The politics and violence of hopelessness

Amongst the scores of articles lamenting the state of Israel-Palestine realtionship, I found the following lines from a piece by M J Akbar, one of India's foremost analysts amongst Muslim scribes in the Times of India of 14th Jan 2009. In these few lines, he provides a brief but telling analysis of the root cause of violence and its utility for a generation of hopeless Muslims, a point I had made earlier in one of my blogs This is the excerpt from M J Akbar's piece "Gaza is imprisoned in two concentric circles. Only one is the blockade by Israel. The larger circle is a noose placed by cynical Arab ruling cliques who feed off Palestine's despair to perpetuate their own survival, using the alibi of conflict. When there is rage on the Arab street, as now, there is silence and wordplay in the Arab secretariat. Organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah have filled a vacuum created by military incompetence and pathetic governance. That is their appeal to Muslims beyond their borders. Poor governance has created a knowledge deficit; and knowledge is the key to strength. An Arab friend sent me some startling statistics; the email was captioned 'A time for introspection'. Here are just a few: there are only 500 odd universities in the Muslim world. The United States has 5,758 and India has nearly 8,500. Literacy in the developed world is 90% against 40% in the Muslim world. If you removed Turkey from the list, the comparison would look grimmer. High tech goods and services constitute only 0.9% of the exports from Pakistan, and 0.3% from Algeria. They add up to 68% of Singapore's exports. Men die for two diametrically opposed reasons: when they value what they seek to defend, and when there is nothing worth living for. Israel has created a state worth defending. The Palestinians must be given something to live for."

Mind as a mirror

I have previously asserted that one could consider the mind to be a reflective mirror. Just as the shape of the mirror can alter the reflection of the object stood in front of it, a mind can represent the reality in ‘altered’ in ways and manners that are different from the real reality! This reflective mirror is really our memories, memories of things that we have learnt, things we have come to expect as the ‘norm’, expectations, ideals, etc. As such mind can only represent to itself phenomena that are currently happening or have happened in the past. It cannot represent phenomena that will happen in the future although it can make predictions based upon past experiences and as weather prediction has shown these can be correct often; the shorter the time-frame the better the prediction. However, we cannot predict how our days will unfold despite making all the plans for a particular day to unfold in a particular way. The predictions that we make are only if these will be assured repetition of what is or has been. Finally, mind creates the sense of time and space. By a dynamic and mobile extension of events and their succession, the illusion of time and its passage is created. Imagine being a snail for a moment. Whilst the human eyes have the capacity of viewing 24 frames of still images in a second such that there is a illusion of continuity, the snail’s capacity is 3 images per second. Just as something that is moving at a rate of thousands of frames per second will give the impression of a blur or in other words of considerable speed of movement, an apple rapidly removed from the view of a snail will give it the impression of a magician trick. The apple will simply disappear for the snail. It is similar to all those who claim to have viewed UFO’s and stated that these objects moved so rapidly so as to be present one moment and disappear the next. Time is such instances either stands still or seems to have been speeded up exponentially. As such it is the rate of information processing of our minds and the perception that things happen in a succession that gives us the feeling of time passing. Similarly, mind gives the impression of space. This occurs due to matter and its divisibility and the stable extension of the divided matter into a succession of events. In other words, with the beginning of a concept of time, a feature that is due to the limitation of our minds, the concept of space is created.

Mind is a faculty for seeking knowledge

Our mind therefore does not convey to us the ultimate reality but merely approximations of a reality which it has the capacity to display. It is like an analogue television set which cannot show us the transmission of digital channels as it does not have the receiving capacity to capture those ‘transmission’ of reality that lies beyond its ‘wavelengths’. The approximations the mind allows us to see is additionally coloured by our language, childhood learning and conditioning by our culture. Thus, certain ethnic groups in the world do not have words for certain emotions that those speaking English have for instance and thus whilst they have the experience of an internal state, they cannot express or describe it to others or indeed to themselves. It is said that in the Yoruba language in Nigeria, the words for hunger, anger and pain are the same. The reality experienced and described by the Yoruba speakers will be very different then. Such idiosyncrasies reveal a reality that is approached from particular standpoints or centres. The mind therefore cannot be a faculty of knowledge, but merely a faculty for seeking knowledge, within multiple constraints. For human beings, the mind seeks knowledge from the time it is born in the following order: i) physiological safety of temperature, hydration and feeding, ii) care and affection, iii) belonging and identity, iv) esteem and power and ultimately v) a tendency to put the needs and concerns of others above oneself, to “actualise” to borrow a term popularised by Maslow, a psychologist, who interestingly believed that only Mahatma Gandhi & Martin Luther King in modern times were those who actualised themselves. Mind therefore can only manage a chunk of the entire spectrum of truth, that which it can store within the bank of memory. This means that collective minds (and in modern times powerful computers) can increase the storage space of memory and therefore the variety and depth of knowledge. However, the capacity of computer to store information is limited for ultimately it is not merely acquiring immense amounts of information but the ability to use it to solve problems is what makes us human. Some amongst us are gifted in that they can use the right information in the correct amount and at the precise moment: the gift of wisdom.

