far-right masculinity

I'm supremely happy to report Sandeep Reddy Vanga has shot himself in the foot crotch with Animal. It is a staggeringly poor film and the one line review of the film has to be what Dheeraj said yesterday, "Hope Vanga will not vangabettudu." Well, mate, he's done exactly that. For starters, I went in assuming that it was going to be problematic. But I kept telling Sravani, who was convinced that it was going to be a complete shit, that for all its faults Arjun Reddy was a very well-made film and that Animal was going to be the same too. I absolutely had no clue that the filmmaking would be as sub-par as this. Where do I start? 

Okay, broadly, there are three major problems: the story, the sex and the violence, and, ofcourse, the misogyny. 

The story is ostensibly of a son who loves his father so much that he's willing to burn the world for his attention and love, and does indeed kill and maul many in the film in a quest to protect and avenge. Which isn't a bad story to explore but there is so little focus or justification on that aspect that for long durations I couldn't really understand why he was wrecking all this havoc. Or like the father himself puts it towards the end, "You are a criminal and use this love for me as an excuse for indulging in those tendencies"; I think a bunch of us in the theatre realised that hours before he did (and with a running time of about 3 hours 21 minutes, I mean hours). The tone is all over the place, veering madly from scene to scene, and I was hard-pressed to understand what emotional register I was supposed to access this on. Its actually a fairly common Telugu film practice, which I find more reflective of incompetence than inspiration (the full meals excuse), and with the large number of Telugu directors making films in Bollywood over the past few years, I think its catching up there too. Ofcourse, it is not necessary that all characters behave in a 'realistic' way in a film, even if it can be precisely defined, but isn't it important that the filmmaker communicate the emotional contours of the film initially and then play within those rules? For instance, even if you are the son of the richest man in the country, can you get away with firing a gun in a college or killing "hundreds" of people in your hotel with a custom-made machine gun? Not one character's actions or reactions seem plausible, even within that context, and they convey nothing about the human condition. All they do is exist as stick characters for Vanga to give his hero an excuse to go behave as selfishly and recklessly as possible, and get away with it.

Towards the beginning of the film, the hero tells the heroine that in an earlier time Alpha males ruled the world and all the womenfolk chose to procreate with them. That made the other men jealous and so they invented poetry. I laughed at the gambit because I felt that it was a provacative statement that would lead onto interesting arcs. But Vanga has nothing interesting to say either about the alphas or the others. His alpha is such a juvenile creation that he can't think of anything except sex, guns or, in a couple of instances, fucking pubes (I never thought I'd have to write that word on this blog, damn!). Take the most alpha obsessed male animals in the entire kingdom, and they'd cringe at the cartoon depictions of sex and violence if you showed them this film. Even those bloody rams would go, "Bro, please, we're more than this". For a second forget the misogyny, this is misandry. He has reduced all men to the occassional fantasies of a 13-year old boy- sex, guns, fast cars, conquest. I found it instructive that the word empire was thrown around a couple of times in the film. I think the portrayal of males in the film is based on medieval myth. This is how I think Vanga believes, say, Genghis Khan's army behaved. With this level of bloodlust, impunity, absence of any morality or thought subtler than the basest of our instincts. Not even medieval fact but myth, because I think even 700 years ago, being a powerful, successful ruler (alpha!) had to be more than being physically strong or rich. Even from a filmmaking perspective, while I suppose he intended the violence to be shocking, it came across more as irritating. I mean you can lift the axe-corridor fight scene from Oldboy but without the commensurate depth in writing, it never goes beyond being a cool, stylistic choice. This is a film that's constantly shouting without having anything interesting to say, that's provacative without being subversive. 

Finally, let's get to the misogyny. Having seen his responses to the flak against Kabir Singh, I expected Vanga to double down on his initial forays towards portrayal of women. I was reluctant to call them his convictions because I didn't know if he genuinely thinks that about women, but after watching this film I'm fairly convinced that even if he thinks that way its not probably a thought-through position. He feels that this kind of characterisation provokes people, gives his film the attention and him the reputation of being an enfant terrible, and he's happy with that arrangement. What Srikanth Srinivasan said so perceptively about Kantara is applicable here; To treat this film "as the expression of a comprehensive worldview is to mischaracterize the work". All women are treated like second-class citizens, sex is conquest and only a reflection of the man's prowess, the patriarchy is unrelenting, there's a pervasive sense of "bros before hoes" and, worst of all, the women embrace and celebrate their position. There were a couple of instances in the film when Bhajji turned to me and laughingly said, "You should've brought Sravani yaar, she'd have loved this scene." Well, she'd have probably flung a slipper at the screen and her action would've been justified. For all this bravado posturing, at some level I think Vanga was quite intimidated by the angry response from feminists to Kabir Singh, because in Animal it is the heroine who slaps the hero, and elevates her husband for being with her in the labour room and subsequently acting as her "nurse, mother, father, gynaecologist.." Having said that though, the heroine, not to mention the hero's sisters or the second heroine or the villain's wives, is treated with such disdain and lack of any importance to her agency that I couldn't help but be repulsed by everyone involved in the making of the film. Like Bhajji, again, so strikingly asked, "What would the director's wife have said after seeing this?"

That's about the film. Now, let's talk about its social ramifications. Instructively, when I wrote about Arjun Reddy 5 years ago, I was keen to get away with the social questions first and trip on the film itself. It is a tribute to all my discussions with Sravani that I'm now capable of looking away from the 'art as art' lens, and see films in a wider context. For all its failings as a film, judging by the responses in the housefull theatre I saw it in, the film will become a hit. The target demographic for this film is 15-30 year old men, and I think they'll be impressed and energised, if not inspired, by a few strong scenes. And as much as I'd like for it to be left at the exit, atleast a few guys will carry some of these thoughts out into the world to act on. While I'm more or less a free speech absolutist, on this point though I must concur with Sravani that this filth is not good for our society and probably shouldn't have been made. Not because it makes arguments that I don't agree with but because it doesn't make particularly interesting or useful arguments. Infact, it doesn't make any arguments except seek to shock and excite at a very shallow level. For all the progress Bollywood has made towards portraying more modern and metrosexual men since the turn of the millennium (thank god for the Farooq Sheikhs and the Amol Palekars, among others, before that), the turn towards an older, toxic form of masculinity is back with us, and it is shameful to see it is being promulgated by Telugu directors. Setting the moral lament aside, I wonder if it is simply an entertainment cyclical trend, with one existing as the mainstream and the other as a sub-stratum, or if it is part of the wider sociocultural milieu in which we extole the "56-inch chest", valorise the hyper-masculinity of the army, or proudly endorse a certain kind of Jat/ Rajput/ Reddy pride. 

Discussing these points with Amma a few minutes ago, I've come to the conclusion that there is no excuse for making this film- not the market, not this is what the audience wants, not artistic freedom, not if not us someone else will. Everyone involved is culpable, including myself which I hope to atone a bit by writing this post, and I really hope there is social pushback. All I can do is end by quoting Ebert, "I hated hated hated this movie".

that rite of passage

కిషోర్ అన్న and శారద గారు invited us to their house last evening because it was సోమవారం కార్తీక పౌర్ణమి and they were planning to do a రుద్రాభిషేకం. So we arrived there expecting to find many people, like it was when they did the సత్యనారాయణ వ్రతం, and were surprised to realise it was just us. Because he hadn't started the పూజ yet, అన్నtold me to change into a ధోతి ఉత్తరీయం and sit with him. While changing I realised I wasn't wearing my జంధ్యం and embarassedly informed him. He paused what he was doing and looked at me with barely concealed anger. He handed me a new one, muttering, "జంధ్యం లేకుండా ఏంటి ఆదిత్య", to which I replied, "Sorry" in a low voice, and he said, "నాకెందుకు sorry". Then we spent the next 15 minutes doing the ceremony so that I could wear it at the end of which he said, "I hope I'm not imposing" and I replied, "అయ్యో, లేదండి. దాన్ని ధిక్కరించే స్థాయికి చేరుకోలేదు", and then we started the అభిషేకం.

As I write this, I can see Sravani grimace, at the time of reading, at my easy capitulation. I understand her anger and disappointment. But at some level, what I said is true. In a different context, I would probably have argued and discussed the metaphysical aspects of the ritual itself and his belief. But there I felt more vulnerable because I was invited precisely for being born into a బ్రాహ్మణ household. And I felt like I was pretending to be one without backing it up with learning and experience. The problem was more in the lack of knowledge than in the pretense. Its the equivalent of being the only Indian amongst a group of people from other nationalities, and be stumped at answering the most basic question about India.

