The Metro: "I Arrive Without Departing"

The crowds spilling out of the metro are successful people with jobs, the men wearing ironed clothes, the women in synthetics. The young people are rushing to some exam or the other, they feel that if they pass this exam, then the world will open out in it’s myriad hues. They don’t look up because they don’t imagine that the scenery will change,  for outside the sky is always red, and the winds hot. The moon turned black many decades ago, and the sunlight dimmed just yesterday. Today, they are in the underworld, and the sky seems far away, the neon lights are also dim. There is no tomorrow, the sirens wail. There has been another incident, another life lost. The stations are dense, the tunnels will take them out into radial roads, and all life is lived underground.

The storm begins to rise, the dust particles falling into the eyes, the clean ironed lines of trousers, the shine of nylon disappearing as the fine dust flies about. I live in a small house in one of the outer streets, where a single cactus still survives. Birds have died, and the caterpillars have become so outsize, that all remaining foliage becomes shredded even before they sprout. It was the year that we had acid rain. It fell on all of us, creating a specific pattern on our skins as it fell. We knew that if we opened our eyes, we would be blinded, and we knew that our tongues would be serrated, as if we had consumed hot pepper corns fried in oil. The world seemed no longer home, so we covered our faces and limped home, applying balm on our skins where ever they had been burnt. In the mines the old lords still extracted every ounce of metal, and the slaves lived on saliva and the wandering microbes that still inhabited the earth. We knew that our days were numbered, but no one counted them anywhere. Children were born scarred in the womb, and mothers died as they gave birth to disfigured beings. Dragon seeds of war had been planted everywhere, and the perfect ones, born with out blemish, ran in and out of the ghoulish metro trains, which dispelled the crowds with a clang of its doors.

In my own house, ofcourse, the moon still visited, quite dreary, an image of someone who had once lived, and was now extinct. I knew it’s coming was a sign of my own madness, my nostalgia, my foreknowledge of things which had once existed and now had died. Why did I look out for the moon? Why, for no reason. All humans remembered the moon, because their mother’s bodies had catapulted to it’s call, along with the cries of the gulls as the sea waves receded. None of us had seen the silver sea for decades, it had gone under a billion volts of dead rivers, it’s own saltiness now defined only with the brackishness of radioactive river water.

I got  out, off the metro at just the right moment, where the tunnels had become like a capillary of veins. I jumped into the crowd, and was wafted by them leaving my fears, I allowed myself to be sifted by the armed guards into the right avenues. I didn’t anymore need to show my card, because the wiring on my wrist activated the routes I had to take, and the scanners immediately swung into action, creating the right kind of leverage. I no longer felt that I was a prisoner of the system. I had even begun to enjoy the rush of electricity that charged into my veins. It was the right amount. A little more, and I could be electrocuted. I knew that, the interrogators knew it. Should I be marked by some casual officer, who did not share my physiognomy, racism it was called in the old days, there was every chance that I would be catapulted into the beyond.

I thought of the beyond almost every day, the still heart, the flat line of brain on machines, where picture book nurses would then call the family doctor, who would sign on the dotted line, saying that I could be sent into auto mode. That meant flying off without a body, and hoping that the bright light would encompass one into the petals of new flowers. Those bright lights were indeed hard to face, one went off into the first gloom and then the next.

Goodbye, world, family, humans, machines, red dust, black and empty moon. Where could one go without a body? It was too hard a question to ask. I would leave it for another day. The small yellow flowers in the red sky were actually stars. I looked at them everyday. When my twisted mind looked at the red sky, I actually saw blue. I lived in the past, it was not permitted. I had to be moving forward like everyone else.

Sometimes in the crevices of the tracks small plants grew, not dependent on the light of the sun, but able to grow, synthesise, sprout leaves without buds in the harsh electric lights which sprung up every few metres. They attracted no insects, not even the large caterpillars which were the most commonly known relic of the past. We were shattered by every jolt of the passing trains in our tiny flats, which like the plants that grew anonymously were in the trusteeship of the electric lights, which took on a strobe like quality whenever there were electricity fluctuations. Quite often, I found myself living in swathes of time, which were unknown to my neighbours for most of them were decades younger than me. Old age is that ephemeral thing, allowed to persist like a common disease if the state permitted it. The real truth was that none of us were able to live in the tempo of the present. We rocked back into the colourful days of our own youth, and that was seen to be an immensely destructive emotion. The vigilantes knew by the glazed look of the old, that they were not keeping time with the galaxies of the present, and that we were again captives of clear blue skies and opaque water in rushing streams. They would jostle us whenever we reached that state, because surely, surely, with our head in the air, we would miss our stations and reach avenues of time and space beyond our comprehension. Everything faltered in us, every time we made a mistake, our watches become disoriented, our tags failed us. If we went into a time zone too distant from our own, we could become electrocuted by our own emotions. It is not that we had nannies, it is just that people followed us all the time, wishing us to return to our rightful places.

Move on, Move on!

I am not sure, am I at the right station? Please can you look at my identity card?

Move on!

Sir, is there an enquiry booth?

Somewhere in the babble of similar disjointed speech and aching limbs, a hand would suddenly reach over the milling heads, and someone I knew, would point me to the returning train, and yes, I had got off at the wrong stop and would be lost for ever if I did not move fast.

