Problems & Solutions

The world lacks solutions…..simple, effective, enduring solutions…..

Its complicated, its not that simple, things are not what they seem….that’s what they all say……

I hate reading newspapers……there’s nothing new…..movie reviews - yes, sports - not interested, comics - definitely, editorials/social news - maybe……………But the main page is monotonous…….

We sign one deal and get entangled in another……there’s no single stand taken in the last 10 years that has been of any significance……yes, we have had events…….we have even had declarations and obviously, ramifications, permutations and combinations of the same……and of course, we have death’s and births.......much more than we ever envisaged.......both usually bloodier than we expected or expect.....

When we were growing up, we read history as being a series of events that were linked by one simple word – significance…..

Significance in the manner that meant as a rudder, as a wind vane, a lighthouse perhaps……significance of direction, of endeavour or even culmination of effort…..I would read news papers as a school kid and convince myself that this was history occurring, something that predicted the way forward……did you ever feel the same?

Or were you too worked up about board results to even sit back and consider what you were reading, besides being useful in the next GK unit test?

And somehow, we were entangled in consumerism that destroyed journalism…..We are entangled in liberalization that has crushed traditional evaluation of self, society…..We are entangled with our understanding within any given structure…….

I am wondering where we are and what we would describe ourselves as…..

Rishabh, my younger colleague at work asked me a few days back, “what’s the solution?”

“Solution to what? There are no solutions, only resolutions, dissolutions and absolutions.” I quipped back.

He was after a solution to this entire issue of terrorism and its eventual solution……I wondered if I had ever posed queries like this, at his age or younger…….After exactly 30 seconds of thought, I decided that I had and I still don’t have answers……Like most people, I tried to make a difference till I finally learnt to let things ride by till they stop bothering me……….tolerance, forbearance, endurance…….whatever you call it……

So, do solutions exist?

Even as a cynical, pessimistic, seen-it-all, done-it-all washed up bum that I have become, I still believe in that one enduring truth……that’s there’s always a way….

(But someone’s got to pay…….says the evil and cynical bum in me)

I admit it…..I can’t answer questions that everyone asks…….but I can think of ways that might construe as means that would ensure an end…….not that they would NOT be easy, not that they would be acceptable or even understood…….but yes, they would be solutions…..

A solution starts with a revolution……..history teaches us that……Hitler found solutions, just like Churchill did, or Bismarck or Blenheim or even by the Borgia’s or by Charlemagne and so on and so forth, or back……just because some worked while others didn’t, doesn’t disprove the fact that they ALL started out as solutions to problems being faced……but the problem with revolutions is that they always come back to where you started off.....that’s why they’re called REVOLUTIONS....

There are many ways to solutions……I always preferred ol’ alex’s way with the geordian knot……We are always one sword slice away from the knottiest problems that can face us……..one sharp, hurting sword slice…….

So, yes……we can have solutions, Rishabh……..but it means a lot of things and takes a lot of people……and maybe some blood, sweat, toil and tears……..bones for bricks and blood as mortar……..and we are past the age of belief, forget about sacrifice…….

As I always say……..freedoms, rights, truth, justice…….it sounds all good…..but nobody ever said that it was nice……and no one talks about the prices paid, because we definitely didn’t pay it……..so, yeah, we can all talk up a storm……as shreya puts it, there’s nothing more stimulating than intellectual masturbation......

You say no revolution? You say satyagraha? You DARE utter Munnabhai or Gandhigiri and I’ll take the family war axe to you, you ignorant philistine!!!

I am sick of Gandhi and his satyagraha bullshit…….when will the world wake up the realise that for one great idea, one man and his multitude of mistakes, dithering, partialism, nepotism, manipulative politics cannot be equated together and all else be forgiven……

Our mistake is that we Indian’s suffer from the royalty complex…..we just want to touch someone’s feet and proclaim them lord god almighty……..although to our benefit, we also have developed the anti-thesis to this…..we expect our gods to perform miracles and if they cannot deliver, we move on to the next would-be god promising us miracles…..truly, as arvind adiga says, we’re a nation of arse kissers and we’ve got far too many arses to kiss, whether they be god’s or supervisor’s.

