Digging for Meaning

I have friends who supports the current majoritarian dispensation in India - the cow-protecting ( killing muslims and scaring poor farmers in the process or as the real motive?), day dreaming (of imagined glories ), women berating (length of skirts and access to phones has again become a topic to deliberate), surveillance instituting ( aadhar is a support to the police state, not to conscientious people), economy breaking ( demonetisation , finance bill, GST mess, deaf to farmer's pleas ) establishment. These friends are film-makers, science educators, bankers etc. And I wonder how these people are supporting a majoritarianism that is killing their own trades, their own careers - Film makers - look what has happened at FTII and with the censor board. Film education is curbed, so is artistic freedom. Censorship is growing to ridiculous levels. It is a direct assault on the very practice of film-making and yet the bhakt film-maker remains blind.   The science educator - So...

:) :-| Binary living of the good professionals Advertisements, movies, friends, strangers - all want you to be happy. you show a sign of emotion that is not happiness or nonchalance, and people wonder what is wrong with you. Its a weird binary world we live in these days. For the most part, it is now normal not to 'feel' anything at all - people walk around with straight faces betraying little of their inner turmoil, wonder, confusion, rage... You spend all your time in office. and in that time, you hardly see people betraying any emotion to any meaningful depth. Everything is so light, so latte! this state of being perpetually emotionless is called being professional. Does it any good for the profession? I doubt. But should the 'good for the profession' come in the way of your humanity? The only other emotion allowed is the beatific 'happiness'. Well, life has never been this easy for humans and its good to enjoy it's riches while it lasts. That expl...

Consider these three scenarios 1. A distraught wife - catches cheating husband. Husband outshouts her to the point where she begins questioning her own narrative - maybe she was to blame? She is terrified of ending the relationship. She ' needs to believe that she can trust her husband'. 2. An unemployed graduate who had voted for Modi's promises three years ago - Believed that Modi would usher us in a new world of opportunities and social justice - instead he has remained unemployed and has to prove his nationalist credentials to random hooligans again and again. He  'needs to believe in Modi's acche din promise' .  He is the 'andh bhakt' - the mother of karan and arjun (except for the fact that Karan and Arjun never turn up). 3. Consider a dalit farmer. He 'knows' he is being fleeced by the local strongman/ patil/ landlord... but he can't afford to question him. He is not afforded the freedom to ask questions when the procurement we...

Learning from bad writing: Meri Pyaru bindu These days I am writing my first story that I intend to complete and publish. So as you can imagine, I am in the writer mode most of the time - anxiously looking for writer's intent, choices, character arcs, alternate story lines etc, while watching any movie or reading any novel. With a well written story, these choices are not that apparent. You have to look hard and yet you might miss out on essential choices that the writer made, to make the film/ novel a great piece of art. It feels as if the story flowed out from the author's mind onto paper with zero loss in translation. For that reason, it is difficult to learn much from good writing. It inspires, yes of course. It helps you get in the mood or get into the right frame of mind. But it can't teach as well as a badly written movie/ novel can. A badly written story makes you aware of your own fallibility. It grounds you. Most importantly, it helps you see the many ways in ...

  There was a crazy old lady who mesmerised the capitalist folks back in the era of cold war, with her emotional appeal to their selfish egos. She was successful because, she managed to turn cold selfishness into a virtue. She made usurpation morally palatable. She made individuality that destroys social fabric of communities, a morally superior choice.  While I understand her perspective coming as it was from a immigrant fleeing communist excesses, I don't understand today's people still seeking inspirations in the nonsensical steam-letting of an old woman whose grip on reality was heavily coloured and biased by narrow experiences and perspectives. Her name was Ayn Rand and she legitimised her biases by giving it a name - objectivism. One of Ayn Rand's most famous character is a certain 'John Galt' - a maverick engineer who  organises a strike among the world's smartest, most creative entrepreneur and artists and thereby - "stops the motor of th...

What's the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship? The book says, not much. India, agrees. Current political dispensation especially agrees vigorously. " Soma " of hindutva and past glory + divided impoverished amnesiac masses + legitimised attack on individual rights + tremendous wealth shared among few = brave new world of oligarchical India. Essentially, democracies/ dictatorships etc., are simply variants of the same power dynamic between the ruler, essentials, influentials and inter-changeables .   Interchangeables are the nominal selectorate - the individual voters who have nominal (or cosmetic) power to choose leader - most of us. Influentials  are the real selectorate - the guys who really choose the leader. In US recently, the electoral college famously went against the popular vote and elected a clown as their president instead. In India, theoretically, the system is a bit better in terms of a wider base of influentials - it could be rel...

Ai Weiwei doing what needs doing, even if it is futile Can China exist as a democracy? Is it even possible? If it can't sustain as a democracy, what makes the single party factory-of-the-world system so special to ensure evolution rather than revolutions? Perhaps the ' dictator's handbook' can answer that question better. Today I was listening to the podcast "Intelligence squared", as I do with every evening walk from my office to home. The motion was that democracy perhaps is not suited for China. I thought that debate is preposterous - say that to an Uighur peasant or a miner dying of lung cancer or an indentured labourer at any of the big electronic companies. He/she will tell you the answer. What I was most interested by was the recurring rhetoric about the economic miracle of China, that this kind of economic growth is unprecedented. That it single-handedly brought 70% of world's out-of-poverty transformations. So on the one hand of the deba...