Books make me happy !

For one resettling after a hiatus of two and a half years ,the fast paced changes in cityscape and culture of towns is stark. So it was, when I homed in to bat out my  second innings in Patna. The town
had a heartening spring in its stride, building more of everything 
and promising even more.

But the bookaholic  in  me is  crestfallen.Forced into quiescence  by 

worldly   cares of raising a family and  the money for it, retirement 

offered it a carte blanche to limitless book reading .As Harold Bloom said, “ Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you”.  Sadly , Patnaites may flay my skin for saying it, the one unmistakable ‘non-change’ is the continued apathy of townsfolk towards reading non-syllabus books, that is  fiction ,non-fiction,in fact anything (excluding porn,of course) other than text books, guides, guess papers or religious texts.

As the ‘malice’ man,Kushwant Singh said,"the ultimate litmus test

test of a town’s sophistication is the number of bookshops it has  , the kind of books they stock ,and the customers they draw” . How 
does Patna measure up on this yardstick ? With malice to none ,I venture to say, little has changed  in its elegance or savour- vivre   . Lets see where do I get the courage to make this assertion;

1. No national booksellers chain has set up shop. And we have a goodly number of such supply chains. While Germany has ten,India has thirteen bookseller chains,to name a few –Crossword, 

Landmark, Odyssey, Quadrangle, Oxford Book Store, Higgins 

Bothams, and Reliance Books.

2. Existing booksellers  have not added any significant additional floor area for general books ,that is, non ‘prescription’ books and religious books ( the latter I include as it may wriggle its way as text books).The few that existed since ages, Books- en -Amee ,Tricel, Readers Corner and, of course ,AH Wheeler still hold fort. A few smaller ones may have opened shop here and there without significantly adding to availability.

3. This lack of supply is particularly galling looking to the size of town literates. Of the population of 16.84 lacs, literates count to 12.35 lacs. A  little less than 50% of literates are in the book reading  age, 13-35 years. This figure does not include the thousands flocking from all over the state to its mushrooming coaching centres/institutes ,mentors,subject-wise   tutorial classes for engineering,medical, management admission tests or various job exams. New national institutes-IIT ,NIT,BIT, Chanakya Law College ,Chandragupta Management Institutes now dot Patna’s skyline, all of them with hordes in the potential book readers’ age.

4.Public libraries still number just four.No Book Clubs, save a  fledgling one run by Books-en-Amee  ,I am told. Booksellers thus 
need fear no competition from libraries and book clubs.

5.The growth rate of literate youth is greater than population  growth rate.
  

6. The annual fortnightly Patna Book Fair attracts just 7 lac visitors and sales of ₹7 crores though book stalls exceed 400. Sales come almost entirely from textbooks and help books with  some biographies, dictionaries, vernacular classics thrown in .

Thus a huge potential market for quality books lies untapped .Besides parents and learning centres, publishers and booksellers too need to spread book reading habits. While “reading maketh a full man’, for them it maketh moolah .Their dictum should be stock more, give monetary incentives, say, discounts, organise book festivals in their stores, in schools, colleges ,institutes, libraries, and public places ,for often supply creates demands.UNESCO marks 23rd April as World Book Day triggering a week long celebration of books and book reading in 100 countries across the world,an excellent opportunity to aggressively market good books. The town 
needs more visibility for good literature. There is absolutely no reason why a sprawling Kankarbagh with over 50 meshed colonies should have no dedicated  bookstore for quality fiction and non-fiction books.

If not English are they reading Hindi literature, Hindi being the townfolk’s lingua franca ? No ,says the circumstantial evidence. My neighbourhood bookstore stocks Hindi classics too but sells only guides,help books and mags. Are they buying and reading online? No proof . If anything the youth are spending all their spare and in- between times on texting messages,mobi chats on what's app, the social media or before the idiot box. That makes  them better connected and more aware but well read ? Uuump....

Certainly the youth of Patna are fully aware of  the virtues of good reads so beautifully recounted in Francis Bacon’s classic essays ‘of 
studies ‘. Our grandmas and mommies knew it and derived immense pleasure in story telling from books to put children to sleep. Alas! that's a dying tradition. Abjuring ‘page turners’ , youth now turn to phablets or TV to drop dead to bed .And parents allow POGO to lull kids into stupor rather than read them to sleep. I do still take a book to bed and sleep well. E-reading  or TV actually keeps one  unhealthily awake.

