The Pursuit of Happiness

My neighbour, Mr Dright, loves to share a morning cup of tea with me once a week. Of my age, shortish, lean so much so that a plumb line drops straight from his neck to toe without kissing any other part of his anatomy, he is as fat-free as a scarecrow. Yet the wiry frame packs much ebullience and mental agility. And years of an unremitting daily hour-long regimen of yoga lend a pleasing sheen to an ageing but taut skin. 

His only known vice, if you can call it one, is Politics with a capital P, It keeps growing on him and with it, his 'right'eousness'. Dright is as 'right' as I am 'wrong'. So any 'up'right political turn of events draws him to my doors with Yama’s noose ready to string me up for any ‘anti-Right, Libtard’ heresies. I am both a sounding board and a punching bag for his evangelism, a pond to slake his proselytising zeal. It's God's poetic justice that He bundles right neighbours with the wrong ones .

"Did you hear about MP government plans to measure happiness of its people. By 2018 the state will have a Happiness Index. For 70 long years Congressis only thought of their own happiness, did they ever think of people’s happiness. What do you say? ", with this outburst Dright set the agenda for this morning's  joust.

The Congress script in the preface was all too familiar, only that a couple of years earlier, the number of years were 60. It was his way of psyching himself for the kill ,like Shylock whetting his knife for Antonio's flesh.So, I ignored it.

"Oh, yes ' I said, ‘first heard of it a year ago." 

Dright updated me, "Since then a Department for Happiness is up and kicking, a committee is close to finalising parameters for the Index, one that will truly gauge Happiness and make MP a ‘Sukhi Rajya Sukhi Praja’. Marvellous isnt it ? The state is on its way to Ram Rajya."

Since his ardour was running far ahead of reality, it needed some cooling. 

"Not so fast, having a measure is only a baby step, surely there is more to happiness than a mere number. The ten most happy countries have remained the same for many years. So, social context and life circumstances too must be determining influences on happiness of people"  

The history of Happiness goes back to 1971 when Bhutan exorcised GDP as a definitive measure of national wellness and conceptualised a Gross National Happiness Index resting on four pillars of good governance, sustainable social and economic development, cultural preservation and environmental conservation. UN embraced the essence of Bhutanese ideation in creating a World Happiness Index (WHI) in 2012. The Index, though, makes India particularly unhappy, according a lowly rank of 122 out of 155 nations. All seven nations on our borders rank higher, even China. Worse, on a 10-point scale we have gradually lost 0.839 WHI index points since 2005-07.

So I  further added,

"Besides, we have already been singed by WHI ranking. What's the need for MP to dabble in yet another such index. Seems a bit impetuous, isn’t it?”

Dright defended, "WHI is more of Western Happiness Index, unsuited to oriental cultures, don’t make much of it. MP is doing the right thing, building an index correctly reflecting our values and ethos, in short, Happiness Indianized. Besides, a poor WHI score for a nation doesn't uniformly apply to all its constituent states. A part can be happier than the whole, hence its own HI."

Something didn't gel though. MP is a state very high on commonplace unhappiness statistics. For instance, MP is not among the TOP FIVE states on the Public Affairs Index on Good Governance ranking compiled by a group of prominent citizen.s But is very much among the TOP FIVE in NCRB 2015 crime statistics- crime rate, crimes against children, rapes, outraging modesty of women, crimes against SC/ST, kidnapping, farmer suicides…. It registers the highest number of complaints against cops-10089 (all India,41424) but the lowest conversion of complaints into criminal case- just 84. VYPAM remains a gory mystery of corruption and murder.

Its agricultural production remains stagnant--76.36 lac tons in 2009-10 and 77.34 in 2014-15; Per capita GDP in 2014-15 is ₹63323 against the national avg of ₹88533. It still remains unhappily BIMARU. All of it must be making the lives of its people somewhat unhappy.

“Isn’t it ironic that MP should be the first state to moot an esoteric Happiness Index despite its unenviable track record. A thought therefore strikes me, should not the state proceed the other way around, from unhappiness towards happiness? After all, what makes Madhya Bharat unhappy is easily spotted.”

