Author Archive: Ankit

There's an article in New York Times today which rekindled a thought process that I last had in Paris. There I saw hordes of people clamoring around the major tourist attractions, selfie sticks in hand, in a frenzied effort to shoot that perfect snap which, as I imagined, would gather the maximum number of likes on Facebook. Although technology apologists try to excuse this behavior by saying that it allows one to share the valuable moments of one's life with those who one cares about, I think this is a weak argument, although not without a certain amount of truth to it. The stronger drive behind the selfie craze, unsurprisingly and quite obviously, is a combined cocktail of two rather perilous human traits: narcissism and insecurity. And an individual's participation on the various social platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Snapchat etc.) is also primarily a manifestation, in different degrees, of these two traits. To the lofty arguments of the simple-minded idealist, this is a realist's (my) counter-position.

The need to establish an elevated social status in comparison with our peers is as old as civilization itself (see Veblen). What social media has done is that it has supercharged the mechanisms through which this status can be manipulated, projected, and interpreted. And it is has done one other major disservice by shrinking social relations and making the boundaries of society extremely fluid and arbitrary. What I realize as fundamentally unachievable for me also does not figure into my deliberations very much. It does not lead to feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. However, those things which are deemed worthy by my peers and which are within my reach if only I jumped the required hoops are precisely the ones which carry the greatest potential of engendering such feelings. Social media, by cheapening the socially admired values and by bringing a large number of people together, has created the conditions wherein the average participant is constantly being bombarded by a bevy of attributes which, if achieved, would elevate his social status among his peers. There is no end to this enticement and this race precisely because of how easy and how cheap it is to gain such attributes and to gain the approval of others. This cheapened style of existence, as I see it, is absolutely catastrophic for individual self-esteem, however, it works brilliantly for the companies whose products are those very people who are the enthusiastic participants in the brave new world.

I am interested in the logical next steps in this process. People have long been turned into commodities and the process has only accelerated in the age of the internet. People, on the other hand, have more than happily acquiesced to the state of things converting themselves, in the process, into walking billboards, zealous fanboys, and selfie-stick wielding insecure narcissists. Where does it all go from here? I have a large bag of popcorn ready!

While walking around among the concrete houses in a posh neighborhood in Ahmadabad I came across a seed of a thought which soon germinated into something quite interesting. I noticed rows upon rows of houses made mostly of bricks and concrete with little windows to peek out on to the streets which were filled with bicycles, motorcycles, cars, trucks, and pedestrians. And then I dipped gingerly into my shallow bank of early memories to discover a large ancestral house, since sold, in a much smaller town in North India. It exists in my memory within a quiet setting, one where I could still clearly make out the Milky way in the night and one where I could step out during the day and experience such natural elements which have been so efficiently removed from the urban setting. Domesticated animals of all sorts, ponds, trees, and rivers. Compared to that setting and that time almost everybody I know in India has moved to places which, in my opinion, are worse in almost every respect.

Big cities in India, like big cities in the US as well, have accommodated an immense concentration of human beings by driving out those very elements of nature, in relation to which humans become aware of their humanity. In these modern metropolises the average human is surrounded, for the most part, by dead things - walls, furniture, and electronics - and he is surrounded, for the most part, by artificial noise. He breathes polluted air and puts up with congestion, traffic, and a general loss of identity. He spends significant portions of his days in long commutes and spends much of his waking hours in jobs which further suck the life out of him. Unfortunately he has little choice in this whole scheme. Power has a tendency to centralize and productive power in the industrial (and post-industrial) age centralizes in large cities. Young people move to these areas out of a necessity to find decent jobs and the older ones, at least in India, tend to follow their children into these nightmare cities. The cities, on the other hand, do what they were meant to accomplish in the first place - efficiently convert human beings and their labor into commercial products (shit which nobody needs, as I like to think). These cities are dehumanizers par excellence.