The lights always blinded, the dark was always corrosive, the air was hot, since the air conditioners were pitched not to cool and calm us down but to actually relive the heat outside, so that we could acclimatise to the environment. Everything was done to make us accept our world. We were not expected to control nature, we were not expected to make our lives comfortable or even liveable. We were here to prove that we could inhabit that dusty planet with the veneer of water, a thin fragile coating on which one day we would be inhabitants returned to our original home.

My house was always dark, with the vague roseate glow which came from the streetlight as it strew the cobbled streets with pretty scraps of yellow light. I looked out, and dreamed of the slice of moon that was our due, but no longer shone on us. As night came on, the dusty air would part, and the motes would circle like planets in ether in the streaming electric light. Strangers passed by my window, wearing their gas masks or their visors. Curiosity had died a tired death many decades previously, and we no longer cared what the other thought. My companion was a young woman who had been deputised by the state. She had her own thoughts, and did not intervene unless there was a crisis. She called me Mom, and lived as if she was an independent tenant. Her silence pleased me, for nothing was expected of me. I was grateful for her kindness, a technician of time, who tied my tags just so, wired me up for travel, took off my boots when I came in from the cold. Her name was unpronounceable, so I called her Angel. She did not mind, her smile was effervescent. She was just thrilled with life, with the cold comfort of our cerebral days on planet earth. I found her yearningly looking toward the sky just as I did, but all we got was cement hanging over our heads. She did not feel lost, stranded, hopeless as I did. She had no longings other than to leave the metro station - housing that we were all forced into, by the eye-ball signatures we entered as we left the transport stand. But where could she go, the officials had placed her with me, saying that our charts showed that she would be a compatible care giver. She smiled brightly at me and asked if she knew the man who had shown some interest in marrying her, and would I have place for both of them?

“Show me his picture, and I will tell you immediately. My memory is good, I can tell with one glance, if I know your suitor or not. “

He was a small man, rather sweet looking, with a saturnine gaze. “Of course, I knew him,” I said, smiling. We had been colleagues at  an art gallery. He looked after the guests, and I kept accounts for the owners of the place. We also ran a café together, which we managed with our other duties. He is a nice man, I said. 

“So can he live with us?

“If you have no objection to sharing a room, certainly, he can live here.”

“We would have no objections, at all, Ma’am!”

 I looked at her with amusement. The delight was so huge, it wrapped itself around her like a warm glow. “And what will you live on?” was my unspoken thought. The girl was like ebony, her skin so dark, it gleamed in the shadowed light of the ever luminescent tubelights that lit the narrow circular pathways of our hooded city. She was tall, thin, and completely at ease. I enjoyed her company, though  I often felt that she was looking at me carefully, a little too carefully. When I asked her the reason for her protracted stare, she would laugh and deny it completely. I knew that she lied easily, because there were times, that her eyes became catatonic, glazed, empty of expression. That was the way, she blocked off her thoughts and became impenetrable. I was keen to meet her boy friend, but she said, she would bring him home closer to the day of their union. Was she thinking of my place as her home? I was startled by that. But ofcourse home is where we live, where we keep our things, where our footsteps lead us.

When she was around, this companion, social worker, nurse, official…. I could no longer remember her true status, the atmosphere was always bright,  even chatty, one might call it. It was never forced, except ofcourse when she disappeared into her lonely tunnel of thoughts. I would sometimes shake her gently when it happened, and she would reappear from her trance, looking as if her view was fragmented. There was nothing cruel about her, ever, she was absent for a moment or two, that was all.

I will put up bright curtains, and buy some flowers. Let me tidy your book case today!

Not a bad idea at all. What would you like to eat? We have some roots, sweet potatoes I think they called them in the old days. And ofcourse mushrooms.

I like potatoes. Is there any fruit?

Yes, we have some dates and figs, which I bought when the sun still shone on the planet. They have kept well. It’s hard to imagine that once they are over, we will have forgotten what fruit was.

I am sure they will be able to have orchards on electric light in another couple of decades, then we will be able to eat again. These are only the transition years.

We stared at each other for a moment, then I went back to putting photographs in chronological order. There were thousands of them, all collected in  shoe boxes.   The state had given me the extraordinary privilege of working with these when I was most in need of money, and had written many letters  to the powers that be, asking for work.

Each of them was of post card size, and had been taken by different people.
The idea was to provide a certain classification by country, where the colour coding would provide an idea of the time of day when it was taken. It was of archival interest only, since the general public would not have access to them, but after filling many forms, and waiting in many queues it would be possible for an occasional researcher to find an answer for something he or she was looking for. Suppose for instance, they wanted to know how many times the colour red was found in the old world, and in what objects, or why the colour yellow was associated with cheerfulness, and summer sunshine, whether in flowers, clothes, or shoes, the photographs would provide the answer. The question had to be specific, the answer general.

Once I had come across a couple, the man was gentle looking, and the woman equally so, both lived in the tropics, and they kept reappearing in photograph after photograph. Who was their vigilante? It was very clear that they were being followed. It seemed as if the one who wished to impress their image on carbon was someone who was near and dear. It was not clear whom he desired more, the photos had a clarity and  an intimacy about them. I was interrupted in my thoughts by my young companion who asked me if I would like to go out for a while.