During the అభిషేకం itself, I felt inadequate and phony- not because of my lack of belief (not at all, actually, because I was processing it at the level of the ritual itself) nor because of the lack of conviction in my atheism, but because of my inability to learn about and embrace, not either but both, fully. If I had to be stupid, I wanted to be profoundly stupid, not simply stupid. I wanted to have known the శ్రీ  సూక్తం, పురుష సూక్తం, నమకం - చమకం, done the ritual properly, and then sat down to talk about it. తెలిసీ తెలియకుండా ప్రశ్నలు వేయడం ఒక వయసు దాక బాగుంటుంది, చాలా అవసరం కూడా , కానీ ఆ వయసు దాటేసిన తరువాత అది అజ్ఞానం, చేతకాని తనం, మరీ ముఖ్యంగా, నిజంగా తెలుసుకోవాలన్న జిజ్ఞాస కాక ఏదో వాగాలి కాబట్టి వాగే అలవాటు గానే మిగిలిపోతుంది. కుర్రాడికి మగవాడికి అదే తేడా.

While that's what happened last night, during the course of a recent, important conversation, I realised that one of the primary reasons why I feel like and act like a boy, permanently, seems to be because I never learnt how to grow into a man. To rephrase what I said then, "I was born a boy and didn't have to be taught how to behave like one. But to grow into a man, I had to see, learn, emulate, follow someone- which I couldn't. Its usually the father who acts as the template and because that was missing, I sort of never went through the rite of passage." Interestingly, I remember having a few very serious conversations on this topic with friends back in college but I don't think its come up since. I've been thinking over the past few days if that is an excuse but I think it is a genuine reason. Not that everyone with a father either learns or can learn from him, but in my case, and its hit me at the age of 33, that it has been a crisis; I know it is a big word and I'm used to downplaying my confusions and struggles as nothing more than products of immaturity or pigheadedness or affectation, but the last few months have been quite impactful in forcing me to look at these issues without escaping into abstraction or frivolity. 

Again, I don't mean to bring this up as an excuse for my actions or words through my adulthood. Infact, maybe some good has happened by not having that tree to grow in the shade of. Nonetheless, I think the time has come to look at this as objectively as I can- both without arrogance and, more dangerously, an escapist, reflexive kind of self-effacement. Stanley Kubrick once said that talking beautifully about a problem can give the mistaken impression that it has been solved. Similarly, talking openly about one's failings or confusions can give the impression, primarily to oneself, that nothing needs to be done to fix it. I seem to have fallen into that trap. Its like my reflexive sorry to anyone- there you go, I've admitted my mistake. Happy? What more do you want from me- to fix it?.

"Don't hedge your prose with little timidities", writes William Zinsser. In a sense, to be a man is to live upto that dictum. I can't keep kvetching and apologising and backtracking and airing my fucking uncertainities all my life. Or to quote Martin McDonagh from In Bruges, "He's suicidal? I'm suicidal, you're suicidal, everybody's fucking suicidal. We don't all keep going on about it. Has he killed himself yet? So he's not fucking suicidal, is he?". 

Yet there's a part of me that cherishes this openness, honesty, a refreshing lack of pretense. I don't want to lose that. I also don't want to extend my 'extended adoloscence' any further. Don't lose the play but don't trivialise the serious. That is the holy grail. I recently wrote to Sravani that I want to live in a way where I cherish the now, the ephemeral intense short-term without losing the ability to build the more permanent, grander long-term artefacts of life. To use Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan's dichotomy, we need both the interesting and the important. The boyish and the manly. I can see the churn happening inside me, intense and focused, in real-time. Has it happened before? I can't recollect. The bigger question, though, is, Will it lead to transformation?

Thankfully, one good thing is the immutable realisation that any transformation is a sum of innumerable daily actions, not an act of inspiration or blessing. I am trying to inculcate that into my daily life and ofcourse it is slow and hard, but as long as delusions don't cloud my eyes for long, I think I'll keep at it and get there. 

Who'd've thought that Tracy Austin was the genius after all.

Democracy in an age of epistemic uncertainty

I wrote this as a Public Engagement submission for my Takshashila GCPP course. It was inspired by a Nitin Pai lecture and I'm somewhat proud of this essay.

--

Democracy in an age of epistemic uncertainty
or politics as usual?

Would mass democracy have been possible except during the high-noon of Modernism?

The notion that a group of citizens can, by voting for their favoured (okay, maybe that’s too strong: how about least-worst?) politicians, choose the best leader to lead the nation seems like a fairly recent one. One that seems to have sprung less from that being the best way than a method with the least need for constant justification. That old fox Churchill was onto something when he called it the worst form of government and all that.

There are two obvious upsides to this arrangement though:

1. Since the people are, ostensibly, (s)electing their rulers (and I use the term with caution in the context of really existing democracy), there is less risk of an internal sabotage or coup, and, consequently, better chances of order and social cohesion.

2. By collating preferences from citizens who are actually impacted by actions of the government, the policy-makers get a sense of what is important for citizenry and what they need to work upon. It is an information gathering mechanism, albeit imperfect and prone to mis/disreadings, but works better than a more authoritarian form of government, if not for anything else but, simply because people are convinced that this is what the majority seems to want and that needs to be respected. Elections are, critically, also an intra-communication mechanism for society to talk to itself.

The precondition for both these tenets is a fundamental trust in the ability and the stated-intentions of the elected politicians and, perhaps more importantly, that other voters are as rational and well-intentioned as one is. The trust in the political system in India seems to have started fraying post the intial heyday of independence with a suspicion of the inadequacies and corruption of the political class taking root. But there was a clear demarcation between the classes of politicians and citizens with the mainstream media acting as the broad platform. To be clear, while any society, especially Indian society, has been sliced into smaller groups across many dimensions of gender, caste, language, region, occupation etc., the notion of all being equal citizens seems to have been deeply ingrained- atleast as a sentiment. With the advent, and rapid penetration, of social media platforms, that sense of seemingly solid reality began cracking up.

Much has been written about how the liberal intelligentsia was rudely exposed to this truth with the twin shocks of Brexit and Trump but if anything that was more a culmination of the process of distintegration begun in the late 2000s than an instantaneous manifestation. Steve Bannon's diabolical genius, it seems to me, was not to find a way to lie to people convincingly or confuse them ('Flood the zone with shit') as much as a realisation that we don't always seek information in search of some pristine truth (even if it indeed is as transcendentally static as some of us like to believe). We do it for various social reasons including signalling, to feel part of a group, reach for it as a way of assuaging some other grievance, to fantasise etc. Like Tyler Cowen recently argued, misinformation isn't a supply-side problem as much as a demand-side one.

People who believe in QAnon conspiracies or the statement that India had internet connection during the Mahabharata or any of those, what might seem like, loony beliefs to a certain English-speaking, liberal, cosmopolitan (the anywheres, to use David Goodhart's useful dichotomy) individual, are not necessarily irrational or stupid or ill-intentioned (though probably that sub-section exists in this larger group) as responding to deeper insecurities or grudges. Pankaj Mishra's argument in Age of Anger that resentment caused by the gap between Neoliberal Capitalism’s extravagant promises and harsh realities thereby creating the ferment that has lead to radical tribalism, while overstretching, seems to me to contain a large truth. The tumult we live in right now is as much cognitive as social, political or economic. The world is becoming stranger and stranger, and some of us who are feeling more unmarooned than others are holding onto whatever we can for temporary succor.

This brings me to the original question of the link between Modernism and a wider optimism with respect to mass democracy. Presumably, and this is a very timid hypothesis because there is a lot of reading I need to do on this subject, during the reign of High Modernist thought, there was a deeply felt sense that the world could be tamed by better instruments of social science, that all of us were rational in a fundamentally similar way, progress was linear, and more information led to better knowledge led to better outcomes for all. That sentiment eroded first slowly and then all at once. But rather than being a failure, I'd like to think of this as reality refusing to conform to any set of theories for long. It is a natural product of evolution, what the philosopher Venkatesh Rao has called Oozification. As long as individual agents are free, intelligent, adaptive, complex, like we insist all of us are (which is one of the fundamental tenets of democracy itself), they will shape the world in ways unforseen. It is ludicrous to insist that all of us should be left to be who we want to be, as the progressives claim, and should be left to make and spend money as we see fit, as the neoliberals claims, and then also expect all to conform to certain Englightenment notions of universalism. Ofcourse, we'd all love to have a royal middle path with the best of both worlds but that's easier said than done. As the brilliant Don Watson recently wrote, “The voters, and all their ignorance and prejudices, their self-interest, their meanness, their gullibility, and all their goodwill, faith and conscientiousness, are the raw material of the democracy, and to blame them is like blaming the rain for falling”.

