Category Archive: Miscellaneous

I have, of late, become fascinated with trying to understand the American experiment in the context of my Indian upbringing. In this quest I have seen myself moving past the simplistic logic of people like Jon Stewart on the left and Bill O'Reilly on the right, and on to some real heavyweights of thought and logic. In this quite different plane lie people like Charles Krauthammer and Noam Chomsky. The former has a very high regard for the principles that America stands for and believes that the principles are honorable enough so as to deserve a kind of state proselytizing. This is the traditional logic and the beginning assumption of those who are identified as conservatives in this country. Chomsky, on the other hand, thinks that American exceptionalism is nothing but yet another ruse to keep people in line. In other words, he thinks that it's an efficient strategy of control and, therefore, there is nothing inherently honorable about it. Both agree at a very deep level, at the question of liberty which is enshrined in the American idea. Krauthammer seems to think that that idea of personal liberty gives America a special place under the Sun which is worth fighting for and Chomsky thinks that that idea of personal liberty is lost precisely when such an argument is made because it sets in motion systems which are much more powerful, much more omniscient than a puny individual. An individual is hopelessly deluded and lost within a machinery vastly more complicated than he can comprehend. Both have very good points and arguments and one can appreciate either side when one begins with the understanding that the fundamental axiomatic assumptions on either side of the debate are essentially arbitrary.

This line of thought led me to the question of liberty vs. equality, because these ideas are inherently at odds with each other. America was founded on the principle of liberty and equality was, in my opinion, added half-heartedly under the influence of Christianity. Still, the society here never seems to have taken equality very seriously and has, more or less, only ever paid lip service to the concept. With the decline of Christianity it appears that the sorry effort at trying to establish equality will also fade away because the arguments of equality from a non-religious point of view are very hard to justify. After all, why should people be equal if they were not created equal by a God? Equality, from a non-religious point of view, must necessarily take a subservient position to freedom. This is how it works in evolution and this is the inherent nature of human beings under evolution. Interestingly enough, while Christianity taught the equality of all people and this is how it affected the American experiment, Hindu philosophy taught the inequality of people through Manu-smriti and led to the establishment of the caste system. Under modern standards of behavior though, this centuries old set of principles is now being challenged. Indians are now being dragged, screaming and kicking, into contemporary expectations of modernity. What do I think? I think that the Hindu philosophy deserves credit for being so ruthlessly logical and for those who are immediately offended by this statement, I'd like to ask them to really think about where they derive their own justifications. I think liberty and inequality are the founding facts of life. These are principles which do not contradict each other and in fact are two sides of the same coin. But the society that they would give rise to would be an unpleasant one for all but the luckiest. This one sees in the Indian experiment and how incredible discrimination was dished out to so many for such a long time. Therefore, equality, as sort of an arbitrary principle and in an ad-hoc way, needs to be imposed on society for it to become reasonably pleasant. Indians are trying to do it and it is right and proper for them in the current age. However, there is a cost involved in this transformation and it should be kept in mind.

Coming to India is always very educational and it becomes more so every time I visit. It goes without saying that India is an entirely different world than the US is and it serves to wake me up from the stupor that is the easy precipitate of the well structured American life. Things are still very chaotic here and I can go on and on about how that chaos has a certain seduction to it and how it is, in some sense, the very essence of life. The life whose color, vitality, unpredictability, taste, and brutality has been tamed, domesticated, and reduced to the question, 'What ethnic food do we fancy today?' in America. I can wax eloquent as to how the external chaos which exists in India has been cynically channeled into utter commercial servitude in the US but let's not be so simple minded shall we. The truth is not black and white and the glass most certainly is half full. But we shall take it as half empty because there is nothing quite so entertaining as a little polemic.

