What do I do, Marriage and other things... A

You have sometimes asked what I do. Or, rather, what I want to do.

You have always seen me in flux. Always in transition, doing things ad hoc. As if I am waiting for something else. As if I am deferring my real job.

You have seen me in politics, as student, in the role of teacher, as film critic and magazine editor.

You have seen me shooting ads, music videos, feature films. You have seen me writing.

Each time you have seen me referring to my work as the path to my goal. None of what I ever did seemed to be the end in itself.

Yeah, you were correct!

So, what do I do? Or, rather, what do I want to do?

My real job is to go deep inside cultural practices and see their origins, how they developed, how they changed. Their anatomy.

This sounds much like science - how chemists play with the elements and compounds in labs. These days, based on scientific understanding of cells and other organic elements, and inorganic, they prepare complex models, and environmental simulations in computers. That is also a kind of lab practice. However, much of cultural close readings (just like chemists read the results and values of experiments based on known parameters, I read culture) is guesswork. We really don't have any option to know how marriage started, how the first religions began, or how the respect for the elder came to establish itself as a natural behavior.

Much is guesswork, much deduction. There is a field of knowledge called Culture Studies. This is an interdisciplinary field. Practitioners from different disciplines - anthropologists, historians, literature experts, sociologists, economists, linguists, psychologists, archaeologists, religion experts, geologists, evolutionary geographers, geneticists and even biochemists, neuroscientists, physicists and chemists work together in the field of Culture Studies.

From the name, you can understand, Culture Studies include everything that contributes to human culture. That possibly means everything. So, you may ask, Why do I need another name for the whole field of knowledge? If Culture Studies just means Knowledge, why is there another name?

Actually, it's partially a misnomer. Culture Studies was the name given to a particular academic routine started in Birmingham University, UK, in the 1950s, by two British sociologists, Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. While their program was initially to study social behavior and social machine through models of hegemony, agency and State apparatus, Culture Studies influenced different American, Canadian and European universities to study ideology and culture as a field of study distinct from academic philosophy.

One way of studying culture is through its everyday effects. Literature, newspaper, TV channels, Soaps, Advertisements, music, dance, sports, food culture, fashion, Public speeches, Cinema, Law, Morality and morality legality institutions such as school/college/universities, police, press/media. 

But, why Culture Studies? Weren't we always studying culture?  Why do we need such a pin-pointed approach?

There is a reason. Long back, in the beginning of every civilization, there were philosophers and mystics. Philosophers wanted to know what, why and how. Deductive logic - the same logic that we follow in Mathematics - came from that. This also led to experimentation and discovery of new things - another name for inductive logic.

Mystics received flashes - almost like inductive logic. They discovered new things through intuition. But, nobody knew how they received wisdom. Nobody, including the mystics themselves, knew the steps of it. Sometimes, extremely rarely, the same person became philosopher and mystic both. Gautama Buddha was someone like this.

In our times, in a specialized field of knowledge, Einstein was like that.

However, most of the population, 90% or more, were neither philosopher nor mystic. They just followed whatever norm prevailed in society. They followed leaders, and after the leader's death ghost of the leader, until another great leader came.

Great leaders sometimes were born in the population itself. They also came from outside, from other communities. Individual migration was always there. I have seen there were always two types of people in any population - settlers and migrants. Migrants are not gypsies, or nomadics, in the popular use of the latter terms, although they shared some common traits with gypsies or nomadics.

Migrants, by nature of the lifestyle, were philosophers or mystics. As they were always on the move, they had to be skilled in different things for survival. They had to go deep into different cultures for the same reason. As they went deeper into many different cultures, they could see similarities and differences. They were the first comparatists.

Comparatists are people who compare among cultures. I probably had some interest in cultures and societies since childhood. But, as I randomly got into Comparative Literature for five years, in the university, I had basic training as comparatist almost unwillingly.

As I had been training myself to be a physicist since the beginning of teenage, I had questions which most fellow students never had. When most others were taking notes and copying from references in library and classroom, I became impatient with repetition of literature. I also had problems with reading long works in English. So, I kept reading books on popular sciences. As many of them as I got. Gradually I became interested in biology and the theoretical part of general biology, especially in Evolution and genetics. I had no guide. So, my study was random.