I think Hegel was onto something when he said there is a natural direction to history. It seems unlikely that a people used to freedom would willingly relinquish it. Interestingly, though, we seem to be doing exactly that with the rise of authoritarianism. Maybe for all its rhetorical value, there is only so much freedom a society and an individual can handle before the centrifugal forces take over and undermine the identity and stability of the entity. In a spectrum stretching from a rigidly fixed identity (say a caste identity that imposes extreme social and economic limitations) to an anything-you-want-to-do-no-restrictions type freedom (say a late capitalist society where nothing is solid and everything is infinitely malleable), I think individuals feel unconfortable at either extreme. And while they want their freedoms, they also want assurances. So, for instance, whatever we gain in economic and social freedoms, we seem to feel compelled give up in political and cultural freedoms. What is to change and what is to remain is the metaphysical responsibility of politics.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that while it may seem like all of this will crash and burn, I think we will be able to create new tools, learn more about ourselves and the world, and fix all this mid-flight. Not a permanent fix but enough to keep flying until it becomes someone else’s problem.

artrippin'

కీడా కోలా అనే ఈ తరుణ్ భాస్కర్ అద్వైత ప్రవచనానికి క్వింటిన్ టారెంటినో వేదిక సిద్ధం చేయగా గయ్ రిట్చీ మైకు సౌండూ బాధ్యతలు నిర్వర్తించారు.

కార్ల పోతున్నప్పుడు నాకు శ్రావణికి అయ్యే మోస్ట్ రిపిటిటివ్ వాదన వివేక్ సాగర ఒవర్రేటెడా కాదా అన్నది. నేనంట అసల్ గసుంటి సౌండ్ ఇంకేడన్నా ఇన్నవా అని, తనంటది అదే ప్రాబ్లం అన్ని పాటల్ ఒకటే తీరుంటయని. నాక్ రెఫ్యూట్ చేయనీకె కరెక్ట్ వాదన దొరక్క తంటాలు పడతాంటా. నేన్ సిగ్నేచర్ అంట, తను రిపిటెటివ్ అంటది. మొన్న డిపిరి డిపిరి తనకి ఇనబెడ్తాన్నప్పుడు అంటే సుందరానికి ప్రోమో సాంగ్ లెక్కనే ఉన్నది కదా అన్నది. నాక్ కాలి అది నెక్స్ట్ ప్లే చేశి ఏంది సిమిలారిటీ అని అడిగిన. ఆ ఎక్సర్సైజ్ వల్ల ఇద్దరం చాలా శ్రద్దతో రెండు పాటలు వింటూంటె నాక్ ఒకటి తట్టింది- తన పాటలు ఆర్ ఎ కలెక్షన్ ఆఫ్ మైక్రో-ట్యూన్స్ అని. ఆ జారీనెస్, బార్డర్లైన్ ఇన్‌కోహెరెన్స్, అమాల్గమేషన్ ఆఫ్ వేరీడ్ సౌండ్ స్టైల్స్ అన్నీ కలిపితే అది వివేక్ సాగర్ సౌండ్.

గీ ముచ్చట నిన్న ధీరజ్‌గాన్తో శ్వాస మీద ధ్యాస మీద ట్రిప్ అయితున్నప్పుడు చెప్పిన. అపుడ్ వాడొక మస్త్ మాట చెప్పిండు- వివెక్ సాగర్ మ్యూజిక్ మాన్యుఫాక్చర్ చెస్తడన్నా అన్నడు. అరె కరెక్ట్ పదం పట్టిండ్రభై అనిపించింది. ఆ తర్వాత తనని, రెహ్మాన్‌ని, ఇళయరాజాని కంపేర్ అండ్ కాంట్రాస్ట్ చేసే ప్రయత్నం చేశ్నం. మేమిద్దరం మ్యూజిక్‌ల అల్టిమేట్ గవార్లం కాబట్టి మాకు కనిపించి, చేజిక్కే పరికరాల్ని కాన్సెప్ట్స్‌నే వెతుకున్నం. మైనర్ డైగ్రెషన్: స్మరణ్ వివేక్ ఆన్ స్టెరాయిడ్స్ అని చెప్పి కొత్త పోరడు సౌండ్ట్రాక్ ఇనమన్న. మీర్‌భీ ఇన్నుర్రి- కిరాక్ ఫకిన్ గుడ్ ఉంటది. బాక్ టు గవార్ మ్యూజిక్ అనాలిసిస్: ధీరజ్ గాడన్నడు రెహ్మాన్ అచ్చిన కొత్తల పబ్లిక్ అంటుండె గీనె సిన్థసైజర్ గవీ ఎక్కువ వాడ్తడు, రాజా మ్యూజిక్ లోని ఇన్‌స్ట్రుమెంటల్ వెరైటీ ఉండది అని. టెక్నికల్లీ సాఫిస్టికేటెడ్ బట్ విదౌట్ ది రిచ్‌నెస్ ఎండ్ క్రియేటివిటీ ఇన్ మ్యూజిక్ అని (అరేయ్ ధీరజ్ నేన్‌గిన నిన్ను మిస్కోట్ చేస్తాంటే కింద కామెంట్స్‌ల తెలియజెయ్). కానీ మా తరం వాళ్ళకి ఆస్ మచ్ ఆస్ వీ లవ్ రాజా సర్, రెహ్మాన్ ఈస్ ద గోల్డ్ స్టాండర్డ్. మేబీ ఇట్సె జెనరేషనల్ థింగ్ అనుకున్నం. కానీ ఆ తర్వాత అచ్చిన అమిత్ త్రివేది (అమ్మతోడు డేవ్.డి ఏమన్న సౌండ్ట్రాకా), వివేక్ సాగర్‌లు ఎంత నచ్చినా ఇంకా రెహ్మాన్ స్టేల్ ఆర్ నీష్ అయిపోలేదు. ఎందుకని జర ఆలోచన పెట్టినం.

అపుడ్ మెహెరన్న తట్టిండు. మా స్మాల్ కెపాసిటీస్‌ల నేను ధీరజ్‌గాడు ఈ కొత్త మ్యూజిక్ డైరెక్టర్స్ లెక్క. కొత్త టూల్స్ వాడుకుంట మాకు ఉన్న కేపబిలిటిల మేము మా యధార్థాన్ని పట్టునికి, ప్రతిబింబించే ఆర్ట్ (నా రాతలకి అది పెద్ద పదం కానీ ప్రస్తుతానికి అడ్జెస్ట్ కార్రి) క్రియేట్ చేస్తున్నం. ఆ ఫ్రాగ్మెంటేషన్, పీస్-మీల్ అప్రోచ్ అప్పుడప్పుడు వర్కౌట్ అయితది కానీ కన్సిస్టెన్సీ అంత లేదు. మోర్ ఇంపార్టెంట్లో, అది మాబోటొల్లకి నచ్చిద్ది కానీ వైడర్ ఆడియెన్స్, బోత్ ఇన్ టైం అండ్ స్పేస్, దొర్కరు. కానీ మెహెరన్న రచనలు అట్ల కాదు. దే ఆర్ నాట్ జస్ట్ స్టాగరింగ్లీ పర్టినెంట్ బట్ అల్సో పార్ట్ ఆఫ్ ది ట్రిడిషన్. అదెట్ల, ఎందుకు అని ఆలోచిస్తే మాకర్థమైనది ఏందటే ఆయన కానన్ చదివిండు, ఆకళింపు చేస్కున్నడు, మంచి చెడు గ్రహించి ఆ పరంపరని ఎంబ్రేజ్ చేశిండు. మేము అట్లేంలే. ఎంతోకొంత రాయొచ్చు కాబట్టి దిమాఖ్ మే జో ఆయా వో లిఖ్ దేరే. ఇప్పటి ప్రపంచంతో ఎంగేజ్ అయితున్నం కాబట్టి ఇంతో అంతో ఆ వైబ్, జైట్‌గైస్ట్ స్పృహ అందులో మిళితమైనా ఫన్‌డమెంటల్ ప్రిన్సిపల్స్ తెలీవు కాబట్టి అవి నిలవవు అని నా అభిప్రాయం. ధీరజ్ గాడికి అట్లాంటిదేదో సృష్టించాలన్న కాంక్ష ఉందనుకుంట గానీ నాక్ లేదు/ పోయింది. ట్రూత్ ఓవర్ బ్యూటీ అని నేననేదానికి మూల కారణం నాలో బ్యూటీని నిర్వచించి, సృష్టించ గలిగే సామర్థ్యం లేకపోవటం. ఎనీవే, మెహెరన్న రెహ్మాన్ లాగ ఎందుకంటే ఆయన క్రాఫ్ట్ ఈజ్ బిల్ట్ ఆన్ ఎ క్లాసికల్ ఎడ్యుకేషన్ బట్ హిజ్ ప్రీఆక్యుపేషన్స్ ఆర్ కాంటెంపొరరీ.