To drive home my point conclusively, I further added,

"Isn't finding what makes people happy an arduous task? As Walt Disney said Happiness is just a state of mind. We pine for our dream houses and when it somehow materialises our hearts leap with joy. After a time, the house becomes all too familiar, and whoops! it no longer sends the same thrills through the body. On the other hand, one unhappy from a disease acquires life long immunity from this source of unhappiness once fully cured. 

Happiness is as fickle as human nature, happy this instant, unhappy the very next.  Therefore the 'via negativa' approach may be more efficacious. Happiness, it premises, is not being unhappy. Pin-pointing what makes people unhappy is much easier. Therefore locate and eliminate unhappy elements is via negativa's prescription for happiness. That makes an unhappiness, rather than a happiness, index more pertinent. "

Dright almost blew up ,

"that's your problem -a negative mindset. Like Shalya ,the charioteer of Karan ,continually belittling him on the Kurushetra battleground, you keep dropping only negatives. Why talk of unhappiness at all? Didn't Buddha say- what you think, you become. If people think of happiness, happy they will be.  Have you heard of PAINS ? "

"No, but experienced loads of it and never found it blissful, Buddha's preference for suffering notwithstanding " 

Dright: "No, No! PAIN is an acronym for Positive Attitude In Negative Situations. Best summed up as -If you can't change what you don't like, change the way you think about it. That's the secret of happiness."

"So, if people in MP don't get electricity in their homes, they should console themselves that less coal is being burned in power plants and therefore citizen are benefiting ecologically."

Dright thought for a moment, then conceded "Ah! well the line of thought is right though your illustration is pure humbuggery..A mind that values '99% fat-free' over '1% fat'  is truly PAINS compliant "

"Come on ! both are equally 'fatty'. PAINS seems to be a web of semantic pains"

A broad knowing smile lit up his face, "semantics is the very fount of political verbiage or as Amit Shah crudely put it ,the art of coining plausible Jumlas. It's all about sending out  positive vibes. What can be a happier vibe than Happiness Index? ."

I tried another line.

"Say, MP does conceive a Happiness Index (HI) and its score slips. Wont it creates avoidable unhappiness? " 

Dright: "Remember, it is a Happiness index. Less happiness doesn’t mean unhappiness. If you take away a few drops from the ocean its level doesn’t drop. In Ram Rajya every one was happy, that didn’t mean there were no ups and down in their lives. Happiness always reigned in the midst of unhappiness'

Humph! With sights for HI set so high, I had no business playing spoil sport. I made my peace.

"You are right. More than any state, MP needs a HI."

And so in 2018 MP is destined to be the only Happily Indexed state in the country. Its people will soon fill up questionnaires with responses to happiness drivers like 'do you have a friend to help you in troubled times ' rather than unhappiness posers like ' do you fear  for your life' to build the Index.Should the unhappiness elements be totally ignored? Maybe MP is better served by including 'absence of unhappiness',the via negativa elements, too in the  questionnaires for a more holistic measure of happiness.

Congress is dead,Long live Congress

In the 15th century on ascension of Charles VII to the throne after the death of his father, the reigning king, the French proclaimed 'Le roi est mort, vive le roi!’, The King is dead, Long live the king.

Much the same holds for the Congress today. What the outcome of state 2017 polls should bring home to party leaders is that its legacies of the freedom movement, sacrifices, tall leaderships, contribution to nation building or to put it all succinctly, its hoary past, are layered too deep down in archaeological remains of time to resonate with millennials or even the generation before it. Seventy years is a long time in political history of a post-war world . So, the present legatees of INC must acknowledge, however agonising it may be, the king is dead. 

Yet as the French said, the king must live long. The liberties, more importantly, the freedom to create and exploit opportunities in all fields of human endeavour and peaceful enjoyment of its fruits; the three D’s, freedom to discuss, debate and dissent; the freedom to pursue one's religious ethos subject to the common weal, lie at the core of a democratic body politic. State, by all reckoning is a necessary evil, deserving of an unending vigil by the lay. As Thomas Jefferson said ' A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have '. And that is best thwarted by an able and strong opposition voicing the counter view.

