Kalmadi: Danger of not Belonging

I must confess that the doings of the self-proclaimed moral majority in the context of the very well orchestrated morality campaign has been very discomforting.

The most recent casualty of this campaign, run with the help of select multi-media-influenced, west-imitating, candle-light campaign is the CBI arrest of Suresh Kalmadi.

My discomfort is not because of whether or not I approve of Kalmadi, but because of my perception of the reasons for which the evil cloud around Kalmadi has been spread. It is a result of a concerted media witch-hunt where a few assume the mantle of 1.2 billion people simply because they have monopolized the access to media and thereby exercise their self-anointed right to influence people.

The fact that Kalmadi has thrice been elected as an elected parliamentary representative of the people is dismissed as another convincing example of corruption by a moral brigade again representing the same 1.2 billion people with little evidence but a face-book count without any idea of which agency is controlling the face-book accounts. That is what is discomforting.

I was told by many Maharashtrians ever since I landed in Pune more than twenty years ago that Kalmadi was very corrupt. They usually said this in the same breath as they had said this of other politicians including Sharad Pawar. It was at this time (near 1990) that the prominent Mahrashtrian leader, V. N. Gadgil lost his parliamentary seat in the elections while Kalmadi was growing his wings and gaining national prominence as a sports administrator. Kalmadi spread his influence in Pune so much so that Gadgil felt threatened and Gadgil's followers started going (around 1998) to the Maratha leader Sharad Pawar's camp, rather than be under the leadership of a non-Maharashtrian. Gadgil and his fellow Konkanashta brahmins, after all, were the same tribe that gave the rule of Peshwas in Pune.

Kalmadi may not have been a pure soul but the reputation of a "touch of sin" suited his happy, if seemingly mischievous personality. Kalmadi was alright for me because of this, since I have always been suspicious of saints, if only because of the heavy influence of catholic saints during my Roman Catholic and Society of Jesus learning days.

I have only heard or perhaps even read about his rise to prominence. It seems that at the time (during the mergency) when Indira Gandhi was being looked upon as a villain by the moralirty brigade of the middle class, Suresh Kalmadi ventured to lead a protest in front of the caravan which was taking Indira Gandhi to jail after the emergency and when the government of the very "immaculately" moral Morarji Desai came to power. I liked Kalmadi's spunk at that time because I thought it was extremely unfair the way the JP movement was created to destabilize the Indira Gandhi government with the help of the courts and the bad reputation of Sanjay Gandhi. I also lernt to my surprise, that he was a pilot in the airforce which he gave up to join public life. He always gave the impression of being a gutsy man, including the time after his recent arrest when he tried to be as composed as he could be. I think he was well composed.

One really cannot say that one is so honest that one feels uncomfortable with a sinner. I, for one, am very uncomfortable with saints who speak like saints. Sri sri Ravi Shankar comes to mind as such an uncomfortable saint for me simply because, perhaps, of his alligator smile. Swami Ramdev does not. Ramdev does give hints of forgiving sins. One may be sadder but also, happily, a little wiser for the sinful experience. I am perhaps influenced by the song of by Professor Harold Hill in "The Music Man" (which I saw in my formative early twenties) when he sings (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PujvRmxvtao) the "Sadder and Wiser Girl for me"
No wide-eyed, eager,
Wholesome innocent Sunday school teacher for me.
That kinda girl spins webs no spider ever--
----
No golden, glorious, gleaming pristine goddess--
No sir!
-----
I flinch, I shy, when the lass with the delicate air goes by
I smile, I grin, when the gal with a touch of sin walks in.

The sadder-but-wiser girl's the girl for me.


I really dont know what corruption means. After all, honesty is something that is different for different environments. Was Robin Hood dishonest? After all, the pindaris plundered for the good of their tribes and for their Maratha rulers. The 2G policy helped the poor man by making the service cheaper and indirectly helped the mobile providers by increasing their sales of mobiles.

An answer that would satisy most (answers.com) is that corruption is "dishonest exploitation of power for personal gain". One does not define what the power is. Financial? Political? Spiritual? Sexual? Poetic? Literary? Patent? physical?.

Can one ever make money for personal gain or otherwise without exploiting the skills of others?

There are people who make money all the time for reasons they themselves may not understand, be they engineers, scientists, yoga teachers, musicians and other artists. I have no complaints against them. They would be good in almost anything.

I am personally a small-time sinner by choice not only because I could have a nervous breakdown if I was confused as a saint of the George Washington kind, but also simply because it is impossible for me to imagine spending a good evening in the company of people who takes pleasure in making money to be stored in Swiss or Seychelles banks for the benefits of the Swiss or the Seychellians. As far as I imagine, the most boring part of an evening with them would be their complete lack of original taste. I am just a petty swindler of the heart-broken kind.

There are various other less tolerable ways of making money. There is bakshish money which you get for services rendered. You can get it as a bearer in a hotel, for a waiter in a restautant, for a pimp to a prostitute of different kinds, sexual or non-, for a courier to an arms dealer, for a prime minister of a banana country, for being a supari killer in various ways which need not include real killing, for being a purohit to a godman or being a TV anchor in a channel with political motives, or maoist revolutionaries who are used to trade in arms with the help of trade in narcotics.

Will I judge the goodness of the much venerated late Sai Baba from his wealth of 40,000 crores and the hospitals he has provided rather than the actual methods by which he has accumulated his wealth. Will I judge the saintliness of Shri Shri Ravi Shankar by his "Art of Living" which appeals to the large majority of people who do not live unless they are told what the living is in simple attractive terms.

Or will I just go by their facial characteristics?

In the picture below there are four godmen of the conventional kind, while the cigar-smoking Castro is another kind of god. Of these six pictures, the conventional godmen have their right eye smaller (left eye as seen by the reader) than their left eye. The right eye is controlled by the more analytic left brain. By this analysis the godmen must be doing considerable analysis besides getting their spontaneous spiritual revelations. Castro and Kalmadi have balanced eyes. Castro's has the happiest image with a touch of sin. Castro's influence worldwide is perhaps the most dominant in my opinion, though I have not actually sat down and counted.

Among the godmen above only the Saibaba did not participate in the democracy-targeting anti-corruption movement. Perhaps it was because he did not have a beard? Were the bearded godmen more corrupt because they did encourage anti parliamentary democracy?

Politicians have their left eyes of the same size as their right eyes. I suppose they have either given up scheming or given up their analytic mind. If they were worried about their image, I guess their left eye (right eye to the viewer) would have shrunk. It seems to do so for Mayawati. For Kiran Bedi both her left brain is calculating and her right brain is worried about her image, or she is looking into the sun.


People who act seem to have a very good balance between their left and right eyes showing an wholesome balance between their left- and right-brain activity. If at all their right eye seems to be more uncertain showing perhaps their concern about their overall image (in my analysis)

The conclusion that I seem to have got at is judging by the way people look at the camera the godmen are the more complicated personalities and more difficult to be taken at their face value than the politician or the actor who become successful for their clean image.

Like the cockroach, corrupt methods have survived the whole of history and religion. It serves as the negative space to project the goodness of people. The morality that judges goodness is a social imposition for controlling/manipulating human behaviour, even if populations of other animals do not have preachers --- except, that their rogue animals have some of the strongest personalities and their queen bees get the largest following.

The Andre Agassi look-alike and "uplifting" science-fiction writer, David Brin, is quoted on the network as “It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.”. I agree with this perhaps, not only because I think I am sane. It is something like saying people who get cancer are attracted to smoking because of their tension-filled lifestyles; this used to be my rebuttal of the relation between tobacco and cancer when I smoked cigarettes. Now I just fume in anger?

It is a truism in India that it is alright to be corrupt as long as there is something to show that benefits the ordinary man, especially those who do not have the opportunity to be corrupt.

Kalmadi's staunch supporters after his arrest are probably not from the local brahmin or maratha community. One of his more vocal supporter is one Ramesh Bagwe who is from the indigeneous (non-Brahmin) dalit community who correctly observed "Kalmadi is innocent and nobody can call him a criminal until proven guilty in the court of law.". Another loyal supporter is Rajani Tribhuvan, former mayor in the Pune Municipal Council, who is reported to have said "We are in a democratic country and nobody can stop us from supporting our leader. If need be, I shall hit the street for Kalmadi, who made, a Dalit woman like me, the mayor of the city."

At what stage does one say that one is corrupt and to what quantifiable degree?