పెద్ద డిస్క్లైమర్: వివేక్ సాగర్‌ది కంప్యూటర్ మ్యూజిక్ అని మా రాతలతో పోల్చటనికి కారణం పైపైన్ మా సృజన కూడ అలాంటిందే అన్న పోలిక కనిపించడం. అంతే కానీ వివేక్‌కి సంగీత జ్ఞానం లేదన్న ప్రతిపాదన కాదు. అలా అనేంత స్థాయి మాకెలానో లేదు, అహంకారమూ లేదు. అంతేగాక తన సంగీతం పట్ల ఎంతో ఇష్టము, కృతజ్ఞత ఉన్నాయి. గీ ముచ్చటల నన్ ఆఫ్ అవర్ పర్సానిఫికేషన్స్ మేబీ ఆక్యురేట్. గిదంతా మా కల్పనే.

ఈ లొల్లి ఎపుడ్ ఉండనే ఉంటది కానీ మీర్ పొయ్యి కీడా కోల చూడుర్రి. ఇచ్చి పడేశిండు తరుణ్. ఇగ వివేక్ భాయ్ దాన్ని మెగా ఎలివేట్ చేశిండు. నాకైతే స్నాచ్ ఇన్స్పిరేషన్ మస్త్ కొట్టొచినట్టు ఔపడ్డది (రఘురామ్ బాటంస్-అప్, ఫ్లైట్ టేకాఫ్, స్క్రీమ్ క్విక్-కట్ ఈజ్ ఎ క్లియర్ హొమాజ్). ఎడ్గర్ రైట్ ప్రభావం ఉందని సద్విన కానీ నేన్ వాన్ సైన్మాల్ సూడలే కాబట్టి తెల్వది. టారెంటినో ఎలానో ఉంటడు. ఆయన వీళ్ళందరి పెద్దన్న- హీ ఈజ్ ద ఒరిజినల్ భక్త నాయుడు. తరుణ్/ జీవన్/ విష్ణు ట్రాక్ ఈజ్ గోల్డ్; విష్ణు ఓయ్ ఈజ్ అల్వేస్ ఎ థ్రిల్ టు వాచ్.

ఒకప్పుడు దీన్ని పోస్ట్-మాడ్రనని గిదని గదని అర్థం చేస్కొని నేన్ గిసుంటిది ఎట్ల క్రియేట్ చేయలని తంటాలు పడి పరేషాన్ అయితుండె. ఇపుడ్ భీ తెల్సుకోవలన్న జిజ్ఞాస, ఇగో గిట్ల ఒర్లే అలవాటు పోలే కానీ అరే నేన్ ఎందుక్ర భై చేయలేక పోతున్న అన్న ఒళ్ళుమంట, కచ్చ లెవ్వు. కొంత వరకు దానికి కారణం నేనూ ఇంతో అంతో రాసుకోడం/ ఫిల్మ్ చేయడం, నా లిమిటెడ్ కేపబిలిటీస్‌ని అక్సెప్ట్ చేయటమే కాక నచ్చిన ఆర్ట్‌ని ఇష్టంతో, కృతజ్ఞతతో, స్వేచ్ఛతో చెరిష్ చేసే పరిపక్వత రావటం. ఇలా బావుంది, ఆస్ యూష్వల్ ఎన్నాళ్ళుంటదో చూడాలి మరి.

the world forgetting by the world forgot

A few days ago I was having lunch with a friend in the office when a bird flew past us. A noisy miner. I don't know how it managed to get in through the revolving doors but it was hopelessly disoriented, confused and, possibly, panicking. It kept flying around and every couple of minutes would fly straight up, mistaking the glass for the sky, and bumping into it and falling back down. It was a wretched sight and we didn't know what to do. The security personnel either didn't mind it or didn't know how to get it out, so it was condemned to be stuck in there until it injured itself or lay down exhausted, and someone could pick it up and fling it out. Ofcourse, like any self-respecting bleeding-heart liberal my heart pined for it, for a few minutes until I went back to my desk- out of sight, out of mind. That incident happened when I was midway through Siddhartha Deb's The Beautiful and the Damned, and it seemed like the perfect metaphor for the lives he was writing about. 

In the film Piku, Deepika takes Irrfan saab around Kolkata on a sight-seeing trip imposing onto places her personal connection with them. At one point she finds a shopping mall where there was an old single-screen, to which were attached fond memories, and is surprised and disappointed with the change. To which his character replies, "लोग शायद इसीको डेवेलपमेंट कहते हैं |". It is a stunning line that conveys way more than it should. It could only be uttered by a bourgeoisie, someone who is capable of noticing even massive change only with respect to how it impacts his feelings. I identified with it so much. 

The people Deb writes about in this magnificent, invaluable book though are impacted so fundamentally and violently by what we would call modernity and development, that they feel lost and tormented for years if not decades. Their lives so quickly and brutally picked up and cast away into the vast maw of the capital-industrial machine (though the word machine feels impossibly meek to describe the vastness and hunger of this amorphous, but unbearably heavy, entity we call Industrial Modernity) that their sense of self, family, community, tradition and culture, everything that makes life meaningful, bearable, occasionally enjoyable, is shredded. This, this thing snatches away their humanity and treats them as nothing more than nuts and bolts required to keep this waves of 'progress' running. I have begun to understand the importance of economic growth (thanks in no small part to Amit Varma's The Seen and the Unseen) but it is not only ridiculous to lazily assume that this is a net good (even if it were what about all the bad?) but that this is the only bloody way to improving the human condition.

I have been fortunate enough, over the last few years, to read, and occasionally watch, incredible social portraits of the effects of modernity on Indian society

• Butter Chicken in Ludhiana - Pankaj Mishra
• Maximum City - Suketu Mehta
• A Free Man - Aman Sethi
• Capital - Rana Dasgupta
• My Seditious Heart - Arundhati Roy
• Shanghai - Dibakar Banerjee
• Leaving Home - Jaideep Varma
• Dreamers - Snigdha Poonam (to read)
  

and to that stellar list, I must add this book. Deb's incisive prose is sharp, strong, deep and poetic, and I had to pause after each of the 6 chapters because it was too much to bear. In contrast to almost all the other works I've cited above, except possibly Roy, it is direct in its indictment of the Indian elites for their greed and collusion in the incredible human suffering. It is easy to say I haven't felt as much shame and anger from reading a book in a long time but only my actions will tell if it really has had an impacted or if its just self-signalling. I'd like to believe that the feelings were real. Deb is a master prose stylist, I was underlining entire paragraphs, and marvelling at his ability to see through all the layers of distractions and get to the heart of the matter.

Briefly, the subjects are as follows:

• Introduction: After painting a broad picture of the changes spreading across India in the mid-2000s- the rise of the Hindu far right, the glamour of the BPO jobs, the exploding urbanisation- he spends time with Abdul Jabbar, a man who runs an NGO in Bhopal for victims of the gas tragedy and tries to capture the reality of a large section of poor, marginalised Indians who have to fight not only with rich corporations, but also the state, for justice.
• The Great Gatsby: I first read this essay in The Caravan many years ago and loved it. Arindham Chaudhuri, at that point in time, was huge and while I always had the suspicion that he was a fraud, Deb's incredible essay not only painted the socioeconomic milieu in which he was operating and gaining such success, but also used his story to convey the cultural shift in the country with regards to notions of success, wealth and an individual's dharma, subsequently even calling out people like myself for our snobbery and condescension.
• Ghosts in the Machine: In which he tries to understand the transformation of Bangalore into the Silicon Valley of India by following a couple of software employees. The return from US but a desire to build a mini-US there, the unmoored-ness waiting to be compensated by New Spirituality, the desire to see Software Engineering as Brahminical in its pristineness and abstraction ignoring the messy materiality in which IT operates, the desire to use technology for greater good that is quickly undermined by corporate and political vested interests. He also understands fairly quickly that the growth story in India wasn't as much about software efficiency as it was about real estate, financialisation, crony capitalism, and broken promises of politicians.
• Red Sorghum: In which he contrasts the increasing richness of Hyderabad with the poverty of surrounding Telangana districts- the farmer suicides, the destruction of older, rural lifestyles, the inequality in development creating a schizophrenic sense of two different worlds less than a hundred kilometres apart. I found this particularly hard reading because I grew up in Hyderabad during this era, had atleast a passing knowledge of the political and economic changes, but no one around me seems to have acknowledged the fact that the rise of one and the fall of all others were interrelated.
• The Factory: He spends time in a TMT factory interacting with workers, mostly migrants from the East and the Northeast, and tries to convey the harsh lives of these men. This was again a tough piece to get through because for once the manipulating factors weren't abstractions like information technology or neoliberal policies, but rather old-school oppression, uprootedness and dehumanising physical work.
• The Girl from F&B: About the life of a particular Manipuri girl who works in the hospitality sector in New Delhi. Deb uses her story to talk about the hundreds of thousands of people from the Northeast who come to mainland India (his phrase) in search of better opportunities and how they're treated as different ("..in the pejorative language commonly used in Delhi for all Mongoloid people - a Chinky") and discriminated against.
  