And who knows the virtues of dissent and consensus better than the Congress? Its founding premise was consensus building. It may seem confounding that the Congress A O Hume founded was an amorphous party; an umbrella organisation seamlessly accommodating leaders with various bents of ideology, from a Fabian socialist like Nehru, a Swarajist C R Das, a moderate G K Gokhale, an Arya Samajist Lajpat Rai, or a Hindu fundamentalist Shyama Prasad Mukherjee. Remember, Subhas Chandra Bose founded Forward Block 'within’ the Congress. So there never was a dearth of dissenting voices  and consensus building in the party.  

Post-Independence, as splinters broke off from Congress to chart their own fortunes, it kept ,unwittingly, creating more political space for its opponents outside its fold. S P Mukherjee broke off to form Jan Sangh, JB Kripalani formed the Kisan Majdoor Praja Party to give company to Socialist Party formed earlier in 1949. And not to forget, The Jharkhand Party of Jaipal Singh Munda. In fact, the subsequent history of Congress is one of ceding more and more of its political space to offshoots. 

What now remains is a pale shadow of itself, a shrunken hulk beaten down from all sides. So much has been written and talked about and requiems sung, often with unconcealed malicious glee, on Congress's impending demise, that further recounting is superfluous. 

One, however, wouldn’t have mourned building a cemetery for Congress had it not held an insidious portent. While Congress's downslide has been contemporaneous with rise in political space for the opposition, including BJP, contrarily, BJP's ascendency has seen a concomitant and unobtrusive contraction of space for others. As BJP goes about creating a Congress-Mukt Bharat, what used to be opposition domain, contracts. But there is a qualitative change from the past . Take for instance Arunachal Pradesh. Congress, stands obliterated in the wake of BJP's Congress mukt 'pogrom' and there is none to take its place. Shiv Sena is slowly but surely asphyxiating and ceding space, not to the opposition, but to BJP. Again, sure-footed BJP is steadily pushing BJD to the brink. Most non-BJP, non-Congress parties have little pan India presence. The possibility of any acquiring a national footprint is too remote. So, there is  real apprehension that in the present scenario of an effete Congress, any regional party or the Congress getting pushed over by BJP there will be an enduring, unexpansive shrinkage of political space for opposition. The trend will only accentuate further as one- man parties lose their fountainhead. Unless Congress, the only other party with a national footprint, emerges from its moribund existence and fills this breach ,loss of opposition space becomes enduring. Hence the king must live long.

Not the 'dead ' king, of course! INC must exuviate and emerge with a skin and sheen adapted to the rigours and opportunities inhering in an upwardly mobile aspirational society. First and foremost, it must de-learn the way it used to carry on business, learn to offer political dreams in consonance with those of the millenials who are now increasingly driving political agendas. That is the biggest challenge before INC ,how to reinvent itself by burning its boat, by  abandoning its legacy baggage. The party does not lack intellectual capital. If invested properly it can conjure up a right fit of ideas, strategies and boots on the ground to implement it in right earnest. And it must, if freedoms are not to be imperilled and risk of ‘Hinduisation’ of a secular socio-polity allayed.

Will Rahul Gandhi show party the way? Well, if popular media is to be believed his political epitaph was written way back in 2012, when his first intensive foray into poll campaigning in UP state polls flattered only to deceive collecting a measly seats haul of 28. Each round of subsequent electoral flops merely itched deeper the writing on the epitaph. Success and failures speak different languages. So, the standards by which media judges the poor fellow are much harsher; a Modi can get away with telling people of Alexander and Taxila being in Bihar or distorting Rahul Gandhi (RG) reference to pineapple juice to coconut juice, but RG speaking of potato factory while talking of food processing factory gets mentioned by Modi and splashed in the media. This, sadly, is symptomatic of the gradual evolution of a uni-directional media narrative with nothing in it for the opposition. Besides an uncharitable press, RG has also inherited a decadent organisation. At the same time his probation period in Congress leadership is getting interminably prolonged. He must come up with a winning political recipe and make national polity truly bipolar. The party must do a genuine manthan, and better do it open to public gaze and participation. Why not revive the practice of holding, unfailingly, annual Congress conventions open to all workers?

