Rocket Science

The enmity between India and Pakistan is at a new high: nice time to have a cricket match—advertising will earn lots of money and beat recession. On the other hand, the press which has had nothing to report but lay-offs has increased readership. War stories and cries sell like hot pancakes on cold Christmas days. So, this war-mongering is good. It will also cause fears of scarcity and shoot prices up. There will be collateral damages like the Bengal famine, and Hiroshima. But, we will tide over recession via cricket matches and war-on-television. Mad mullahs versus an economist will be fantastic! The latter’s daughters do plenty of weird things like history teaching in India and civil liberties in America (she dares not do the same in India—no one wants an embarrassed daddy!). They’d get first hand experience on how parts of India become archaeological curios and civil liberty disasters.

Recently, my teacher and I walked into an eatery on Lodhi road in Delhi. A sales guy couldn’t spell ‘black forest’. We were bemused. But, the nation isn’t. We mourn job losses of ‘executives’ in retails. What would they have done if they didn’t have these jobs in the first place? Or what prompted entrepreneurs to employ these people? There was a surge in demand and quality had to be compromised to meet it. This is a simple answer that does not make me happy. I feel that the idea was to open up stores and staff them with uneducated and cheap labour. The idea is to not just make lots of money but to keep the bottom line fat. So, when demands fall my revenue dips but my margins continue to remain healthy. I invest less and make less money but I’m not in the red. My marginal cost and marginal revenue continue to be equal. In other words, I am still maximizing profits. This continues till my cost cutting makes me dysfunctional or till marginal cost and revenue both become zero. On the other hand this example makes us understand that all the employees in the information industry were uneducated too. Naryanamurthy, himself acknowledges that. In an interview he says--: I have no doubt at all that free trade is extremely important for poor countries to create more and more jobs. When we talk of free trade, it is free trade not just in India, it is free trade in G7 countries, free trade in G15, free trade all over. The key question we have to ask is what does a country have to offer, and what does a country have to sell in the global market? The moment we have something that we produce better than anybody else at the most competitive price in the global market, as long as there is free trade, then that country can sell those products in the global market, obtain global currency, and then import the best product at the best prices to fulfil its other needs. So free trade is good; there is no doubt at all.

But the assumption is that every country has something to offer in the global marketplace. Unless I have something to offer in the global marketplace, then free trade is not good for me, and I will blame others who believe in free trade. So the question that every doubting country has to address on a very urgent basis is: Have we something to offer the world at the best price? Have we something of the best quality at the best price? And that is a much more difficult question to answer rather than saying that free trade is bad for the world. But free trade is not bad for the world at all.

... At different points of time in different sections of the economy, different sectors of the industry, different countries will have competition at one thing. At one point in time China had computers; Japan had computers and radios. Even today, for example, when I go home I have a General Electric fridge, I open [it] and then I see Pepsi. I see so many of these things. My computers in this company, for example, we import $50 million worth of technology from the U.S. every year. The point is simply this. Indian computer manufacturers, Indian soft drink manufacturers will say, "Why do you drink Pepsi?" or "Why do you buy computers from outside India?" India must have some strength in certain products. United States today has the best strength in terms of computer technology, and everybody will buy the U.S. technology, but that's the best technology at the best prices. The question that we have to ask is what is it that I can bring to the global market at the best price, something that is considered the best in the world? That's the only way it works.1

The point is that in India we are very good at producing cheap labour. We still do not make great computers, fridges, or even colas. We produce graduates who know enough to sell their labour cheaply but not sufficient to claim first-world wages. So, all those who face lay-offs need to remember that their education is not indispensable. What can be duplicated easily and had at lower rates is definitely not high-quality specialized stuff. Rocket scientists are made of sterner stuff.