US is not much better in this respect, although there is still a little more freedom of choice mostly owing to a much reduced pressure on resources compared to India. NYC, the prototypical American urban center, is a despicable and detestable place from the point of view of  a human being and his relation to nature, from the point of view of his humanity. However, it can still boast of harboring culture even though the average person living in the city can hardly be called cultured. The other great urban center in the US, the silicon valley, sadly cannot even call itself cultured. As the center of the tech juggernaut, however, I think it is very appropriately mechanical. Other urban centers fall somewhere along this spectrum. They are all similar to each other in their merciless dehumanizing effect on people.

With every passing time that I visit India I get to see some of its character in more detail, especially when compared against the US. We went to see a new movie in the theater which is about a young Pakistani girl who happens to find herself lost in India. The story is about the protagonist's quest to take her back to her family in Pakistan. One would think that would simply be a matter of getting a visa, boarding a train, and job done. But in true Bollywood fashion there are twists and turns enough for the simple premise to stretch over 2 hours. The movie is fun in a very Bollywood kind of way. In a certain sense it is also very characteristic of the society here, but then as they say, art does imitate life.

There is an undercurrent of activism here and I have noticed it in several other Bollywood movies. The central premise is the following: those who wield the institutions of power are corrupt and it takes for people to come together to get things done and to improve the general lot. The institutions of power include, but are not limited to, police, government, even religion. The response to the unfair powers is, in typical Bollywood fashion, idealistic where, in the end, not only are the primary objectives achieved (the common man prevails) but these objectives are achieved in most moral of fashions. The entire suite of virtue is upheld in this fictionalized rebellion of sorts and this idealism, in essence, is the idealism of Ramayana (as opposed to Mahabharata) where there is much suffering emanating from the requirement that to an ideal person suffering is preferable to immorality, pain preferable to short cuts. This idealism unfortunately has no place in the real world where heinous injustices are often inevitable by-products of the pursuit of high minded goals.

Compare this to the typical American narrative where the powers that be are incompetent (and not corrupt) and, therefore, there is hardly any case to be made for rage and rebellion on a social level. This is why the typical American movies and the typical American obsessions are isolationary and individual with little regard for issues larger than one's own. To Americans, the war is being fought somewhere in Asia whose carnage is continuously being cleaned up and packaged in neat little statistics so as not to offend anybody. The kind of poverty which is seen in India is largely not an experience in the US and, therefore, its stories are not about overcoming it and general unfairness. However, it doesn't mean everything is great in the US. There exists a kind of existential meaningless there which is absolutely debilitating and that is why, I think, the American stories are so escapist. Escapism in comic books and their movie adaptations, escapism in the kinds of movies typified by need for speed, escapism in a general extended adolescence which stretches all the way into the 40s and 50s, and escapism in fairy tail stories such as Harry Potter and LOTR. Movies there are symptomatic of a general cultural trait: there are no real issues, at least, none of the same caliber as those found in a third world country like India, however, there's a terrible issue within oneself which nobody knows how to solve so let's just run away from it.

Perhaps it is a sign of all times that the truth underlying the average reality appears bleak to those who can take a moment to tear away from the opium of the age. The opium famously used to be religion for people both rich and poor but the opium of our age, especially for the middle class and up, is consumption. Consumption of gadgetry, of entertainment, and of material goods. And the cost that is paid for this consumption is more than just monetary. It constitutes the very human soul.