And no matter how critical the party maybe of media pre-empting a call on RG leadership, one that is only the party's take, its feedback is valuable nonetheless. Party honchos will ignore it only at it peril. Though in throes of an existential threat, INC must stand a national vigil for the values that animated the freedom movement and got enshrined in the constitution. It’s a big ask.

Uneasy must lie the head that shoulders this burden!  

Ass is not an abuse ,it is a plate of praise

«Gadha koi gaali nahin, Tarif ki thali hai»

(ass is not an abuse, it is a plateful of praise)

The monkey god, Lord Hanuman, is oft invoked in poll rhetoric, yet electioneering in India is no monkey business. Hopping to ten unfamiliar locations, each distinct in its historicity and lingo, to address crowds in ten various stages of animation with ten differently woven scripts that factor in all of it, and to deliver in harmony with mood swings of restlessly and endlessly waiting multitudes all in a day, is a real tough grind for star campaigners. Greek law makers and philosophers knew how taxing it could be and judiciously included rhetoric as a subject of study for the young males of ruling class. Our lesser endowed netas make do with learning on the streets. Anyways, by all reckoning poll assignments of our netas are a back-breaking plod. Precisely, a donkey’s work.

Yet the equine sub species, donkey, itself never received much attention, forever overshadowed by the more illustrious kindred sub species, the horse. But recognition of the asinine virtues of “King of Spain’s trumpeter” is overdue. PM, Narendra Modi by his spirited riposte to Akhilesh Yadav’s donkey jibe now firmly imprints the donkey in our political consciousness. Henceforth political discourses may sound half-baked till the ass in some way worms its way in. And mind you, the mentions may not all be in unedifying terms. As Mr Modi pointedly stated, the donkey is an inspirational animal. It immediately conjures up a vision of an indefatigable, steadfast, loyal worker; attributes that corporate CEOs would love their crop of young job-hopping, footloose, aspirational executives to be liberally imbued with. Donkeys are gratified to Mr Modi for securing them an enduring and place in our political lexicon.

It’s not that the donkey’s worth is newly discovered. At the height of  Sumerian civilisation the donkey was synonymous with wealth and power. Opulent Egyptians were known to own flocks of over 1000 asses. King Narmer, the first of the Pharaohs went to his grave with ten donkeys. Donkeys have close association with divinity too. A Hindu legend has it that Devi Kaalratri, rode a powerful donkey to capture the demons, Chanda and Munda for Goddess Chamundi (Kali) to slay. In biblical times, the ass is said to have saved the diviner, Balaam, from falling under the sword of angel of the Lord, a biblical truth that Dutch artist, Rembrandt recorded for posterity in 1626 in his painting ‘Balaam and the Ass’. The donkey is the symbol of  Egyptian sun god ‘Ra’ and the Greek god of wine, Dionysus. In John’s Gospel Jesus is said to have made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem riding a donkey, an event commemorated by observance of Palm Sunday in Christianity.

Popular culture too is spliced with narratives involving the ass. Our folklore echoes with exploits of the dhobi and his donkey, the immense value of the beast starkly manifest in the aphorism ‘dhobi ka kutta na ghar ka na ghat ka’. Read carefully! the animal spoken of is the dog, not the ass. While Indian pejoratives include ‘suar ke bacche’, ‘kutte ke bacche’, ‘bhais ki aulad ‘but never ‘gadhe ke bacche’. The animal is too valuable to be so stigmatised. If one, perchance, mistakenly happens to bark ‘gadha kahin ka ‘or some such calumnious phrase, shouldn’t you therefore ignore it and move on, giving the ignoramus utterer the benefit of doubt? Better still, follow the Bachchian precept;

“agli baar koi aapko gadha kahe toh bilkul burra mat maniyega, balki usse thank you boleey ga.”

Let’s now face it, donkeys are here to stay. This beast that typically brays for an average of 20 seconds at a time, sends its ‘denchu… denchu…’ across a distance as much as three kilometres. Oooo…..the animal is a real power pack. And now we are told the mouse-coloured hide of wild asses of Gujarat glisten for months even without a single water wash. Asses, it seems, come maintenance- free. I wonder what chemicals do their innards secrete that keeps its skin burnished, ever smooth and glossy. Shouldn’t an enterprising FMCG company put some money on the table to fund research into unravelling this mystery? If we can bet on finding oil within the uncertainties of treacherous deep sea prospecting, this one is much safer and profoundly beneficial for mankind and obviously, profitable to the angel investor. The wild ass of Gujarat holds the key to an ever youthful, sparkling human skin, one that Yayati longed for and begged his sons to bestow upon him. The burden lies, fairly and squarely, on mankind to unearth the processes that make the wild ass so resplendent. If it does, a destiny greater than a mere beast of burden, or as a delicacy of donkey meat on a Chinese dinner plate, awaits the ass.