References

1 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitextlo/int_narayanamurthy.html#1

Premchand’s Ramlila and Joyce’s Araby: A Comparative Reading

Joyce’s Araby foregrounds, via the medium of the short fiction, a kind of psychological insight and use of symbolism that would soon become the genre’s mainstay. Storytelling, after Dubliners, would be more mimetic, symbolic (bringing to use classical myth as subtext), and less likely to discussing events in someone’s life. Direct narration of events would be replaced by dense psychological moments. (Like the description of a boy, love struck and lonely, clasping his hands and probably genitals, listening to the sound of rain drops pattering on the grass outside his room and he feels that they are like needles impinging on his skin and senses.) Few years later, the technique would be taken to a greater height of complexity by T S Eliot in The Wasteland. Cultural and psychological space would become like the cursed and barren kingdom of the Fisher king in the Arthurian legend: the mad poet in search of shanti would be described as ‘shoring his fragments against the ruins’.

Premchand, rooted and committed to social reality of the villages and small towns of his era, could explore psychological complexities through a way of narration that is less symbolic and more direct; he would use a style that would not make us question the authenticity of the ‘dramatized narrator’ (an expression lent to us by Wayne C Booth in his classic The Rhetoric of Fiction) as we are expected to when we read Araby. In Ramlila, for instance, as we progress with the story, we are told that the narrator does not think much of the Ramlila festival in Kashi for the one in his village was as colourful and more fun. Soon, we discover that the disenchantment is born out of nostalgia as he is now a retired man who has been pensioned off. He has fathered sons and worked to feed and get them married. In Araby, the boy is never seen to grow old. His disillusioned narrative, full of Biblical symbols that re-tell the story of Genesis and the Quest of the Holy Grail in a misogynistic fashion, constantly overlaps youthful romantic exasperation with a matured man’s sense of decadence that pervades his atmosphere. Expressions like ‘my foolish blood’ co-exist with ‘her name was like a prayer to my lips’.

Yet, Ramlila like Araby tells the story of growing up and disillusionment; both use the motif of the religious festival where evil triumphs over good and tell us how the festival becomes the occasion of epiphanic revelation of reality that subverts the cultural memory of mythical heroism and goodness. If the young boy in Araby journeys to the occidental fair imagining himself to be the Arthurian knight in search of the Grail; Premchand’s narrator enjoys his proximity to the mythical hero Ram. The father in Ramlila would find his counterpart in the drunken uncle of Araby who turns out to be a spoilsport and also a representative of a decadent gerontocracy. If Araby has been read as a precursor to Joyce’s classic bildungsroman Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the first-person narrator in Ramlila, much like Premchand lives in Beneras. The flirtatious women in Araby could be read as the counterpart of the tawaif in Premchand’s story.

The richness of Premchand’s story comes from its economy of style, its spare use of symbolism and yet the deep and subtle psychological ramifications that it brings out. Recall, that the story had begun with a sense of fondness for the Ramlila festivities in his village; he even privileges it over the more glossy and glitzy events of Kashi, that is, Beneras. The story ends with the narrator in tears, a mellow satisfaction of seeing off a friend with a couple of annas as fare for the road. The disillusionment has not been the expected one: that the mythical hero Ram turned out to be penurious or that he did not recognize his friend during the brief moment of glory as Ram. It came from the action of his father who could pay gold coins to a courtesan and not an artist who had entertained the spiritual needs of a whole community. He says, Us din se pitaji par se meri shraddha uth gayi. His respect for his father was lost on that very day. The perversity of a feudal lord, a government employee, and a businessman is placed against the innocent love and admiration that the narrator has for a friend and artist. While the older men respond to sexual gestures, the narrator is aroused by the sheer power of performance. But, what contributes to the complexity of this apparently simple story of growing-up is the way such a bitter memory is overpowered by fond nostalgia for the same experience.Discovering hatred for ones father cannot be explained away by merely citing Freudian theory; it is too strong an emotion to forget. If Ramlila has been the source of such strong and bitter emotions, one needs to understand the reason for renewed attachment to it. The fact that he has been a father himself is not explanation enough. I believe that there was something more enduring in the festival itself that has lingered on and more strongly than the sentiments of resentment.