The bloody Brits were NOT driven out by Gandhi and his movements…..They LEFT of their own free will…..There were three other movements before the Quit India Movements……..Gandhi proved weak and indecisive……I don’t take this as a perspective, but an opinion……others are welcome to dispute my belief’s, but this is not the forum perhaps…..

What we always forget is that behind 1947 stood over 90 years of relentless struggle, most of it violent and singularly and collectively defeated by the British…..since 1857, there have been 90 bloody years of struggle that has been erased by one idea and one politician who was smart enough to push the envelope and become a saint through desperate politicking and insecurity......

What we forget is that India was not a Union of States but a collection of princely states, each with their own mandate, each with their own biases……..

What we forget is that the people were divided as sharply over differing issues and contexts then as they are today……the lines of caste have merely been replaced by bank balances…….the lines of regionalism have replaced the old beliefs of feudalism……not much has changed….As a people today, India within 61 years of independence has achieved the same status that it had in 1857, pre-sepoy mutiny……..

Divided, controlled and yet surging with a restless urge of economic and social transformation……our old lines of control have been erased leaving nothing in their place……

Our social mores & values have disappeared with evolving conditions leaving no solidarity of ground or platform, except that of economics and consumerism……the proverbial carrot to us donkeys…..and we’re still paying for the damn carrot!!!

Our unity is in disarray because we have no common ground, other than that of relentless movement, but even there we are directionless…..

So, into THIS, you want to carve out solutions…….through satyagraha?

Gandhi arrived in a boiling seething mass agitated by 60 years of unremitting activism, singly and collectively, on every possible layer of Indian society and consciousness……It was tumultuous, aye……It was enervating, true……it was perfect timing to leave South Africa and enter India…..of this cohesive whole, he fashioned his idea of non-violence........a brilliant idea, FOR THE TIME & PLACE ONLY.......

Today we have India Shining and its immaculate barricades under siege......as it has always been.......Yesterday it was a western hegemony and today its face of racial and radical hegemonies......

Do we have solutions which are not revolutions? I think not.....

We have to suffer more, be far more bereft and reach the boiling point of cohesion and unity to be ready for hammering out the steel of destiny on the forge of time......just like another generations, a few jumps in the past were submitted to.....

We have not the singularity of purpose with which we can reach a unified objective....

We do not have ideals or beliefs which are above daily, humdrum concerns....

We do not have anything in which the people of our nation believe in.......

We do not have leaders......

We are still awaiting the men of the hour who will take the stand to decide that democracy works when the mass understands the meaning of the vote.......

We are still awaiting the rise of those voices which will not be stilled by the relentless tide of consumerism and self-gratification.....

We still await the presence of sense.........just like me writing these lines and still hoping for the damn messiah!!!

As I stated before, we Indians are still awaiting the next fresh arse to kiss......

And you ask for solutions?

Parent Trap

Whisky chewed my office shoes.

Let’s back up – whisky is the 1.5 year old golden retriever my wife adopted, nursed to health and considers a daughter. I am not a animal person, but I don’t mind dogs either (as long as I don’t have to take care of them, clean up after them etc.) so, it’s generally pat them, rub their belly and generally ignore them. Oh, yes, one more thing – I can shout at her and if necessary wield the slipper when she misbehaves, without flinching and actually mean it. My wife is the “good cop”, you see and I am happily hen-pecked, so apparently, this makes me the boss of the household whenever the wife does not like doing something. 

I am posted in Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh as a government functionary which means, we have to attend official parties and such. We went out last evening and I made the fundamental mistake of leaving my official shoes beside the sofa as I was in a hurry. This article would not have happened if I had just remembered to put away the damned shoes on the shoe rack, but such is fate, especially that of my readers.

So, we got back and found my office shoes literally in tatters. The damned dog is teething and this is the second pair of shoes which she has chewed to bits, despite being provided with enough chew toys to drown in.