Regrettably,reading as a hobby is asphixiating. Though much of time spent in travelling can be profitably utilised for reading, for the young that's more time to be active on mobiles.  I only  , infrequently,  see a  millennial carrying a fiction in hand or even reading mags for time pass in public places or on trains.

Have the town’s youth given up on a potent instrument of personality development,  book reading, to becomes pedagogues rather than learned ,equanimous citizens? I leave it to the reader to ruminate over the issue and sign off with these golden thoughts

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested” : Francis Bacon

  

" Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life " MARK TWAIN

HARDLY SWACCH

THIS DAY, THE 15TH OF AUGUST

in the year 1947, the rhythms of RULE BRITANNICA  in 

India ebbed to an everlasting perdendo. Sixty nine years, 

and three generations later, the three things most Indians 

recall of that day are Gandhi, Nehru, and a speech, ‘tryst        

with destiny’.

“Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the 

time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or 

in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the 

midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life 

and freedom…..” Jawaharlal Nehru

On this day Congress too redeemed its pledge of Poorna 

Swaraj made in 1929.Though Lord Curzon in all his 

foolhardiness and imperial hauteur felt  Congress “tottering 

to its fall” in 1905 and did all “to assist it to a peaceful 

demise” it proved resilient enough to outlast British 

appetite for an extended colonial  rule. Within a relatively 

short span of 62 years of continuing existence Congress 

relieved the ‘white man’ of his ‘burden’. Two years ago, on 

this very day, Allied Powers had formally declared victory 

over an imperial Japan that had capitulated a day before. 

What better day could there be to write the epitaph of British 

imperialism in India too ?

In the cyclical flow of time some days are rendered 

conspicuous by history. India’s day of deliverance, 15th 

August, ushered in freedom in four nations-Korea, Congo, 

Leichtenstein and Bahrain. In fact it was a happy augury for 

anti-colonial movements everywhere, particularly in Asia 

where over the next 20 years, save for Hong Kong; all 

vestiges of long endured colonialism were interred.

On this day, a new nation's name was pasted on the global 

map, a free nation of emancipated American slaves. Liberia 

is a historical quirk, a unique case of assisted reverse 

migration .When slavery was abolished in America, 

thousands of Afro-American slaves gained manumission but 

lost a roof over their head. Disowned by white masters as 

corrupting influence on ‘American’ culture, and objects of 

intense racial dislike they had nowhere to go. Trust the 

American to find a way out. An American Colonization 

Society sprouted that relocated the free slaves in batches 

along a string of new settlements on the west coast of 

Africa. In 1824 on 15^th August these settlements conjoined 

to become Liberia.

On this day other significant historical footprints were:

1. for cricket lovers, Fred Truman took his 300^th wicket and 

Ian Botham scored a test century in 86 balls against 

Australia at Old Trafford

2. the ‘Day of the Jackal’ ended in 1994 with the arrest of   

Carlos, nicknamed, the jackal, in Khartoum, Sudan by the 

French cops. Carlos was associated with almost all terrorist 

organisations of the day- Japan Red Army, Peoples Front for 

Liberation of Palestine, Organisation of Armed Arab Struggle.

3. two chapters of fascist history were inked. In 1934 Paul 

Von Hindenburg in his last will and testament endorsed 

Hitler’s proposal to revive the fatherland paving the way for 

the horrors of Nazi rule. Berlin Wall was erected in 1961 and 

in the year 1796 Napolean Bonaparte of Corsica was born 

4. Apple launched its iconic internet based laptop I-mac

5. in 1998, Bill Clinton broke the heart of his wife, Hillary 

Clinton by confessing to her details of his ‘brief and sporadic’ 

salacious dalliances with Monica Lewinsky

6. the 'The Wizard of Oz' premiered at Grauman Chinese 

Theatre, Hollywood . Though Walt Disney’s ‘Snow White 

and the Seven Dwarfs’ was the first ever feature length 

animated movie, Oz dwarfed it at  popularity stakes by 

quite some distance.  Its unique characters - the brainless 

scarecrow, the literally heartless Tin man,the lion who knew 

not why he was a coward,the witches and wizards are all 

now an integral  part of children's world of fantasy. The 

Library of Congress maintains Oz to be the most watched 

film of all times.The catchphrase ‘there’s no place like 

home' is OZ's gift to posterity

True, there’s no place like home and no nation like our own.