I want to offer a taste by quoting a few lines:

• And when the writer needs the stories of people's lives, those narratives that insert recognisable, human shapes into large but abstract conflicts, he or she depends on people who have a sense of their own trajectories and who are willing to impose form on the chaos of their experiences and memories. -On how a writer sets out searching for stories
  
• But the glamour was irresistible when combined with his middlebrow characteristics. He was one of the audience, even if he represented the final stage in the evolution of the petite bourgeoisie.. distilling down for them that cocktail of spurious tradition and manufactured modernity. -Reg Arindham Chaudhuri's Leadership Seminars
• ..invisible for the most part in the social landscape, they are considered safe people, productive at work, conservative in values and unlikely ever to raise difficult questions about race or inequality. -Reg NRIs considered the model minority
• ..where Western men in khakis accompanied their Indian co-workers on a hesitant sampling of the food court version of native cuisine. -On gora corporate employees traveling to their Indian workspaces
• He was alternatively opinionated and nervous, making random statements that seemed to have no point to them.. in a long rant that was perfectly articulate in flow if incoherent in thought. [Next to this line, I wrote, "OMG Aditya, be careful"] -About a young, frustrated man who spent a little too much time on rightwing message boards
• The simplicity of the surroundings as well as the idealism it evoked seemed intensely familiar, until it brought to me, in a sudden, unbearable wave of nostalgia, my childhood and a time in India when many middle-class households had been like this, animated by literature, art and politics, and where people still lived in a community and believed in social justice. -During a meeting with an old Telugu Marxist in his middle-class, book-lined house late into the night as his granddaughter slept on his lap
• ..leaving farmers to function in the best way they could in the free market with its syndicates, price volatility and speculation. -On the effects of the Naidu-McKinsey approach
• When I put these different fragments together, I got not a whole but a bewildering, cubist image. -On trying to understanding the workings of a factory by interacting with people in various roles
• It was utterly masculine in atmosphere.. the barracks were shorn of the softening aspects of the worst slum, from the liveliness of the children playing to women talking with each other. In a slum, there would have been colourful saris hung out to dry, the smell of cooking that was more than just functional.. -On the living quarters of the factory workers
• Yet Delhi as an imperial capital was also a postmodern, millennial city where Esther traversed different layers of history everyday on her way to work. -The other side of the celebrated adage, "India lives in the 12th and the 21st century, and all the centuries in the middle, simultaneously"
• In the West, with its long excess of capitalism, it might be possible to scoff at luxury brands. They had been around so long that they had lost some of their meaning. But in India, luxury brands still possessed power. -On reflecting on his own nervousness for entering a Paul Smith store in an upscale Delhi mall

At the end of one of Prof. Mehta's Justice lectures, I remember writing to myself that one of the primary duties of education is to de-invisibilise the invisible. In that sense, this is a supremely edifying and eye-opening read. Since moving to Australia 5 years ago, every Indian visit has opened my eyes to complexities, injustices and travails that people face there. However, reading this book has peeled further layers to show the ruthless, harsh conditions in which people live. It is one thing to imagine and theorise on the stunning power of Big Capital and Big State and Big Technology; Something else entirely to see the impact on millions of lives (the loss of older forms of knowledge, the lost cultural practices, broken social bonds, major psychological shifts) that these manifest. 

In an old The Seen and the Unseen episode, a guest tells Amit Varma that he doesn't feel like a citizen of a country, or a state, or even a city as much as the citizen of a particular village or a mohalla. I now understand better what he means. We are embodied beings, able to move only slowly and thoughtfully in the quarters of our actual geography, but we don't use the same caution when creating big theories and selling grand narratives based on them. Maybe those of us who wield that power (granted by money, social status, technical skill etc.) would do better by being more circumspect. This book will help that cause.

moonstar meanderings

When once asked if how they played depended on their mood, setting, attire on stage etc. the inimitable Indian Ocean replied in the affirmitive, saying, "अगर नहा के गाओ तो अलग बजता हैं, बिना नहाके गाओ तो अलग बजता हैं |", before memorably adding, "और टट्टी के साथ गाओ तो बिलकुल अलग |". Holding onto that powerful dictum, I present to you material sublime:

Compared to making day night day night, this brewed for longer and I found it harder to grasp a narrative bassline that excited me. I started out by wanting to make it explicitly about Japan and then riffing on how it is almost impossible to understand an entire country and its complex history, before coming back to the inevitability of wanting and needing that compressed, imperfect model. But that task was both too daunting and less exciting because I had a rough idea of the complete picture and it was just about putting the pieces together. For a while I wanted to turn into a Zen-ish video but that too fell apart because I felt it was too easy to make a faux-Zen video that signalled depth without to backing it up with truth. 

A major phase transition happened thanks to Prof. Amit Chaudhuri's incredible Finding the Raga, and after spending weeks listening to new music for the film (from Japanese Jazz to Ryuichi Sakamoto and American Folk to Hamir Kalyani), I knew this was going to be Dhrupad too. That then freed me up from wanting to create a video essay, and let me go back to free associating and juxtaposing images, and instead of informing or convincing the viewer, to just prompt them into going off on their own on a slightly unusual (compared to their otherwise day-to-day concerns) path. The birds kind of came home in the last couple of weeks as I read Siddhartha Deb's astounding, brutal, magical The Beautiful and the Damned (which I hope to write about soon). I wanted to make this about the prosaic, the quitodian, the sensual, the anonymous, and I didn't really know if I found that exhilarating or limiting. Which was just as well because it was both, and having that ambiguity created enough epistemic and existential longing to get going. In the midst of this, at some point, my brain also said that I didn't have to make it the definitive Japan diary, and that freed me into pursuing and celebrating my present preoccupations and fascinations. I wanted to call it surfaces&essences to convey that gap between thinking we see and know and understand and truly seeing, knowing and understanding, but I didn't feel confident enough to make that claim not least because I wasn't sure if I was seeing things as they were or was being fooled by a deeper, more problemlatic part of my own mind that was claiming understanding without actually doing it. My eureka moment came in the shower one day when the quasi-poem i am things came to me unbidden, and I knew that the real world and its marvels excited me the most, and that was, for the most part, a genuine feeling. And all this was a way of trying to capture and convey that feeling.

So, yeah, I enjoyed making but have been very reluctant to share it widely. It is a strange, potent mix of arrogance ("I don't make it for others, I don't want to be corrupted by others' often shallow feedback"), self-loathing ("I have nothing original to say and I don't want to waste others' time by my shallow signalling"), shame ("The video clips are crap and I'm a fraud for trying to gain some validation by riding on the soaring wings of majestic artists, primarily Dagar Brothers"), and fear of rejection/ mockery ("What if I ask them to watch it, and they think its juvenile and see through its pretensions"). The few people I've sent it to have come back with comments sweet and kind as well as meh, so I know they're not all lying. 