I had no desire to see the artificial moon that the authorities hung out with its painted smile. It shocked me that people actually thought that it made up for destruction by bombing which took away everything that made us human. Why would they want us to go out at all? The girl however looked happy. She went by the simple name of Anjali, which was easy to pronounce, though sometimes I forgot and called her Angel, and suited her good looks and charming manner.

You go, I am busy today.

But it is compulsory for us to be seen enjoying the evening.

Oh, that’s for young people like you. We don’t have those pressures.

Come, Auntie! It’s something which we need to do together. I only get paid every month if I tow you out, willingly or unwillingly. I can get the wheel chair if you like, we only need to pay a small amount by token.

The wheel chair!

Yes, it is comfortable. If only you would try it out. I think we should today.

There was something menacing about her. I thought it’s so hard for young people to keep their jobs, and something which looks like charity, or state endorsed social work, is actually a “job”. I smiled at her, and she was suddenly comforted, and it was as if she was the dependent. The care giver had become the dependent. Elation coursed through me. I was the reason she got food to eat, had a home to live in, had the possibility to marry. My immense powerfulness was as if it was the reason that the earth still careened around a non-existent sun. She began to escort me outside, and I knew that her sense of assurance came from being registered once more in the official log book of duties daily carried out by young adults pursuing a career in Life Insurance.

Everytime Stella (I often thought of myself in the third person,allowing for a certain detachment in telling my story) went out with Anjali, she was startled by the beauty of their world. Though they lived in fear, yet, in the underground caverns of the earth, there was still a memory of galactic time, the sonorous nature of the dark, punctuated by the eerie whistle of the metro trains, as they shunted hour after hour, without break. They were with out drivers, decades ago the administrators had taken away the soulless concentration of driving the underground trains, and replaced humans with automation, which worked well. No one thought much about it, even when Stella was young, she remembered that a woman had pointed it out to her, and she had shrugged, merely shrugged. Man or Machine, it was emotions that made us human, she had thought, and those without machines, they belong to the world of the damned and the becalmed. They, the humans, would be pounded out, left to die, no one would have anything in common with them.  It was in essence, the oligarchy of the meek and the composite, those who spoke one language, and lived one dream which was bleakly posed. “How to make the Habitable  Inhabitable, and the Inhabitable Habitable”. The Greeks had a word for it, Midas, but here we just lived as we did, by the monosyllable of time, where nothing existed but our need for thought.

We walked silently back, or rather Anjali did, her heels clicking with a simple staccato beat rather like a heart. I was contented imagining the stars, the planets, the whirr of moths by the old street lights. We never allowed the State to interfere with our thoughts, and though they had digital archives of our feelings, emotions, dreams, they never quite admitted that they could manipulate us with those. We were wired up to the hilt, internally and externally, but other than the name tags, which allowed us to move in and out of determined zones, we were not really visible as automations. Ofcourse, it’s clear, we had emotions, we were not automats, robots as they called them in the old days.  Tactility was one of the last instincts to go, and we watched each other for the flutter of eyelashes, the tensing of muscles or the clinching of fists. When we reached back to the square where I lived, the metro lines curving to accommodate the street lights and the odd bench, I found I was out of breath. It was fear. I thought of the young man who would be making his home with us, an artist by temperament, and very good looking too. I remembered from our companionate working days that he was rather loud in his laugh, a forced laugh. It made  everyone understand that he felt it would be a wall against his introverted self to project what he was not. Laughter is like a veil, it hides our torment, our sense of worthlessness, it can come bellowing out of us, or snicker quietly behind the hand. I dreaded that part of his personality. For the rest, I had no problem that he would be sleeping with my aid, and together, the house would burst with a certain sunny quality that both had. We had no sun, but we remembered sunshine, and still warmed to the digital reconstructions which so often came our way.

Somewhere, there was a silvery light which echoed the moon, returned to us when we least expected it. It was there, when we woke up at night, thirsty, hot, baffled, a bit like a lizard’s tail that slaps the ground as it lies severed. The moonlight was eerie, full of stops and starts, and then one realised, it was the light from the metro windows. The trains were silent, no long drawn out whistling, no sense of going anywhere, for after all, they only went round and round the desolate tracks. There were no buildings, no monuments, no histories. Information was carried in us, when we died, and were electrocuted to ashes, our memories enbloc were fed into another human. There was nothing frightening about it, because we ourselves knew that childbirth had become another fiction, another way of thinking about something that would never regenerate biologically. Decades had passed since in vitrio had become the only way to give birth. It was not test tubes, it was cloning that won the day. I had insisted that I be buried, so trees would grow on me, and everyone looked away shiftily, knowing that the warp lay in my recurring memory codes that placed me in an old weft of time.

I often referred to myself in the third person, Stella, as if that would cover up for my lapses, as if I need not be responsible for them. “That Stella!” I would croon to myself, as I  went to sleep, remembering every event that happened. It was so important to do that, with words, and with images. The memory was replenished by the retelling. My laugh often rang out into the night, and sometimes, I talked. Anjali, with her youth and the huge work load that she carried every day, did not puzzle about this, because she normally had her ear phones on. Even when she tended to me, as she did now, edging the chair carefully over the kerb, she was singing softly to herself. Sometimes the ear plugs fell out, and in the static I could hear the music of the 70s, the 1970s, as they called it so long ago! How pleasurable, the Jimi Hendrix, the Bob Marley, the Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles, the Jethro Tull, Cat Stevens, Englebert Humperdink, Tom Jones, Bruce Springstein, I could go on and on……She would plug them back, and the moment was gone, we were back in 2022.

