imply that 'reactionaries' use social media to instigate not-fully-thought-through uprisings against the establishment?

Reactionary is by a definition 'an extreme conservative; an opponent of progress or liberalism'.

Therefore, you can call  these people- who either take part in such uprisings or accompanying social media movements- anything but reactionaries!

On the contrary,  these people are progressivists (those who favor progress toward better conditions in government and society)! Some of them  may be extremely naive even arrogant but they aren't reactionaries and some may just be responding to their wife's- I assume- nagging- "Why don't you start something?"- as in the picture below.

Artist: Robert J Day, The New Yorker, July 16 1932


As The Economist quote at the top says, there is nothing new about social media. We always had social media and also the smart people to leverage it to precipitate a revolution. Therefore, why blame 'new' social media?

In any case,  as Chris Lehmann explains below, they only played a marginal role in Egypt in 2011?

 "Social networking mattered in Egypt, but the root causes of the uprising were scarcity, official corruption and social conflict, none of which fit the cyber-utopian narrative or flatter America’s technological vanity. The original scheduled protests of January 25 arose out of a past effort to organize an anti-Mubarak general strike, and it was the spread of the protests to the less wired workers in Egypt’s long-pinched labor economy that helped furnish the telling last blows to the Mubarak order. According to many reports from Cairo, the protests continued to gain momentum not from tweets or Facebook posts but instead from the direct spectacle of the populace congregating, We the People style, in Tahrir Square. Most Egyptians were following events on state television, which was parroting the official propaganda approved by the Mubarak regime, holding that the protests were the handiwork of foreign agitators. Not being regular blog readers, ordinary Egyptians went into the streets and saw that the state media were lying, that the protesters were their neighbors, their family members, their co-workers. The effort to coax a new political order into being grew from the power of popular witness, filtered through the evidence of citizens’ own eyes and ears."

(Note- TV did not help the change-seekers!)

Even then there were many skeptical about happenings there.

Toby Wilkinson wrote in WSJ in February 2011:

"But there is a final lesson from ancient Egyptian history that those urging regime change should heed. Today, tanks stand guard beside the Pyramids of Giza, the grandest symbols of authoritarian rule ever built. The pyramids sum up the unbridled confidence of ancient Egypt at the height of its power. The pyramid-builders must have assumed that the glories of pharaonic civilization would last forever. What brought the Age of the Pyramid to an end in 2175 B.C. was not war, invasion, or pestilence, but a political vacuum following the demise of a long-lived ruler. Factionalism and paralysis beset the Egyptian government, the economy collapsed and the country was plunged into a protracted civil war.
Egyptian history has a depressing habit of repeating itself. Let us all hope that, in this last respect, it does not."

If you accused Mr. Wilkinson of being a reactionary in 2011, you may now laud him as a visionary!

Does Loksatta expect people who start or instigate uprisings to fully think through their consequences and only after suggesting a solid alternative to the existing order? Has recorded history worked like that?

The late Jacques Barzun wrote in "From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present- 500 Years of Western Cultural Life", 2000:

"How a revolution erupts from a commonplace event—tidal wave from a ripple—is cause for endless astonishment. Neither Luther in 1517 nor the men who gathered at Versailles in 1789 intended at first what they produced at last. Even less did the Russian Liberals who made the revolution of 1917 foresee what followed. All were as ignorant as everybody else of how much was about to be destroyed. Nor could they guess what feverish feelings, what strange behavior ensue when revolution, great or short-lived, is in the air...

...A curious leveling takes place: the common people learn words and ideas hitherto not familiar and not interesting and discuss them like intellectuals, while others neglect their usual concerns—art, philosophy, scholarship—because there is only one compelling topic, the revolutionary Idea. The welltodo and the "right-thinking," full of fear, come together to defend their possessions and habits. But counsels are divided and many see their young "taking the wrong side." The powers that be wonder and keep watch, with fleeting thoughts of advantage to be had from the confusion. Leaders of opinion try to put together some of the ideas
afloat into a position which they mean to fight for. They will reassure others, or preach boldness, and anyhow head the movement. Voices grow shrill, parties form and adopt names or are tagged with them in derision and contempt. Again and again comes the shock of broken friendships, broken families. As time goes on, "betraying the cause" is an incessant charge, and there are indeed turncoats. Authorities are bewildered,
heads of institutions try threats and concessions by turns, hoping the surge of subversion will collapse like previous ones. But none of this holds back that transfer of power and property which is the mark of revolution and which in the end establishes the Idea."

