Hope King Shivaji Comes Back Without His Century! राजे तुम्ही परत जन्माला या, तुमचे शतक मागे ठेवून!

तुकाराम : "रात्रंदिन आम्हा युद्धाचा प्रसंग। अंतर्बाह्य जग आणि मन।"

Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M.Smith

"Writing early in 1643 some friends of the count-duke of Olivares, the disgraced chief minister of Philip IV of Spain, noted a global context for the failures of their hero in the apologetic tract, Nicandro: All the north in commotion… England, Ireland and Scotland aflame with Civil War… The Ottomans tearing each other to pieces… China invaded by the Tartars, Ethiopia by the Turks, and the Indian kings who live scattered through the region between the Ganges and the Indus all at each other’s throats."

('The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century', 1978)

रा भा पाटणकर :

"शिवाजीने रयतेच्या भल्यासाठी केलेल्या गोष्टी सर्वश्रुत आहेत. पण तरीही तेथील सामान्य रयत सुखात होती असे म्हणता येणार  नाही ."

(पृष्ठ 56, 'अपूर्ण  क्रांती',  1999)


JOHANN HARI :

"You and I and everyone we know are always living only a few weeks of food away from famine psychosis. Here’s how it goes. Deprived of meals, your body starts to consume itself. It uses up the glucose stored in your liver and body fats. It uses up the proteins in its own muscles and cells. Rapidly, your body starts to mock you: your belly swells as if you are becoming fat, because the breakdown of muscle causes the remaining fat to bunch there.

And then your personality is consumed. As Thomas Keneally puts it in “Three Famines”: “The victim becomes a new person. The fastidious become slovenly; the kindly become aggressive; the moral are caught up in the great amorality of famine. Fraternity and love wither. Judgment vanishes, and a hyperactive anxiety seizes the mind.” You are gripped by psychotic delusions. Sometimes you will eat your own children. You will become so insane you don’t even recognize food when it is put in front of you; rescued famine victims often howl for sustenance long after it is offered to them. And then you die..."

 
In Maharashtra, I have now seen a number of motor vehicles (and even other structures) that carry Shivaji's (1630-1680)  picture with an appeal.

The appeal in Marathi reads something like this: "राजे तुम्ही परत  जन्माला या." (King you be borne again.)

I believe people are so fed up with the current state of administration in Maharashtra that they long for what they perceive as the good administration: Shivaji's rule.

A commercially successful film 'Mee Shivajiraje Bhosale Boltoy' (मी शिवाजीराजे भोसले बोलतोय), 2009  had the theme of return of Shivaji to the current times to address the so-called woes of middle-class Marathi speaking people in Mumbai.


I too wish Shivaji returned to rule Maharashtra with a small rider: He doesn't bring back 17th century along with him!

Why?

I recently read a review of  Geoffrey Parker's book "Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century". Review is done by Christopher Booker  for  The Spectator, UK. (The following words are based extensively on that review.)
 
All around the globe except in a few countries like Japan, 17th century was peculiarly cruel time to be alive.

"It marked the depths of that ‘Little Ice Age’ which saw global temperatures lower than at any time since the end of the last glaciation 13,000 years ago."

This change of climate would play a decisive role the way 17th century shaped. 

When we read popular history of 17th century Maharashtra, this fact seldom comes across. 

Not just that but I don't recall even D G Godse (द ग गोडसे) or T S Shejwalkar (त्र्यं शं शेजवलकर) or Setu Madhavrao Pagdi (सेतु माधवराव पगडी) mentioning it- little ice age-  in any of their great essays on Maratha history and culture.

It is a big miss because of what that huge climate change did to people of India.

"Everywhere from China and India to Britain and Ireland, droughts, floods, cold summers and freezing winters caused massive crop failures and economic breakdown, not only leading to widespread famines but making it impossible for impoverished and starving populations to meet those ever-rising tax demands."

Anthony Reid writes: "In India as a whole the worst years were 1630 and 1631, representing ‘almost certainly the most destructive Indian famine of the early modern era’, which killed about 3,000,000 people in Gujerat alone...In 1660–61 another appalling drought struck South India, and particularly Tanjore, where ‘famine has so increased that whole villages, towns and hamlets have been depopulated, and hardly anyone remains, the dead lying in dried-up tanks’."

 ('THE CRISIS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA')


Poet-saint Tukaram (1598 ? - 1650) was very much alive during 1630-31. His life too like most others was wrecked by the recurring droughts and famines of 17th century. 

Since self-rule started in 1947, the rain-gods have generally been kind to Maharashtra, planet earth has not seen anything like a little ice age and yet we have this huge water crisis in the summer of 2013.