I have been following the Greek economic crisis with keen interest wondering whether there are lessons to be learned from it, whether it points to deeper trends in the human journey. The crisis is perhaps exacerbated because of Greece's inability to devalue its own currency under the monetary union but the general chaos, I think, is indicative of larger trends. It is the post-2008 world which has finally begun to show us the ugly side of unfettered capitalism whose seeds of destruction were laid all the way back in the 70s with the dismantling of the Bretton Woods system. The monster was given more than a helping hand by the extreme deregulatory emphasis of the Reagan-Greenspan era, supported by the theories of the fine sounding academics in the World's most famous economics departments, most notably in the University of Chicago where Milton Friedman and his steady stream of proteges created a mathematical model of real world economics which abetted and supported a system which has led to the present chaos. What is the human cost here? Figures suggest that income inequality now is as high as it was after the great depression and that the real wages of average workers in the US is below what it used to be in the 70s. What lies in the future? The future, at least in the near term, looks pretty dismal to me for reasons that I have talked about earlier. With increasing mechanization and reach of technology, humans will slowly be displaced from any and all forms of occupations. It's only a matter of when and not if. During this time we will see more extreme levels of inequalities, poverty, misery, and lack of opportunities essentially because of one reason. Human beings will become less and less competitive and for no fault of theirs. However, this will not prevent the game of victim-blaming from those who have benefited from living under a more benign economic climate. They will proudly say, well, you should have worked harder. Hopefully these idiots will die away before it's too late.

The reason I say before it's too late is because I do think that there is light at the end of the tunnel but it is not clear how society would get there. There is already a surplus of goods and services in the World and yet we see extreme levels of poverty and misery. How can a rational person, in good conscience, justify this level of absurdity? In the future, goods and services will be plentiful and a mechanism will need to be designed which redistributes this surplus without any expectation of work. This might be done through powerful central mechanisms but, more interestingly to me, it may also be done through highly decentralized initiatives which will become feasible as the required knowledge and technology will essentially become free. The Greek crisis is a small act in this long term tussle because it essentially represents the painful cries of a people rendered highly noncompetitive through mechanisms outside of their control (the common currency in this case). And the only solution, as the IMF indicates, is through what is essentially a fiscal transfer. We are hearing the usual recriminations from those in power (Germany), that the Greeks should have worked hard...

In moving from India to the US at the time that I did, I, more than perhaps others who came before me, inherited in my heart a vacuum whose depths I have been trying to plumb quite unsuccessfully for the last ten years. In moments of stillness when I can muster enough courage to weigh a life in balance, I become aware of the existence of a loss whose essence appears impossible to communicate. In brief disjointed flashes of arbitrary cuts of memory a scene from a movie Koshish comes to mind (and why I remember this inconsequential scene is as incomprehensible to me as why I remember the movie at all). A sunny day on a beach, a clenched fist, and sand slowly draining from between the fingers. The harder the fist clenched, the faster the sand drained. Some poignant dialogue, I am sure, followed but I do not remember it. I do not need to, because I feel its real, alive context in my nerve endings; I understand, in the deepest of ways, the metaphor of the slippery sand. Unlike most Indians that I have known, I do not have a place where I could fix my past to. There is no single city where I could authoritatively place myself in, there is no set of alleyways which exists in my memory as the definitive labyrinth of childhood, there is no special set of friends whose company I can trace back through the decades. In the absence of these concrete markers I think I was inadvertently forced to create surrogate connections to more abstract ideas, to rest my nostalgia not on the foundations of a certain house which might appear with soft edges in the mind's eye but with vague symbols which stood for certain values which were deeply Indian. A particular set of Ghazals, for example, which remind me of nothing concrete at all from my past but make me aware of a lovely, idealized crystallization of what meant to be Indian, if only in a childish, innocent sort of way. The sum total of these nostalgic markers indicate to me a world which actually might not really have existed outside of my idiotic, easily led, imagination. I was an idealist then which explains why I am a cynic now. Back then, however, I searched for Malgudi in the real world and, unfortunately, I found it too. Now that I go back to India, I am deeply dismayed to see that my metaphoric Malgudi hasn't stood the test of time, that it has shriveled and disintegrated against the onslaught of money, ambition, greed, and, well... reality. It's as if I woke up one day and found that my past was extinguished. All that remained was a faint whiff of smoke and a dark, slightly warm wick.