courtesy: Wikipedia 

Waits for Us All On a City Road With an IC Engine Beside HIm

The Hindu, July 1 2013:  

"It does not take new accident data from the National Crime Records Bureau to confirm that India’s roads, bursting at the seams with about 141 million motorised vehicles in 2012, are deadly. The Centre has been ignoring the shameful toll of death and disability for years, responding only with token measures. State governments mostly limit themselves to granting meagre compensation to the families of victims, instead of engaging in serious reform. That 139,091 lives were lost on the roads last year seems to be an insignificant statistic, given the extraordinary indifference among policymakers to a worsening public health disaster. There is even less attention paid to the burden of disability caused annually by crash injuries. Studies show that figure could be 15 to 20 times the number of deaths..."

 James Graham Ballard:

“I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.'' 

Every time I drive in Pune or hear about a crash, I think of Ballard's novel 'Crash', 1972 and George Miller's movie  'Mad Max 2', 1981.

If my 19th century ancestors, I often think, who never saw 20th century,  were to return today, they would be surprised most not by mobile phones, not by television /radio, not by inhouse plumbing and electricity, not by antibiotics, not by aeroplanes, not by computers but how difficult it has now become  for a pedestrian to walk on a road in Pune even between 6:30 AM to 10 PM.

This is what happened to a family, related to us from my my wife's side, because of an automobile accident: A young man having a pregnant wife meets with an accident near Chembur, Mumbai. He is riding  a motor bike. He does not die. He goes into coma.  He wakes up from coma but never fully recovers. His parents sell off almost all their assets treating him and go broke. His sister shelters them in another city. His wife and kid leave him. His parents die. Bedridden he, looked after by his sister and her family, survives.

I haven't read or heard a more tragic middle-class tale than this.  

G A Kulkarni's ( जी ए कुलकर्णी) stories and letters have angry gods,  old abandoned water-wells, shortage of food,  abject poverty, diseases, lakes covered with moss, black magic, lightnings but no crashing automobiles. Lucky him! And us!!

J G Ballard says about his creation:  "Crash is less a hymn to death than an attempt to appease death, to buy off the executioner who waits for us all in a quiet garden nearby, like [Francis] Bacon's headless figure in his herringbone jacket, who sits patiently at a table with a machine gun beside him."
 
For Indians like me, he waits impatiently for us all on a chaotic, noisy, familiar city road with an IC engine beside him.

Artist: Unknown to me

Is Sulochana Singing to Singer?...सर्वभार घेतला असा समर्थ खांब तू

Leon Wieseltier, New Republic, May 28 2013: 

"For decades now in America we have been witnessing a steady and sickening denigration of humanistic understanding and humanistic method. We live in a society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily governed by the values of utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience. The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer practical questions to questions of meaning – to ask of things not if they are true or false, or good or evil, but how they work..."

Martin Wolf, Financial Times, October 2 2012:

"The speed of travel went from the horse to the jet plane. Then, some fifty years ago, it stuck. Urbanisation is a one-off. So, too, is the collapse in child mortality and the tripling of life expectancy. So, too, is control over domestic temperatures. So, too, is liberation of women from domestic drudgery.

By such standards, today’s information age is full of sound and fury signifying little. Many of the labour-saving benefits of computers occurred decades ago. There was an upsurge in productivity growth in the 1990s. But the effect petered out.


In the 2000s, the impact of the information revolution has come largely via enthralling entertainment and communication devices. How important is this? Prof Gordon proposes a thought-experiment. You may keep either the brilliant devices invented since 2002 or running water and inside lavatories. I will throw in Facebook. Does that make you change your mind? I thought not. I would not keep everything invented since 1970 if the alternative were losing running water. 

What we are now living through is an intense, but narrow, set of innovations in one important area of technology. Does it matter? Yes. We can, after all, see that a decade or two from now every human being will have access to all of the world’s information. But the view that overall innovation is now slower than a century ago is compelling."

My in-laws have a sewing machine. Once almost every middle-class home I knew at Miraj used to have one.

I liked the sound it made.