One contrast that draws my attention is the difference in the means of popular delusion in both places. America is a young country and it was created on ideas which, in principle, were very noble. It could afford to do so because it was not burdened by the weight of 5 millenniums of history and culture. The noblest principle of them all was perhaps the implicit idea of personal freedom but freedom, writ large, doesn't sit very well with a structured and domesticated society. It's a great idea but nobody who is in charge likes it very much. However, it could not just be wished away because people, however shortsighted they may be, generally would not give it away if asked simply. The solution was to cloud up the issue, to create diversions and to dangle all sorts of carrots in front of the collective consciousness. The solution was to create all sorts of races which would keep everyone occupied throughout their entire lives. Race to the top, to success, to beauty, to lose weight, to health and fitness, to salvation, to personal improvement, to a respectable and quintessential American dream. And an entire population was thereby straitjacketed into a brilliant deception. Perhaps there was a time when freedom of choice really did exist in America and I am sure that was a chaotic and interesting time. Now, however, there is merely an illusion of this freedom, at least for most people. The incessant materialistic run is Americas delusion and the 21st century religion of atheism fits neatly into this scheme. It is the perfect religion for the shallow, materialistic, and entirely superficial idiot of the modern world.

India, on the other hand, has its own very interesting collective delusion which is again a watering down of the high principles where the country finds it roots. The country itself is a recent invention but its philosophy runs deep in history. It is a highly sophisticated philosophy in front of which the sorry philosophies of the Abrahamic religions appear crass and entirely unsophisticated. Too bad then that almost nobody in India seems to know what it is. What they do seem to know is merely a badly done caricature of the same. There are temples galore where I see a lot of people standing in lines to look at what is otherwise just a stone. They live their lives by a set of principles which is a gross simplification and distilling of the original spirit of imagination and inquiry. They proudly proclaim it their culture and get in line with flowers in their hands and prayers on their lips. Dimwits peddling ridiculous superstitions infest the popular consciousness and they are caricatured in embarrassingly simple minded ways by the popular media. There is no sophistication to be found in either the practice of the faith or its ridicule. What a fall from grace for a people of such illustrious intellectual history! Perhaps there was a time when the popular discourse was informed by the brilliant philosophy of the Hindu religion. When it encouraged them to ask the real questions of life and to face its many challenges with courage and vitality and not with delusion and cowardice. This isn't that time, however.

So what do we have here? Here we have two societies which had very different beginnings. In some ways, very noble beginnings. Both societies have degenerated, at least in my inconsequential and humble opinion. But they have degenerated in different ways and it is entertaining for me to compare and contrast the two. The merchants of drivel, it seems, have customized delusions for sale to suit the needs of all ages. And it sells them to people who just want to sleep and dream.

The other day I was reading some particularly funny passages from Catch-22 for the umpteenth time when my mind wandered off into many different useless directions, finally settling on to a point which I thought was quite interesting and worth elaborating upon. Yossarian, it seemed to me, was a particularly notable hero in the pantheon of fictional heroes, quite on par with the majestic dude from the venerable movie the big Lebowski. Catch-22 is not the greatest book ever written and the big Lebowski is not the greatest movie ever made but Yossarian and the dude are, in my opinion, the greatest heroes which were ever created. For those unfortunate souls who have not yet read the book, Yossarian is a fighter pilot in the second world war whose sole aim is to survive the war at whatever cost it may require. And for those who haven't seen the movie, the dude is an utter slacker whose concern revolves around a rug that was soiled by some vandals as he is dealt one blow after another throughout the movie. Not exactly the kinds of characters that one has come to associate with the word hero but then the characteristics that one does associate with the word hero are heavily clouded by the surreal logic of the tragicomic world that we live in.

We associate the qualities of courage, self-sacrifice, honorable conduct etc. with the word hero but it is not hard to see how these only apply to a rather limited worldview and become absurd when one asks some difficult questions. As an example courage, as evidenced in wars, is the easiest to bring down from its high and noble pedestal and I'd quote a few lines from the book to draw home the point:

What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for.