As per school catechism class, I was told of sins of commission and sins of omission. Sins of commission are sins (by ten commandment standards) that you have committed that you should not have. The sins of commissions are good things that you should have done but have failed to do. Of these the sins of omission are the less sinful and may be forgiven.

Forgive me O Lord the man was dying on the street after a bus ran over him but I could not help him because I was late. That would be a sin of omission and you will be forgiven.

Forgive me O Lord, the man was a commission agent breaking up my ancestros' village landscape built over many generations simply because he had a legal right to develop it. So we damaged his bulldozer. That is a sin of commission. You will be punished.

In organized Mafia of any kind (political, financial, religious, scientific, medical) the sins of commission and omission are slightly different. You got a commission and you left us out of it. That is a sin of omission and you will get your supari!

I think as far as execution of public projects where there are sins of commission which require being overlooked. It has been said that Sreedhar would not have finished the Delhi metro project had he not committed himself in various ways. I also think in running an International Games in a country with the seeming disparateness that prevents an outwardly smooth functioning without an insider commitment (such as the Delhi Development Authority), is near impossible.

Kalmadi's most serious shortcoming as far as his role in Maharashtra is perhaps the fact that the established Maharashtrians of Pune did not benefit directly from his rule. Kalmadi rose up the ranks to be head of several important international sports organization because of a credibility in organizing events and a needed pliability in the context of the international requirements when a sporting event is sold as a franchise to various countries. Olympic Associations are notorious for extracting their profits through their franchises for various sporting and commercial goods at the expense of hosting nations --- as China and Greece have discovered.

In the real commercial world, the olympics movement has little to do with healthy minds in healthy bodies. Kalmadi as president of the Indian Olympic association has to keep the interests of the International Olympics Committee in mind especially if he is interested in getting the Olympic Games to India. In the book The Olympic games: a social science perspective" by Toohey and Veal (p 128) there is something about the way the Olypmics programme that isextracted below (click to expand):

At the bottom of the extract is the relevant section on the Omega company which Kalmadi has been accused of favouring. It might have seemed to Kalmadi that if he rejects Omega who have developed (http://www.sportaserviss.lv/files/varia/DOCU_ST_Present1_E.pdf) the entire timing-scoring relevant to the olympic and other games, the chances of the olympic games being held in India would have been jeopardised. Kalmadi would have been perfectly right in thinking so just as Manmohan Singh would have been perfectly right in supporting American interests following Montek Singh Ahluwallia's arguments.

It seems that even if there is a considerable amount of publicity given to the alleged loss of revenue of ~ 100 crores on the Timing-Scoring deal the actual deal for which the CBI seems to have found evidence for is that " AM Films in London was hired in September 2009 to provide services like taxis and public-display television screens for the Queen's Baton Relay which kickstarted the Commonwealth Games."

Kalmadi had written earlier that the relay "... was approved by the executive board including a budget of Rs. 13.13 crore. OC has incurred an expense of Rs. 5.75 crore only." The actual eventual loss as estimated by the most honest would have been about 1.5 crore!

Kalmadi was arrested for theft of all things! The amount involved in the corruption would have been less than the price of the Audi in which he drove down to the CBI office. The actual swindling discrepancy in the relay deal was probably less than the annual salary of a middle rank IT office man and the monthly salary of a middle level CEO.

The amount of theft Kalmadi has been charged with must have been the most humiliating aspect of this case for Kalmadi. Its like being charged with the theft of a candy from my grand-daughter's lunch box, even if my grand-daughter is a lovely dog.

There has been a concerted effort to discredit Kalmadi. Compared to the 100,000 crore rupes scam it started with, it has finally boiled down to less than 0.005% of that amount. Who is behind this effort is not clear.

On the other hand, every body knows that Olympic Games are run for the image of the country even if it incurs a considerable loss. The Chinese spent more than 50 billion dollars at a huge financial loss and considerable national prestige. The Greece made equally impressive losses and squandered their prestige later.

The Commonwealth Games would have added to the national prestige. To do this one could have well understood if some corners were cut given the fact that two successive sports ministers were as as keen as any saboteur to sabotage the games or its organizers.

The national TV channels seemed to be hell bent in destroying any chance at getting any prestige and did not bother to conceal their happiness at every withdrawal of evry important athlete. Wasn't this sabotage a grossly corrupt practice that lowered the nation's prestige just so that it would hit Kalmadi?

The enthusiasm with which Ajay Maken is getting rid of Suresh Kalmadi without aiming for any verdict of guilt from a court immediately suggests, after a little research, that the bigwigs of Delhi --- probably Shiela Dixit herself --- would like to use Kalmadi as a scapegoat (see my blog : The CWG Syndrome in the Bt Brinjal: Part I. Commonwealth Games of 22 sept 2010).

In my (outsider) opinion, this anti-Kalmadi effort must have been orchestrated by those, among others, who think Kalmadi does not belong to their community. Maybe it is the Rahul Gandhi camp which has taken note of the Sanjay Gandhi connection of Kalmadi and would like to rid Pune of this influence. Maybe Sharad Pawar and his nephew Ajit Pawar, who have been so manytimes denied control of Pune municipality because of Kalmadi, that they seized this opportunity to damage Kalmadi.

Who knows?!

Kalmadi would know. He had stopped belonging.

The Kalmadis from Tulunad are a highly respected and ancient scholarly family from Mangalore (see http://www.daijiworld.com/chan/exclusive_arch.asp?ex_id=1421&ex_title=Kalmadi+Footprints+in+Mangalore). Shamarao Kalmadi, father of Suresh Kalmadi, located to Pune via Bombay. The Karnatka High School of Pune is now named after Kalmadi's father and is one of the better schools of Pune. Suresh Kalmadi must have been a lively young man when he joined the airforce, earned his medals, set up a fast food shop in Deccan, met Sanjay Gandhi and became a Congressman, although I am not sure of the sequence.

The sorry point emerging from all this is that Kalmadi has been given a bad name and is being hanged because he does not belong.

Since the time I came to Pune, I have seen Kalmadi in various public functions on TV and even in Public in the Deccan Queen or some train travelling a little boisterously but merrily with his normal middle class family. Kalmadi came across as a jolly man. His phsique dteriorated with time and he wobbled and panted quite a bit when he ran, say, with the torch for the commonwealth games. I noticed that he had shaped up considerably for the better for the opening of the commonwealth games' opening ceremony. He actually made an effort to run up the steps.

We focus on corruption in the same way as we focus on god. We dont know what we exactly mean by corruption just as we dont know exactly what we mean by god, except that we think, without any evidence, that god cannot be corrupt.

The face-book well endowed protestors who think they are the ones who brought justice to Kalmadi maybe, by their ignorance of real motives, be doing a disservice to those from the aam aadmi who "... do some of the hardest work ... who grow our food, run our factories, and fight our wars ... who did not attend Harvard, Princeton or Yale don't drink lattes, have colonics, "do lunch," pay someone to walk our dog, or frighten our children with "green" ... environmental propaganda." This is from an article in praise of Sarah Palin with reference to the "Silent Majority" of America. I am no supporter of Palin but I am definitely a supporter of the notion that the dangerous people are the °self-appointed brainy and cerebral" followers of the moral brigade who pose the biggest threat when they act beyond their awareness.

Youth who protest a lot on a common platform should be aware of Nitezsche's warning:
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”

Should America be afraid of G. K. Chesterton?

The title of this blog is derived from Edward Albee's play "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf" Virginia Woolf is an author who writes to remove illusions about the upper class. She does not actually appear in the play. It is her spirit that is reflected in the play.

What the title could mean is whether America should be afraid of G. K. Chesterton's revelations on America.

When as a teen-age child, studying in a Roman-Catholic school in Madras (set up for the orphans of the British Army, during their early colonial days) and following the Cambridge exmination system, we had for our examples of essays, the writings of sevral English essayists. One of them was G. K. Chesterton, whose style of writing was one that my elder brother liked and we followed in liking GKC. I remember one essay which caught my attention and cast (at least partly) my philosophy towards life. The essay of more than a hundred years (1909) ago is titled "The Advantages of having One Leg"

Now, in the age of the internet, I could find this essay easily. The first line of the essay struck me at that time. It was: A friend of mine who was visiting a poor woman in bereavement and casting about for some phrase of consolation that should not be either insolent or weak, said at last, "I think one can live through these great sorrows and even be the better. What wears one is the little worries." "That's quite right, mum," answered the old woman with emphasis, "and I ought to know, seeing I've had ten of 'em."

The modern world is plagued by the little worries. The biggest countries are plagued the most. As GKC wrote within the next few sentence "But I am afraid that the maxim that the smallest worries are the worst is sometimes used or abused by people, becasue they have nothing but the very smallest worries."