Quiet, Democracy is Not Sleeping !

Quiet, Democracy is Not Sleeping !

---

  

"O sleep ,O gentle sleep ,Nature's soft nurse......." Henry IV

Alas ! Not for our Rip Van Winkles the Nature's nurse inside 
Parliament. Manohar Parrikar today, Rahul Gandhi yesterday ,Narendra Modi the day before and so on (not necessarily in the same time sequence ), the sanctimonious media lamblasts parliamentarians caught in the perfectly 'natural ' act of dozing off in "
parliament .The dread of the stalking lens is about as great as the terror Gau Rakshak  Dals  strike in the hearts of Dalits and Muslims. Can we then really blame our star MPs like Sachin Tendulkar, Rekha if they elect not to visit the Houses or on the rare occasion they do ,to 'sleep walk' to their seat and snooze with starry unseeing open eyes and ears plugged ? 

Menacing our somnolent MPs is an attack on the inalienable rights of man. And denying it to the ones who enforce those rights is downright bunkum .One eats and drinks as per bodily needs, why not sleep too whenever Hypnos comes calling ."what has night to do with sleep"  John Milton rightly said . And aren't slumbering parliamentarians a tribe straddling democracies across the world ? Cleve Palmer, MP from Gold Coast caught napping said "I apologise for that ,but it's liable to happen again.I am a human being" Why then single out ours ? I say, leave the sleeping beauties alone so long as they don't SLEEP OVER THINGS.

   

My admiration for H D Devegowda ,ex-PM ,instantly went up a notch when he said "I may be a sleeping politician.But one should know that a sleeping politician is always awake about national politics. I am not like politicians who sleep on national issues though they may awake physically" ,echoing Ernest Hemingway "I love sleep, my life has the tendency to fall apart when I am awake". Right, Sirs, keep sleeping, after all " Sleep is God , Go worship" .

Though some  MPs do genuinely suffer sleep deprivation. Lots of travel ,loads of meetings and weighed down by care of their distressed constituents leave them sleep starved . Sleep Council of UK found that British parliamentarians sleep ,on an average ,only 5 hours against the prescribed minimum of 7 hour. These 'sleeping beauties' need our utmost empathy, not censure, when they take their forty winks in parliament to catch up on lost sleep.

Some of the supposed culprits 'caught' ,figuratively, with pants down, and literally, with dropped eyelids ,may not even be in repose.'Eye Rest ' or chewing on words being spoken, deep thought, meditation are all perfectly legit. Closing eyes shuts vision not ,necessarily, hearing or the mental faculties. Mashbane caught supplicating Hypnos hit the nail on  the coffin "I was praying ,do you not close your eyes while praying " Right, madam ,had all the MPs in South Africa done likewise, the nation would be radiating divine bliss now.

Possibly, our MPs too may be praying .Only there is a twist in the tale, a 'criminal conspiracy' 
angle to their somnolence.Deep in penance supplicating Lord Brahma for bestowing the political 
Indrasan ,PM's chair, other Gods intervene to deny them. Mata  Saraswati does a repeat Kumbhkarna act. They desire of the Lord, Indrasan but their tongue somehow says Nidrasan and sleep overtakes them. That's cruel, cruel indeed ! Especially for Rahul Gandhi ,being worsted in the  game twice in as many years. Maybe ,third time lucky ,the tongue may indeed blurt Indrasan.

The culprit though is melatonin ,the sleep hormone. It builds up during the day to peak in the afternoon , just when parliamentary debates are building upto a cresendo. The urge to catnap becomes mirresistible. As it is the lengthy,monotonic, monologues that characterise parliamentary speeches are soporific enough. So what's the big deal if a few cut corners in their parliamentary existence and give themselves upto melatonin. And it isn't  a bad idea. 