How lucky we are that we don't live in 17th century and how lucky 17th century people were that they didn't have 21st century rulers!

Natives Waiting for Relief at Bangalore

The Great Famine of 1876–78,  the worst famine of the century, which claimed perhaps 5.5 million lives in the Deccan and the south

Artist: Unknown, The Illustrated London News , October 20 1877


courtesy: Wikimedia Commons.
  

"It has long been familiar that the 17th century was also a time of extraordinary political turmoil right across Europe and Asia, from the Thirty Years War which laid waste vast tracts of Germany to the overthrow of the Ming dynasty in China; from the murderous civil wars and revolutions which rocked Britain and France to the disintegration of the Spanish empire. As early as 1643 a Spaniard observed that it was ‘one of the epochs when every nation is turned upside down’. Voltaire noted, a century later, how many rulers had been murdered or executed, from the Ottoman Sultan Ibrahim in 1648 and Charles I in 1649 to the Mogul emperor Shah Jehan in 1658, calling it ‘a period of usurpations almost from one end of the world to another’.

Again and again we see similar patterns, as empires and kingdoms became drawn into a plethora of wars, requiring their rulers to raise ever larger sums of money in taxes. But again and again, as countries and whole regions were thrown into chaos by war, made worse by epidemics of disease, such as smallpox and the last recrudescence of that plague which had wracked Europe since the Black Death, we see how extreme weather events intervened to make the situation much worse.

 It is no accident that it was right in the middle of the 17th century that Thomas Hobbes included his heartcry in Leviathan that the life of man is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. Reading Parker’s painful accounts of how the general crisis tore apart one country after another, from Ireland to China, one can only think how fortunate we are not to live in a time as desperate as any in human history.

 In Szechuan alone, in the chaos surrounding the downfall of the 200-year old Ming dynasty, more than a million died. Vast areas of Europe in the chaos of the Thirty Years War lost up to a third or more of their population. The French civil war between 1649 and 1653, the Fronde, caused a million deaths. In Britain the various civil wars between 1638 and 1660 led to the deaths of seven per cent of the population, far greater than the two per cent who died in the first world war. In Ireland this rose to a fifth.

 By adding the vagaries of the weather to the overall equation, Parker is not suggesting that these were the cause of the general catastrophe. But what he does show for the first time, with his wealth of evidence drawn from thousands of sources, is how the climate seriously aggravated the effects of all those wars and other disorders which made the 17th century such a peculiarly cruel time to be alive... "

That is why I appeal to Shivaji: King you be borne again, leaving behind your century! (राजे तुम्ही परत  जन्माला या, तुमचे शतक मागे ठेवून!)

What Made My Parents Cry? Sugar, Rice, Wheat, Cotton...

Inflation is high in India, particularly food inflation. The Consumer Price Index that is published today reads red hot  9.31%.   Current account deficit is knocking Indian rupee down,  stoking fears of even higher inflation.

(Inflation has appeared many times on this blog before. Most notably here and here.)

My father-in-law (borne 1930) belonged to an economically well off family. But he had to eat millet rotis when he went for college education in Solapur. He still describes how he had to swallow the rotis with hot peanut chutney powder (aka 'gun powder').

My parents after their marriage in 1957 were  struggling economically.

My father once told me how hard it was to find some affordable rice after the birth of my younger brother in June 1962 and the young mother wanted rice for herself and the two kids.

He, already a college teacher,  could get only some "yellow rice". (Was it because Chinese were at the gates and their shadow fell over the rice?)

Artist: Claude Smith, The New Yorker, 16 July 1960

So was food inflation higher then than today?

The Economist informs:

"In a new paper David Jacks, an economist at Simon Fraser University, assembles figures on inflation-adjusted prices for 30 commodities over 160 years...Over the very long run commodity prices display a marked upward trend, having risen by 192% since 1950, and by 252% since 1900. But an upward trend has clearly not translated into global famine, and not all commodities are alike.


Long-run rises have been most pronounced for commodities that are “in the ground”, like minerals and natural gas. Energy commodities especially have boomed, soaring by roughly 300% since 1950. Prices of precious metals have also risen, as have industrial ingredients like iron ore. In contrast, prices for resources that can be grown have trended downwards (see chart). The inflation-adjusted prices of rice, corn and wheat are lower now than they were in 1950. Although the global population is 2.8 times above its 1950 level, world grain production is 3.6 times higher."


Look at the chart below. Rice, wheat, sugar, cotton- all essential commodities for a middle-class family- are today more than 50%  cheaper than they were in 1950's.