As I read the six volumes of Stephen Jay Gould's Reflections in Natural History, Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene, Steven Pinker's three books (Visual Cognition, How the Mind Works, The Language Instinct), a lot from Darwin's own writing, some Russian books and finally regular textbooks works from the sixties and seventies, the idea of psychogenetics slowly developed in my mind.

I remembered from plus-2 classes that an individual is specificity of characters-characters are specificity of proteins- proteins are specificity of genes-genes are specificity of nucleotides. You know I stopped studying in plus-2. So, I didn't really understand the meaning of this chain at that time. But, with the renewed knowledge, it became clear to me. I studies Steven Rose's Not in Our Genes. The interaction between environmental pressure and genetic makeup of an individual became clear to me.

I also read  E O Wilson's Sociobiology at that time. The idea that human behavior is also naturally selected, and just like geological evolution it can have precise manifestation, became clear to me.

By this time, my courses in Comparative Literature got over, and I was largely unsuccessful in the university because of my personal journey. But, I came back. This time with Film Studies.

I saw literature, cinema and any other cultural expression as specific outlet of naturally selected behavior working under cultural pressure. 

Cultural pressure and cultural selection are very similar to natural pressure and natural selection; but there are differences too.

I guess you know although I never clearly told you. I have genuine interest in bipolar disorder, and some types of neuroses. I got chances to watch and live closely with such patients. I know certain genes in their bodies switch themselves and others on and certain others off, to produce certain hormonal makeup, under certain environmental conditions. That produce uneasiness in body, which leads to uneasiness of mind, and that produces a never-ending feedback loop.

I am not a physician. I don't know exactly how the endocrine system changes with external inputs, for such patients.

The only part in this chain known to me was environment. I came to know this because of personal experiences. I saw, one solution is  avoiding environments which start off this chain. Warm and dry climate, lots of sunlight, and being surrounded by people with positive outlook kills the electro-chemical circuits which cause depressive behavior.

I was interested in knowing how the normal and the depressed people behave differently in getting imbibed in the same culture.

I also saw that Jung's introvert and extravert division have some real merits. They are not fiddler's imagination.

Personality type is partially genetic, and partially shaped up by the culture at the time of growing up, early socializing, schooling, peer pressures, parental influence, family environment and many other factors.

In time, a full grown personality adds to the cultural pool, with his/her own idiosyncrasies. 

As the culture, or the person him/herself, is not a fixed entity; as s/he is always changing, reshaping, the personality can change from one type to another without limit, at any age.

I needed to compare, among different individuals, and among groups. That brought me to academic study of psychology, and partially, to the study of behavioral economics.

A comparatist is commonly known as a cultural critic. Here, critic means someone who closely reads the culture, tries to find out the origins and see that nothing is final.

In that sense, I call the mythological figure Krishna a comparatist. It is significant that he didn't take a warrior's role in the war. He was a critic.

I finally found out my job a decade and a half after plus-2. I was a comparatist, and my job was to make films and write about what I find.

I was almost a scientist. But, unlike the definite history and properties of elements and their interactions, a lot of my materials were guesswork, or deductive logic from minimal finding. It was not strictly scientific. Yet, it was not pseudoscience like astrology.

Quite naturally, I grew interested in psychology and its different branches. I also wanted to see how different cultural expressions such films, literature, painting, dance and music affect individual minds and groups; how they create a feedback loop.

As I came to see through different expressions of culture, I started losing deep belief in their stability. 

Marriage was one of these.

I was never interested in marriage for marriage's sake. State is interested in that. If there is no sexual union, there would be no next generation. However, if there is promiscuous sexual union, children would be born outside fixed families. They would be burden for a single person - mother. But, it's meaningless to force any male person to take care of any child. So, the society needed a way to ascertain who is linked biologically for the birth of the child. This started the process of sexual union under the sanction of the society. Powerful leaders in the society gave that sanction. To make the process more accepted to most people, such leaders connected marriage to divine things and gods. However, the sole reason behind marriage was always economic.