In this same essay GKC would write: To appreciate anything we must always isolate it, even if the thing itself symbolises something other than isolation. ... ... One Tower of Giotto is sublime; a row of Towers of Giotto would be only like a row of white posts. The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping the single star. And so, in the same pensive lucidity, I find the poetry of all human anatomy in standing on a single leg. To express complete and perfect leggishness the leg must stand in sublime isolation, like the tower in the wilderness. As Ibsen so finely says, the strongest leg is that which stands most alone.

GKC wrote this essay when his legs were " ... unequally balanced, the helplessness or dislocation of the one leg may find compensation in the astonishing strength and classic beauty of the other leg." In this body of nations which is our world, a weak (say, by material standards) country would be a weak leg which would admire the strong one. Supposing two countries were strong, and the body "... had really two legs. Two legs were superfluous and irrelevant, a reflection, and a confusion. ... ... That having had one good leg he should have another--this would be to use vain repetitions as the Gentiles do. She (Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson in Mr. George Meredith's novel) would have been as much bewildered by him as if he had been a centipede.

America is perhaps now worrying whether there is a second leg growing strong, when it could imminently lose it eminence, if it has not done so already.

Many years later (middle 1990s) in Pune I found a tattered old copy of Chesterton's book "What I saw in America" in a shop that buys old printed matter and sells them to those who would make pulp out of them for more profitable purposes, such as packing boxes, or cardboard (not toilet paper). Among these printed matter are books read by older people when they were younger, and now sold as "raddi" (scrap) by weight. The book did not look great but it was a treasure for me. I always thought, since I started blogging, that I should examine parts of the book in my blogs in the context of what I now think of America and which would naturally be different from Lala Lajpat Rai's (1916) book "The United States of America: A hindu's Impressions and a Study" (found in the same book shop).



I have not done it because there were other more trivial things (such as my science and other blogs) to handle. After extracting by hand the material for the blog from the book, I now find that the book is on the net and can be read by anyone who cares to.

I persist nevertheless, since the comments are my own. I have used, for this blog only the first chapter on "What is America?". This is the viewpoint of one of the best minds of Britain at a time when England was at its intellectual best and deserved its reputation of it being the capital of the Western World! It is another matter that the Western World thought itself to be the whole world.

I will give some extracts (in italics) from this first chapter and add my comments in normal font. The emphasis will, of course, be on GKC's ways of putting things across. As for the answer to the title of the blog, it is left to the reader. You can huff and you can puff, but you will still hope that the house is not blown down.

When I went to to the American consulate to regularise my passports, I was capable of expecting the American consulate to be American. Embassies and consulates are by tradition like islands of the soil for which they stand; and I have often finding the tradition corresponding to a truth. I have seen the unmistakable French official living on omelettes and a little wine and serving his sacred abstractions under the last palm-trees fringing a desert…. The officials I interviewed were very American, especially in being very polite ; for whatever may have been the mood or meaning of Martin Chuzzlewit, I have always found Americans by far the politest people in the world. They put in my hands a form to be filled up … it as very different from any form I had ever filed up in my life. ….

According to Wikipedia "The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (commonly known as Martin Chuzzlewit) is a novel serialized between 1843-1844 by Charles Dickens which he himself proclaimed ... to be his best work ... Dickens changed the plot to send the title character to America ... to portray the United States (which he had visited in 1842) satirically as a near wilderness with pockets of civilization filled with deceptive and self-promoting hucksters. This book is also available from Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/968/pg968.txt). Dickens would write in the preface of the book "The American portion of this story is in no other respect a caricature than as it is an exhibition, for the most part ... of a ludicrous side, ONLY, of the American character--of that side which was, four-and-twenty years ago, from its nature, the most obtrusive, and the most likely to be seen." In the 1868 postscript he would write "to declare how astounded I have been by the amazing changes I have seen around me on every side--changes moral, changes physical, changes in the amount of land subdued and peopled, changes in the rise of vast new cities, changes in the growth of older cities almost out of recognition, changes in the graces and amenities of life, changes in the Press, without whose advancement no advancement can take place anywhere."

This was three years after Lincoln's assasination.

Securing an American visa for an Indian in independent India is another matter from what GKC experienced. I dont know if one has to still come to the embassy office early in the morning and stand on pavements till the gate is opened by security guards who think they have to be more American than the Americans themselves. One also cannot blame the American embassy official who have no particular reason to be considerate considering what they see as hoards of applicants each one of whom consider themselves as special individuals and nod their heads as ambidextrously and ambiguously to ordinary questions which they perceive as being double entendres.

It is amusing that in my first visit to America, I found a piece of India in a place called Hindustan, (with three dwellings at that time, and pronounced by the local resident as Ind-houston) in Monroe County, Indiana. There is a Hindustan Christian Church there established in 1852(http://www.apertome.com/blog/2007/04/). I think we drove down the old state with some of my younger aquaintances (now lost in some science wilderness) to see the place and ended up with a photo of myself there. Hindustan, Indiana, could be the first Non-Resident India in America as distinct from the hordes of proudly American Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) there telling us Resident Indians what is wrong with India.


Dickens satirical novel on Chuzzlewit family is about their selfishness. This selfishness comes from a life of denial so that one cannot but deny others not only what they have, but also to deny others the opportunity to have what they have just in case the newly rich will be denied the pleasure of conspicuously consuming, since it will not be conspicuous otherwise. In America this selfishness has been regenerated with every wave of immigrants of different ethnic colours.

One of the questions on the paper was, “Are you an anarchist?” … Then there was the question “Are you in favour of subverting the government of United States by force?” Against this I should write “I prefer to answer that question at the end of the tour and not at the beginning.” The inquisitor, in his more than morbid curiosity had then written down, “Are you a polygamist?” … I like to think of the foreign desperado, seeking to slip into America with official papers under official protection, and sitting down to write with a beautiful gravity, “I am an anarchist. I hate you all and wish to destroy you.” Or … “Yes, I am a polygamist all right, and my forty seven wives are accompanying me on the voyage disguised as secretaries.” .. it is reassuring to know that anarchists and polygamists are so pure and good that the police have only to ask them questions and they are certain to tell no lies.

I don't know whether they ask these questions now. In the modern era they dont have to ask questions to track a man's affair. Even close to 1970s, when a friend of mine came back from his visit to the United States, he was greeted back home through a letter from the United States Information Service (USIS), Madras (at that time). How and why did the USIS keep track of my friend so well?

Paul, that was his first name, and I wanted to protest against the Mao-Tse-Tung following wing of communists protesting against the Americans in Vietnam while the Chinese themselves had attacked India. They were to make this protest in front of the USIS. We didn't want to show we supported US policies on Vietnam nor did we want to be seen as supporting the Communist support for China. We had worn aprons of newspapers on which we had written ambiguous slogans such as (I forget the actual slogans) "Long live Chinese Imperialism" and "Down with American Revisionism" (Chinese had used the term revisionism for marxists such as Russians who deviated from marxist premises) and stood in front of the USIS building late ion the evening (near dusk) when the procession reached USIS. We were held firmly by plain clothesmen --- they really had a firm grip by which one understood immediately the authority --- and whisked away from the scene. This was fortunate because the communists were interested in an incident which would have given them more publicity. The police informed us the next day that our lives could have been in danger.

Chesterton did not find the questions laughable. "A man is perfectly entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh at it as incomprehensible, and then criticize it as if he comprehended it."

He would explain his reasons later, but not before he said some more things.

".. I have stood on the other side of Jordan, in the land ruled by a rude Arab chief, where the police looked so like brigands that one wondered what the brigands looked like. But they did not ask me whether I had come to subvert the power of the Shereef; … It would be esy to argue that Western democracy persecutes where even Eastern despotism tolerates of emancipates. …It would be easy to develop the fancy that compared with the sultans of Turkey or Egypt, the American constitution is a thing like the Spanish Inquisition."

