Do bear with me, I carry a social evil around.

A few months before my superannuation I took an executive health check up, the final one that my employer would pay for. The doctor leafed through the test reports and hummed -bowel well, eyes spectacled but sight bright, prostate moderate, liver still full of vigour, ears hear, kidney not all that balooney, heart aah ! that was problematic. 

‘It doesn’t beat of itself’ said the doc placidly. 

‘But is it in the right place ?’ I queried mischievously. Being a bit pally with the doc, a demur elderly lady as ancient looking as I, I had the temerity to take some liberties with her. 

‘ It is in situ. If you have been throwing it around, then all I can say is that, somehow ,you do manage to tuck it back in the right place. Don’t worry ,the pacemaker is working fine. Now go and meet the Dietician’. 

Off I went to the Dietician. 

“ The one thing you must take care of is the bowel. Make it move regularly and smoothly by whatever means possible, even enemas if it comes to that. Roughage helps ,take heaps of it . Eat less carbohydrates and more proteins. You are overweight by 15 kgs at least. Lastly, eat calcium- rich food and take in lots of sunshine.” 

Few people save for Yogis, rishis and babas like to bugger themselves everyday. I am not one . So I cut down on rice and rotis , and proportionately increased intake of beans, saag, milk ,curd ,salad and fruits. 

Body, however, has not taken kindly to this switch. It has started to revolt at unpredictable hours , not in the sickly way, but in an idiom of speech ,at once , unnatural and impolite in urbane, genteel company. Unfortunately, the mind keeps secrets well ,not the belly. If it’s bloated ,it must blow up, nothing can hold it down. 

But an irony lies in its choice of outlet. Through the mouth the extrusion becomes a burp or a belch. Both are welcome. Mothers coax burps out of their infants after breastfeed by repeatedly slapping  their backs.  And in most societies a belch is a deliberate act signalling a meal gormandised , relished, and a complimentary bow to the host. 

But expulsion of the very same intestinal vapours through the backdoor with or without trumpeting is deemed odious in any social company. Even the word for it is unutterable, only to be hinted at like ‘ who did it ‘ , ‘Did you ?’, the vile deed being instinctively understood. Such are the worldly iniquities , the outlet decides social attitudes not the stuff. A universal human experience rather needlessly socially frowned upon. 

Excuse me folks, the word must now be said even at the risk of sounding scurrilous - FART. The profusion of milk ,French beans, boro, chick peas , pumpkins, spinach in my diet is causing flatulence ending up in random bouts of fart attacks. The visitations are more frequent in the night. Being a light
 sleeper more often I get woken up at odd hours by staccato bursts from my rear. 

Before sleep deprivation could set in, I consulted the doc. NAD, he said. Worry only if the aggregate fart volume exceeds half a litre a day. He didn’t tell me how to measure it ,so I presume he was being zestful. The problem ,however, refuses to get shooed away. 

I have tried many things -  cycling, Baba Ramdev’s Ayurveda, dadi ma ke nuske, naturopathy , nothing has worked so far, beyond a temporary relief of a few days. I suppose one will have to live with occasional embarrassing moments when the belly despite all admonition expels flatus from the wrong end in midst of august company. But is it such an evil that society makes it out to be ? 

At least there is one occasion where the fart is welcomed. If you are returned alive from the surgeon’s table to the recovery room, the question uppermost is , if you are in Bihar ‘hawa nikla ? ’,  and in a metropolis ‘wind pass hua ? ’. Once it does, there are celebratory smiles all around,‘wind pass ho gaya ‘. 

And there are uses too.  It is a fail-safe conversation breaker. When the heat of the discussion gets a bit unbearable just let your sphincter muscles vibrate . The sound , the diffusion of foul odour or both will immediately quieten things up for a while. The more smelly, sulphurous the stink the longer is the break. For it takes a while for those who had strategically drifted away to reassemble. And its wise to feign ignorance   , for an old saying goes “ he who smelt it, dealt it’ or ‘he who denied it supplied it’. 

Also deep within our entrails lies our vilest expression of disapprobation or the weapon to inflict the ultimate insult - just let your sphincter muscles vibrate and walk away.

