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!

Buddha

Two Thousand Five Hundred years ago, a man was born in the Himalayan Valley. A man who challenged God.

We may not get enough hang of the Sub-Himalayan subcontinent of that time. That was much similar to the current civilization, minus our technology. Almost all the major janapadas were run on oligarchy, and sometimes had some type of primitive parliaments, with representations from a wide range of citizens.                                                                                                                                        

At that time, the Aryan conquest was complete. The battle between the Indra clan and the Agni clan on the possession of soma was settled too. The earlier inhabitants of this land, the dasyus moved downsouth. Others mixed with the newcomers. Vedic codes of conduct were standardized. With settlements, ritualistic dogma could set in. Religion begun.

Kings, Chieftains and Lords started totemic worship. Notable chiefs of the clan, founder of major bloodlines, were also worshipped. As cows were used as money, any kind of wealth became known as Go or Gow - गो, गौ, गाव: A population was bound to maintain gotra, for marital, business and religious relationships.

With time and settlement, the power hierarchy became rigid, as a formal caste system. Druids monopolized the acquisition and use of knowledge among themselves. Even Kings were not normally allowed to interpret the knowledge of the system without professional help.

They called the total system of knowledge by its Vedic name, Veda. And the knowledge flashed through intuitions and/or meditation, as wisdom, to the minds of certain knowledge-seekers (similar to Sophists in ancient Greece). They saw the truth, they uttered the truth in metred words. Truth was ṛta and the verse was ṛk.

Unfortunately, knowledge became dogma in few centuries. Nothing unusual. We have seen, how, in modern times, Marxism, structuralilsm, Bakhtin's dialogism, other forms of post-structuralism including Derrida's approach to Texts have become dogma. All types of formats and structures to knowing and interpretation become dogma in a generation.

In ancient times,  just like today, dogmas were firmly fed by the power pyramid. In turn, such dogmas gave a validity to the power. Such feedback loop was clear, even in those pre-historic days, to some ṛṣis. Some of them, like Kapil, secluded himself. Some, like Viswamitra, challenged the leaders of the system to get a pie from the system itself.

There were challenges within the system. Continuous immigration from the agnijaji Persians, and the other middle-Asian tribes, introduced new clan-leaders and gods, in every generation. To maintain the system, in a settlement, standardization was necessary.

To keep things in order, a rigid code of conduct and a set of overseers were born.

Interesting. Isn't it? That is exactly what today's Indian constitution and the judicial system do. And you cannot challenge the Indian constitution, other Laws and the judicial system in the Court. You can challenge the application of certain Laws and certain interpretations through appeals in the higher court of Law.

Direct challenge and denial of the Judiciary would result in the Contempt of the Court.

It was exactly the same, three thousand years ago.

That is why Charvaks were to be hanged in most Kingdoms. That is why Rama, the Great King, cut off the head of Shambuka, a Shudra ascetic practicing Vedic ritual (does not matter if the shambuka story is an extrapolation. It reflects the rigid power hierarchy of this land.)

In a nutshell, Knowledge was not for all.

In a nutshell, majority were to follow the dictum of the extreme minority as the god's voice. No dissonant tone was allowed. Plutarchy and Monarchy ruled together.

The whole population was treated as child. Don't we see the same attitude today when leaders say, "They don't have voice. We have to give them voice."

Didn't we see the same thing when even leaders like Rabindranath, Gandhi and Nehru advocated in favor of civilizing the savage. Today, the savage has another name - the subaltern. Leaders could never put up with a dissonance in history. It was a curse for them that certain people could be outside the grab of the history.

This mentality did not let Gandhi allow the abolition of caste system.

However, we, participants and witness to this large play of history, meekly ask, "Who is Gandhi to allow? Is he god?"

Similar questions were raised two thousand five hundred years ago. That period was more difficult than today. Counter-cultures were part of dogma, just like today.

Yet, rebels appeared. They appeared with a long history.

Jains trace their root back to the beginning of the Iksvaku clan, to the first Tirthankar Parsvanath. Interestingly this clan gave birth to  Rama, the great King. All Jain Tirthankars were Royal Princes. All of them except two were from the Iksvaku clan. 

Surely, this looks like some kind of validation.

Bṛhaspati was another rebel from the time of the Vedas. His sutras are perished (or annihilated?), however.

Thre are allusions to such rebels in the Vedic literature itself. Some of these rebels were assimilated. Others, like Viswamitra, wanted to be assimilated on their own terms.

That time was more like today's Hindu Bharat. It was similar to the golden calf worship of the orgiastic Jews, when Moses went up Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments.

People in power wanted the rigid social order to remain as it were. Kings wanted more wealth and power. Brahmins wanted more power in the society and eternal glory. Everyone believed in the ritual of sacrifice to gods to get more of everything.

The idea of indulgence, penance and payment, exactly like the Chrisitian Catholic Church, raised its heads through all these. One could commit any crime - genocide, rape, incest, theft, robbery and almost any other sacrilege. One just needed to pay the correct amount, or in the correct kind, as penance, to the head of the Priest class, or to the King, or both.

The goal of human life was to appease gods, and gods' representatives, so that one could have eternal bliss in the heaven, after death.

The idea of the cycle of births and the impermanence of heaven was there. But, nobody would actively think about impermanence. Materialist philosophers such as Brihaspati were marginal. People called them Nastik. They could not give any long hope. They refused any reality other than the one obtained through physical senses. They believed in the existence of the body, and the material existence of the soul attached to the body, in case a soul exists.