 Look at it this way, they had told us, when they shifted us down into the metros, that  we were the survivors, and we would live in the stations and basements and yes, even inside  the underground trains. They told us that while the new subterranean city was being built, the plan was to lift the earth what remained of it, on to a giant cable and we would be flung further away from the black hole of the sun, and the diminished, no, the eclipse of the moon. It didn’t happen that way. We all lived underground, and that became our home. Occasionally, we would hear, that Gaiaa had appeared, and flung some stable station half way across the world into the sea. Sizzling and steaming the earth ran into the sea, the people with it.

I was never very worried, since for more than a decade, the question of the world to come had been settled through our continuity by cloning and the mesmerising space of our memories congealed in wiring that matched our nerves, pulsated with them, mimicked them. What was there to fear? Fear was for those who had an imagination, who could think about the future, who had hopes, aspirations, lived in a bubble of time. I presumed that our generation, old, yet full of the memories of a century or more, were bedecked with our sense of laughter, pride, vulnerability. We were indeed human, not yet cloned, still present with our being as God given, rather than Science given. We were the first generation survivors of the world which was reaped, harvested, devastated, reborn, reinvested. We knew the past, not as refurbished by techne, but by our bodies’ experience of it. 

We were inside the cavern of the buildings that housed my two room flat. There was no kitchen, all food appeared through the machine, that was placed in each room, with an incinerator by it’s side. It would be appropriate for the age and status of each person who thumbed their identity into the technology. It would be translated to chefs who believed that it was their destiny to turn the  home fires of their clients into  edible matter, a computer programme, which could be reinstated into the  working routines of the next day.

The fire would burn an electric orange, the dishes would be placed, the food would be piped into the plates, hot, bubbling, nutritious, even colourful. Industrial piping was successful, rust free, and if clients were not pleased with the dreadful regularity of the menu, they had no one to complain to. Anjali pushed my  wheel chair with a little venom over the ridge and it was her ribs which were jolted, mine had been replaced with a viscuous plastic, many decades ago. Unlike the artificial or cadaver replacements, the plastic which was generated from flat broad computers to be found in every house were ever so convenient. Along with limbs, one could print them out according to need. I never even had to strain, I knew the zones by their colour, not by their number, and so had become efficient at replacing those of my body parts which had taken too much strain. The blood swirling was still my own. The plastic anatomical recreations were as eternal as the soul.

Anjali was now weeping with the effort of pushing my wheel chair. I felt sorry for her, after all it was not my idea to go out into the smog, the poisoned air, which was so heady that it made one feel one had smoked forty cigarettes and would soon die. Any normal person would faint with exertion. However, it was one of her duties, and she had to tick a certain portion of the form everyday to receive her due payment. I got up, pulled my turquoise shawl over my head, because the night guard always looked to see who I was, and I thought covering my head, helped disguising my identity. Hair colour was such a great way of believing that one was younger, and I never bothered with it. I walked without a sense of exhaustion, trilling with the excitement of being home. The guard peered at me, for quite a while, following with his gaze right upto the escalator, which was not working. It was a strain for him, but then I coughed, and he recognised my cough, and pushed a button, and we were heading upstairs. The girl was still heaving, sputtering, her face contorted with the effort to breathe. I opened the door, the lights were all on, as the guard had switched those on seeing us falter up the landing. Life was short for the caregivers, they had to remain stationed against their monitors. They really had no way of calling the world their own. The privilege of age was really a form of ancestor worship.

Demonetisation as Greek Tragedy

Awaiting Burial

 Sophocles,  was a Greek general, who wrote the play Antigone, around 440 B.C.  Creon is Antigone’s mother’s brother and his son Haemon, is engaged to marry his cousin. Their marriage is doomed, because Antigone’s brother, Polynices, returning from exile is killed in battle with his own brother,  Etiocles, who dies too. With the death of Etiocles, Creon, as their nearest relative, ascends the throne. Antigone, her sister Ismene, Etiocles and Polynieces are all children of Oedipus, who through ignorance slept with his mother, and then put out his eyes, when he came to know of the terrible sin he had unwittingly committed.

The chorus has the most important part to play, and through its sepulchral lines it intervenes at all levels to counsel. We, too benefit on hearing it’s voice, for they say, ironically speaking of fate,  “The future is ordered by those who should order it.”  Destiny lulls us into accepting our fate, and free will liberates us.

The real focus of  the play is the arrogance of Creon, who dispenses justice by the measure of his egoism, and it counterposes Antigone’s  love for the divine, and for the ordinances of the Gods, which she will not disobey. There is some  cultural motive, some social habit, or instinct here,  of separating the human from the animal, some space of tremendous courage, where the love for the brother, amounts to a duty, which involves honouring the body, in death.

We often carry out commands because we have no alternative, much like the population of Thebes which was given to mutter. We are under the rule of a variety of despots, national and international, who make no bones about their ability to rule over the destiny of humans. We are pushed and buffeted by oligarchies. We know that  school children are blinded by pellets, in Kashmir, that people are shot in Manipur and not given a burial, but unlike Antigone, we do not press for enquiries and justice. Curiously,  though, human beings everywhere, resist despotism. They protest, they flee, they resist.