I remember how precious sugar was when I was a kid. Most non-Brahmin families (and even a few Brahmin ones too)  in our neighbourhood could not afford it and drank tea with milk and jaggery. They could afford  rice and wheat only on festival or other special days. Most had very few clothes.

So my parents, in-laws and their contemporaries  have borne the brunt of food inflation far more than me.

courtesy: The Economist, June 2013

Does Usain Bolt Understand French? Majority of Us Don't

Harry Shearer:

"When you want your euphemising to be particularly opaque, you go French."

French moralist Nicolas Chamfort:

 “A man should swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead.”

Patrick West, June 5 2013:

" If you consider that the English and the French spent a good part of 800 years at war with each other, it’s not surprising that relations between the two peoples and their cultures remain awkward. The latest manifestation of this came last week. We learned that many people in France have been up in arms about plans to allow English to be used to teach science courses in its universities. The British, in turn, have found such fury and indignation hilarious...

...Everyone in the world - except Dutch and Scandinavian footballers - learns American English because it is today’s lingua franca. It’s the principal means for disseminating ideas and getting work, as Latin used to be. As Luc Ferry of Le Figaro, writing approvingly of the new French legislation, noted last week: ‘Si Descartes n’avait pas écrit en latin, come le feront encore après lui Leibniz ou Spinoza, il n’aurait jamais été lu dans le monde entier.’ People stopped using French when that country went into decline and lost influence in the nineteenth century, and it was the same story for British English in the twentieth. But neither language has disappeared, and neither is ‘threatened’ by American English. It’s also worth remembering that as America declines, so will its influence and the importance of its language. No empire lasts for ever."
 
On the rainy evening of June 9 2013, on TV, I saw closing parts of Men's final at French open and then stayed on for the presentation ceremony.

Usain Bolt presented the trophies. But I wonder if he understood anything that was spoken around him in Spanish and French for a large part of the ceremony.

Shouldn't just every one try speak English as a courtesy to not just millions of TV viewers around the world but the chief guest?

Sure, you can translate each line into French for the stadium spectators and French-only TV viewers around the world.

Do French think this will popularise their great language? In India, I meet a lot of young people learning German and Japanese but hardly any one learning French.

I don't get angry at this, I am just amused.

Artist: Helen E. Hokinson, The New Yorker, September 2 1944 

I Only Want You to Love Me...What Was I Doing In That Kitchen?

Alejandro Zambra:

“My books would be very different if I had written them in another room, looking out another window.”

Charles Simic:

" A good photograph, like a good poem, is a self-contained little universe inexhaustible to scrutiny."
  
Margaret Atwood:

“...Don’t move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.”
 

Artist: Miles Aldridge, 'I Only Want You to Love Me', created 2005-2012

 When I first saw the picture above, needless to say where I was looking and what I was focused on...It took a while for me to note that she was doing plumbing work under a sink!

And what started only as carnal ended in very complex emotions.

Very glamorous 'she' was disconnected from her surroundings and yet she belonged...And what was I doing in that kitchen? Was it her or was it mine? Was I a being voyeur taking advantage of her discomfiture?

And finally, was she asking me to fuck off?

Probably yes!

Dnyaneshwari's Animal Planet: अहा कटा हें वोखटें । मृत्युलोकींचें उफराटें ।

Alfred Edward Housman:

"For nature, heartless, witless nature,

  Will neither care nor know

What stranger's feet may find the meadow

  And trespass there and go,

Nor ask amid the dews of morning

  If they are mine or no."

James Parker says: "Character, human character, expressed through relationship with bird, beast, or fish—that’s the Animal Planet method. "

This is so  because Animal Planet is not about animals it's about us, humans! 

James Parker continues:

“And if nature asks us to treat it with humor?” enquired Czeslaw Milosz, introducing a poem by Robert Francis in the anthology 'A Book of Luminous Things': If Winnie the Pooh, Piglet, and Rabbit, and his friends-and-relations, if all that humanization is precisely what nature expects from us? In other words, perhaps we are unable to say—to tell her—anything, except ascribing to her sadness, smiles, ominousness, serenity?  What a canny poet Milosz was. Nature unobserved, unsentimentalized, unpolluted with our delusions, is just a bunch of stuff eating itself. Here endeth the lesson of Animal Planet: it’s all about the human. Oh, Homo sapiens. Oh, blessed biped. Oh, you."

 "Nature is just a bunch of stuff eating itself."

But the nature in Dnyaneshwari is closer to the truth than in the animal planet.