Our home at Miraj, just like cooking gas, never had any. I don't remember seeing my mother even using it.  I always wanted us to get one.

Our neighbours at Miraj used to sell a brand of sewing machines at Sangli. I think they became prosperous in the process.

When my aunt Kumud-mavashi (कुमुद-मावशी) was widowed for the second time in 1971, one of the suggestions I heard was to 'empower' her with a sewing machine. 

Not just homes but almost every movie- Hindi or Marathi used to have one. Poor mothers- especially widows- brought up our heroes or heroines stitching clothes.

Just like NREGA today for rural poor, sewing machine once was thought to be a panacea for middle-class 'poverty'.

So far I have been talking about the 1960's and 1970's. But I did not know the status of sewing machine in 19th century.

Evgeny Morozov writes in New Republic, May 27 2013:

"The sewing machine was the smartphone of the nineteenth century. Just skim through the promotional materials of the leading sewing-machine manufacturers of that distant era and you will notice the many similarities with our own lofty, dizzy discourse. The catalog from Willcox & Gibbs, the Apple of its day, in 1864, includes glowing testimonials from a number of reverends thrilled by the civilizing powers of the new machine. One calls it a “Christian institution”; another celebrates its usefulness in his missionary efforts in Syria; a third, after praising it as an “honest machine,” expresses his hope that “every man and woman who owns one will take pattern from it, in principle and duty.” The brochure from Singer in 1880—modestly titled “Genius Rewarded: or, the Story of the Sewing Machine”—takes such rhetoric even further, presenting the sewing machine as the ultimate platform for spreading American culture. The machine’s appeal is universal and its impact is revolutionary..."
 
Christian institution?

If only, in the then India, Jansangh had little more weight...imagine 'Hindu institution'...the ultimate platform for spreading Indian culture...Rathyatra with a sewing machine mounted atop!

1892 Singer sewing machine advertisement card, distributed at World Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893, showing six people from Zululand (South Africa) with Singer sewing machine.

courtesy: Wikimedia and the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division

 Evgeny Morozov continues:

 "Even its marketing is pure poetry:

On every sea are floating the Singer Machines; along every road pressed by the foot of civilized man this tireless ally of the world’s great sisterhood is going upon its errand of helpfulness. Its cheering tune is understood no less by the sturdy German matron than by the slender Japanese maiden; it sings as intelligibly to the flaxen-haired Russian peasant girl as to the dark-eyed Mexican Señorita. It needs no interpreter, whether it sings amidst the snows of Canada or upon the pampas of Paraguay; the Hindoo mother and the Chicago maiden are to-night making the self-same stitch; the untiring feet of Ireland’s fair-skinned Nora are driving the same treadle with the tiny understandings of China’s tawny daughter; and thus American machines, American brains, and American money are bringing the women of the whole world into one universal kinship and sisterhood."

 Matching that poetry and sisterhood is the following image:

 Indian actor Sulochana (सुलोचना) playing widow, operating 'Singer' and  'singing' a lovely melodious song written by G D Madgulkar composed by Sudhir Phadke using voice of playback singer Suman Kalyanpur  in a Marathi film "Ektee" (एकटी), 1968

"लिंबलोण उतरू कशी असशि दूर लांब तू
इथून दृष्ट काढिते निमिष एक थांब तू"


[ग. दि. माडगूळकर, सुधीर फडके, सुमन कल्याणपूर]

There is a line in the song: 'सर्वभार घेतला असा समर्थ खांब तू' (You are the capable pillar that endures all the pressure.)....Is she singing to Singer?

In 19th century India and earlier, women sang as they sat at the grinding stone. When used in 20th century around me, I liked the sound it made. Here is that machine:

Image courtesy: www.manipal.net


 Evgeny Morozov:

 "...And what of the almighty sewing machine? That great beacon of hope—described as “America’s Chief Contribution to Civilization” in Singer’s catalog from 1915—did not achieve its cosmopolitan mission. (How little has changed: a few years ago, one of Twitter’s co-founders described his company as a “triumph of humanity.”) In 1989 the Singer company, in a deeply humiliating surrender to the forces of globalization, was sold off to a company owned by a Shanghai-born Canadian that went bankrupt a decade later. American machines, American brains, and American money were no longer American. One day Google, too, will fall. The good news is that, thanks in part to this superficial and megalomaniacal book, the company’s mammoth intellectual ambitions will be preserved for posterity to study in a cautionary way. The virtual world of Google’s imagination might not be real, but the glib arrogance of its executives definitely is."