What is Mind?

What is Mind? It is that power within us that limits, measures, fixes a particular centre and views from that standpoint, e.g. a theory or a perspective. Whilst the user of mind can also see things from different points and perspectives, he must fix himself, i.e. fix his standpoint somewhere. He must take a position; otherwise he might be musing like a poet. We are taught from our childhood days that mind is what makes us different from animals and indeed from lesser mortals. We associate mind with the powers of thinking, feelings, experience and intelligence. Some might say that mind is what allows us to experience our worlds and all the knowledge therein. But mind is not a faculty of knowledge. And therefore what it creates cannot be the ultimate knowledge, or ultimate reality. It is merely a prism through which we experience only that aspect of reality which it has the capacity to reveal to us. Consider the minds of those who are learning disabled and you get immediately the sense of what I am trying to communicate. Consider too the mind of a buffalo. With it inability to see colours, its world is black and white. How would we adjust to a world that had only two major shades and the various hues of grey in between? The beauty of a sunrise or the magnificent colours of iridescent flowers would be lost to us. Consider too the bats that locate objects in space in the dark through the power of echo-location. It ‘sees’ only by sending out frequency sonar of its own, like an ultrasound machine in hospitals, and ‘views’ objects when this sonar is reflected off it. Its perception relies entirely upon echo, i.e. reflection rather than direct experience. Its reality is so different from ours and its world obviously so. Reality is different for different animals, those on the ground from those in air to those in the submarine world.

The Indian toilet: A pagan ritual for cleansing the soul

(This piece was written after a particularly traumatic experience in an Indian toilet on a train between Delhi and Jaipur that was running several hours late but moving swiftly and ‘mud-mustly’ swinging from side to side. The toilet was munking, the water flow was down to a trickle, and yours truly had had enough. The following should be read in that frame of mind – a pissed off shade of grey It was also written by someone now used routinely to sit on western style toilets while contributing to Mother Nature rather than squat; one could debate the pros and cons of either position indefinitely.) Indian toilets are torture chambers. One has to squat on two pieces of concrete the size of your feet on either side of the commode which looks like a man’s genital with the penis pointing forwards and the testicles at the back, sat on its base rather than hanging down. If you spread your toes a little, you run the risk of dislocating your metatarsals in your feet. You need to sit absolutely still and tight – the most your feet can move is to curl up your toes at the prospect that lies ahead. Once the contents of the bowels have been unloaded of their own accord for the thighs in the squat position press mercilessly on the innards, get ready for the toes to curl up even more. The stench of expelled turd assaults you. And if your aim is unlike that of a sharpshooter, i.e. you cannot align your posterior orifice with the orifice of the commode – all of a radius of 2-3 inches (around 20 square inches in all), the assault to the nose is even worse - the stench of expelled turd is bad, especially if one has been feasting on ‘lehsun ka chutney’ the night before. God help you if you’re of the variety that suffers with constipation. Your time for torture is exponentially increased. It might be safer to think that God won’t help you for if he wanted to do so, he wouldn’t have given you constipation. As you are balancing yourself either on your toes if you wish to give the heels some rest, or the heels if the toes are curling up (again), you cannot prop yourself in that position for long without tipping forward and shitting on yourself, or toppling backwards and peeing on yourself out of the sheer shock of it. Once the senses have been armageddoned, your legs aching and about to give way under you, the innards squelched and bowels revealed on the floor of the commode (not if you’re an Avinav Bindra with your backside), the arms come into play. All this while they had been clasping the knees – real white knuckled stuff if a train is hurtling along on poorly aligned tracks and unoiled wheels, let me tell you. For the uninitiated and of weaker mettle, the nails and tips of finger would also have been chewed by now from sheer panic of collapsing into the faecal waste and being devoured by the hole. But now the arms must release the knees and reach around the back. Convention dictates that one leads with the left hand, unless you’ve already lost it, in which case use your right but don’t tell the obsessional cleaners of the ‘shauch’ variety. The left hand approaches the rear aperture with apprehension and a fair degree of stealth. The right does likewise, in a dyadic dance, reaching around half a litre of a jugful of water. The pagan ritual is now entering the climactic stage. This is a terribly precarious position – not only are you perched on the two bricks the size of your feet with your toes curled up, narrowing the contact of the entire body to the ground to a few square inches, your eyes are now half-closed in utmost meditative concentration, nose twitching spasmodically at the stench emanating from between your cramped feet, eyes smarting from pain, ears ringing as all your blood has rushed to the head due the abdominal crunch, and the arms stretched behind like a free-falling skier balancing himself without the picks. The end looms near. The last chapter of the pagan rite is upon us now. This one is called ‘water-splashing’ and bears a close resemblance to its American counterpart, ‘water-boarding’, used so splendidly in counter-espionage tactics at the strategically placed Guantanamo Bay in US. The key differences lie in the position and purpose of the bodily orifices that are subjected to water therapy and the manner in which therapeutic water is delivered. Clearly the Indian tactic targets the lower end and uses water judiciously, responsibly, and in a manner consistent with a greener world – absolutely no wastage, the government does not allow it in most places by limiting water supply to a trickle a couple of times a day only. How wasteful our American democratic cousins are; dipping their subjects into water upto their noses for longish periods – no concern for the environment whatsoever. A mugful, if that, is splashed and the flow manoeuvred adroitly by the left hand on the backside is the grand finale of torture. The hand is subjected to the goo and wipes the backside clean. The bugs, smell and small specs of microscopic waste must reside within the safety of the fingertips and the nail-beds, lying in wait for use on unsuspecting souls (including yourself) entering the body from the other end and thereby completing a cycle of birth, death and rebirth – reincarnation in action. What spiritual nirvana for the bacteria and such-lie. When the last palpable vestige of faeces has exited the backside (if not the entire body), prepare for a dizzy spell. As you stand up, blood rushes away from head where it had been pooling and into the legs which experience pins and needles, the arms stretch above the head in a sun salutation to the spiritual elders for a pagan rite successfully completed without significant loss of life and limb, and the individual atma-ic spirit soars in gleeful abandon. Many forget to do the hand ablutions afterwards and thus perpetuate the cycle of reincarnation of one’s inner delights. Ahm brahmasmi!! You indeed are Sir. You’ve come back from the land of the dead and dying.