One last thing: usually when I'm done making something, and wrestle with myself between making it more known and just letting it be out there ("గింజకి జీవశక్తి ఉంటే అది ఎక్కడ పడేసినా పోదు" and all that), I arrive, sooner or later, at the question of why is it even out there? Why don't I just save it on my computer and never tell anyone about it? Because its not really validation or attention or fame (however small it maybe) or social change is what I'm seeking. Ofcourse they all do exist but none of them are fundamental. The answer came to me in a conversation with Bhajji after I sent him the link and I was rather pleased for finally seeming to have arrived at a satisfactory, definite conclusion: 

It is that everything I write, film, say, quote, rant about and all that is to find friends, people who share my wavelength. With whom I can sit down on in a cafe on a late afternoon and get lost in expansive, spiralling conversations as the evening thickens around us. That, I find, is not a bad reason to put your rawest, most honest but also the best self out.

playing it by the ear

A few days ago Sravani and I were at Nancy-Ankur's place and I was playing with Anaya. The little game we'd improvised was that I'd carry her half a foot above the ground and she'd try to pick her toys from the floor using her feet. Obviously it was tough but everytime the toy slipped from her grip, she only laughed harder until suddenly, in a split second, she slipped from my hands and fell on her head with a thud. We look at each other, both too shocked, for what seemed like a long moment before she started to cry. I picked her up and started apologising profusely which only seemed to make her cry harder. The adults around were nonchalant and when Ankur picked her up, I just sat there, crestfallen, unable to lift my head. They kept pacifying me, laughing it off and saying, "बच्चे तो गिरते रहते ही हैं, don't worry about it" but the look on Anaya's face refused to go away from my sight. Her expression seemed to say, "I trusted you and you let this happen". I felt so ashamed for having betrayed not just her trust but also the trust of her parents and नानी and मसि, that I broke down and refused to look up until Ankur insisted that we go out for a drive during which he proceeded to tell me how many times he had dropped her or caused a little injury inadvertently. I felt better but the shame refused to completely go away, so much so that even right now I feel a little tremor in my heart when I think of that incident. The pain that I caused her makes me feel bad ofcourse but what seemed to affect me more was my own failing: here was a child who trusted me and I couldn't live upto it. Viewing from the old Guilt-Shame classification, I didn't feel guilt for that particular action (neither did I do it wilfully nor was I particularly negligent and most importantly, and thankfully, it was only a minor accident) but shame (during those minutes, the entirety of my being felt inadequate- 33 years on Earth and I couldn't do one thing right. I felt undeserving of any good feeling).

I've had discussions around fatherhood with quite a few people and hands down Ankur has been the most brutally honest and articulate about his journey. So, again, after the incident we spoke about fatherhood, my vague fears, about fathers we saw around, and his intense feelings for her. When he spoke about thinking about her or missing her when he was at work, I thought I saw the poetic romance of a 12-year old boy floating in the clouds when thinking about his crush. Not just the joy, the longing, the singular presence of that girl in his life, but also a pleasant surprise at his own transformation of being able to love someone like that. It was incredibly sweet. Towards the end he told me, "यार टाइम लगता हैं इन सब चीज़ों में| मेरेको टाइम लगा सीखने में के क्या चीज़े करनी हैं, कैसे करनी हैं, मैं किस किसम का बाप हूँ| देख, फर इंस्टेंस, मैं उसको कुछ बोल नहीं सकता, मेरेको उसे ये सिखाना हैं वह सिखाना हैं करके कोई ख्वाइश हैं नहीं. मुझे सिर्फ वह खुश चाहिए, मैं उस के लिए प्लेमेट हु| मैं ये चाहता हूँ के वह मेरे पास आके कुछ भी बोले, के पापा हैं तोह चिल हैं|". 

This dovetailed with something instructive Sravani told me a couple of weeks ago, when I was, as usual, hemming and hawing about not wanting to be a 'typical' father, "You don't have to be a certain type of father. You do realise that you choose what is important for you, what you want to inculcate in the kid. If you think I wanna travel with my kid, then that's what you'll do. It doesn't only have to be buying property or taking them to tuitions or disciplining them or whatever else you think a 'typical' father does"¹. That sort of helped me see that one of my biggest fears has been that I may to have change myself into a certain idea of a father, and both the standard refusal to conform as well as guilt that I may not be able to and fail the kid, created a demon within. It does now, finally, seem like there are as many kinds of fathers (the variations might be minor but they do exist) as there are kids.

Even during our walk yesterday, when TK was saying that he hasn't been able to buy something for himself because his keeps using that set money to buy something for his son, and I asked him if it pissed him off sometimes, he said, "नहीं, मतलब जब तक तुमने ये बात पूछी नहीं मुझे लगा ही नहीं के मैं कुछ सैक्रिफाइस कर रहा हूँ| बस हो जाता हैं|"

Finally, towards the end of another conversation, after I raved on about the complexity of being a human being, the myriad experiences, emotions, biases, weaknesses, desires we harbour etc. in our long lives (when I compare the difference between the lifetime of a feeling/ thought and the length of my own life, it does seem like a long life), it struck me that to want to isolate 'pure' intentions and 'genuine' feelings to ensure we really want it before embarking on a journey is a fool's errand. It is the full-blooded entirety of my being, all my history and biology and philosophy and poetry and narratives, that I call myself at this point of time that feels and does something. Ofcourse that could, and probably will, change about every single decision I've taken, and there's nothing I can do about it except adapt and improvise. Its not escapism for my actions in the sense of "please don't hold me responsible for what a different me did 5 years ago" as much as an acceptance of the complexity of my being- all murky thoughts and messy feelings. 

Dheeraj recently told me of an aphorism Ramarao Kanneganti garu apparently uttered, "We are not rational people. We are rationalising people". I find it to contain a deep truth. All this kvetching and manoeuvring and soaring I do on the blog is at some level a joke. For all the claims of realisations and epiphanies, I don't think I've been able to consciously apply these learnings. It exists primarily as a document of my wrangling with trying to understand and rationalise my behaviour. Everything here is both true and false. It is the truth but not the whole truth, whatever that is.

¹Reminds me of the beautiful line from ఆకాశమంత- "ఒక బిడ్డ పుట్టినప్పుడే ఆ తండ్రి కూడా పుడతాడు"

well, sorta kinda

I ran my first marathon on Sunday, 17-Sep-2023. It took me 5 hours and 38 minutes. I was supposed to write this post the next day and had been excited about logging events of the amazing week leading upto it. But a certain listlessness came over me on Monday and I ended up spending the day watching Maa Vinta Gaadha Vinuma, and getting fairly irritated with the few people who were congratulating me for finishing the race. Broadly there were two reasons for the whining: 1. I felt like I didn't really earn the medal because I was constantly drinking electrolyte and eating energy bars throughout the run. It felt like I cheated my way through, of signalling fitness without actually being fit. 2. The congratulations had an air of social mores akin to wishing someone Happy Birthday or congratulating someone on their pregnancy. It just felt, no not fake but, shallow. There was no deep engagement or understanding except it being a slightly unusual entrant in polite, social small talk. Ofcourse, people for the most part don't give a hoot about what others do (I don't, so I assume everyone doesn't as well) and while I understand society works on the basis of these weak ties, maybe its my problem to not take it for what it is and compartmentalise well. Sravani, though, identified the problem brilliantly later the same day: "You can't be happy for long. You feel compelled to puncture it". I think she is spot on but let's leave that armchair exploration for a later blog post. To wind up that thread, since that day I've fallen sick, been stressed at work, vowed and failed, and didn't do anything much useful or fun. I feel surefooted now on more solid ground.

On 09-Sep, after two good GCPP lectures in one of which I got a laugh from the lecturer for characterising the Indian Constitution as "a philosophical treatise that makes some metaphysical assumptions", we went to Karunesh Talwar's special Adrak Ka Swaad in UNSW. That was good fun. The next day, Sravani and I visited a White Australian's house for the first time, a co-greenie, and ended up having a very good time. On Monday, it was another good discussion at the Socialist Alternative Reading Group though I'm getting tired of how everyone is already fairly convinced of socialism, so there are no arguments strong enough for people to question their priors. On Tuesday, I had a good conversation with a Dr. Haroon, also a co-greenie, who is trying to create a diverse group of people from the sub-continent to push back against the increasing Hindutva thought down here in Australia. On Wednesday morning, I handed out YES leaflets at the Westmead Station¹. It was a lovely² experience, and I chatted with this old lady I was paired with who is also an artist/ art instructor.  Later in the night I met Kruthi after 12 years and it was like entering a time portal. I hadn't realised how much I'd journeyed (too little objectively though), and all that that's happened over the interim period. On Thursday, I went to my first rally⁴ in Australia and that was a very illuminative experience. I couldn't find the group I was supposed to be with but nonetheless stuck up a couple of conversations, one very long with a Socialist Alternative member who recognised me from the reading groups, and we ranted and bitched about corrupt politicians and corporate types who weren't doing anything to halt global warming. On Friday, I rewatched Krishna and His Leela, and loved it more than I did the first time. Other than being fun and entertaining, I think it also raises important questions. To extend from Herzog⁵, we need 21st century stories for 21st century questions and complexities. And maybe part of the reason so much pop culture is obsessed with nostalgia is because it isn't able to create/ crack the new paradigm. On Saturday, Sravani and I had a long, hard argument which was only diffused by me having to run on Sunday. And Sunday was, for the lack of a better word, fun (bloody hell, I need a thesauraus). I had been fairly confident of doing the distance and after the first 10k I knew that as long as I didn't hurt myself or dehydrate and cramp, I'd finish the race. Kilometres circa 28-37 were the toughest due to the heat, the field of runners around me, and the slowness with which time passed but my playlist and my watch really helped. I'm glad I completed it, hopefully faster and purer next time.