Courage, if it exists at all in the form that we instinctively think of, must be denounced on purely rational grounds as it only serves to extend conflicts. In other words, if everybody was a coward, perhaps there wouldn't be so many wars and conflicts. But we unfortunately do not live in a world where people are cowards. We live in a world where intelligent people make less intelligent people believe how great it is to be courageous so that the latter can fight and die to preserve what is essentially the private property and influence of the former. Nationalistic songs are written where the motherland is praised, religious sermons are given which egg people on, paintings glorifying wars and conquests are commissioned and immense sculptures are created in national capitals. Many people take all this very seriously and buy bumper stickers which say how they support their soldiers which of course I find  extremely amusing. Sometimes I see beneath the veneer of equanimity on the faces of reasonable people, a tinge of self-righteousness in matters of historical and contemporary conflict; as if these conflicts were really anything more than a struggle for survival between arbitrary entities. If courage is to be assessed under a rational light then it must be praised only to the extent that it helps us prevail over them but there is neither morality nor sentimentality in this view. In this view courage is a very useful quality which I'd like others to have and I'd like for them to exercise it when the time comes. This is essentially what the expectation from the word is in our world but it is rarely expressed like that because it runs so counter to some of our most cherished ideals. Yossarian gets it and has too much intelligence and honesty to pretend otherwise. What he cannot understand is how others don't seem to see his point. He is caught in this arbitrary war between arbitrary entities and all he is trying to accomplish is the one thing that nature intended him to do, survive. He understands that the structure which is erected to prevent him from doing so must necessarily be self serving and deceitful. Others, however, do not see the incredible deceit and buy into the stories that they have cumulatively told each other. They are operating in a world of mirages where the ideals which drive these essentially good and honest and hardworking people are nothing but useful characteristics which a system much bigger than them demands of them. The system needs to survive and it is unsympathetic and it doesn't care. Yossarian is the true hero to me because he is the only one who operates in the world of reality. He is the only sane man among the madmen around him. Dude, obviously, is the other guy who gets it but I'll leave him for some other time.

It was one of those routine bus trips back from Guwahati city to IIT campus late in the night around 13 years ago. I remember sitting at the left side rear window and noticing an elderly lady a few rows ahead. Apart from her the bus was full of students, most of whom were friends from my own class. These students were loud and unruly like young students tend to be especially when they are rounded up in close quarters and I have no doubt that I myself had at other times, participated in the sort of unruliness that I am talking about. However this time, with that extra person on board, I remember feeling a distinct sense of discomfort at the obnoxious loudmouthedness, the excessive cursing, and the general savageness of the atmosphere. I remember feeling ashamed on behalf of the person and a sense of anger at the insensitivity of my friends to my imagined discomfort of this person whom I did not even know. This emotion has since manifested itself a number of times, most recently at a concert at the Chicago symphony orchestra where I took my parents for a rendition of Mahler. A couple sitting in the row in front of mine could not keep their mouths shut for the duration of the concert. They were sitting a few columns away from me which prevented me from interrupting their interruptions. However, my rage was complete at their indecorous behavior which seemed to be ruining the experience for my parents and others who were trying to listen. However, the interesting thing about this emotion of mine, of feeling uncomfortable on behalf of others, is the fact that it might have no legitimacy at all. The old woman on that bus that night might have been perfectly fine with her surroundings and my parents and others, for all I know, might not have cared at all during the concert. It's possible, perhaps even likely, that others have thicker skins than I attribute to them. Moreover, the idea of being ashamed on behalf of others rests on a very slippery slope for it is the same impulse which tries to legitimize all sorts of censorship. People have made a hobby out of getting offended on the behalf of others. They get offended on behalf of their children, the religious, moral, and ethical sentiments of their communities, on the behalf of minorities, so on and so forth. And it is a short trip from feeling offended on the behalf of others to trying to suppress speech, behavior, and opinion uncomfortable to one. Of course people who do get all tied up in such a fashion are only more ridiculous than those whom they dislike so much.

And yet, there was something personally wrong with the couple who sat whispering in that concert and with the behavior of those students on that bus. I can, in a very private way, take issue with them but the offense must be personally owned in order for it to have any sort of meaning in my own eyes. The thread which unifies these two incidences together with the many others which I have experienced is perhaps an elitist one. I dislike unruly behavior as I see it primarily as being uncivilized (and not as being morally wrong). I prefer civilization over savagery, deliberation over red-blooded passion, and intellect over emotions. I prefer refinement over brutishness and I, therefore, prefer Tennis over American Football! So when the couple sat whispering and when my friends brought down the roof, they had, to me, incarnated as uncivilized brutes. Their behavior was something that civilization and common sense was supposed to have put a check on. The fact that it had failed to do so was and still is, in my eyes, the failings of certain people the company of whom I steadfastly try to avoid now. However, the real kicker is that I realize this as a deep personality flaw in myself, in that my leanings are so heavy. I'd have liked to strike a certain balance which one sees in a passage by Russel but it's not there yet.