Still, one must beware the rectal groan. If mankind survives annihilation by nuclear war  it surely wont escape incineration by Bumsen Burner ( a third of fart is inflammable) or the greenhouse effect of gaseous efflux ( 40% is greenhouse )from the anus. 

A school boy came home and told his mother jubilantly. 

‘Mum, today was a great day in school for me.’

‘How come’, asked mum 

‘The teacher asked a question that none could answer but I did ‘

‘Ooo...Shabaash , i always knew you were brilliant . And what was the question? ‘

‘Who farted ? ‘ 

No , PM, Mr Modi you didn’t say it right !

‘TelePhone Banking’, cause of  34lac cr spurt in bank credit in 2008-14 (18 lac cr in previous 60 yrs) -PM 

No, Mr PM , that’s economising on truth . Absolute data may score political brownie points ,but more often than not, absolutely obscure understanding. Credit growth is correlated to economic growth. Hence, abnormal growth is best indicated by comparing growth rates of GDP and Credit simultaneously. 

The historical time series of the two growth rates confirms both moving in conjunction throughout and downward , yes DOWNWARD, since 2008 to 2014, ipsy facto invalidating presumptions of graft. The absolute figures appear huge because the GDP growth was huge. Incidentally, the biggest divergences appear in Vajpayee years, ‘India Shining’. So inferences drawn on stand alone basis are flawed. 

However, if loans were indeed given to unviable entitities ,or bcoz of phone calls, the culprits deserve the dungeons, no less. Credit process is thoroughly documented, call records too are easily available, Mr PM   go ahead and let heads roll. If they have already, let it be known, who and how many.. Defaulting agri borrowers are shamed by remorselessly publishing list of defaulters, why then draw a shield over ravenous malfeasant moguls on untenable grounds of confidentiality or imagined risks of unsettling financial stability ? 

And let’s not forget, bankers don’t cook up unviable, crooked projects, entrepreneurs do .Hang them too , not just the bankers, ‘telecallers’ . 

Unfortunately, Mr PM , your regime’s record ,to be charitable, is unenviable. The much touted 2G spectrum ‘scam’ has withered away. The names of bankers, entrepreneurs, ‘telephone callers’ still remains in the clouds.  Mr PM ,did your people investigate the ₹11000 cr that Nirav Modi swindled from PNB in 2017 from the angle of ‘telephone banking’ ? We don’t know. 

Rhetoric is no proof of facts.

Unshackling Hindutva post LS 2014

Dew drops never quench a man’s thirst . So far, Hindutva has come in driblets like ban on cow slaughter, chorussing Bharat Mata ki Jai, compulsory standing up and singing of national anthem in theatres , love jihad, Gau cess, informal ban on critical references to the armed forces, and ‘othering’ of minorities in myriad subtle ways. Is that it ? 

Shashi Tharoor (Congress MP) , at the cost getting his office in Thiruvananthapuram vandalised by BJP vigilantes, has ignited a public debate with his prognosis that says no ; a BJP win in LS 2019 will leapfrog Hindutva or Hindu Rashtra into political consciousness as never before. 

Already in control of over half the states, if it pulls off a two thirds majority it would ,in due time , result in a similar strength in RS as well. What would then stop BJP from dressing up the constitution in a manner that hands Hindutva on a platter to Sangh parivar ? And why would it not, after all a Hindu Rashtra is Sangh’s existential be all end all. 

There are just four possible reason why it may not - a genuine faith in the existing ethos of the constitution, or the moral imperative to make good on protestations of fealty to it, or fear of judicial obstruction, or finally, dread of adverse global opinion. 

Let’s first take the moral question first. No BJP leader ever pledged not to amend the constitution. So it will suffer no moral qualms in altering it through the laid down process. A wolf set to guard a chicken poop doesn’t sanctimoniously turn vegetarian. So the chickens will soon start disappearing and among the first ones will be secularism, socialism, free judiciary, independent institutions, election laws, even Citizenship Act. 