I suppose Chesterton would have looked at the likes of the Israeli cabinet (Israel was not there at that time) occupying Arab land now and would have wondered why the European Jews were there in the first place controlling over the Arabs. He could have also looked at Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat and others and wondered whether a monarchy, or a democracy, or a dictatorship would have been more preferable to the Hegemony of NATO or Israel. Chesterton had written in the preface to his book "The New Jerusalem" To talk of the Jews always as the oppressed and never as the oppressors is simply absurd; it is as if men pleaded for reasonable help for exiled French aristocrats or ruined Irish landlords, and forgot that the French and Irish peasants had any wrongs at all. I am sure GKC's ideas of fairplay would have required some re-examination. He would also write in the same book: "And the burden of it is the burden of Palestine; the narrowness of the boundaries and the stratification of the rock. A voice not of my reason but rather sounding heavily in my heart, seemed to be repeating sentences like pessimistic proverbs. There is no place for the Temple of Solomon but on the ruins of the Mosque of Omar. There is no place for the nation of the Jews but in the country of the Arabs. ... I felt almost a momentary impulse to flee from the place, like one who has received an omen. For two voices had met in my ears; and within the same narrow space and in the same dark hour, electric and yet eclipsed with cloud, I had heard Islam crying from the turret and Israel wailing at the wall."

It may have seemed something less than a compliment to compare the American Constitution to the Spanish Inquisition. But oddly enough, it does involve a truth; and still more oddly perhaps it involves a compliment…America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed.. … It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority for that reason is just. … The Spanish Inquisition might be admittedly Inquisitorial; but the Spanish Inquisition could not be merely Spanish. Such a Spaniard, even when he was narrower than his own creed, had to be broader than his own empire.

He might burn a philosopher because he was heterodox; but he might accept a barbarian because he was orthodox.. … the same Church which is blamed for making sages heretics is also blamed for making savages priests.

It does not seem that Chesterton was being mischievous when he wrote about the American vision that all men are equal in the same breath as the Spanish Inquisition (intended to maintain Catholic orthodoxy among those who had converted to the Catholic faith from Judaism and Islam and thereby break away from Papal control; I still don't know what it has to do with Higgins shouting "I'd prefer a new edition Of the Spanish Inquisition Than to ever let a woman in my life"). The Spanish Inquisition was ostensibly to safeguard the Spanish King from the intentions of the Pope by adding new converts to his side. The Americans have used the democracy card as an orthodoxy card for their democratic religious which protect democratic institutions that they recognise as democratic. We Indians do not figure in that list as we are not banana ripe enough perhaps.

There is something of the same idea at the back of the great American experiment; the experiment of a democracy of diverse races which hs been compared to a melting pot. …. The melting pot must not melt…. America invites all men to become citizens; but it implies the dogma that there is such a thing as citizenship … The missionary can condemn a cannibal, precisely because he cannot condemn a Sandwich islander. …. The American may exclude a polygamist, precisely because he cannot exclude a Turk.

When we realize the democratic designs of such a cosmopolitan commonwealth, and compare it with our insular reliance or instincts, we see at once why such a thing has to be not only democratic but dogmatic. … Suppose somebody said, “Do let me bring Colonel Robinson down for the weekend; he’s a bit of a crank but quite interesting.” We should not anticipate the colonel running amuck with a carving knife … for these are not among the daily habits of an old English colonel; … If somebody wished to add a Hairy Ainu to the family party at Christmas, we should want to know a little more about it and him. … Is the Hiry Ainu content with hair, or does he wear any clothes? … In short as in the American formula, is he an anarchist?

The Americans are very patriotic, and wish to make their new citizens patriotic Americans. In a word, what is not unique is not America, but what is called Americanization. … And the process, … is not internationalization. It would be truer to say it is the nationalization of the internationalized. It is making a home out vagabonds and a nation out of exiles.

There is an outbreak of Democratic Institutions in the Arab lands by agents of mass-media-control such as Facebook and twitter, who proclaim themselves to be instant agents of freedom from governmental control which can always be found to be corrupt. This movement is only against government corruption and has nothing about corruption at private level. In India there is the real danger of the Lokpal movement becoming something like an inquisition. Either you subscribe to the lokpal or we will fast unto death against you, if you are in the government. Private corruption does not come into their agenda even if they are members of the lokpal drafting committee. In the Spanish Inquisition, there is an accusation and a denunciation during which the property of the accused is either confiscated or used to pay for expenses. The lokpal may end up doing the same.

Americans have nationalities at the end of the street which for us are at the ends of the earth. …. The Declaration of Independence is something that is not only absent from the British Constitution, but something which all our constitutionalists have invariably thanked God, with the jolliest boasting and bragging, that they had kept out of the British Constitution. It is the thing called abstraction or academic logic. It is the thing which such jolly people call theory; and those who can practice it call thought. And the theory or thought is the very last to which English people are accustomed … . It is thetheory of equality. It is the pure classic conception that no man must aspire to be anything more than a citizen, and that no man should endure to be anything less. ...

The word "Americanization" appears in the title of one of the better movies "The Americanization of Emily" that I have seen so far. With all the TV and media images of successive American wars for protecting its democracy, and its counter suicide bombing, the phrase "horrors of war" has ceased to impress as an horror but seems to serves more as a titillation ("there are some disturbing images") for TV channels. The movie itself is about an English driver Emily who, during the war, "... despite losing her father, brother, husband and several cousins to war, it takes the tragic and wholly unnecessary death of her new lover for Emily to realize the imprudence of her idealism, for her to become "Americanized." (see http://www.lewrockwell.com/gee/gee10.html) This loss of faith in lofty ideals is not the Americanization that Chesterton had in mind, I guess. His Americanization, "home out of vagabonds and nation out of exiles" instead describes a loss of another ideal ... that of loss of identity with any other nation or culture but that of the American.

Towards the end of this first Chapter of his book "What I see In America" does some introspection on the actual realities and the illusion which I include, suppressing all desires to comment. The text is eloquent.

The realities are quite another matter, and we shall consider … whether the ideal will be able to shape the realities or will merely be beaten shapeless by them. … But citizenship is still the American ideal; there is an army of actualities opposed to that ideal; but there is no ideal opposed to that ideal. … He need not set himself to develop equality, but he need not set himself to misunderstand it. … He may at least be a philosopher and see that equality is an idea; and not merely one of those soft-headed skeptics who, having risen by low tricks to high places, drink bad champagne in tawdry hotel lounges, and tell ech other twnty times over, with unwearied iteration, that equality is an illusion.

In truth it is inequality that is the illusion. The extreme disproportion between men, that we seem to see in life, is a thing of changing lights, and lengthening shadows, a twilight full of fancies and distortions. ... We find a man famous and cannot live long enough to find him forgotten; we see a race dominant and cannot linger to see it decay. It is the experience of man that always returns to the equality of men; ... It is when men have seen and suffered much ... that they see men as men under an equal light of death and daily laughter. ...

For veritably, in the spirit as well as in the symbol, suns and moons and meteors pass and fill our skies with a fleeting and almost theatrical conflagration; and whenever the old shadow stoops upon the earth the stars return.

The last two lines should be the ephemeral that mighty nations don't discover until they have lost their egos. Indian mindsets aim at being ego-less like a true old civilization.

The return of a new Gandhi could generate the desired Americanization of the Indian youth who perceive themselves to be more equal than some others.


In his essay "Tremendous Trifles" Chesterton would write "I have my doubts about all this real value in mountaineering, in getting to the top of everything and overlooking everything. Satan was the most celebrated of Alpine guides, when he took Jesus to the top of an exceeding high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth. But the joy of Satan in standing on a peak is not a joy in largeness, but a joy in beholding smallness, in the fact that all men look like insects at his feet. It is from the valley that things look large; it is from the level that things look high; I am a child of the level and have no need of that celebrated Alpine guide. I will lift up my eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help; but I will not lift up my carcass to the hills, unless it is absolutely necessary. Everything is in an attitude of mind; and at this moment I am in a comfortable attitude. I will sit still and let the marvels and the adventures settle on me like flies. There are plenty of them, I assure you. The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

I subscribe to this view. I am an ancient civilization.

Lokpal II: Fasting Pastimes

On Fasting in General.

Most of us are not corrupt. We take comfort in sayings such as “What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul.”
Some of the times it is perhaps because we are too lazy to "gain the whole world".
Some of the times we don't have an opportunity to be corrupt.

Fasting against corruption is a matter we think we understand because no gain is involved esecially if one is not fasting for a public cause oneself. We prefer others to do it perhaps for the same reason that we are not corrupt.

It is good for our soul, or so we think, which would be enough.

Fasting regularly is one of the more common eating habits especially when we are not corrupt.

We do it to also purify our digestive tracts (for which we can find solid if not concrete evidence) along with our soul (which we don't really know where it is) most times.

What is interesting is that, for those who are able to afford it, the fasting menu is quite rich and rather tasty. Fasting of the starving kind is not what one has in mind when we Indians conjure up images of fasting.

Moreover. fasting food in India need not kill one faster than fast food.