Its funny how all this seemed so incredible as I was running and imagining writing this post on Sunday, but now just feels.. yeah, that wasn't too bad. I must've also read/ listened to some interesting stuff over the period but nothing stands out now, except maybe Prof. Amit Chaudhuri's philosophical-self-questioning-inducing⁶ Finding the Raga. 

It was a good week.

P.S: In other news, I've just started working on the Japan film primarily because Sravani said a while ago that she's really excited to see it. The ears of the old boyfriend inside perked up. Stay tuned.

¹Infact, being vocal about YES has led me to a couple of intense arguments, primarily with Ankur and Prasad Babai, and while the conversations were thought-provoking, I couldn't find a way to persuade the other party because our primary assumptions about the nature of the world were quite different. I understood Ankur's POV but while he was letting fear of things taking an ugly turn stop him, I was more idealistic (and maybe naive in his eyes or, worse, a virtue-signalling liberal) and in need of a more redemptive arc for The Story of Australia. 

²I wanted to write enriching but thankfully realised it sounds too much like PR bullshit³. I think this is why language evolves: people find a nice way of communicating a deep, personal, human experience and soon enough the advertisers and PR fuckers take it over and corrupt it, forcing us to find new, purer ways to express.

³“An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.” -David Foster Wallace

⁴I also ended up being featured in the photo on The Guardian. In case you're wondering, I'm the genius holding the corflute upside down.

⁵"Give us adequate images. We, we lack adequate images, our civilization doesn't have adequate images. And I think our civilization is doomed, is gonna die out like dinosaurs if it does not develop an adequate language or adequate images." -Werner Herzog

⁶I initially wrote gobsmacking here but that's not what I felt except in a couple of occasions. Writing is so hard- to distil all the myriad and dynamic thoughts and emotions floating around in my head in the hours I spent with the book into one or two adjectives without exagerrating or doing disservice to my original feelings is so challenging. Not to mention finding a way to evade the catchy-line traps I must've setup in my head while reading and simultaenously anticipating this-ish post.

Universal Basic Income: A way for a just society

This piece was published in the Basic Income Australia blogs section last week.

--

In his landmark book Justice: What is the right thing to do?, Prof. Michael Sandel presents three important aspects of a just society: that a just society Maximises Welfare, Respects Freedoms, and Promotes Virtue. Interestingly, they are also three progressive checkpoints on that journey. I want to explore the implications of UBI in pursuit of those ends. 

UBI for Welfare

As citizens of a civilised society, we are entitled to expect certain provisions from the state - that there be a rule of law, that there be functioning public infrastructure, and that there be availability of basic education and healthcare. We think that every citizen of the country, irrespective of their circumstances or other forms of eligibility, should be able to access these services. But in a capitalist society, a certain amount of income is needed too to pay for basic necessities and that role is usually fulfilled by employment. While traditionally governments have relied on private enterprise to ensure maximum employability, when economies stagnate or there's a massive downturn of the business cycle, they have stepped in as 'the employer of last resort' (the famed Keynesian policies). Over decades that has transformed into a mechanism like JobSeeker (unemployment insurance or, colloquially, dole) which has been instituted to ensure people have enough money to get by. So in terms of welfare, the intentions here in Australia are present.

Now there are at least 3 issues with this mechanism:

1. With this so-called 'Means Tested Eligibility', the government defines a set of conditions under which a person becomes eligible for payment. While this may seem like an understandable and acceptable policy, it is still a 20th century 'Seeing like the State' conception that may not be applicable to the dynamic, hard-to-categorise realities of the contemporary job market, especially with the AI revolution about to be tacked on. Additionally, a government in power can wilfully choose to exclude certain sections of the population to suit their own agenda. A recent example is the Coalition's decision to exclude university staff from JobSeeker payment during the COVID crisis.

2. This eligibility testing mechanism needs to ensure that 'bad players' are not gaming the system, so it needs a large organisational and technical structure to police and punish those getting benefits unfairly. Notwithstanding the bloat in the government and the expenditure of public money required to do so, we saw an example of the human suffering unleashed by faulty, inefficient and morally compromised actions the state is capable of with Robodebt .

3. This type of eligibility testing also gives a certain section of society the ammunition to malign those seeking benefit as freeloaders or somehow morally compromised or even deserving of their predicament (the former Prime Minister's Lifters and Leaners dichotomy comes to mind). While it can be accorded that a certain section of the population are in a precarious position because of their own failings (whatever they are), studies have shown that structural inequality is a much bigger cause of poverty. Today we have ample studies to show how the nefarious effects of wealth inequality has affected younger generations disproportionately , condemning them to structural poverty. So it is wrong to claim that all those who are poor deserve it. Although the more fundamental question to ask ourselves, considering how rich we are as a country and how unextravagant UBI is (it literally is the basic amount a person needs to get by), is whether we can't provide the basics to each member of our society, whoever they are and whatever they be like.  

UBI for Freedom

The technology philosopher Venkatesh Rao once defined money as something like the best co-ordination mechanism created by humans. It is the fuel that powers economic activity that then promotes human flourishing. It obviously has no inherent value except as the lifeblood of an economy.

When we buy goods or services with money, we abstract away all the creativity, skill, material resources, physical labour into this single unit of exchange. The seller sells all that for money so that they can turn around and buy what they need. Of all the things money can buy it can, and does, buy freedom. When a person signs up for work, more often than not they are selling 8 hours of their day so that they can do what they want to in the other 16 hours. To have money is to be able to choose what one wants to do with their time- it could be time away from any work, or to buy and use goods and services required for personal well-being or enjoyment, or in fact being able to afford resources to unlock one's full potential to make more money or to create something else of value. But the weird thing about money is that it can be passed on inter-generationally within a family, so that gives some of us more freedom to begin with and others less. Freedom to access certain institutions, certain forms of knowledge, certain tools and comforts. And those can turn into staggeringly large advantages compared to those born into lesser money. The economist Prof. Karthik Muralidharan in regard to a country’s educational policies once said, and I paraphrase, "A society does best when all children start with the same resources and then they end up in a place they deserve. But the motive of every parent is to provide their child as much advantage as they can afford. That is the strange paradox”.

Another aspect of money is its information signalling capability. The argument is that since people make transactions of their own free volition in the marketplace, flows of money can be used to gauge what people value most and who is providing the most value, thereby incentivising entrepreneurs to produce most of what's in demand. It is the ability of individuals to participate in the marketplace that encourages them to buy and sell, thereby increasing their income and wealth while also providing what society values most (the famous 'Double Thank you Moment'). But what if an individual is locked out of the marketplace because they hardly have any money to even have their presence felt. That is what poverty is- it is an exclusion from the realm in which one can get rich. In a society that stringently upholds rules and rights of private property ownership, do we define those who don't have property and have been locked out of the legal methods to try and acquire it as non-citizens? And that's only one side of the equation; On the other side producers who stand to benefit from the sale of their goods to those in need cannot do it because those without money are not able to voice their preferences- because the only way to do it is via money.

And this is where the initial co-ordination characteristic of money comes in- it is of no good except as a way for society to communicate with itself. UBI seeks to correct the flaw in markets by providing those in most need to voice what they want. It is foolish to expect citizens of a society to have real political and social freedoms without economic freedom (in fact, traditionally depriving an individual of economic freedom was the most coercive way of curtailing their other freedoms), and like every citizen has a right to vote or be the way they wish to, they should also be able to afford a minimum, dignified lifestyle. 