Even judiciary may not turn out to be as big an impediment as it looks. With SC and HC justices unabashedly accepting state employment post retirement with no cooling period , and the MoP for appointment of higher judges empowering Centre to reject or delay indefinitely consideration of Collegium vetted names that it finds inconvenient or not amenable to its overtures , or simply failing to notify them, ‘committed’ High Judicial benches doesn’t look improbable. For instances the link between re-employment of Justices AKGoel, RK Agrawal, Anthony Dominic and P Sadashivam and pro state judgements in important cases , including Amit Shah cases seem less than tenuous. 

Further, the collegium appears powerless , or so it wants to be , in getting its recommendations through in the face of obdurate refusal by state.  Justice Kurien to SC and advocates Md Mansoor, Basharat Ali Khan, Nasir Ahmed Beig to HCs are some cases in point. Coincidentally, the ‘disfavoured’ all belong to minority groups. Does it disclose an unfolding pattern ? 

Nor is the ruling regime high strung on adverse international opinions/reports. In the perception of women, world-wide, India is perched at top of countries deemed most dangerous for women ; UN wants to investigate alleged human rights violations and atrocities in Kashmir ; its own party wings, VHP and Bajrang Dal, are put on UN’s list of religious militant organisations ; a Swedish  think tank has tolled the tocsin on our steep decline in Liberal Democracy Index score under since Mr Modi’s helmsmanship, none of these raise its hackles. It’s life as usual, unfazed and unapologetic. 

That brings us to the last one , faith in constitution. Our constitution bestows to all its citizen a secular federal polity, a social life free of discrimination on grounds of religion, caste and ethnicity. Its ineluctable ethos is promotion of scientific temper, and individual’s right to free speech and dissent. 

The ideological nursing of BJP leadership is in the school of Hindutva. And Hindutva is the very anti- thesis of our constitution. It conjures up a vision of one race, one religion, one language, one culture , one history, and , presumably, one political party - a convergent singularity that admits of only Hindus , others living at its sufferance. To put it succinctly, the conflict is one of - majoritarianism vs secularism, unitary vs federalism, backward looking nostalgia vs scientific temper, mono-culture vs pluralism, constitutional authoritarianism vs liberal democracy, monolingual vs multilingual, conformity vs creativity, ‘Othering ‘ vs ‘We’ feel . If the nation falls under the sway of Hindutva, the constitution risks being reduced to a dark shadow of its former self . 

There is little evidence that PM has disowned the heirloom of Hindutva. Confronted with public outrage over abominations, including man slaughter and lynching by various Vigilante groups on Muslims and Dalits PM elects to wear a cloak of silence, or responds belatedly and softly. Is it that the victims are on the wrong side of Hindutva , one for reason of religion, the other, for caste and therefore ineligible for his mercies ? 

It is precisely at these times that PM needs to shed his customary obtuseness and assert vehemently his moral authority.  With 22 of the 29 states in his party’s kitty, he wields unlimited persuasive powers across large swathe of the political spectrum should he so wish. How else can he claim to represent ‘sawa sau crore deshwasi’? 

We see today a strange spectacle of hitherto unheard of restraints on conduct of individual’s social life being privately imposed and supervised by Sangh parivar goons- beef ban, meat ban on occasion of Hindu festivals,  community bans on inter caste marriages, ban on muslims offering namaz in public spaces in some cities, more than subtle hints to women to dress demurely, love jihad vigilantism, anti-Valentine day and anti-Romeo squads, ban on films .........all in consonance with elements of Hindutva philosophy. 

The impunity with which these crimes are committed is distressing. The perpetrators publicly orchestrate their crime and expect to be feted  and felicitated. A sympathetic administration blinks, if not winks. Even union ministers stand in solidarity with these goons , doing photo ops sessions. A sense of elation , rather than shock and horror at perpetration of a crime prevails. This only emboldens and empowers these politically sponsored thugs. 

These incessant onslaughts have muffled  voices of minorities and Dalits in political and social life. Nothing could be more stark than BJP’s denial of a fair proportion of seats for minorities to contest in assemblies and Lok Sabha . It only aggravates their feel of being unwanted, of being ghettoised, precisely what the fate Hindutva has decreed for them - living at the sufferance of the majority. Isn’t this proof of an inexorable creep towards majoritarianism, Hindutva by stealth ? 