However, personally for me, finding my partner was important. Marriage was practically non-existent for me. I was ready to marry my partner if she wants. But, marriage was not something divine. It was just a social sanction; and I see social sanctions for what they are - social sanctions only.

It is interesting, as the ideas are getting clarity to myself, Indian judicial systems are opening up to liberal inter-personal sexual relationship too.

I change my field so often, as I go out of my comfort zone to look for answers, through new experiences. Yeah. I need more disciplined approach for my exploration to be fruitful to others. I'll keep that in mind.

Why don't you join me too? May not be full time. This doesn't pay in short term. We need payment. We need to survive.

This is a long road.

Bulgaria... and Clichés on Pronunciation

Four years ago, I was shooting a short film in Goa. We were behind the schedule, tired and irritated. Budget was hiking up. We didn't know it would cost so much getting the lighting unit from outstation. We all were angry. But, we had to finish the shoot. After ten days of onsite pre-production the shoot began. And during the second day lunch, I faced Bulgaria.

Hokkolorob

Today, 24th December, 2014, students and alumni of Jadavpur University, Kolkata, are going to demonstrate their solidarity against the idiosyncratic, fascist behavior of the highest authorities.

As a token protest against the management's weird decision, they are going to refuse and surrender medals and other honors from the University, which they earned in a hard way through month's of disciplined study.

Some eminent teachers, such as Sukanta Choudhury, Ex-Professor of English, JU, and Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, Ex-Professor of Comparative Literature, JU, wrote articles in leading newspapers condemning the police attack on protesting students and the subsequent actions taken by the Vice chancellor and the Education Ministry, West Bengal.

The movement subsidized in the wake of the autumn festival, Durgapuja. However, it was revived by a fresh call from a major section of protesting students who denied to attend the yearly convocation on 24th December, unless the Vice Chancellor's actions are sufficiently condemned and punished by the higher authorities, in this case the Education Ministry. Sufficient punishment means the person's removal from the post, in this case.

This is the context, and today is 24th December.

As a result of all such events, the registrar of JU declared that no outsider would be allowed to enter the university campus without a proper visitor's card, which s/he would get at the discretion of the authority.

Are the alumni outsiders? Would the alumni association evaporate now? Nobody clearly asked this question. The question comes up because the Vice Chancellor previously pointed at the alumni of the University, calling them outsiders.

[Click this to see an interesting protest!]

Today, a large section of the alumni are in solidarity with the protesting students. And the questions that come to the surface are all related to morality.

But, my question is not moral. Even Prof Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, who instilled in us the habit of raising such questions, did not mention this clearly in his  ABP article.

                                           Image Courtesy: theguardian.com

I do not see the authority's behavior as abnormal or outrageous.

The behaviour goes perfectly in line with the purpose of education, not only in India, but anywhere anytime in the human history.

Education is a political program.

It is a political program for creating and sustaining hegemony for the current and each subsequent generations of citizens so that they follow the system in a happy manner.

The system is always in favor of stability.

In a capitalist system, stability means the worker always forgetting the urge of going back to the origin of anything. This results in the perpetuation of myths in Roland Barthe's term.

Even in a communist system, education and educational institutions run on the same program.

A framework is needed to run a system - any system. That framework is created first, mostly in unconscious ways, like a language, by the behavior of the leaders.

That basic framework renews itself in each subsequent generation and produces every other element of social relations. The technical name of this basic framework is ideology.

Antonio Gramsci has written, following and expanding Marx, at length, about how ideology works.

Althusser has written extensively to show that ideology can never be successfully challenged or thrown away.

Education is the program that installs ideology as a collective conditioning to normalize individual citizens to society.

In an unequal society, the role of educational institutions is to make naturalized followers or slaves who should obey without asking much.

And exactly this is why, I see, the University authority did not veer from their professed goal when they wanted to stamp the certificate of each convocation boycotter.

This is to show that the student has failed in his/her training program and refused to be properly hegemonized by the educational institution.

Education is a political program. This has nothing noble and sacred around it.