Is democracy the right choice for India?

The nature of knowledge and the mental tools of inquiry, i.e. the models and concepts and ideas upon which one bases one’s assumptions, are necessarily a function of the geological and socio-cultural milieu within which these have evolved. The nature of world and cosmic views and the use of mental processes to solve everyday problems depend largely upon where the individual has lived the formative and deliberative aspects of one’s life. It forms the bedrock upon which one develops the ways of inquiry and the meanings one associates to the knowledge. The western (read European) mode of analytical and logical thinking is as much a product of what preceded this way of thinking, namely the excesses of the Church and the spiritual and with the suppression of individuality, pursuit of rational explanations of universal realities with radical removal of those keen to go it alone, as Copernicus found out. The renaissance was the first stage of breaking this stranglehold. Indeed Nico Machiavelli, who was credited with writing probably the first treatise on politicking reportedly said that all his wisdom was a retelling of old knowledge wisdom contained within the Greek classics, that he had merely reinterpreted. Renaissance was followed sequentially by reformation of the church, i.e. separation of spiritual (read fanatical and violent religiosity) from the political. This in turn was followed by rationalism, the use of reason and logic to explain the mysteries of the universe rather than invoking supernatural forces. The last stage in this process was revolution in many European states as a means of violently purging the society of religious hegemony which the previous stages of change had not succeeded in achieving. This heralded the arrival of democracy, its institutions, which had been evolving through the previous stages of change, and the linkage of democratic governmental management with individual human rights and freedom, where the life and view of every individual was valued. For he had been witness and participant to a huge cathartic process whereby dark and credulous forces of superstition, feudalism and internecine medieval warfare that involved the suppression of one group by another had been in a piece-meal manner smashed beyond recognition. His own intellectual evolution and emancipation was as much the stuff of democracy as the Magna Carta, that first piece of document penned in Lincolnshire and now preserved in the small town of Runnymede by the Thames. Democracy did not evolve overnight like a magical solution to centuries of autocracy, despotism, nepotism and malevolent monarchy alongside parasitic spirituality/religiosity. It took centuries of development which formed the bedrock of civil society in Europe and the Caucasian world. It is therefore not surprising that India, despite being the largest democracy in the world, and Iraq and Afghanistan, the newest converts to this process of governance have struggled to uphold the rule of law for all, basic rights and responsibilities for everyone, and the real rallying cry of ‘Of the people, By the people and For the people. Inhabitants of these nations and their leaders have not had to earn a democratic right for themselves, they’ve been handed it on a platter by those who had little knowledge of the socio-cultural mores of these peoples. The democratic process in India, is conspicuous by its absence in the social and community life. Think of the smallest denominator of social life – the family. There is hardly any democracy there. Children are very rarely to have their own thoughts, wishes and desires; those are censured by the parents, even those beyond the risky choices that children make. They cannot marry of their own accord, they cant choose a partner, nor can they choose to make a career the way they wish to. Whilst the availability of and the capacity of an average Indian to make choices is increasing, its no way the same of his western counterpart. It’s a moot point whether democracy is the best way of governing India?