Less publicised is the amazingly deceptive, and manipulative nature of the beast. To all outwardly appearances, a shy, languorous, slow, dim-witted creature, the donkey is a promiscuous lecher with a remarkably developed libido, a step far ahead of its human master. The He-donkey gets the hots even for the mare, a female outside its sub-species. The offspring from this cross copulation is the mule -a sturdier and better adapted draft animal. Zebra dams too get seduced by donkey sires to birth Zonkeys. Not to be left behind the she-ass, called jenny, tempts the stallion to stoop low to conquer her and give birth to a hinny. Besides promiscuity there is an element of shrewdness too. The donkey’s genetic blueprint guarantees that the mules, zonkeys, hinnies it sires are all born sterile ensuring that on coming of age they do not compete with the parents.

However, the most endearing qualities of the beast are best brought out by William Wordsworth in ‘Peter Bell’. The donkey in it uncomplainingly bears severe lashing from Peter but refuses to budge till his master lying dead on the ground is taken care of. Peter Bell is filled with remorse and laments,

He lifts his head and sees the Ass,

Yet standing in the clear moonshine.

‘When shall I be as good as though?

Oh! Would, poor beast, that I had now

A heart but half as good as thine!

Still, literature has largely failed the donkey. R L Stevenson in his book ‘Travels with a Donkey’ has some pretty disparaging things to say of his 12-day travel mate, Modestine, the she-donkey. Nothing quickens a donkey’s pace beyond “something as much slower than a walk is slower than a run”. ‘Proot’, the masonic prompt word donkey drivers use to goad the animal to move is also ineffectual “I prooted like a lion, I prooted mellifluously like a sucking-dove; but Modestine would be neither softened nor intimidated”. To his chagrin, when he loses the trail and trusts Modestine to find it, he learns “the instinct of an ass is what might be expected from the name, in half a minute she was clambering round and round among same boulders, as lost as a donkey as you would wish to see “

Popular perception is even less charitable. A Pashto saying from Ethiopia cautions donkeys are bad company “A heifer that spends time with a donkey learns to fart’.  In the Panchatantra tale ‘The Donkey and the cunning Fox’, a wily fox lures a fat donkey to its death in the claws of an old lion and then persuades the lion to bathe before feasting on its kill. While the lion is away the fox eats up the donkey’s brain. The lion returns to find the carcass without a brain and the fox cheekily affirms “Donkeys have no brains.” The lion agrees. Donkeys are stubborn and troublesome say the Italian, ‘women, donkeys and goats all have heads”. Worse still is the fate of “Buridan’s Ass” that sees goodies all around yet dies from hunger because it can’t decide which goodies to go for.

The French proverb, ‘DUR COMME UN ANE’ (……as an ass) about sums up all asinine ‘Tarif ki thali ’.‘DUR’ may mean anyone or all of - difficult, hard, inconvenient, stiff, harsh, bitter, laborious, petulant, doughty, dour, severe, stern, tough-minded, hardheaded, unfailing, astringent, rough and ready. WOW! no less than seventeen traits. The donkey qualifies as a cult-like figure, indeed.

Alas! Donkeys are an endangered species. Across the globe just 4 crores survive, mostly in underdeveloped regions. China with the largest human population, also hosts more donkeys than any other nation, 1.1 crores strong, followed by, and this may excite most Indians, Pakistan. By contrast, we have only 4500 wild asses romping in our solitary wildlife sanctuary for asses, an hour and half drive away from Ahmedabad. Mechanised transport has sounded the death knoll for all beasts of burden. Let us conserve and grow the species of asses.

The growth can be organic, through breeding, or inorganic, that is to say, otherwise; in the final analysis, only the asinine head count matters.