To call it noble or sacred would be equal to to calling politics and power noble and sacred.

Some people actually do that, however.

Education is needed. I am not denying that.

But, the political purpose of education should be clearly stated.

In India, as well as abroad, that purpose is forced to oblivion by the authorities.

I would feel happy if the current, ongoing protest by JU students bring that forgotten purpose back to the collective memory.

Love and Violence

I loved a girl. Eight years ago. Nothing like that happened ever before or after. Body was on fire, mind was always elsewhere, I was high on oxytocin. I was addicted.

Such a love is bound to fail, even before it begins, in real life. But, that taught me a lesson sharply. Love is violence.

For some reason, I was not much aware of my sex-drive well into mid-youth. I was a strong believer of Platonic love. It never occurred to me that the foundation of society is in population. And population means copulation.

I was a big fan of Darwinian Theory of Evolution in my mid-youth, thanks to the series Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould; and the two books The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. Yet, it never dawned on me that romantic love had to evolve as a motivational pathway to sex, by the same means of natural selection.

I was too romantic, and naive, probably. The knowledge that love creates violence made me shaky. But, that way, any social or inter-personal communication creates violence. For me, violence was encroachment of personal space, creating influence, any form of persuasion.

Obviously, I was striding the other extreme in an impractical bite of conscience to be politically correct.

Interestingly, I had no compunction with being violent in any other socio-political setup, if needed. When it came to women and romantic relationship, I was shaky, mixing all ideas of political correctness and violence. Probably, I foresaw the Indian culture of rape through my experience and readings on power and difference.

World doesn't specifically hate women. World hates difference.

In my childhood, I was not much welcome to any sporting field. I was shy, and I couldn't play football. Problem was I never learnt.

Things changed drastically in early teenage when I went for swimming, cycling and suddenly jumped up the school grade just like magic. Suddenly, I was the most popular guy in the class. Thus, I saw, at an early age, how difference vanishes in a jiffy. And when it vanishes, acceptance comes. But, I didn't think much about that. I was only 13.

I enjoyed heroism throughout the junior school years. Always topping in the manly subjects English and Maths. Playing dominant roles in all social functions in and outside school. I grew a very high superiority complex.

When I went to learn Kyokushin at the South Asian HQ (and I was a serious student for the first two years), whatever little complex about fitness I had went away. Quickly, I was the fittest among all friends from school and neighborhood. Superiority complex grew.

It all broke down in a massive blow in high school. I have forgotten those two years, and the subsequent damage to my ego. What I remember is a sudden fall in stature in one's own eye creates a huge difference. People with whom I never talked in school (in fact, I didn't consider them intelligent enough to talk) now had a chance to pity, and accept, me in their group. That was a blow!

And this difference made a problem in self-acceptance. Obviously, when one cannot accept himself, others follow suit.

However, what I didn't fully realize at 18, this link between difference and acceptance (self-acceptance or acceptance by others) is not natural. It is socially constructed, and perpetuated. This is a direct legacy from our hunter-gatherer forest days. Different kinds of differences are linked to acceptance in different cultures. And, the privileged class is never aware of their privilege. They think it is natural.

In almost every culture in the world, women are the different. In many cultures, women try to be assimilated in the privileged class. That happened mostly in the second wave of feminism, in the late 60s and 70s. The third wave started questioning this assimilation frenzy. Yet, that continues to different extents, especially in a confused economy like India.

That merely reinforces the myth of the natural link between difference and non-acceptance. They say, sex starts in mind. If that is true for romantic love - lovemaking, that must be equally true for real-time violence-perpetrators to the different.

The privileged wants to teach a lesson to the different? The privileged celebrates his privilege more so, in this society of negotiation. When negotiation doesn't work, hack the interaction. Use more primitive powers.

The world hates the woman, when the woman comprises almost half the world population!

It is surprising, women still love men! Even after all this.

Woman Objectified...

Yes, women are objectified in our country But, I can't say, more than ever. It was worse before. For decades, if not Centuries, high class brahmin males ate off their hundred married wives' (or their dads') property. We heard voice against such objectification in the Mahabharata, where Draupadi challenged a hapless Yudhisthira how he could pawn his wife.