Exhibit 1:

Dnyaneshwari (ज्ञानेश्वरी, अध्याय ९ राजविद्याराजगृह्ययोग):

"जंव जंव बाळ बळिया वाढे । तंव तंव भोजें नाचती कोडें । आयुष्य निमालें आंतुलियेकडे । ते ग्लानीचि नाहीं ॥ ५११ ॥

जन्मलिया दिवसदिवसें । हों लागे काळाचियाचि ऐसें । कीं वाढती करिती उल्हासें । उभविती गुढिया ॥ ५१२ ॥ अगा मर हा बोलु न साहती । आणि मेलिया तरी रडती । परि असतें जात न गणिती । गहिंसपणें ॥ ५१३ ॥

दर्दुर सापें गिळिजतु आहे उभा । कीं तो मासिया वेटाळी जिभा । तैसे प्राणिये कवणा । वाढविती तृष्णा ॥ ५१४ ॥

अहा कटा हें वोखटें । मृत्युलोकींचें उफराटें । एथ अर्जुना जरी अवचटें । जन्मलासी तूं ॥ ५१५॥"

(As a child grows, they fondle it with great joy and do not grieve that its life is getting reduced. A child comes under the sway of death from its very birth, but they celebrate its birthday with great pomp. O Partha, people cannot bear to hear the name of death and mourn when a relation dies. But they do not foolishly consider how their life is getting spent. When the serpent is swallowing the frog, the latter is catching flies with its tongue. In the same way, being increase their desires. Alas! How foul and perverse are the things of this mortal world! O Partha, even though you are born in this world by mere accident (511-515), spurn it and take to the path of devotion, by which you will come to my eternal abode.)

Snake is eating frog, frog is eating fly...

Exhibit-II:

"हें जाणों मृत्यु रागिटा । सिंहाडयाचा दरकुटा । परी काय वांजटा । पूरिजत असे ? ॥६०॥

महाकल्पापरौतीं । कव घालूनि अवचितीं । सत्यलोकभद्रजाती । आंगीं वाजे ॥६१॥

लोकपाळ नित्य नवे । दिग्गजांचे मेळावे । स्वर्गींचिये आडवे । रिगोनि मोडी ॥६२॥

येर ययाचेनि अंगवातें । जन्ममृत्यूचिये गर्तें । निर्जिवें होऊनि भ्रमतें । जीवमृगें ॥६३॥

न्याहाळीं पां केव्हडा । पसरलासे चवडा । जो करूनियां माजिवडा । आकारगजु ॥६४॥

म्हणौनि काळाची सत्ता । हाचि बोलु निरुता । ऐसे वाद पंडुसुता । क्षेत्रालागीं ॥६५॥"

("This Kala is dreadful like a den of lions. If after knowing this you indulge in empty talk, how will it help you? This Kala will hold in his fatal grip all of a sudden even the blessed denizens of Satyaloka at the final dissolution of the world. He enters the heavenly woods and destroys the eight regents and elephants that guard the eight quarters. In the whirl of this Kala, the deer in the form of human beings become dispirited and wander in the pits of births and deaths. Just see how this Kala has spread out his paw and has held in it the elephant in the form of the world and so the supremacy of this Kala over the Field is the sole truth.

O Arjuna, these are different views about the Field. (61-65)")

In this instance lion overpowering elephant and deer...

And the lions are not just in jungles and zoos...

Artist: Charles Barsotti, The New Yorker, February 8 1999

Infosys: An Honest and Politically-Correct Face of Nepotic, Inbreeding India

The Hindu, June 3 2013:

"Though dynastic succession is accepted in Indian businesses as much as in politics, the fact is that by inducting the son, even if it is as a mere assistant to the father, Infosys appears to have fallen short of the high standards of global corporate governance which it professes to practise."
 
Gardiner Harris, The New York Times, October 26 2012


"...In the past, private sector companies grew like gangbusters in part by shutting out the rest of India and avoiding interactions with a dysfunctional and corrupt government. But top executives here now say they can no longer turn their backs on the chaos that surrounds them. “Building these islands, or expanding them to become the whole of India, I don’t believe will work,” said S. Gopalakrishnan, executive co-chairman of Infosys, India’s leading technology giant. He gestured out the window at his company’s immaculate campus, which included a glass pyramid, food courts, basketball courts and gardens. “At some point, the resistance from the outside world will overwhelm them.” 