The British were probably of the type who, like me, were impressed by voluntary fasting, which they may have misunderstood, as I did, as voluntary starving. It is amusing to think that the clever Krishna-like Gandhi may have known about this when he threatened the British with a fast.

All but one of his fasts were under British rule.

His last fast was after Independence --- in January 1948 --- for seeking communal peace in Delhi which resulted in a peace pledge between the communities after six days when he gave up his fast. One community which knew about fasting food perhaps could not stand Gandhi using fasting as a tool against his own community.

So why does one believe that one is going to fast unto death?

For one, as Gandhi himself said, "You must be the change you wish to see in the world."Martin Luther King, Jr. seems to have said " If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live." Most of us would say that that's what we do in any case: to spend our life till our death.

There is a difference, of course. Both the Indian and American Gandhi's were killed for their beliefs. That is what they meant perhaps. To oppose by their examples those who they thought were oppressive to such an extent that they (the Gandhis) had to be killed by those they opposed. They did not need to fast to die for their cause.

For a fast to be effective, one must be judged by the way one wears the Gandhi cap.

When Gladys in Dorian Gray says “… all good hats are made out of nothing”. Lord Henry interrupts with (with perhaps the same logic that gives Newton’s third law): “Like all good reputations, Gladys ….Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.”

What the author means by "mediocrity" is not clear since the author is Oscar Wilde. What is probably meant is that one must have a simple common perception regrding weaknesses which are easily identifiable.

Gandhi's Experiments with Fasting.

Gandhi fasted several times for less than seven days mostly. In keeping with Lord Henry's observations about falling in love mentioned earlier, each time Gandhi fasted, the effect of his fasts had greater intensity.

Gandhi's fasting was rarely tagged as a political weapon but rather as one for "upliftment of the soul" if one may call it that.

It is difficult, however, to realize that Gandhi, idolized by all, could set unreasonably high "upliftment" standards for his own family! His first fast was for seven days against his own son who kissed a teenage girl in Gandhi's neighbourhood in Phoenix, Durban. Gandhi himself may not have understood the urges of a teenager as he was married when he was only thirteen. However, as a result "Manilal’s actions were always tempered by the fact that Gandhi would punish himself through fasting when displeased with his actions."(from "Gandhi's Prisoner: Manilal Gandhi as Son and South African Dissident" by Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie).

Gandhi must have learnt from this unreasonable act. He probably thought, because of his son's reaction, that he required becoming a Father figure for the Indian Nation.

His first fasting for the nation's problems was perhaps by accident. The textile labourers in Ahmedabad were paid poorly and Gandhi organized a strike by them demanding a 35% increase in wages. The strike was about to be broken because the striking workers agreed to a proposal of a 20% wage increase. The impression (true) was spread that Gandhi belonged to people who 'come and go in their car' and 'eat elegant food' without knowing the agonies of starving. It was then that Gandhi came up ('unbidden and all by themselves the words came to my lips' Gandhi would write unconvincingly in his autobiography later) with “I cannot tolerate for a minute that you break your pledge. I shall not take any food nor use a car till you get a 35 percent increase.” This was Gandhi, the fast-thinker.

In 1919 when he was at the Sabarmati ashram far away for the Jalianwallah Bagh massacre, he did a penitential fast in for three days in Ashram claiming an exaggerated 52,000 deaths. He saw his opportunity of abjuring violence as a method of protest (and perhaps to neutralize Subhash Chandra Bose) and also perhaps to ensure among the British rulers that he was the more reasonable person. He fasted for five days after the Chauri Chaura incident of 5 February 1922 when 21 constables and a sub-inspector were burnt alive inside the police station. He began a 21 day fast in 1924 for Hindu-Muslim amity, when he "... took upon himself the sins of his Hindu and Muslim compatriots ..." .

Gandhi was also against the reservation system when he started his first “fast unto death” in 1932 to demand an abolition of a separate electorate for Harijans (a name given to them by Gandhi, which meant actually that the childen of god would be untouchables in India). This demand for a separate electorate was from Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a graduate from Columbia University who adopted the suited and booted dress of the upper class so that the voice of the untouchables would be heard, probably as a reaction to Gandhi who would adopt the dress of the poor so that the poor would identify with him. After six days of fasting the British Government accepted Gandhi's demands.

It would seem that Gandhi went on the fast track when he had to change mindsets more than obtaining a political objectives.

Did Potti Sriramulu have to die?

Post Independence, Potti Sriramulu actually fasted for fifty-eight days to death demanding a separate state of Andhra, even though Nehru agreed to his demands after fifty days of fasting.

Who benefited by this death? Did his death serve the purpose of those who had prepared themselves for this eventuality?

After Potti Sriramulu's death, violence was fanned vigorously by Communist ambitions. It is claimed that it was this violene that hastened the formation of the new Andhra Pradesh. It was the first state to be formed based solely on linguistic considerations. The Telugu-speaking Andhra Pradesh contained the Telugu-speaking Telangana region also.

Subsequent events show that while fasting can bring about a result, it is not always a desired result for many others. Andhra Pradesh was initially formed with Kurnool as its capital. The poorer Telengana region felt betrayed when its capital, Hyderabad, was made the capital of the integrated Andhra Pradesh. The people of the Telengana region felt always alienated from the richer Andhra regions. Now, we have a Telangana leader (KCR) fasting-unto-death (for a short while) demanding a Telangana state.

Anna Hazare (Anna could be the equivalent for dada in bengali which usually means an elder brother whom you respect) is a different person. He should be especially followed for his work that began in 1975 on creating a model village based on using traditional methods for water conservation, grazing land management and improving the environment of the barren drought-prone village, Ralegan Siddhi, in Ahmednagar, Maharashtra. It is this that brought him into prominence and resulted in introducing different Model Village schemes in his state.

He did not have to fast for this. He did it by example.

We have many things to learn from Anna Hazare and his "model village" development. He was a simple army driver who had to return to his barren village. He fought against desolation and was influence by saffron-dressed Swami Vivekananda to resurrect himself and his village.

He has also a very impressive record in his fight against corruption. He started in 1995 when he perhaps thought that the new BJP-Shiv-Sena government of Maharashtra would be more amenable. He started his fight for rights to information (RTI) struggle in 1998 by observing maun or silence which to many would be more difficult than fasting. He won his RTI fight after he successfully used his fasting strategy in August 2003 to get overwhelming popular support for RTI. It was conceded after 12 days of fasting.

I worry about his simple background and the way he may be molded or may have been influenced by the modern media-savvy spirits.

The ordinary people of Maharashtra remain very hard working with little time to be corrupt. Maharashtra was the first state to pass the Lok Ayukta bill in 1972, and the first state to get the RTI act which was passed for the entire nation.

But those who have the time, inclination and the money use it to their full advantaqe giving Maharashtra the reputation of being the most corrupt state. So much so that their most powerful politician, Sharad Pawar, had to sit out of the government committee on Lok Pal as a first condition.

In the meanwhile it is perhaps important to know amongst the hoopla of the fight against corruption by self-elevated giant spiritual leaders there were seven relative dwarfs: the seven Gandhians included six freedom fighters (they would have been less than thirty when Gandhi was shot). These were: Shambhu Dutta (92 years, has been trying to introduce the Lokpal bill for the past 15 years), R. Saradamani Devi (84 years), K.P. Sahu (79 years), Murari Lal Gupta (94 years), Govind Narain Seth (78 years) and Amarnath Khanna (89 years).

We wonder where they were positioned, if they were positioned at all, before the TV cameras.

Lokpal I: Corruption in the Fast track

One of the truisms that always brings out a chuckle even if you have heard it zillion times is “Giving up smoking is very easy, I have given it up several times”.

It reminds me of (I don’t know why; perhaps it could eventually find a place in this blog) what Lord Henry said in Oscar Wilde’s “Picture of Dorian Gray” :”Each time one loves is the only time one has ever loved, each time with increasing intensity” modifying a bit Lord Henry's addition “Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it.” So when some one, say Bertram Wooster, professes love for someone and she says “you must have loved a million girls before” or something like that Bertram Wooster could have said “But Darling! The intensity of love is a million times more than that for my first love”. I do not know whether Wooster actually said it, but I would have loved to have said it to my favorite woman in my life if I had the opportunity?

What Lord Henry may have said now, after the recent upheavals due to threats of fasting unto death is perhaps “each time one fasts unto death is the only time one has fasted unto death each time with increasing intensity”.