UBI for Virtue

In a popular TED talk, the designer Thomas Twaites talks about his attempt to build a toaster from scratch - an innocuous, everyday, "dumb" toaster and soon realises that he can't even properly source a few of the 400 or so components required to build it. Fascinatingly, he does not acknowledge what a huge advantage he already has- of all the cumulative knowledge that tells him what a toaster is, how it works and how he can go about building one. That knowledge is part of the commons, a shared bounty that belongs to all. While of course we should celebrate and reward those among us who create something valuable, it is imperative to remember that any new invention is not possible without the cumulative immense contributions of before. We, like bees, are an interlinked and interdependent species, more so as we advance technologically further where the proportion of an individual's knowledge keeps getting smaller in comparison to all the knowledge in the world. The fact that some people can have so much while many have so little is not, largely, because of inherent differences as much as how we have shaped our institutions, how power is so unequally distributed, and dumb luck.

The other aspect of this argument is how the market does not value the contributions of those who are responsible for taking care of the young or the old or the ill informally, or those who are producing work that the market doesn't understand or is incapable of valuing at this point in time- writers, artists, intellectuals, social workers, conservationists who are not necessarily, or entirely, motivated by money but nonetheless use their time and skill creating immense value and contributing to the greater good. Not all values can be, or should be, measured by money and thank heavens for that.

But this too is an instrumentalist argument. At the end of the day, a known fact is that right now in the world, we have the ability to ensure that every human in the world has enough to live at a certain level of dignity- we produce enough that, at least in a material aspect, no human has to suffer. The fact that there is as much poverty then is an indictment of our generation. We cannot let that happen and UBI is a good way for us to ensure that.

majaa aagaya

For the past few months, I've been flitting between two extremes of a certain dichotomy where I try to cut off completely from reading on my phone or computer, watching anything new, listening to any podcasts vs immersing myself extremely into those acts, desperately seeking anything that'll hold my attention for a while. For a week I do one with the first couple of days being super enjoyable until a nagging feeling starts cropping up. Slowly my mind keeps dropping hints at why the other way is the better way until I give in at the end of the week. And I don't give in apprehensively or gently but just jump right in and go cold turkey on the other. That works for a couple of days until the pattern starts repeating. So essentially what that means is that I delete and re-download apps like Evernote, Feedly, Pocket, Libby, PocketCasts etc. multiple times a year. It's bizarre how my mind seems to refuse to learn; also pathetic, exhausting and somewhat, a tiny bit, endearing. Should I just give in to each moment, reading, listening to, feeling, jotting down whatever I'm feeling or do I not let so many moments tyrranise me but transcend these ephemeral sensations and wait for something deeper, more profound, more long-living to approach me. Should I celebrate the atomicity of each individual sensation or desperately seek to extract as much utility from each of them for better narrativisation. Both those thoughts seem to desire the same thing though: clarity, adulation and the right kind of mental quiet.

Of all the sights and sounds and events of our 15-day long Japan trip, the most memorable has been the evening before our return when for an hour around dusk, after they'd closed the temple, Sravani and I sat amidst the crowds at Sensoji and she sang, among others, అందాల ఆమని, మనసౌనె ఓ రాధ, శ్రీ కృష్ణాయను, తెలిసిరామచింతనతో, మనసా వాచా. It was beautiful and like Meheranna writes in ముక్కు, I knew it was going to become a terrific memory right then. I've been thinking of that scene for the last one week and my feeling is that creating memories is also a conscious process, not in the sense that we literally create them but that its almost an involuntary, deeply honed habit (background job) akin to narrativisation that's constantly sifting through and rearranging scenes to create powerful versions. The memory-generating procedure, which in some ways is the act of telling stories to ourselves, follows certain aesthetic guidelines, and to be good they have to have strong images, settings and, most importantly, a certain kind of incongruity that makes them interesting enough to standout. And I sense that rather than create a scene around all the ramen or the bullet trains or the pop culture or the Shinto temples, which are rather obvious, a stronger impression is formed when one puts together a temple in Tokyo and తెలుగు లలిత గీతాలు.

Another interesting aspect for me is that that particular scene is not representative of the whole trip, we only did that once and our trip infact had lot of other touristy and personally exciting events, but acts more like a portal (metonym?) that then links to other aspects of the trip. For instance, when I think of our Italy trip, of all the wonderful sights, the key to opening that (imaginary) room is the evening ride from Ravello to Tramonti, and how I was overawed by the shade of light. And the single image from the Fiji trip is of my swimming laps in the 50m pool as light was fading and people were settling down for dinner amidst candles. Ofcourse, the more I conscisouly exalt them the more they're burnished but the question then becomes do they gain more power or lose all specificity and meaning (a version of semantic satiation).

I read two superb, and unexpectedly related, essays at work last Wednesday- One was Kathryn Schulz's piece on Carl Linnaeus in The New Yorker, and the other one was a long bookmarked essay in Daedalus called The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism. Both of them have to do with the link between how we theorise and classify the world, and how if that is only a convenient structure for us to understand or if infact we're discovering qualities that are inherent. Also, possibly owing to the stage of development we're in as a civilisation, both of them are not content with making these first-order remarks. They go on to ruminate about how our assumptions, biases and approaches then shape our own thinking thereby reflexing shaping the fields of enquiry further. While it is undoubtedly interesting, it is also an important question because a lot of our expecations of ourselves and others in our lives comes from the assumption that we're all playing certain roles and need to behave (and feel) in certain ways. But as everyone can attest to, more often than not those categorisations only put us in a straitjacket to curtain our freedoms, whims and erratic(!) behaviours. Which also explains why creating fundamental changes in society are so hard- we don't know what our roles and responsibilities are. And so it is imperative to keep investigating the categories we assign ourselves to.

My enjoyment and learning from both those essays was immensely compounded by a book I'd started reading earlier- Jonardon Ganeri's Philosophy in Classical India: The Proper Work of Reason. I've been reading Prof. Ganeri since discovering Peter Adamson's wonderful podcast History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps during Sydney's 2021 lockdown. While I haven't finished either of The Lost Age of Reason or Classical Indian Philosophy (nothing unusual there, I guess), their basic explanation of the Pramanas (ways of gaining knowledge: Perception, Inference, Analogy and Testimony) and that the six Astika schools being originally six methodologies for understanding and argument is one of the most basic tools (after a basic application of the Theory of Evolution) I use when I'm actively thinking of something. His clear elucidation that reason is a powerful tool that needs to be used judiciously, that Vitanda is the act of undermining the other's argument without being able to offer an alternative of one's own, and that one of the primary uses/ responsibilities of cognition is to be able to integrate the information coming from sensory organs with prior experience to gain a better understanding of reality and thus help one act better by extrapolating have been immensely clarifying. I found so much in common between his explanation and what I'd read in Prof. Anil Seth's Being You (the mind is an internal physiological state thermometer among other things) and Prof. Nicholas Humphrey's The Inner Eye (we look within to better understand how to understand, and predict, the behaviour of others).

Around the same time I discovered Prof. Amit Chaudhuri's super interesting talk called What Kind of Music Is This? In it he says that he wants to write a book with only opening paragraphs. He elaborates it with a simple example: Imagine a man sitting in a room. He's sitting at his desk and maybe looking out the window. It's not yet dawn and quiet, and he's looking out of the window lost in contemplation. And Prof. Chaudhuri says I want to stop there. Because in the second paragaraph the writer has to provide context and reasons to justify him sitting there thinking. The writer has to create a narrative which then has to follow one of the expectant paths, and can only deviate so much even when it wants to. But before that narrative takes over, the original scene of contemplation has immense possibilities. And that's where Prof. Chaudhuri wants to stop. From that opening salvo, he jumps into the differences between Western Music (where representation of an experience or a situation is the primary motive) and Hindustani Music (which does not worry about representation as much as chooses to create a space for something else). Its a somewhat challenging albeit invigorating talk.

Sravani and I also met Senator Mehreen Faruqi for coffee yesterday and she was lovely and super charming. We met her in June at a Greens event in Narrabeen and had been planning this coffee catchup since. I'll probably elaborate on that later.

Today I had a long, multi-hour, incredible conversation with Dheeraj where we tripped over Meheranna, Madhav garu, his upcoming book, Modi, desi reactions to Chandrayaan, Saagara Sangamam, Naipaul, growing old(er) among quite a few other things. We spoke for a bit about form, and both of us felt we had one or more epiphanic moments when trying to understand how we approach a book vs a facebook post vs reading a poem while scrolling online etc. and he said something beautiful- "కథ/ళ అంటే స్వయంప్రతిపత్తి ఉన్న ప్రపంచం ఉండాలె". That felt so true.

Meheranna's new book is coming out పండగహో!

P.S: How long has it been since I sat in the darkness at night and blogged listening to instrumental music - Only Lovers Left Alive and Amelie soundtracks.

P.P.S: Reg the title: Man, Kaala!!