Indeed, India’s dysfunction is now taking a toll on Infosys’ well-known productivity, Mr. Gopalakrishnan said. His employees’ commutes are longer, their fights with schools more intractable. “If you have just 100 employees, the impact is not so much,” he said. “But with 150,000 employees, more and more the environment affects us as individuals, and, yes, it slows things down. At some point, you can’t shut your mind to what is happening around you....”


लोकसत्ता संपादकीय (Loksatta leader), June 3 2013:

"...तरुणांशी संवाद साधण्याची, त्यांच्या नजरेतून कंपनी चालवण्याची गरज फक्त चिरंजीवाशीच संवाद साधून पूर्ण होईल असे थोरले मूर्ती यांना वाटते काय? रोहन यांच्याकडे प्रशासकीय अधिकार नाहीत हे कबूल. ते अधिकृतपणे देण्याची गरजही नाही. कारण रोहन हे नारायण मूर्ती यांचे सुपुत्र आहेत ही एकच बाब त्यांना हवे ते अधिकार मिळण्यासाठी पुरेशी आहे. तेव्हा रोहन मूर्ती यांनी एक रुपया मानधन घेतले काय किंवा फुकट काम केले काय, तो देखावाच राहतो. रोहन हे तीर्थरूपांच्या कार्यालयाचे नेतृत्व करणार आहेत. तेव्हा त्यांच्याकडून आलेली सूचना वा विनंती ही कोणत्याही प्रशासकीय अधिकाराशिवायदेखील अन्य कर्मचाऱ्यांसाठी शिरसावंद्य असेल, हे उघड आहे. तेव्हा चि. रोहन यांना प्रशासकीय अधिकार नाहीत हा दावा दांभिकपणाचा झाला आणि तो मूर्ती यांच्याकडून अपेक्षित नाही..."


Ajit Dayal:

"At one level, the decision of Narayana Murthy at the age of 66 years, to head back to the chair can be explained as pure wealth protection. His family owns own about 5% in Infosys. That is worth some Rs 7,000 crore today. The April announcement of lower visibility saw a 20% knock in the share price - a loss of some Rs 1,500 crore for the Murthy family in that one day. That is a lot of erosion of wealth for any family."


Recycling my earlier post dated December 1 2007

On November 27, 2007, I saw Shekhar Kapoor saying, on NDTV panel discussion in Goa, that Hindi film Saawariya does NOT feature newcomers but kids of (well established insiders like) Rishi Kapoor, Nitu Singh and Anil Kapoor.

He wondered if Sony corp. would have indeed invested Rs. 38 crores on a pair of unknown artists.

Indian film industry, similar to Indian businesses, is like larger Indian society, deeply nepotic right from the days of Mahabharat.

If Saawariya pair is a new comer, following Indians should also be called "newcomers" to their respective fields:

Rahul Gandhi, Supriya Pawar, M.K. Kanimozhi, Uddhav Thackeray, Rahul Mahajan, Maran brothers…to infinity.

Would you?

Nepotism has not worked in sports yet. But who knows? I would bet on a Tendulkar or a Ganguly captaining Indian national cricket team around year 2025.

In India, social mobility was always suspect because of caste system. What about the rest of the world?

Nepotism is prospering every where.

Newsweek November 3, 2007 announced: “The Death Of Social Mobility. In the Asian Tiger economies, the next generation will struggle to do as well as their parents did.”

Once beacon of social mobility, America too is turning very nepotic.

Paul Krugman:

“…Very few children of the lower class are making their way to even moderate affluence. This goes along with other studies indicating that rags-to-riches stories have become vanishingly rare, and that the correlation between fathers' and sons' incomes has risen in recent decades. In modern America, it seems, you're quite likely to stay in the social and economic class into which you were born… “

(“The Death of Horatio Alger”)

The Economist (January 8, 2004) said:

“…AMERICA likes to think of itself as the very embodiment of the spirit of meritocracy: a country where all people are judged on their individual abilities rather than their family connections. The American Revolution swept away the flummery of feudal titles. Thomas Jefferson dreamed of creating a “natural aristocracy”. Benjamin Franklin sniped that “a man who makes boast of his ancestors doth but advertise his own insignificance.”

… But are they right? The more you look at modern America, the more you are struck by how frequently it departs from the meritocratic ideal. George Bush's Washington is a study in family influence: look at the Powells, the Chao/McConnells, the Scalias and the Cheneys, not to mention the Shrub himself.

The biggest insult to meritocracy, however, is found in the country's top universities. These institutions, which control access to the country's most impressive jobs, consider themselves far above Washington and its grubby spoils system. Yet they continue to operate a system of “legacy preferences”—affirmative action for the children of alumni…”






Artist: R K Laxman, The Times of India, 11 September 2006