Demonetisation came upon the Indian public without warning, since hoarders and black money funds had  ostensibly to be pounced upon, by submitting all to the same punishment. No one  has asked about hawala and Swiss bank accounts, or the role of the Income Tax department in revealing where exactly the black money lies.

People have stood in queues, and have got used to it. They are adjusting to the new dispensation much as if it were a war zone, where rations will soon be distributed through just such queues.  As those vulnerable, and accepting of government claims to legitimation of these political drives,  they must accept their fate.

Ismene pleaded with Creon to release Antigone, and then pleaded with Antigone in turn to accept her, “But amidst your troubles I am not ashamed to make myself your companion in misfortune.”  Ismene has many lines in the play, trying desperately to mediate, speaking as a woman, who understands that laws when passed are totalising, and subjects have no voice. She tries so hard to  translate between her  sister and Creon, bringing  in Antigone’s faithful lover Haemon into her conversation with Creon, using marriage as a plea for her sister’s life. Antigone will not accept Ismene’s delayed overture, for her brother lay without ritual burial, and Ismene had  initially refused to help her.

 The Indian population seems Ismene like, believing that the Finance Minister and the RBI had together really, really wanted to prove the loyalty of the people to their Prime Minister. Meanwhile, the five hundred and the thousand rupee notes lie, waiting to be ritually incinerated. The freedom of speech allows many to ask, “Is digitalisation, electricity dependent and hacker vulnerable, really the answer to an economy such as ours?” Do we really want to do away with the friendly grocer who provides the busy housewife with credit when needed and conversation between routine tasks. Do we all want to stand in malls to have Reliance company vegetables sent in by phone and card? Do we want to support  rapid industrialisation which will pull out iron from holy mountains and render local communities destitute so that urban roads can be further clogged, or outer space rendered dissolute with war heads and missiles piling up? We have a right to our opinions, and the Greens movement worldwide has supported tourism and local communities, with their horticultural and organic food farms. These are political movements as much as ideological ones. If the hostile terrains had people friendly policies, such as access to food, medicine, shelter and education the death rates on all sides would immediately decrease. We could extend this to international politics, which have created a dead land of continuous bombing in the Middle East. Terrorism terrifies, but so does totalitarianism. Creons appear everywhere.

Malthusian Economics

Malthusian economics, as we know well from the works of Charles Dickens, was essentially posed to get rid of the poor and usher in the industrial revolution. Today, we understand the digitalisation revolution as an ongoing aspect of just such similar politics, as preliminary to the journey to Mars. By forcing the population into the strait jacket of conformity to a laboratory society, the Modi government has made it very clear the politics of  its extremism. Ghettoisation of Muslims in Gujerat was the first step, Extinction of the Poor the second, as this government supports industrialised farming and conspicuous consumption, promising smart cities and sanitised waterfronts. Amit Shah promises a car to every villager, as he does not have to face the traffic jams and the poison gas of the city of Delhi, in his siren wailing, gun toting -security guarded,  airconditioned and curtained car.

In America, Trump’s victory establishes the reign of similar right wingers. There too, the poor will be sent off to war, to “fight for their country”. The poor are enlisted from the agricultural populations in stifled hinterlands, and those who in the city,  find no other avenues to work. They are promised University education, on their return, or are treated for medical and psychiatric disorders in state funded camps. While they work very hard to normalise, their real life is represented in the patterns of loneliness and despair, and constant running away, mentally and physically, that makes them typical of a new class of refugees. The occupation of war keeps the arms manufacturing, the medical industry and the insurance companies well integrated with the genetic manipulation of food industries.

A demonetised proletariat in India is rendered servile, and kept from earning their daily wages. They are subjugated by the machineries of the state, which include private security agencies,  as well as police, who threaten them with dire consequences should they break out of the interminable queues to which they are shackled, in order to buy their bare necessities. A death here and there, a suicide now and then, are all flecked off as the unnecessary detritus of a well oiled state machinery that speaks to itself.  The banalities of Mr Jaitley can only come from being completely out of touch with the every day life of the nation. As for the black money, it is turning into white, at the invitation of the government, and we presume that the quantities of used notes will now be recycled into making new notes, which will return to the public, when the machines have been recalibrated. Everyone waits anxiously in queues to withdraw from the bank, and to pay the daily labourers they may employ as carpenters or gardeners or maids. The ideologies of the political parties are varied, so each political party, which has behaved exactly as we expect them to do, which is populist and petty bourgeoisie, including the Communists, ask the same question, “Why were we not told?”

Trump’s contribution to war mongering has been so arrogant, that it causes some embarrassment to the viewer. Modi’s call to war against terrorism carries much the same rhetoric. By demonetisation, the State’s coffers are full, and war is one way of spending the cash. Let’s hope that the military does not become a collective of mercenaries looking to exchange lives for promised pensions. When the Government said, after a tragic suicide by an ex soldier that the  promised OROP was only  to collect votes, the nation was completely startled. A young girl’s suicide after several attempts to get money out from the bank has been horrific. No one more than the Indian media has been alert to the travesties of justice in this government. Can we just stop to ask why the RSS thinktanks in the Government would believe that they can do what they want, without thinking of the consequences. The Ambanis are not in the news, the Adnanis have everything their way, the Swiss accounts of those who siphoned money out of the country are in a haze of anonymity. The rich do not look discomfited one bit, their credit cards are numerous, and their servants stand in queues for them. Whose laughing now all the way to the bank?