This is when Prince Siddhartha was born somewhere in the Himalayan valley, five centuries before Christ. 

We all know how he was predicted at birth by the ascetic Asita that he would be a King of Kings, like the one the world had never seen before. We also know how he was brought up within the confines of the palace, just like the Happy Prince. And then we also know what happened next.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

I first read García Márquez in the university. His most famous novel was my text, in the undergrads syllabus of Comparative Literature.

I was not used to reading long works in English, back then, thanks to the erstwhile government policy of introducing ABCD from 6th class. Unavailability of any library in school, or anywhere else, added to that.

I bought One Hundred Years in the first Calcutta book fair after I joined uni. I got a Penguin Modern Classics edition at a low price. I did not know, I was buying arguably the most powerful work in the World literature after the WW II.

It was very easy to read. Almost as easy as Alice in the Wonderland – the only other English novel I enjoyed reading until then.

What struck me most, however, were the images. Rarely I had come across a piece of prosaic work where images were born spontaneously. They were like rainbows after rain; or the blow of the wind through the dense leaves of Amazon forest.


It was actually a film unrolling before my eyes. I could not understand that, those days. I was witnessing the coming of modernity to Macondo.

I was, in a way, foreseeing the coming of modernity to Calcutta, to India.

This is why I feel perfectly at ease today with any technological innovation; with any social change ensuing that.

One Hundred Years prepared me for that, years ago.

That was the beginning of a new journey. Frenzied, I found out García Márquez from each nook and corner of every library I would visit.

I enjoyed the gory non-linear narration in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. I followed the life and death of a madman in The Autumn of the Patriarch. I tried to feel the Colonel’s grief who does not get the letter. I wanted Erendira fly away on her large wings like Pegasus.

I read about twenty books – novels, stories, non-fiction and interviews of García Márquez in two months. The only book which I began, but could not cross the first chapter, was The General in his Labyrinth.

That book has remained unread ever since. Maybe now I shall take to that again.

I have not read The Memories of My Melancholy Whores. But, I have seen the film based on that.

I sense I have to read that now.

I discovered García Márquez over a decade and a half back. He never stopped writing in these years.

I do not know what is magic realism. But, I believe human mind cannot imagine anything which does not exist anywhere. Very few can, however, see the real, uncovering the veil of gross habit that we call reality.

Some people get glances of that, and call that fantasy. Rarely a mind enquires so much that it pushes through.
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In my childhood, Bibhutibhshan took us to that playground. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Feynman’s writings made me an untrained visitor to the game.

Gabriel García Márquez inspired me to stay back, and embrace it, forever.

On the teaching of Biology

Biology is taught in India in very wrong ways.

It has always been taught like that. A boring, lifeless subject about life, where you have to draw a lot of diagrams and label them, accompanying almost all answers.

That was how biology was taught in my school. And in almost every other school in the city, it was taught similarly.

Most other cities were not notable exceptions. Students were forced to remember different organ systems, tissues and their functions in animals. Topics like photosynthesis and respiration were like doses of quinine fed to the mind. Their relevance in everyday life, their application, were never clear.

Most of us hated biology. Not so much as we hated political geography. Yet, very close to the latter.

Nobody ever told us that Biology was the show of the magic called life. No teacher ever felt the necessity.

In my middle teens, the worst patch of my life begun. That would continue for the next twelve years. But, it was in those years,  I first came to see the magic show.

The magician's name was Ajit Sengupta. And the method he followed is structuralism.

He laid the structure of the science open to us. And everything changed!

It always began with the study of the cell. How the cell developed from inanimate proto-cells through geological evolution and replication, maybe quite accidentally. How the unicellular organisms behave.

I came to know some of those unicellular organisms are practically immortal.

That the multicellular animals like us may be seen as co-operative clusters of such unicellular organisms automatically led our interest to knowing more about them.

Detailed study of the cell started.

As those cells developed in the salty water of the sea (most of the earth is still the sea water), it was natural to be curious how those cells behave with a change in the concentration of salt in the water.

That led to matching it with our personal experience of physical discomfort which comes with electrolyte imbalance. This link threw us back to the evolution of human beings from the sea animals.

We studied almost everything in biology through cells. We studied the cell for about ten months.

However, in the school, it was the regular dose of clueless tissues, functions and life cycles.

Although they were sometimes interesting in themselves (such as, the life cycle of the earthworm), we failed to associate them with any immediate purpose.

It is not normal for a teenager to feel interested in anything that he cannot use for an immediate purpose.

But, some of them appear to do that.

They score highly. They become doctors.

I just wonder which kind of doctors they would make.

Of course, some of these same teenagers who crammed and diluted, would later change their pattern of association.

But, how would we know who they are?

A genuine disrespect and apathy for the teaching professions are responsible for this.

Students do not feel interested, because teachers do not know how to teach. Teachers do not know because genuinely passionate students usually do not become teachers in school.

They do not become teachers in school because they lose scopes for further research and studies.

Of course our education system is responsible for this vicious cycle.

Today, when I feel that I could be a doctor myself, I blame this education system which forced us to hate biology in our early teens.

I also hate this social system which forced us to see a career of doctor as a way of wealth creation, and not as an art or magic just like Physics.

It is not so in most other countries. I know the school curricula in most countries of Europe. They could associate teaching with everyday life.

But, that is another story!