She obviously needed to be “disciplined” or the behaviour might continue. But despite my anger and frustration, I couldn’t quite bring myself to do much more than shout at her (she promptly disappeared under the bed!) and make excuses – she had her shots recently and was running a slight fever. Also, I disliked being the “bad cop” all the time.

So, what about disciplining her in order to ensure correct behaviour in the future.

More to the point, what would I have done if this was my kid, instead of a “damned dog”?

We don’t have children yet. Most of my friends have kids in pre-school, if not in middle school already. One of the reasons I told myself, was financial instability. Belonging to a generation which has undergone self-funded education abroad, the effects of recession and extremely strong though fluctuating career growth; marriage and a traditional social life was a much deferred choice till my early thirties. Children, considered a natural progression in a typical social milieu, literally scared my pants off.

Blessed with a wonderful and supportive partner, however I overcame a lot of my fears. And getting a dog was the recommended alternative to becoming a parent. And, so I became a father figure to an adolescent furry teenager who has repeated a bad behavioural trait.

This is not where I shine. In fact, I am literally close to blowing out a fuse.

My parents were great adherents of “spare the rod, spoil the child” and “discipline”. Not just them, but the entire damned family were worshippers of Marquis De Sade when it came to education and discipline. Cousins abroad wouldn’t believe us when we traded stories of growing up and it was much, much later that I personally realized that, our parents had been unintentionally brutal in certain aspects of child-rearing.

But as my dad stolidly maintains, “it was all for your own good”.

True – they produced over-achievers who were literally fearless and didn’t know how to give up. Stubborn to a fault, aggressive and capable children with by-products of depression, failure-anxiety, rage-driven at times and more. Sometimes, parents would animate their own frustrations on their children and this is especially true of Indian parents, creating clones of themselves perhaps. As another uncle puts it, “you kids got nothing on what we received.” And child is indeed, the father of the man.

It’s hard to say exactly if they were in the right to discipline us the way they were themselves. Somewhere, this cycle has to stop, any reasonable person would conclude.

But where exactly is the line? Between ineffectual parenting and brutalizing.

India is the land of over-achievers. Despite Amir Khan’s life-affirming movies, millions of parents, rich or poor, insist on discipline as the right way of “moulding” their children. Without discipline, children are ruined, they claim and are proved right, as well. The road-wrecks of well-meaning parents lie as eye-catching debris in a land where the sheer population ensures that moral science is a joke class and success defined by social worth or career growth.

To the rest of their social circle, my parents are damned successful – they have done their jobs well indeed. And now, the “eyes” are on me with my furry daughter.

So, who teaches us parenting and discipline? Our parents? Who taught them?

Whisky has received two light whacks from the chewed shoe from wifey and I am currently refusing to pet her – she is literally in the doghouse.

I am not ready for kids.

Or in commonspeak, “Dawg, shit be unreal!”

Solving Corruption

My people, including myself, lack dignity & discipline. Not surprising, considering that we had a little too much of it growing up in India. And typical with age or even human frailty, one wishes for his childhood with the passage of time. I too, long for the simplicity and authority of an earlier time when the folk seemed more genteel and courteous but then realise that I rebelled against those very ideas when I faced them. 

Our generations have undergone drastic and sudden change without the advantages of graduated absorption and accordingly, social interactions or transactions have acquired a different hue & colour in their applications or perspectives. This is not wrong in itself, but the world is surprisingly over-populated and the human race seems to have become a sprint rather than a marathon.

The New York Times claims that the average American sees 5000 advertisements a day from a variety of sources and acts accordingly. The average Indian sees at least 500 instances of corruption, rule violations, minor misdemeanours and social nuisances and also acts accordingly.

Corruption is endemic states our media most emphatically while breaking the same rules and regulations while in pursuit of such rule-breakers. Irony is definitely not a term to be found in their dictionaries and nor is hypocrisy. The virtues we espouse publicly are western in genesis and hence, privately we choose to ignore them whenever we think we’re not being observed. Such is our plight, the modern Indian.