Prime Minister Modi  did not know that majority of Indian people are not yet digitalised, because they are wage workers, who  may have mobile phones, but only literacy and computer skills allow for internet banking? For those who are elderly, or first generation literate, the miniscule screen of the mobile blips too fast, before they can punch in the required information. We know, even in the case of 40 naval officers who lost money in internet banking, that education and power are not enough to tackle the hackers in IT. 

Business Houses

Family Firms                                                                                                       

 The late K.M Mathew, describes in his autobiography, the famous Mammen Mappillai family, founders of the Malayala Manorama in Kerala. Written at the age of 90 years, Mathew wanders through a labyrinth, with the help of his mother’s ring, symbolising love and integrity, left to him by his father, who had melted down his wife’s ornaments and had a ring soldered for each of his children. So, K M Mathew calls his memoir, “Ettam Modram” or “The Eighth Ring”,  (Penguin Viking 2015) as he was the eighth child.

The book takes on the analogy of the Ancient Mariner, with the parallel of the sea farer who tells a tale, but we remain transfixed as readers as the author writes about the travails of the family which go through unusual situations of wealth and poverty. It is as much a history of Kerala, told from the point of view of dominant caste politics, as well as their relationships with their friends and those who served  them. One of the chapters is devoted totally to the collusion politics of  C.P Ramawami Aiyar against the St Thomas Christians and the Mammen Mapillai family in particular. Participation in the Freedom Movement by the author’s father, , eight years in prison and then to return broken hearted to the bedraggled circumstances of their lost fortunes is told with intimate detail. The banks that Mammen Mappilai owned were shut down, the newspaper closed, and the family had to restart it’s ventures.

“Appachen could not bear the disappointment when the establishment that he had nurtured with his dreams and hard work, and that had grown to become the biggest insurance company in India, changed hands. It had flourished better than our bank. I sometimes think that even if it had not crashed, both the bank and the insurance company would anyway have been nationalised later, in 1969. The insurance company that Chaidambaram Chettiar took over from us became a part of the Life Insurance Corporation of India, the LIC, when all the insurance companies in the country were nationalised.” (128)

Failure was not an embarrassment to the Mammen Mappillai family. The women kept cows and sold the milk to support the family. They all lived together, when circumstances forced them to, shifting out to their own homes when their economic condition improved. Their lovely home at Kuppapuram, near Allapuzha town became their icon, in the days when  several members of the family were shunting around in small houses  in Presidency towns, while finding new trades. The balloon factory became their first successful business during the second world war, with it’s market in Bombay, where one of the brothers lived and traded. The factory itself was in one of their tea plantations,  in Kerrikunda in Chikmagalur District. The smell of latex killed off one of their brothers, K.M. Jacob or Chacko, who had resisted the appearance of the factory next to his  well maintained colonial bungalow, in the tea estate. However, the profit motive and the good of the family  as a cluster, was seen to be sufficient reason to establish  the factory, in spite of the resistance of the brother who had inherited the family gene for bad lungs.

 How the balloon factory led the way to the Madras Rubber Factory is an enthralling story.  The  Manorama Family keeps its rural sensibility, and overthrows a multinational company, using their wit, loyalty of workers, and adherence to norms. Tragedy overtakes them many times, but they just pick themselves up and start again. Among his father’s papers Mathew finds a note to the children about losses incurred while building an empire. These include the failure of a chit fund, which is a type of local banking; a lemon grass producing oil unit; a wholesale business in Kottayam; a coir processing unit; losses incurred in the Kottanad, Tamarasserry, and Nilambur estates; ship purchased and losses incurred; a cigarette factory; a tile factory; losses in land purchased in Punalur, Chengars, Pullikkanam. (199)  Ofcourse these losses were nothing to the closing down of the bank, insurance company and newspaper, during the time when C.P ruled Kerala in the name of the regent.

The women K.M. Mathew writes about dominate the narrative. His mother always hired a house in Alleppey, to have her babies, since she didn’t want to give birth in Kuppappuram which flooded regularly.  His sisters in law are marked by their grit and effeciency. As for romantic love, K.M. Mathew suggests that he never had cause to think about women before his marriage, because it was not the custom. His love for his wife, Annamma is a  palpable and grateful love  which was immortalised through a biography of the same name, which I look forward to reading. Docility and authority were the two virtues women were meant to have, apparently.

Byline Madurai

Perumal Murugan and  Home

 Perumal Murugan spoke in Delhi,  on August 22^nd 2016, at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, after his two books, One Part Woman, (Maadhorubaagan) and Pyre, were published  in English, by Penguin. The foremost question in  some people’s minds was, “Will you be comfortable in metropolitan cities like New Delhi, Paris, or Berlin?” Murugan, a quiet, self assured, soft spoken man made it very clear that he longed for home, that he had never slept under a roof till he was twenty. The great outdoors, the cowshed, the loveliness of the trees, the rich earth, that was what he missed most, now that he had been forced out of the familiar places which he was so intimate with.