A Sacred Geography? Maybe. A Sacred Geology?

Will Durant:

"Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice."


Norman Mailer:

"Well, nonetheless, nature still exhibits manifestations which defy all methods of collecting information and data. For example, an earthquake may occur, or a tidal wave may come in, or a hurricane may strike. And the information will lag critically behind our ability to control it."

बा सी मर्ढेकर (B S Mardhekar):

"असशील जेथे तिथे रहा तू,
हा इथला मज पुरे फवारा !"


I bought much praised, best-seller in India, Diana L. Eck's "India A Sacred Geography", 2012 in January 2013.


I did not find it very exciting unlike Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus: An Alternative History", 2009. I thumbed through it and since then it remained on "to read" list.

Last night I went through its index for Kedarnath. It appears most between pages 226-33.

I read those pages. Not an inkling it gives that "June 2013" might happen there one day.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe I think so today. Maybe such things have happened in the past but have gone unrecorded. Maybe I am having a stroke of  'cemetery-reclusion' (स्मशान वैराग्य) after reading and watching about the disaster...But  as long as I live, I will always associate Kedarnath more with the colossal tragedy that took place in June 2013 than Lord Shiva's abode,,,

                                          Kedarnath Temple in the high Himalayas

courtesy: Diana L. Eck's "India A Sacred Geography"

The book ends with these words:

"...We began this journey in Kāshī, often said to be preeminent among those places where one who has come to the end of this life can find liberation, crossing over to the far shore of immortality. As Shiva shows his beloved city to the goddess Pārvatī, he compares the city to a ferry boat, exclaiming:

Look dear! Look at Kāshī, a boat stretched out for the crossing …a boat not of wood and iron, but the light of illumination for all the people it ferries across the sea of  life.

And yet, in exploring the sacred geography of India more widely, we have learned that one might board this boat for the great crossing-beyond at any of the seven tīrthas of India said to be mokshadāyaka, “bestowers of liberation.” But even more—the claim to a crossing inheres in the very notion of a tīrtha. While the tīrtha may ferry one over the trials and tribulations of earthly life, the tīrtha is finally a ferry to help one cross over from the entanglement of repeated birth and death to the freedom of liberation. One just might board that boat anywhere. Taking a pilgrim journey to a distant place may be a necessary discipline, but not because the nearby place is not also a crossing. Tīrthas are plentiful—where the rivers meet, where the hill rises, where the temple flag waves. The south Indian poet Dasimayya writes that for the one who is truly awake to the reality of Shiva, “his own front yard is the true Banāras.” And the tīrtha just might be closer still. Lalla, a fourteenth-century devotional poet from Kashmir, wrote: “I, Lalla, went out far in search of Shiva, the omnipresent lord; having wandered, I found him in my own body, sitting in his house.”..."

Why should I go for "chardham" pilgrimage when he is sitting in his house? And even if he is not, as poet  B S Mardhekar says in the quote at the top: You stay where you are, for me sprinkling here will do !

Genkhis Khan Has Branches In All Cities

Richard Dawkins:

“In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.”

 
Indian media, for some reason, are rejoicing that the second-in-line to the British throne, Prince William,  is 1/256th Indian.

I too rejoiced something about my lineage when I saw this  program on National Geographic: 

"Genghis Khan, the fearsome Mongolian warrior of the 13th century, may have done more than rule the largest empire in the world; according to a recently published genetic study, he may have helped populate it too.

An international group of geneticists studying Y-chromosome data have found that nearly 8 percent of the men living in the region of the former Mongol empire carry y-chromosomes that are nearly identical. That translates to 0.5 percent of the male population in the world, or roughly 16 million descendants living today..."

"0.5 percent of the male population in the world"? That is 1 in 200...I have a good shot at being a member of that set.

Look at the following picture by one of my favourite artists the late J B Handelsman.

It's actually Mr. Khan, more than Mr.  Bonaparte, who should be introduced as having branches in every city and not just the major ones!

Artist: John Bernard "J.B." Handelsman, The New Yorker,  January 30 1984