But Yudhisthira didn't only pawn his wife. He pawned his brothers too. He considered everyone in the family his possession, regardless of gender. So, Yudhisthira may not be seen sexist at least in this act.

The same challenge was not given to Yudhisthira or any of the Pandavas when they decided to divide Draupadi among themselves, following their mother's order (I don't know how Kuntui could be so callous. She had enough chanc to know where the Pandavas had gone, and why.)

In the Ramayana, Sita didn't challenge Rama in the same way. She had to die as the only way of protest. A recent film Ratichakravyuha revamped my belief that she fell in love with Ravana and left her forest hut by choice. This really proves why she, who used to hold the big bow up every day for cleaning, had to be undermined by a loser in the contest.

Yet Sita couldn't voice dissent, or freedom, after the battle. She had to be protected. She needed a owner, as voiced by Rama.

I agree with Jared Diamond's view that the objectification of women started the day the first settlement took place. As it is popularly surmised, women invented agriculture. That led to a gender-based society. Women were the first victim of the origin of class and private property.

Recent researches claim that menopause was a product of sexual selection. However, we would never know for sure why women fell back to be the victim, why they couldn't limit pregnancy, or if they ever did.

We only know about our times to historical surety.


I was reading a blog posting on rape by the scholar-activist Debolina Dubois. She is very clear about how the casual use of the word rape, in media and public sphere, as a metaphor for some other catastrophe or violence lead to a dilution of the original purport of the word. However, she didn't add any remark to Barun Biswas' comment that our daughters, sisters, wives and mothers are to be protected. A clear-headed scholar, Debolina missed the nuances in the comment that every woman (ie, wife of some man) must be tagged by some family relationship. At least, Debolina chose not to deal with this.

What makes me feel troubled is the current emphasis on reform. Thousands of reforms have been done before. But, always, women remained a property to be protected, provided.

This leads to the relationship experts' confirmation of gender roles, equally valid in modern urban societies - males : social provider and social protector; females : carer and nurturer. I don't understand, why activists like Debolina refuse to understand that the seed of objectification and rape is hidden in this gender role. It is not that they don't understand this. But, they refuse to see the further implications and the prevailing line of action that divulges from attacking the seed in a very conspicuous way, in my opinion.

Let's see what it is.

Political Correctness and...

A spate of political correctness has been shadowing over our middle-class culture for the last few years.

By political correctness, I understand insinuation to a "morally justifiable" power structure through the use of words, or phrases. When a power structure is morally justifiable, that means either a deep-seated belief in a person's ideoverse, or seeing the stance as pragmatic, practical.

When the power structure is laid bare through words (in fact any semiotic - that includes body language, relationship, professional attitude, sartorial and accessory fashion : in fact any interpersonal and social actitivity) in a manner which assumes the power relation is natural, we call that political incorrectness.

At least, I understand the term this way, checking its practice in and around my circles, media and distant communications.

Politically correct statements, on the other hand, try to refute this naturalness of power position. I wish they could see the origin and continuation of this myth wherever possible.


Myth = Showing an artificial, created concept as a natural phenomenon (TVCs/ Ad films use the power of myth to persuade potential buyers) (One of the major forces of any statecraft is the reinforced creation of leadership and happiness myths. The process of such creations is sometimes called hegemony)


In both the cases, it is conditioned. Worse, this conditioning is the root of most other conditioning. No wonder this is almost impossible to see as conditioning at all.

Political correctness is sometimes equated with euphemism. We are taught by our parents not to call a lame man lame. In the line of behavioral psychology, this may condition our personality to some extent where we become inherently uncomfortable with differences.

I guess, euphemism is more about the other person, than about me. It is a way to ensure that I don't hurt the other's psyche. In both the cases, the society ensures acceptance.

My question is, does it really do so? Is political correctness, practiced very meticulously, a good thing?

And how is it leaked, despite trying to be correct all the time? It is leaked, and that shows something is repressed.

Some examples are necessary.