In 2014 the middle classs were seduced with slideshows of vikas leaping out of a Gujarat Model. Four years down the line Vikas seems more familiar as the name of the neighbour’s boy than economic growth. In the circumstances, BJP may, as a winning strategy, turn minorities into a surrogate mother to birth a  supposed ‘repressed consciousness’ of Hindu identity.

Mr Tharoor’s anguish is no cry wolf. A bellicose evangelism of Hindutva has the potential to brainwash the republic into handing BJP a two third majority in LS. The Hindutva creep will then become a leap. That would not bode well for those who value liberal humanism and freedom of speech and expression. And for parties that swear by it . Unless they adumbrate an appropriate counter narrative and put it across effectively , for them the dungeons await. A majoritarian polity treats dissentient voices rather brutally. 

All talk of a Hindutva democracy is oxymoronic. 

PS Regretably, a draft composition on the subject got inadvertently posted earlier. It has been deleted. 

O ! Where have the open spaces gone ?

Solitude injects an overdose of nostalgia , and climbing years, an onset of amnesia. In stray moments when lonesomeness or schmaltz gets a grip over me for no particular reason, the house in front morphs into a tombstone with the epitaph ‘ fifty years ago, here lay a 160 ft by 40 ft moat, deep enough to drown a man ‘.That moat had held me in thrall.  

From the balcony, I used to watch it awaken and take on a life on its own. Half a century later, the house in front still causes flakes and scrapings of reminisces to chip off my memory evoking wistfulness, and its nemesis, forgetfulness.  Try as hard as I can, the faces that gave it a life don’t come back but recall of life that the moat spawned never fails me. 

In the 60s when the housing cooperative society started plotting the land for allotment to members, this finger- shaped moat found no takers, the cost of filling it up was too prohibitive. The society designated it a park area and forget about it. It never had the money nor the collective will to develop it . I wonder why the didn’t go for a a swimming pool, it would have been more financially feasible. Anyway, it remained in its pristine state of nature , a 6500 sq ft expanse of dark green fetid water. A mute witness to frenetic house building activity all around it till the evil forces of urbanisation swallowed it up whole. In between, it lived, grew old and finally had a four storied building raised upon it as an unacknowledged tomb to commemorate an unsung glory. 

The first flakes of memory recognise it  as an all weather water body. Even in the scorching summer heat when lakes and rivers dry up, this pool retained some water. Those were the days when municipality was non-existent in newly colonised areas. ‘Naturally’ surrounding houses drained its waste water into the moat, thus endowing it with a perennial source of recharge. 

At dawn , it became a mini Dhobi ghat without a Munna Bhai MBBS around to lend muscle.  It didn’t seem too hygienic, so I asked my own dhobin who took our home washed clothes for ironing whether she used this pool. She looked at me menacingly,

 ‘ Have you ever seen me washing there?’ 

No I hadn’t . But what she next said raised my hackles. 

‘ Besides, Saheb, it’s not the water but soap that washes clothes’ 

That left doubts to linger. We gave up any thoughts we ever harboured of sending clothes to her for washing . She continued to iron our clothes and we kept our faith with bucket and surf for washing clothes at home. 

Those were the days of mushrooming khatals, our only source of daily milk. Every colony had one, so had we. One either went to one or the cows were brought to one’s doorsteps to open up her udders. You paid more for this door delivery service, but in the bargain were surer of the quality. 

Naturally, the moat also became a bathing pool and watering hole for cattle with crows taking occasional free rides on their backs. They were joined later in the day by herd of pigs. Sometimes kids from the nearby tola joined them. Cows , buffaloes, crows, pigs, humans - picture perfect example of harmonious coexistence.

Then Bharat had lots of open spaces and Swatch Bharat wasn’t conceived. So anyone could dump anything, anywhere. The nearest vacant plot became the first choice open air garbage dump. Gradually vacant plots got houses built upon it , therefore , people took to disposing their household litter under the surface. Yes , you got it , the moat. Soon after municipality too moved in and laid down underground drain pipes to which all houses connected in due course. The moat lost its 24x7 source of water supply. 