The intensity of corruption in India (and elsewhere, I guess) is such that the intensity of fast undertaken against corruption by an individual has to promise a lot, the extreme being a fast unto death by somebody who has a believable reputation. It does not actually mean that the faster has to die, although that would be a spectacle that the public could secretly enjoy as they did, so they say, watching gladiators being killed when the thumb went down.

Its easier said than done?

Before Anna Hazare's movement took over this anti-corruption movement, the Gandhian Satyagraha Brigade (GSB) had started their own fasts-unto-death in January 2011 on a very small scale. The GSB consisisted of "true" (whatever that may mean) Gandhians and being mainly octagenrians and nonagenerians, all senior Gandhians compared to Anna Hazare.

This movement must have been extended (I wont say hijacked) to larger proportions within a period of a few months, by would-be saints such as Kiran Bedi (a TV reality show under her belt) and Swami Agnivesh who takes the effort to wear a dress that symbolises the fire that he says is within him, and who represents people who dont believe in a democratic character for their self-professed revolutions. Revolutionaries don't have to account to the public for their funding. They will never come under a Lok pal or a Lok ayukta or a Central Vigilance committee. Something like the Board of Control of Cricket of India.

These aspiring saints, such as Kiran Bedi or Agnivesh, prop up Anna Hazare with the help of desperate TRP-seeking TV channels to a fever demanding a Lok Pal who would be a protector of the people against corruption. They do not explain how the Lok Pal would function and under what authority. They claim the support of 1.2 billion people just like the cricket team. It may not seem even frivolous to some if Sachin Tendulkar was made a popular Lok Pal!

One of the less frivolous and certainly more dangerous signal from the Anna Hazare movement is their insistence that the representative democracy should be done away with. This is reminiscent of the Jaiprakash Narayan Movement of 1977, a movement that set the country back several years without raising its moral standards or even changing for long enough times the political leadership. Indeed, Indira Gandhi's re-election showed the futility of the JP movement even if it had a validity. The JP movement has so far provided only one genuine politically trustworthy leader, Nitish Kumar.

Believe it or not, one of the successes of the JP movement is the introduction of the Double-7 Cola, which was meant to fight the imperialism of Coca-Cola. Judging by the way Coca-Cola and Pepsi now dominate the Indian advertising landscape, they must thank Double 7.

It is difficult to imagine how one Lok Pal could bring out a corruption-free society by just passing a bill. It could only be a beginning, at best. There is a real danger in having unbridled janata rule that Anna Hazare said is required to replace representative democracy.

The Democratic State has now a great democratic weapon of mass media to exercise their Big Brother control, without the wasteful nuisance of a representative democracy. When democracy is used as a spontaneous conquering religious movement without the wisdom of a restraining parliament, one can easily self implode. One may imagine a Lok Pal unleashing a "Lok Pal" zouth brigade without taking extreme care that it would not degenerate into something like a Hitler Youth Brigade.

The television channels would love it to be a reality show sponsored by multinational companies and Coca Cola advertisements with contenders asking/answering questions and winners being declared based on number of SMSs without a genuine-ness guarantee and softwares that generate SMSs.

This new Indian Lok Pal reality show could chose a genuine leader by the sacrifice the candidate could make, excluding perhaps actual fasts unto deaths. This could generate more sincere activists. As Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche famously said "One never dives into the water to save a drowning man more eagerly than when there are others present who dare not take the risk."

"There is an old illusion - it is called good and evil." --- Nietzsche

While it is easy to point to corruption as an all pervasive evil, there does not seem to be a strict criterion as to what kind of corruption should be tackled at what level and who is to benefit from the elimination of corruption?

The so-called 2G scam is an example of confusion over what constitutes corruption. Kapil Sibal would argue that the 2G policy has benefited the common man and the loss of revenue is made up by the several increase in revenue by the increase in tele density. I think that is a perfectly valid argument.

The CAG like all banking clerks only looks at the revenues lost by not having an auction. They did not bother about the benefits of the aam aadmi. Thats not their concern´nor has it ever been.

One should always be aware of a Bank clerk, Lewis Carroll has probably experiEnced THIS when he writes in his poem "The Mad Gardner's song"
He thought he saw a Banker’s Clerk
Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
A Hippopotamus.
‘If this should stay to dine,’ he said,
‘There won’t be much for us!’

It is only now after the row between Kapil Sibal and the CAG that I really understood what was meant. The Banker's clerk like good orthodox people from Tanjore and elsewhere in the purely Academic communities follow rules strictly and leave nothing for experimentation.

We will not be worried about Anna Hazare's intentions. We do not know need to worry also whether he has Gandhi's sense of humour. We need to be worried about those who surround him. Two of the more conspicuous credit-baggers are Kiran Bedi and Swami Agnivesh. The latter will be dismissed because he has already committed himself to a non-representative parliamentary democracy and has championed an anarchic revolution of the people.

Kiran Bedi, who would have loved to have been nominated as a Chief Vigilance Commissioner, does not now leave Hazare's side exploiting all photo-opportunities. She must have loved being the only one jumping with as much joy she could put on for the cameras. She also literally forces a very uncomfortable and perhaps reluctant but very sweet little girl to give a glass of juice to Anna Hazare to break his fast (http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/news/anna-hazare-ends-fast-says-real-fight-begins-now/196091).

I happened to listen to Kiran Bedi on you tube speaking to a packed medium-sized Hall of middle class american women audience. The talk was full of self praise (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_CSsL3it9Y&feature=related). It was the kind of talk that most impresses foreigners who would love to have one, who they can identify with, telling them the great things they have doen for a horrible country. She got the applause for giving the Prime Minsiter's car a parking ticket. She did not mention that Indira Gandhi was not in India and she did not mention how the car came to be parked wherever it was in the first place. Her taking credit for this incident is something like the donkey taking credit for chasing a tiger simply because the donkey happened to be running behind a running tiger.

She does not mention what others have done for prison workers.
It was all about her self.
A comment on the video would read: It's all about her, about how great she is, how couragious and smart she handles stuff.... I hear very little about the prisoners. They prayed and had lessons (and she became holy??) .

Kiran Bedi has the horrible mistinction (if that is the word describing the opposite of distinction) of being the host and TV judge of a TV series "Aapki Kacheri" (see, for instance, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hZZcmk8HHo), broadcast on the Indian TV channel, Star Plus. One cannot imagine how a civilised country can have such a lady advising any one of who or what a Lok Pal should be!

More ominously, Kiran Bedi also predicted in this talk that she is working on an ombudsman bill against corruption about which they will hear a lot about. This was more than three months ago! "Daal mein kuch kaala hain?".

Just as an exercise I looked up the memebers of the India Against Corruption movement. It is a motley crowd including many so-called spiritual leaders with probably good management and marketing skills if they are not successful con men. The group is led by Swami Ramdev (Bharat Swahiman Trust; Akhada Parishad Baba Hat Yogi, said of the Swami: " A decade ago, Ramdev used to move on a bicycle. He even had to struggle to find money to fix his punctured cycle. Now he flies on a chopper. …." ) , Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (Art of Living: Sri Sri Ravi Shankar … has repackaged a well-known breathing technique and commercialized it. See http:// www.deeshaa.org/is-sri-sri-ravi-shankar-a-con-man/; see also The The great great Sri Sri NGO NGO scam scam --- http://churumuri.wordpress.com/2008/02/01/the-the-great-great-sri-sri-ngo-ngo-scam-scam/
see also ), Kiran Bedi (we know about her), Swami Agnivesh (Bonded Labour Liberation Front!!! among others), Anna Hazare (simple man), Arvind Kejriwalh (IIT Mechanical engineer, joined Indian Revenue Service with his eyes open) J. M. Lyngdoh (good man), Justice Tewatia (litigation for amount of pension he could receive since he was Chief Justice for only six months, this was crucial since he could call himself chief justice), Mallika Sarabhai (Peter Brooks fame), Facebook personalities Maulana Mufti Shamoom Kashmi and Maulana Kalbe Rizvi , Arch Bishop Vincent M Concessao (of Delhi wears wooden cross instead of silver cross to identify with poor), Prashant Bhushan (500 PILs) , Devinder Sharma (interviewed Dr Borlaug), Subhash Chandra Aggarwal (4000 letters to editors, guiness book of records), Pradeep Gupta (Pan IIT), B. D. Lall (could not find anything about him, a non-entity?) and Sunita Godara (marathon Arjuna award winner, ran 200 international marathons, Director with Population Control Society - an International NGO!!! how come?) among others.