There were two celebrations on the fateful day. One was the Ramlila itself. The other one was dance of the courtesan. The second led to a denial of the first. Let us work out a schema—Ramlila: Innocence::Nautch:Experience::Good:Evil::Son:Father. The triumph of Ram over the evil Ravana that the Ramlila symbolically conveys is denied by the commercial and carnal interests of the Chaudhary and the father of the narrator. (In fact the triumvirate of the Chaudhary, the Daroga and the Baniya, that silences the actor, carries the Marxist symbolism of the feudal, the bureaucratic, and the businessman working in cohorts against the proletarian artist. In Araby Irish politics is nonexistent. Here is probably the major difference between the modernist in South-Asia and in the West.) The act of giving a couple of annas to the actor, who played the role of Ram and earned money for the feudal-patron, is an attempt to fight for the mythical-hero and also the friend. This is what the Ramlila of childhood offered: a chance to be Ram. It is a role played in silence and oblivion but a role that the ‘real-Rama’ acknowledges. It fills his eyes with tears and heart with satisfaction—Unhe vida karke lauta, to meri ankhein sajal thi; par hriday anand se ubhra huwa tha. As he has moved on in life, Ramlila has acquired more colour and more glitz. Yet, here, he can never be friends with Ram; he can never win over the Ravana, even if that meant that the villain was his own father. Therein lay his pleasure and the source of all his fond nostalgia. Premchand invests in the narrator’s entry into puberty (when defying the father-figure is common) with social and cultural values. This is what distinguishes man from monkey; the artist from the munshi.

Delhi at the Jama Masjid and Lodi Gardens

Purana Quila and Jama Masjid

A kid ran after a ball at the Purana Quila. A few men enjoyed their siesta at the grand mosque. Pigeons flew, a man meditated, women gossiped.
It was a mellow afternoon at the Jama Masjid. Hordes of foreigners, believers, and touts made good holiday and money. My little camera either gave too much depth or too little of the colour and the mood that was there. Yet, here is a modest attempt for a city that I silently admire.

Shimla

In the summer of 1958, my father came to Shimla with his sister and nephew and nieces. It was summer and the season of apples. They walked till chhota Shimla and Jackoo hills and so many other places. And of course, they stayed at the Kalibari. Those were the days when rickshaws pulled by men were seen on the mall and the Ridge.

Twenty years later he came with my mother and a group of friends. They stayed at the Kalibari once again and walked all the way to Jackoo hill; my mother was not impressed. It was the year of the floods and they quickly moved to Manali. That was a couple of years before I was born.

Fifty years later, last Sunday, he again went to Shimla. This time I was around and his family was complete. He has been to Shimla when he went to school, he was in Shimla when was young and strong, he now went to Shimla--slightly weak, and very old. It indeed has been a pilgrimage. Bengalis have made similar routine out of Darjeeling and Puri; Shimla is indeed a little strange place for such a feat. I feel that he has also been lucky.

We stayed near the Mall, and in a hotel. Kalibari was visited once and casually. The room was well appointed and pricey. Life indeed had turned a full circle. He had come with a Roliflex in '58, in 1978 he carried a Minolta SRT101, and this time around I used a Canon Powershot. He loved sipping the tea at the Sarkari-tourist-department run cafe on the Ridge and watching children on horseback. We didn't go to Jackoo hill or Chhota Shimla but we went to Fagu, Naldera and Kufri. He did not climb any mountain slope but quietly sat for coffee at Fagu and waited for my mother as she limped and struggled to get out of the tourist bus. They were happy and tired. After a long and a lonely while--I was at peace.