Under this double assault the moat wilted, its bed rose and it dehydrated rapidly, till reduced to a thin strip of land with deep dents here and there.  it lost all ‘aquatic’  life and gained pre-eminence as a sundry garbage dump for all sorts of litter. The ‘once -a- moat’ , however, proved , more resilient than one gave it credit. A new set of people added a new lease of life to it. Earlier litter used to go under, now it was accessible on the surface. The rag pickers moved in , rummaging for value hidden in the garbage heaps , some went for paper, cardboard,and wood , others for polythene bags and plastics, yet others for metallic tidbits, some sort of an indivisible division of labour. The thin non-biodegradable valueless polythene ,however, was left to float freely , trespassing into compounds of nearby houses aided by gusts of wind. We were among its many victims, forced to hire labour hours to keep the compounds clean.

Meanwhile, the herd of pigs and stray dogs foraged among the litter for leftover eatables. Crows too . Before dusk fell the ‘once-a-moat’  was clear of stale, decaying food and useful litter. Operation salvage accomplished. ‘Once -a-moat’ rested for life to begin anew next day at break of dawn. 

An ugly sore sight it was. Nevertheless, it teemed with life, a microcosm of a  social life transforming right before my eyes under the impact of an inexorable, unrelenting Urbanising force . 

Alas ! the keno phobic housing society parcelled out the ‘once-a-moat’ into three residential plots, on one of which the building now stands. Its blank walls , bland and lifeless, stare at me remorselessly. When claustrophobia strikes, my heart bemoans

‘O, where gone are the open spaces 

that He gave us free ? 

Let it be 

More we devour ,

Less be the places 

For Him to plant His foot 

When He comes a calling at the final hour. 

Are we to become One Dimentional ?

Of all commodities that humans trade in ,money alone holds promise of enriching beyond its worth, both the giver and the taker. It may not seem obvious but even in alms giving it is true ; besides being salvational , alms-given is a step taken on the highway to heavenly paradise.

 In the Middle Ages western sovereigns lent money and resources to intrepid mercantilist sea-farers for a share in profits to be made from new sources of spices and trade routes. The sovereigns ended up with treasuries overflowing with unimagined amounts of gold. The adventurers, in turn, got more than money , their private colonies in far off lands, the biggies being the British,East India Co, and the Dutch, Vereeniging Oostindische Compagnie, VOC . That was centuries years ago. 

Nearer to our times and nearer home , not too long ago our netas spent money patronising ‘musclemen’ to capture booths , intimidate electors to vote for their overlords, and forcibly stamp ballot papers. It all ended up with the musclemen starting to stamp ballots for themselves to enter the august portals of Lok Sabha and state assemblies.  

Meanwhile, the turn of the millennium has seen an unprecedented upsurge in aggregation of corporations into fewer business houses creating behemoths that straddle large swathe of human existence and increasingly dictate their choices. Today, American Presidents don’t,  figuratively speaking, get elected until business houses pour money into their campaign funds used to seduce voters. And have profited immensely in the process ; for instance, Donald Trump just rewarded them with enviable tax cuts . We too have our financial conglomerates with tremendous financial clout donating anonymously into party funds, a process further smoothened and enshrouded by electoral 

bonds. And getting their quid pro quo. 

With this huge ‘money muscle’, will 21st century see financial moguls doing what the other muscle men did to our electoral system - use their money to elect themselves, not proxies ? History would not invest this apprehension with fancifulness , that is for sure. It would ,however, be legitimate to ask , what’s wierd about it ? 

I feel, the governing spirit would change - from welfare to mercenary or mercantilism, a return to Protestant ethics of thrift and profit. Increasingly, moguls are building a system where more needs are created that only they satisfy, and subtly create conditions that disparage or even deny other non-monetary intangible needs - the need for togetherness, the motherly touch of home cooked food. I can go on and on. And yet the point would need further elaboration but this isn’t the space to do so.

A rule by moguls runs a real risk of transforming humans into a one-dimensional man- one fed on a congery of choices for satiation of needs, having uniform outlook,tastes and needs for entertainment, all endemic within a stultifying system created by capitalist behemoths. One that Herbert Marcuse posited in 1962, a good read on lib.com.