It is possible that these "spiritual" leaders mobilised the support through facebook and the to make it look massive. The fast has exploited the polling exigencies well to achieve what it wanted to do:- to extract a promise from the Government. The real game will begin after the results are known.

One silver lining among this crowd of spiritual leaders is that they are not innocent and they must be having a good experience of corruption that has allowed them to become the leaders they have become.

Requirements for a Lokpal

The least important of the issues is perhaps what the Lok Pal would actually look like.

It has to be rememebered that the Lok Pal is based on the institute of the Swedish Ombudsman whose purpose was to look after the affiars of the king (Charles) when he was recovering from a military defeat in Turkey. The Ombudsman has different interpretations in different countries. The French have one who is supposed to be a protector of the people just as our Lok pal is supposed to be.

There is no ombudsman in USA at the national level. This is for the information of the vocal NRIs in USA in case they did not know.

The Ombudsman of Phillipines, a lady, has been impeached by parliament.

The actual function of the ombudsman is difficult to visualize and seemingly cannot be solved by an unilateral fast unto death by a public movement, if only because of different perceptions of corruption in different societies or different value systems.

As per a description on the net (see http://www.jstor.org/pss/3230819) "The classical ombudsman has to be (1) legally established, (2) functionally autonomous, (3) external to the administration, (4) operationally independent of both the legislature and the executive, (5) specialist, (6) expert, (7) nonpartisan, (8) normatively universalistic, (9) client-centred but not anti-administration, and (10) both popularly accessible and visible." That sort of disqualifies all those public figures we know for or against the Lok Pal?

The problem with ombudsmen is that they can investigate only government agencies.

A mischievous private body with adequate financial resources can easily make the function of the Lok Pal hopelessly innocuous and ineffective serving only the purpose of crippling the government.
We have enough of such mischievous men, especially with multinationals who really would like to handle the way we are corrupt for their advantage.

So we wait.

The (T)Ides of March, Falguni Poornima, and Conclave of India Today: The Bold, the Beautiful and the Ugly.

This March has been a tediously sad and overly long drawn month that has changed my world of the last seventy years very much. I have little hope to regain my confidence in the future or my faith in my past, not because I like to do so, but because the events of March ordain that I do so, because of the inevitability of it. It does not affect at all my joy of being alive and kicking in the present, even if it may be sometimes at the expense of those others.

I love the people of Japan very intuitively and for other reasons of affinity that I may describe in other blogs (if blogging survives twittering). I draw attention only to one video (http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/showthread.php?p=400598) when the earthquake struck. The water coming out of the pavement must have been a surprise for them. This video draws attention to the attitudes of Japanese people on the street (mainly women doing their shopping) during the earthquake. Their demeanor is a reflection of their boldness and their inner strength and their sanguinity which all of us would do well to emulate.

This blog has a large section on the earthquake of a geological nature. This discussion is more to highlight some features that a reader may have been interested in and also to bring a connection with the full moon of the season that came a week after the event. This falguni full moon is thought to be the most beautiful moon (Supermoon is a typical americanism, I guess) and heralds many folk celebrations all over the world. The last part of this blog is un-necessary perhaps. I included it just as an ugly contrast of the money-maker's reality.

The Earthquake
If, as an amateur, one is looking for causes for the recent earth-quake in Japan one could be able to directly associate it with the plate tectonics that is usually discussed. I found an article of Earthquake Disaster Mitigation Policy for Japan written in 2007 by Ikeuchi and Isago. (http://www.pwri.go.jp/eng/ujnr/joint/39/paper/42ikeuchi.pdf earthquake disaster mitigation policy). I have reproduced Figs 1 and 2 from their article below which shows the tectonic plates and troughs in Japan. The high earth-quake activity of Japan is usually associated with its complex crust structure where the Pacific Plate sinks under inland plate and Philippine Sea Plate at Chishima Trough, Japan Trough and Izu-Ogasawara Trough. In the Tokai and Nankai regions the last major earthquake took place more than 150 years ago.

Strong earthquakes due to build up of stress in the plates is expected from the year 2007 in the Tokai and in the Tonanaki Nankai regions pn the Nankai trough and is expected to hit Tokyo most. The Disaster Mitigation policy was mainly aimed towards Tokyo.A worst case scenario estimate for this disaster is estimated at approximately 18,000 deaths, of which about 8,600 may be attributable to tsunamis with a total damage of nearly 600 billion dollars with 360 thousand collapsed or burned houses. This same article (written in 2007) points out that major earthquakes in the Miyagi-ken area occurs nearly every forty year so that a major earthquake is anticipated in that area. They estimated an economic loss of nearly 150 billion dollars (by present rates) and gave measures for taking precautions against tsunami. The Japanese were prepared but the earth quaked much more than hey could have anticipated (since they were taught not to use their intuition?).

Among the major earthquake rehion involving plates is the one between plates. The earth 110311 earthquake would seem to be between the plates from the first impressions of the images below where the one on the right shows the number of earthquakes and after shocks (magnitude greater than 4) in the first week after 110311 as can be seen in the right below and the one on the left shows the boundary of the pacific plate. The size of the circles gives the magnitude, with those in pink being more than 6 in the Richter scale.

The number of earth quakes for the same seven days around the Pacific region for the same seven days are shown below.

The outline of the quakes around the pacific ocean coincides roughly with the edges of the continental plates as shown below.

There are also earthquakes in what are called back-arc basins (BAB) which are characteristic of sea-floor spreading and is different from that involving plates.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fe/BAB_of_the_World_-Converted-.jpg

The BAB maps of earthquakes (see above) seems to me to be showing earthquakes close to that of the plates. BAB earthquakes may be associated with sea-floor spreading near the plate edges.

A closer look at the map of earthquakes after 110311 seem to suggest that the majority of the quakes was in the region between the pacific plate and the main plate so that part of the activity could be due to sea-floor spreading towards the continental plate. The main earthquake was about 130 km from Sendai which is about half way from the mainland to the edge of the continental plate.

The actual reason for the large magnitude is unknown and therefore unexpected. If the earthquake is due to the motion of the Pacific plate (~ 8 cm or 3.5" per year under the Hinshu plate) then over the last forty fifty years where there was no major earthquake in the region one would have expected the plate to have moved 3 to four metres. Coincidentally this is very close to the extent of increase of the width of the land mass of portions of Japan near Sendai towards north America. The pacific plate itself is said to have moved in the opposite direction, westwards towards the mainland of Japan, by nearly 40 metres which is not expected.

The break in the fault line as a result of the quake was only (according to experts) tens of kilometres long instead of the nearly 500 kilometres linear rupture length anticipated for a quake of 9.0 magnitude. Because of the curved plate boundary in this region the magnitude of earthquake is not expected to exceed 8.5 in these models and is therefore a surprise to seismologists; so I read. I do not know what is the requirement in the sea-floor-spreading BAB model for an earthquake magnitude of this size.

There have been other earthquakes, of course, near Sendai. The epicentre of a 7.4 magnitude Miyagiken-Oki earthquake in 1978 near (38.1N and 122.2E; 120 km away and 40 km deep) Sendai was very close to the 110311 Tohoku-Chiho Taiheiyo-Oki earthquake (38.3 N and 143.3E) near Sendai. There was no tsunami in 1978. The death toll was 27; 10,000 were injured and 60,000 houses damaged. One interesting finding was that the number of wooden houses that were totally damaged in the 1978 earthquake was four times more when built on artificial filling than those built on natural slopes.

An interest analysis from the Harvard Seismology Group (see figure below)has suggested that an independent event such as the 7.2 magnitude Sanriku-Oki earthquake on March 9, 2011 (not a foreshock, they say) triggered the main earthquake. Subsequently, the main 110311 Tohoku-Chiho Taiheiyo-Oki earthquake may have triggered (after shock) the Ibaraki-Oki earthquake of 6.8 magnitude. The group suggests that these events are not foreshocks or aftershocks that happened about half an hour after the main event may not be an aftershock since they occur in regions of energy dissipation not covered by the main earthquake. They rather think that it is a "cascading failure of different segments of the plate interface" which moves toward Alaska(?). The propagation of the rupture front is in the opposite direction to that from the foreshock to the aftershock. It could suggest that there was a sining of the seafloor and the rupture front moved in the direction of sinking.