Ten years that shook my world

I spent ten years in Kolkata. When I came, it was known as Calcutta. One day, much to the chagrin of many (and that includes good ol' Fr Pat Eaton, sj) it changed to 'Kolkata'. I came here in summer; it was April, the 'cruelest month'. Thrust into Park Street, this country-oaf from Durgapur was both amazed and confused. There were so many lonely walks on Short Street, Harrington Street, Hungerford Street. Then there was this friend of mine--Swagatam. Both of us soon delved into Kantian noumena, Heiddeger and Kierkergaard. While most of my friends gunned for the IITs and the medical colleges, we spent hours at Nandan. Nothing great was achieved. I still had to negotiate cruel hours in stranded trains, messy Sealdah in the rains, running from one bus to another. There were girls from Loreto, and Birla High on the tube. One of them, was ravishing. I was particularly jealous of a St Joseph's boy who managed a cosy fifteen minutes with her, everyday. Later, he came to my college and soon dropped out. He stayed close by in Barrackpore. I am told that he is into some business in Singapore. He didn't have the girl, but, did he care?
Swagatam died on 13 January, 2004. He was killed by a bus driver who drove over him. Swagatm and I had chatted, cried and been tortured by the world. He was a wonderful boy. Yes, a boy he was. When did they allow him to grow into manhood? To hell with Calcutta and its rowdy, hooligans like cadre-driven society.
Did the city care for me? I doubt it. After college, where I learnt a lesson that I've kept very close to my heart, getting into the finest University was a breeze. Yes, where was I? On lessons learnt. In this city the 'system' is much bigger than the individual. No matter how good you are, it is going to cut you down to the size of a Bantu. The university, the board, teachers, all of them would set the standards of mediocrity and then ask you to beat nincompoops. Mugging answers, rote learning critical surveys, and writing fancy long winded English was more important than being original, imaginative and crisp. Of course I look back to college with affection. I wouldn't have learnt how to read poetry had it not been for Bertram Da Silva, I would not have read with passion and zeal for performance if it hadn't been for Partho Mukherjee. And, who could forget the dedication, steady hard work, and the gentlemanly warmth that Professor Kapadia had.
The amazing interiors of Goethals Library, reading a dusty cloth covered book--tattered at many ends--at the National Library, as the November sun mellowed upon the dust on the teak of the table, was something that Calcutta offered with ample happiness. So was the smell of jasmine flowers I bought for someone at Rashbehari, while she was schooled in Rabindrasangeet. We walked, softly, as summer eased into rains, through Garcha, Dover Lane ,Hazra....
If Hussain’s does Hyderabad proud, we have our Foreign Publishers' on the Grand Hotel arcade. Babuda, would always have the odd book, and he could make you buy it. Ashis Bhattacahrya has been known as Babu to many Calcuttans. He has a credit system for those wrinkled, frowning and bemused intellectuals who avoid or abhor credit cards. He can sell academic hardbacks like no one else can. And, it has always been a delight talking to him. Conversation would be a mix of adulation, criticism, and the banal. I bought my RSC Shakespeare from him and he favoured me with a good discount. Warm regards for Babu-da
The old British Council, on 5 Theatre Road, was also a pleasure. It had cane chairs, a nice cafe, and long umbrellas for rainy days.
I watched films at Metro and Globe and preferred them to Priya. The multiplexes are such an abuse of cinema-going! The Dharamtullah halls were all dirty, didn't make much money, but, the day they turned Lighthouse to a shopping mall I was angry. That was plain uncultured and the Bong-middle-class Chief Minister couldn't care less. However, I do love the rejuvenated Coffee House on Central Avenue. Though, the micro-wave heated pakoras are a bit disappointing.
The day I got my job at Orient Longman, I walked all the way, in rain, from my office at Chandni Chowk to Coffee House on College Street. I met a friend of mine; he was well past sixty and a radical--Professor Pranab Nayak. I would also not forget Kanchankumar Mukherjee and Rabinbabu. We shared a cup of black coffee and listened to stories of a generation murdered and dragged down the drains by Indira Gandhi's stooges. And, the communists-in-power exonerated all that. I wrote for a magazine called Ikshan. Long live the revolution of the Bengali gentleman!! De la grande Mephistophilis. Yak Yak
I left for Delhi ten summers after I'd come. I had fallen in love, gone to the University, taught at colleges, hated the mediocrity and the middle class that is so typical of the city. Once on the train, I realised I hadn't taken my ticket! Did the city not want me to leave? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

Hi,

Sorry for the goof up, but it seems that I've unwittingly deleted my first post! I will be back with it shortly.