Recent researches confirm that a 30 minute afternoon catnap ,which the White Sahib in India never missed ,reinvigourates the body and mind ,enhances mental alertness and cognitive skills,lowers blood pressure and stress .Done  3 times a week risk of health related death is lowered by as much as 37%.The brain uses the recess to transfer short term memory to long term storage ,thereby freeing up mental space whereby there is a sharpening of memory and mental agility. lets not therefore condemn our Hypnos lovers.

Corporate Houses  go with working lunches where Meeting and Eating continue uninterruptedly . Why can't our parliamentary debates also proceed apace with 'working sleep' ! folks think hard . I would go a step further .As a nation which put Yoga Day on UN calendar, we shoulder the humongous burden of  demonstrating to the world it's immense potential for human wellness .What better way than a power nap session of 30 minutes for parliamentarians inside the House in an appropriate Nidrasana ! If it clicks , the whole nation can follow  suit at their work stations  , a true parading of our soft yoga power 365 days in a year. That's what the world expects from a yogic nation.

"A day without a nap is like a cupcake without frosting."

mind your language

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE                                                                                                                                                                                                           

“The tongue is a small thing,          

but what enormous damage it can do!” James 3.5(TLD)

Dayashanker Singh, VP of UP unit of BJP, and his family learnt it the hard way when he savaged Mayawati, BSP supremo, as ‘worse than prostitute’. Jailed and expelled Dayashanker received no daya (mercy) from any quarters. These are no biblical times when virtue was once a prostitute’s identity - woman of easy virtue, or when her Indian counterpart was called Devadasi, even Nagarbadhu. It is now a stinging pejorative term. And what is ‘worse than’ a prostitute, only he knows. Anyways the abuse was utterly repugnant to civil discourse even in the muddied waters of Indian polity. Better that politicos de-vocab the word from their linguistic armoury.

Malice in political rivalry is no licence to character assassinate. As a politician’s business is public oration, he needs to exercise more than ordinary care in the choice of tone, tenor and grammar of his language. If the reach of his words is wider and influence deeper, in equal  measure is the potential for self- damage that is inflicted 
upon him by ill  worded  and  ill-timed  assaults  on   rivals.Still, 
Dayashanker will not be last man on earth to viciously malign a 
rival, utter the cuss word or revolting expletives. Simply because as Orwell said “politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.". Trumpism is here to stay which buys the question, is there a better way to take pot shots without an injurious ricochet ? And what, in the first place, is the compelling need to abuse?

The word ‘abuse’ derives from the Latin ‘ab’ (away) and the French ‘uti’ (use), so abuses are ‘rude and offensive words said to another person.’ Now, who doesn’t lose his head once in a while, all of us do .We are humans after all, not automatons. And till we attain moksha we shall on occasions, be rude, utter the four letter word and in turn be paid back in kind. Yet none of us want to meet the fate of Dayashanker.

Though crude invectives like chickens come home to roost, an 
abusive intent draped in witty innuendos passes muster. And though it looks soft the punch is even more lethal. For instance, ‘Maa bête ki sarkar’, or ‘suit boot ki sarkar’, are both insulting. Sonia-Rahul were not a part of any government, and calling a ‘chaiwala’s regime pro rich is capital punishment. And the blow 
was deadly. The ‘Maa bête ki sarkar’ cost Congress its Delhi raj, and the latter forced a mid-course correction of Modi raj’s economic direction, besides a loss of mojo. No hell broke loose 
though, rather just a whine at being worsted in the perception game.

This, to me, is ‘dignified’ abuse, one in the grey area between profane and pedestrian, purple not red .A skillful play on words, an 
artful insinuation, or loaded sarcasm is bewitchingly within the boundaries of civilised public intercourse. There is, in a sense vesting of 'dignity', on what otherwise is abuse. Wit and tongue- in- cheek retorts ensure a bite without bleed.

What fun is there in calling an opponent ‘Butcher of Gujarat ' or a ‘Narbhakchi’, or a ‘Psychopath’, or Donald Trump insinuating that Hillary Clinton was an enabler to her husband’s peccadilloes. An 
Indian equivalent would be Mr Maurya calling Mrs Sheila Dixit, the Congress CM hopeful for UP, a ‘rejected maal’, maal being a misogynist rant. The salvos are too straight and narrow like hammering a nail. It lacks finesse, literary creativity, all in all seems too gauche, maybe even puerile, and is more likely to invite a virulent backlash.