One Part Woman represents the Aradhaneswar cult, a soft and sensuous code for unmitigated passion, when Parvati comes home to Siva, and merges into him. For those who hated Murugan’s representation of  an arbitrary coitus as serving the practical interests of people without children, the traditions of local communities were forcibly sanitized by them, in popular protests in order to write new cultural histories. Murugan however, was very clear that tradition and history are suffused in our present. He believed that fiction merely clothed emotions which still lie latent, and all the possibilities of promiscuity, when conjoined by faith, deliver us into a landscape that is peopled with other realities, other truths. To write intimately of the wretchedness of traditional practice, with the seductiveness of the novelist’s claim to represent reality, was his only crime. To be forced to leave home because he told a  historical tale, haunted his days, till the  Court came out with the verdict that he was free to write, “Write!”

 The holy hill at Tiruchengode, Namakkal district, where the  Aradhaneswara  (symbiosis of Shiva and Parvati) cult still exists, is a site of tremendous power. The ancient Saivite shrines illustrate that the cult of the goddess is dependent on the absorption of the devi. Much of the advaitin principle of assimilation is brought to our notice here, in the convergence of symbols, and the secret and the hidden are represented as important symbols of a cosmic fertility. The local community reinforces the idea not only of the vividness of sarpa worship, which are chthonic reminders of ancient cultic forms before anthropomorphism takes place, but are also  emotional organisers of contemporary representations of fear, sexuality and effervescence. The rat, the boar, the elephant,  the cow, the bull become the totemistic forms of the meeting of nature and culture, where their  sacred and aesthetic presence becomes of immense importance. Within this, the segregation of local communities can be well located in terms of their personal relations with the animal world. In the hill at Tiruchengode, Amba nestles with Durga, which communicates the primacy of her status during Navarathri over other manifestations of the divine.

The hierarchy that Hinduism imposes in tradition is inviolable when the order of birth is prescribed by tradition. Perumal Murugan describes this inviolability by looking at how each caste then represents its order in terms of the consummation of its caste rules. Lower caste orthodoxies can thus be as powerful as upper caste ones, they can be as forbidding and as totalizing. The real world view of the poor then closes upon itself in terms which are borrowed from varna, or colour, and the power of the presence of existing rules can exclude as much as it can forbid. Love by itself can never survive in the face of these terrible rules, they foreclose destiny, they crumple free will.

Perumal Murugan, named after the great Lord at Tiruchengode,  now resides in  solitude, in exile with his family in  an unfamiliar urban milieu. Yet, the landscape that he describes for us, is so over powering, so exquisite,  that we can only dwell in the calmness of these rural spaces. Here subsistence farming allows the Tamils their historic splendor of unspoiled lands, with  their produce of groundnut, rice, sugar cane, jasmines, plantains, palm trees (providing areca, dates, and nongu, and coconuts,) also the mangoes which ornament every house, and the  moringa trees. The sea at Rameswaram, with its cross bow of water at nearby Dhanushkodi, is  very close. The blue is turquoise and grey, and the sun provides us a  dazzling glimpse of this hot, unfettered land. Not far from Tiruchenkode, the Uttarasumangalai temple presents us the  remembrance of the whispered conversations of Siva and Parvati, an upadesha  which is love itself.

Saivite cults are open to all, choosing the massive hillocks and flat plains  to communicate love and valour. Here are Perumal Murugan’s people, his multi caste village, his green topography of cultivated land on red soil that  he longs for most. Surely the Goddess at Tiruchengode will usher his return home.

Because I don't want war.

The magic of words

We must believe that words have efficacy. More importantly, we must hope that people believe what they say. War is an easy word, and drumming for war makes the war mongers feel that they have a job to do. Soldiers are people who have families, and while soldiering on is something they do, occupationally, for love of the country, the war mongers see them as fodder in war. The second world war was fought to end all wars. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasake left the molten shadows of men and women on the kerbside as they ran.

Water wars are the worst, for our common humanity becomes lost as we view the ‘other’ as the enemy. We always blame someone else for our troubles. Colonial water sharing devices are out of sync with modern needs, and egalitarian motives. Across the border, the Pakistani enjoyment of lands is represented through 200 families owning most of the land. As in India, when land redistribution occurred, the wealthy families gave away unproductive lands to the cultivator farmer, and kept the better acreage. So the ways in which we understand how tribals represent the  force of an illegal marauding army which in India we call “terrorist”, is placed back in terms of how terrorism manipulates emotions of border people. The line of no return faces us very soon in terms of how we think of every day questions of blocking water to Pakistan, which the present government thinks as practical.

These are mighty rivers, which cross the borders of China, Pakistan and India. We have seen how floods over run North East India, when dam work across the border releases excess water. If we block the Indus, Punjab will be flooded and while boundary lines are political, river basins are not. The arsenal that Pakistan develops is nuclear. If they bomb us, they too will die. We do not live in isolation from one another. If the emotional encroachment in Kashmir over years has been so huge, it is because the local people have been singled out for attention by terrorist infiltration and for martyrdom, by specialised training in camps. We have to be very clear that the presence of the army in border areas is a natural phenomenon. The case for  territorial supremacy in India is a question of history. The British could never suppress the emotions of  people  of the North West or the North East of India, and over decades, the Indian government was able to provide a sense of solidarity to tribal communities in both areas to invest their sense of belonging to the presence of the Centre. Federalism was seen to be the answer to these multi sited loyalties. Kashmiri merchants following their trade routes  arrived in all parts of India, without feeling the necessity for secessionism. If we look at the protracted battle between the Centre and the State, comprising Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh, we must presume that Kashmir is a part of a larger entity, and should it receive it’s Azadi, then it will be surrounded by segments of the state which remain loyal to the subcontinental image of India.