These days we use English words without gender. At least, we try to do so. Actor, writer, director (this was always the word. I have never seen Directress or Realiseteuse, its French equivalent) - numbers galore. After all there is no gender specific word for engineer, doctor, painter or singer, probably because these professions hardly saw a girl before the French enlightenment.

I myself have a problem with the word woman. It has come to our modern form from the Old English wīfmon, which means wife of man. Husband  came from the same root from where husbandry comes. Both the words signify tilling the ground for cultivation. 

In North Indian languages, the popular word पति (pati) means lord, owner. Its counterperson पत्नी (patni) is just the counterword - owned. So, the power structure in embedded deeply in the languages.

Male and female partners are words much more acceptable to me, interms of functionality and idea. But, in reality, are they really partners? And would it be easier to form an ideal team if just the words are changed, but the structure is not?

Surely this leads to a debate around the primariness of language. Does language reflect the structure, or does it influence too? It is commonly accepted that language influences the structure a lot. But, can that influence be guided? Is it dialectical? Is language a kind of symptoms for a greater malady? 

And finally, can we go to the root through symptoms?

Example 2. In today's Times of India frontpage, two reports are published. Both are on the violation of the female. 

In the first report, a judge, who happens to be female, had to resign "from the judicial service to protect her "dignity, womanhood and self-esteem" ", following sexual harrassment.

The trio of dignity, womanhood and self-esteem are given within quotes by the TOI team. Evidently, this was written by the judge herself, in her resignation letter.

What strikes me is why she had to write womanhood? Why not just humanity?

In the second report, the TOI team themselves reported the female person in question (I personally prefer the word girl regardless of marital status, anyone younger than the middle-age category) with the information "a 27 year-old mother of two young children."

What has the violation of a human being to do with her being the mother of two children? This information excess reeks of the same attitude that coined the word woman. Surely, this shows that political correctness in the use of words is not sufficient to rub the "incorrect" mentality off. It leaks here and there, in every page.

This blog is getting too long and unwieldy. 

Time to wrap up.

The Five Year Story

I have seen, every five years life changes.

I don't know why. Surely such a long span of time gives life enough oppotunities to focus on a single short-term goal, try out tests and come to a conclusion. Life learns from such experiments.

Maybe this is why the idea of five year plan for a country comes to fruition. Maybe the ancient statecraft artists noticed that long ago; further in the past than Chanakya or Socrates. Further in the past than Buddha.

In Suttapitaka, Buddha talked about a five year period to come to certain understandings of nature. Understandings that would lead to realization - where you become the idea.

But, why should I care for Buddha? I can dive in myself. I can see other people, around me. Our drive for self-actualization, which is stronger than libido in long-term, pushes us to reject certain things for others continuously.

Our values change, sometimes dramatically. Slowly, after five years, we come to see how we can handle previously uncontrollable situations. We become mature.

In five years, our bodies change a lot. Internally at least. We become stronger, or weaker, as we age. We become more adamant, and then flexible, as we grow. This growth sustains throughout life.

When the growth stops we become vegetable. That is worse than death. For the wise, growth never stops.

Socrates said, wisdom is alignment with the nature. I see the validity of that statement. Life is like a spring. Sometimes it recoils, again to expand. 

Our Indian philosophy called the sources sanskara. Each incident leaves impression on the body, and mind, very deeply. Sometimes we are aware of these impressions. More often we are not. Freud called the reservoir of such impressions the unconscious. Buddha believed such impressions are passed on from life to life. Buddhist meditation, Vipassana, is a psycho-physical way to bring all such impressions to the conscious level and then to get rid of them.

In five years, such impressions probably collect to an organic whole to plunge deep inside the mind - becoming almost a second instinct. They condition the mind, and the body.

I see our love for contrast, opposite situations - oppositions - is inborn. I guess, we move towards some kind of opposition after five years. Maybe to counterbalance the previous boredom. Another cycle starts.

Buddha says, the observer, the silent witness, is the blessed person - one who enjoys the play with all its ups and downs, the dramatic conflicts, as a theatre spectator.

But, I am not Buddha. I love participating in this cycle of life with all wildness. 

After five years, life is more interesting!