The British, masters in the art of dignified abuse, would have said 
the same thing in innuendos, laced with just the right dollops of sarcasm and witticism to clothe the abuse. Judge for yourself.

1. John Montague ‘Sir, I do not know whether you will die on the gallows or of the pox’

John Wilkins ‘that Sir, depends on whether I first embrace your lordships principles, or your lordships mistresses ’

Or

2.   Churchill calling Attlee a duffer,

‘An empty taxi arrives at 10 Downing Street and when the door is opened, Attlee got out”

Or

3. Jonathan Aitken saying much the same thing of Margaret thatcher

“She probably thinks Sinai is the plural of sinus”

Or

4.  Hislop on Boris Johnson 

‘People always ask me the same question, they say ‘is Boris a very very clever man pretending to be an idiot’, and I always say ,no’

Macaulay promoted the English language to produce brilliant Brown Sahibs but failed to ingrain humour in the Indian psyche. 
Our parliamentary debates, if they do happen, they are as fickle as the English weather, lack the Englishman’s witty sarcasm and innuendos, or the skill set of Aristotelian rhetoric. Mock, sneer, cynicism interspersed with sloganeering does provide some comic 
relief. But that’s only, beer without fizz. A few do humour the House with repartees that mirthfully kill. But just a few, most use the sledge hammer of unadulterated abuse.

Among the exceptions is Narendra Modi, PM. He spews a lot of vitriol in his sarcasm. On Ghulam Nabi Azad pointing out lacunae in Jan Dhan Yojna in MP, Mr Modi retorted “you went out with a 
microscope to see where we are lacking. Had you earlier worked with binoculars, this work would not have been left for Modi”. Though he too, at times, is known to attack crudely. On Rahul 
Gandhi he said, "Some people's age increases, but their wisdom does not increase." as riposte to Mr Gandhi’s “in villages people now say Arhar Modi, Arhar Modi ,Arhar Modi “ referring to soaring prices of Arhar pulse.

Now the question, why the need to abuse. The profane, ’don’t do stuff’ is seductive, even Adam couldn’t resist the forbidden apple. A leader trashing opponents in vilest terms trespasses political correctness and therefore finds an instant connect with followers or bhakts, the collective term for Modi acolytes, who share the antipathies being vocalised at a high pitch. The screaming, frothing political messiah sends blood coursing through their veins, and compensates for the exaggerations and hollowness of the spoken words per se. In desi lingo, for him full paisa wasool. Donald Trump has travelled thus far in the US presidential race on the strength of his vituperative attacks on his opponents, and not much more else. Who knows, may even take him to the White House

Secondly the abuse gets noticed, the pedantic, wishy washy stuff isn’t. One little knew that a Dayashanker walked on this earth till the infamous rant. In a news crazy world politicians abusing each other is worthy of prime time news byte, print headline. Thirdly, doing the not done thing is supposedly macho, bold and a strong take- on of his opponents. The fan is lulled into a false sense of security by this display of pseudo muscularity and courage .Lastly, it reflects a value system that puts too much premium on succeeding, winning, the best or nothing. The pressure to win seduces politicians to pander to the baser instincts of his fan following in order to cement their loyalties.

Many justify abuse as harmless rhetoric. No, it is not, make no mistake .Rhetoric, properly speaking, is the art of persuasive argument intended to win over people to the speakers cause. And abuse is no winning argument. Mudslinging, if anything is dissuasive of those not in thralls of the speaker

So should verbal abuse be exorcised from all public discourse? The alternative would be to walk through public life with Ramayana or Bible in hand, no fury just the peace of graveyard. Even if we desired it human frailties won’t allow it. A democracy must tolerate a certain level of abuse to animate discussions, sway public opinions, even to mobilise votes. But mind you, there is no space for hate speeches of the ‘Ramzade or Haramzade’ genre in a pluralistic society.

Let’s sign off on a lighter note.The master iconoclast ,satirist,  author, columnist who wrote from within an inverted bulb ,  Kushwant Singh, had this to say about his insatiable urge to write

“Nobody has yet invented a condom for a pen”