The map of India  presents it’s own logic of subcontinental identity. Terrorism can never promote democracy, as Paul Wilkinson argues in “Terrorism vs Democracy” ( Routledge 2001). The armoury of guerrilla warfare is time tested, with successful results, and the price that the civilians have to pay is huge. Where the state practise of terrorism gets in the way of diplomacy, we have to understand that the grammar of mediation must come from other legitimating institutions, such as ambassadorial functions of surrounding countries. Without State support, the idea of freedom and autonomy, regarding the right to work and travel may well be taken away from us by parochialising interests which sees war as the first option available. Why should we think that people across the borders of our country want to die? They would be the first victims, and evacuation would create more wounded, more zones of loss and privation.

Citizens’ forums have a great part to play in both India and Pakistan. Their role is primary in avoiding war. Unless we identify our share of common interests, the soldiers whom we value as true patriots will die terrible deaths in war, or in post war camps. Anyone who has been to Kargil, knows that the heroism of our soldiers cannot be disputed. Even now, the stones leach blood. To put the army to dysfunctional use, by shooting and killing citizens in Kashmir, who think differently from us,  is a terrible act of finality. It is true Gorbachov and Rasisa Gorbachov died in penury and singularly difficult circumstances, but let us not forget the first lessons of the 1990s, the lessons in dialogue.

Ready for that Rocket?

The Surreal World of Preparation to Enter Other Galaxies

Hollywood uses a plethora of grey in the new films that it makes for viewers in  cinema halls and of television. The subdued lighting, whether it is space age fiction, or murder mysteries or espionage tales, all tell us that the world has to be understood with it’s new significance, that there is no longer black, white or colour, which will inform our  post modern understanding. The subtlety of this choice is overplayed, not just by shooting indoors, often in laboratory settings or in toned down apartments, but the threat perception is exaggerated with evening scenes and clouded skies.  With post terrorism appearing in the west, the battle lines have changed. The new forms of warfare know no boundaries, there is no ethic, no sportsmanship on either side, and even less,  etiquette. The advertisement breaks return the viewer to the real world, as there are routine chores for the housewife,  such as food to be prepared, and water collected, before the family returns. In a way, the sophoric romances too, so appealing to couch potatoes, have been replaced by sullen dramas which paint old age as vicious, children as traumatic and traumatising, married couples as continually adulterous or suspicious. However, when the  viewer returns to the t.v, she finds the same old advertisements are continually replaying. This nexus between the advertisers and the channels are probably worth millions, but it’s boring to be sold the same shampoos, soaps and face creams over and over again. It has the desired effect of making the viewer feel that the traditional remedies of orange or lemon scrub, papaya, turmeric, cream of milk and friendly oils such as sesame, are quite out of the pale.

Fair skin for men and women is such a premium that it makes one wonder what happened to the debates on skin colour and racism. The dark good looks of Omar Sharif or the great Shakespearean actor Sir Lawrence Olivier are a thing of the past. Their earthiness, their corporeality, their passion have been replaced by the fervour, cunning, athleticism and shockingly cereberal or erudite prowess of the new actors, well paid, handsome, and in tune with the Star Wars manifesto of having blank faces and quick  moves. Indian viewers of Hollywood realise that  every decade finds one or two takers, who can mimic the west’s ideal of how tropical faces can assimilate Caucasian orientations to beauty. Ofcourse, Priyanka Chopra, loved by admen, producers, and viewers equally has entered the world of recognition by the West. But is there a West, anymore? The world, through the contribution of Business Processing Houses is singularly round, and dialects and accents produced according to the consumer’s need. What makes the film industry so relevant is that it jumps ahead of it’s times, it memorises the details of scientific paraphernalia and jargon, is able to create Mars in studios, and to fly towards the other planets, destroying the Moon on the way. However, earthlings always struggle to keep the beauty of the earth going, and the simplest of horticulturists appear to return the earth to its former naivete, before the hazardous plants from scientific revolutions poisoned the earth.

Joan Kelly, one of the most powerful feminists of the last century, asserted that the single parent household should not be viewed as an anamoly. Would she conclude that even if one’s parent was thousands of light years away, love itself is sufficient to keep the bonds of the family together? Desire for knowledge, and for extra terrestrial experiences is sufficient to make men and women, trained for the job, to set aside the obligations to family and neighbourhood. The detachment, thus experienced is not detrimental, but it allows for the evolution of society. That society may not look like the one we know, or like, but the plane of intergalactic experience is such, that the viewer is actually zoned in to accept technological society as the ultimate good. In such a society, we have no right to our personal feelings, our motivations, our ambitions. We must submit to surveillance society, and the janitors who double officially as keepers of the law. The law is ofcourse, concocted by the moment. It is the oligarchy of technicians who decide what individuals may or may not do. The appearance of the individualist is the greatest anarchic moment. Hollywood states very clearly that whether it is war in the Arab countries against a terrorist enclave, or mars wars, the orientation to the doctored voice is the only clue the viewer has to what is good or evil.  We must accept the simian in the cyborg as Donna Harroway put it so brilliantly.