The uncle who condemns the deplorable law & order situation is un-surprisingly the first to break lanes in traffic to get ahead. The cousins who spew fundamentalist and alarmingly socialist views in our drawing rooms are quite secular and capitalistically compromising in handling their due payments & not above paying off the “fragrant grease” (as the Chinese term it) for expediting their matters. 

That I have not followed that principle is why I am being published in an online journal, perhaps but then, this is not a rant, merely an observation.

A favourite mentor once explained that in India, problems are never solved – they are resolved, absolved or best, DISSOLVED - preferably with scotch & soda. People do not wish for end-game solutions, lest they and their comfort-zones are antagonized or changed.

We Indians might make a hullabaloo about corruption and love to talk, rant or hear about it on mass & local media but we do not truly wish it gone. We fear that if we were to live in a truly corruption-free society, we would not be able to do what we have always done. Simple facts of life, pleasures even such as littering, over-speeding, drunk-driving, traffic abuse and all those simple truths of everyday existence for an Indian might disappear. Or worse, cost more than they do now – And we hate inflation, us Indians!

Charity begins at home, mercy is a taught quality – most of our “moral science” virtues are afforded by civilizations which do not have worry about empty bellies and desperate dreams, such as those owned by 1.3 billion Indians. Which is why, we see a negative connotation of Moses Abrahamovitz’s famous theory of convergence. We learnt how to leap-frog into western technology and while doing so, inadvertently picked up their social mores without the appending years of individualism, personal limitations and social tolerance. 

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing indeed.

Corruption essentially is an issue of self-pride or nation pride and even ego, if one takes it that way. It is a state of disconnected-ness which leads to insecurity or fear and thus fostering aspirations or even creation of desire or fear of normal fulfillment and hence adoption of other modes of acquiring one’s desires. In a way, it could be called a state of mind or being, subjected to an individual or a nation, in the throes of deprivation or desperation – in short, corruption is the reflection of a society or a people who are afraid of their future and wish to secure it at any cost. 

Socialist India was far more structured and the division between the haves & have-not’s were not nearly as discriminatory or visible as they are today. Corruption like inflation was similarly controlled till the late 70’s, not that it was non-existent. The authority paradigm was stronger with social value systems in place to curb against extremism or blatant antagonism.  Since 1992, rapid liberalization & globalization have caused a massive imbalance (of sorts) in the parent-child, teacher-student or the authority paradigm resulting in several generations who are disconnected, lacking identity or self-worth, seeking the price of everything without ascribing value to anything, they are truly Wilde(s) children. 

Solving corruption therefore necessitates we recover the coming generations if we wish to hope for a society without corruption or one with structure & values which are not over-ridden by a mob-mentality. Demanding today’s generations to change and follow the westernized model of society as being self-realized and structured is like expecting a fish to become amphibious over-night, not to mention a land-dweller by the next day. 

Education is obviously the key, but exactly what sort of education? 

We need values and dignity – discipline essentially in almost all endeavours.

We need vigorous penalties and a systemic approach towards mal-functions or break-downs.

We need specific branding and visibility upon which to base our value systems.

India Shining is not a brand that benefits the society holistically. The numbers of visa applications to the west prove that we’re not happy with our own image or of our country. It doesn’t satisfy us to be Indians and till we resolve this crucial issue – from children’s bedrooms to schoolrooms, we will not escape the issues of corruption.

Blindly copying and emulating the west is not enough for the rest.  We need self-realization and perhaps a dictator while we are at it. Not that I would know much about power paradigm shifts anyhow, but we Indians are still too naive and need guidance with firm control. Anything less is proving calamitous in every predictable future for our nation. 

Incidents like the one in GS Road, at Guwahati happened and were dealt with monetarily and therefore significantly forgotten within the period of a few weeks. We would be incited and provoked into a social media circus in the belief of a rural octogenarian who has 17^th century solutions for 21^st century problems and less than a year later, it’s in the past and the new fight is about invasion of the lungi-clad religious fundamentalists led by a perfume merchant who preaches. 

By the way, did you know what was the title/surname of the perfume merchants of Gujrat?

Gandhi.

Someone return our dignity & discipline – we are lost.