One wonders what a subsidence or elevation of the sea-floor would do. There is the perfectly valid but neverthelss surprising argument that an increase in the earths circumference by six feet would mean a local change in height by nearly one foot. If there is a local increase in width of Japan by six metres, can one expect changes in local heights by a metre or so?
Is the amount of relative subsidence of the sea coast due to a continental-shelf spreading? Or vice versa, a sea-floor spreading, because I always get my calculations with signs opposite to the correct one.
Is the unusual Tsunami due to such unusual changes.
Since the earth's rotation period has decreased by a few microseconds after the earthquake, has the earth's diameter reduced, just as a ballerina increases her speed of rotation by bringing her hands down?

One of the natural approaches to theories of complex behavior that leads to natural disasters must be the catastrophe theory in which there is sudden shifts
(http://gillesdaniel.com/papers/1995.Horgan.From_Complexity_to_Perplexity.pdf)
in behavior arising from small changes in one parameter. Thus, a harmless critical comment on a partner's life style could lead to a divorce, a bifurcation from a married state to two separated states with memories that sustain the separation. Phil Anderson, my favourite Nobel laureate, would comment that the hierarchical structure of reality has at every step levels above and below, which determine the cascading of events which can be catastrophic at some stage. To interpret this, we may think of stocks of cans piled up in a stable pyramid in a supermarket until an unattended curious child takes a fancy to them and picks up one from the bottom; or, pieces of wood and stones piled up by fishermen or beavers in a river during the previous rains to dam water in a river to catch fish would dry to a loose pile that is not able to dam water as effectively and would result in a dam burst and a flash flood in the next season. A happy unsuspecting enthusiastic skier new to thrills of skiing would guide his ski to a fresh track of new snow and cause a huge avalanche. A boyhood memory of mine is a scene from the 1954 movie "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" when the seven brothers stop the screaming of seven girls they have carried away as they go past a valley of snow-covered hill since they think it would cause an avalanche. After they have safely crossed the hill the brothers shoot off their guns to cause the avalanche (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6604707406622364321#) the effect of which is quite disproportionate to the sound from the gun.

When small shifts make catastrophic changes who knows what the phase of a moon, or the launching of a rocket, or the flutter of a butterfly wings would do. There is a always a small change on going from one stable state to another. The change is usually imperceptibly small but when the bifurcation involves, say the child and the pile of cans the change can from a gravity-stabilized pile of cans to a gravity-driven heap of cans the change is dramatic.

When the Moon Hits Your Eyes

The month of March should not have been so.

March is a glorious month for many of us Indians who live our life the way we think we should live our lives as we think we have lived in our past lives in this part of the world, so proximate to Tibet.

It is usually the month of the Falguni full moon. The moon on this day is called the super-moon in recent times obsessed as we are with super-things in a genuinely superficial way. Like all good things seem to be, this full moon is associated with Buddha as the day when relatives are to meet. By all accounts the Buddhist influence was strong in Bengal and continued to be strong near Chittagong, the port which connected the Arab world to China for their silk trade. It is through Chittagong that the Islamic religion spread in Bengal before the Moghul invasion. It is also likely that the thoughts and practice of the people who gave Buddha must have spread to the western world through the contacts with the arabs. One did not need the Arabs, of course, to spread the enlightened Buddha thoughts in India and the eastern world, where it may have pre-existed Buddha, such as in the Shinto religion of Japan and elsewhere.

March is the month of many festivals all over the northern hemisphere of our earth, not only because it has the shortest day in the year nor because it is the month before spring. It is the month of falguna which, when it comes, cannot have vasant with its glorious moon. It is the season when love with lust is sown and spring is born later, as Shakespeare, among many others, must have known. It is this faith in offsprings that is symbolized right from early times in Bengal when red abir colours of passion and falguni were sprayed from bamboo syringes by the followers (the abhir s or yadavs or the cattle-herds) of their amorous local god whom they named as Krishna (who could also have been called Herakles or Hercules in some Greek connections).

I really dont know what falguni means. Falguna is a double (purva- and uttara-) pattern of stars that together represents (suggestively?) a fig tree or a bed? Falguni is one born in this month.

Since Buddhists were later accepted into the vaishnavite fold, it is likely that vishnu festivals are actually of Buddhist origin. It is also an interesting possibility that the buddhist originators of the holi spirit would have looked amusedly at the severe penances of shiva followers. Thus they must have found Shiva ignoring Parvati and paying more attention to his meditation a sheer waste of time. Kamadeva, the god of love must have been bathed in falguni spirits when he shot his arrow to disrupt Shiva's meditations and helped Parvati to become Shiva's wife. It is another story that Shiva turned Kamadeva to ashes and later turned his physical lusting intentions to probably less reproductive but more spiritual and tender loving thoughts.

As a bengali, Falguni is one of my favourite words because it evokes so many of my fondest memories. A Tagore song that evokes tender emotions has the lines "Ektuku chhoa lagey, ektuku kotha shuni, Tayi diye monay monay rochi momo Falguni" which has a delicate sensibility that could translate in English (the wrong language) to "with a tender touch, a few whispered words in my ear, I weave my mind's romances" which could be the right translation if the reader only knew what I had in my mind when I translated it; or what Tagore had in mind when he wrote it. The multimedia world have their own commercially profitable you-tube interpretation that must be the most suitable (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nToLNJRjNk0&feature=related for instance) for probably those of the sans reproductive lust, sans committed tenderness, and spin(e)-less non-directional youth.

It must have been this spontaneous, primitive and primeval spirit of lust and love that made falguni poornima an auspicious occasion for all our gods and all the regions of this country and elsewhere. In the Tamil calendar, the last month is Panguni which coincides with the month of falguni. It is on the full-moon day of Panguni Uthiram that weddings between godly people take place. Shiva and Parvathi, Murugan and Deivanai, Ranganayaki and Ranganathar,were married on this day. It is the day of Mahalakshmi Jayanthi when Lakshmi was born after the churning of the seas. This is also the full moon day when Ayyappan was born. When Parvathi as Gowri marries Siva, it is Gowri Kalyanam (wedding). Without knowing it at the time I got a panel of this wedding for our living room (see below).

At the Murugan temples an important aspect is the kavadi which can be quite impresseive (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WrB7k7NAH). The kavadis containing materials (milk, rose water, curd, water, sandalwood paste, flower) used for abiskhekam to the temple.
An important festival on 15 February in early Roman periods is the Lupercalia festival in honour of Lupercus, a pastoral god (shades of Krishna?) of fertility, at the Lupercal cave on the Palatine Hill of Romulus-and-Remus and the wolf (Lupe) fame. Animals with strong sexual instincts such as the goat and the dog were sacrificed on that day. Naked young men wearing loincloths made from the skin of the sacrificed animals would run around town touching maidens with a stick. That was supposed to increase the fertility of the maidens that were suppressed in the winter months. It was this festival that Mark Antony, master of the Luperci college of priests, offered the crown to Julius Ceasar in 44 BC.

It turns out that many of the much-celebrated Christian festivals of Europe are what they term as pagan festivals. The term pagan is applied to religions which do not think that other religions require to be changed or other religious believers to be converted or proselytized since they depend only on their own living mythology which cannot be changed. The festivals of these living mythologies are therefore necessarily ancient. One of these pagan festivals that the church frowned down upon without any effect is the Carnavale of Venice. While researching the internet for this blog I learnt that carnavale is derived from the Latin term "carnem levare" which means to avoid meat, which is a very Buddhist or Jain approach. This abstention from meat follows the long celebrations of March and precedes the fasting and penances of the Lent period in April. The day of the gatari amavasya of Maharashtra (see my blog "Gnostic Embrace of Warkaris in the Monsoon Season around Pune: Part III Kanifnath, Kanoba, and Syncretism") is celebrated in an opposite way as the last day of indulgence when one is expected to drink and feast on meat till one drops into a gutter before one begins fasting in the month of shravan near August.

The Venice carnival followed up perhaps from the Lupercalia festival, which, like the holi festival, was a licentious festival and much anticipated because of that. Venetian masks were used to hide the identity of the participants, especially from the upper class. The month of falguna became the month of love magic and ancient Pagan sex rituals. The church did not like their flock to be pagan and secular. So they built or encouraged a story around a St. Valentine. The Shiv Sena, after all, may have been perfectly right in finding St. Valentine's day so alien to our culture. We have ours, not for roses, but for the abir of the bamboo syringes. They are much more fun!

Try as they might the Popes of that could not influence any change in the Venice carnival even if they licenced a shortened period of celebration (which could be six months or more in Venice) from the twelfth night (from Christmas) to Mardi Gras, the last Tuesday before lent which begins with Ash Wednesday.

Since I consider the Japanese people to be of the pre-Gautam-Buddha Nepali/Tibet origin it is satisfying to me that they have spread their influence throughout the world through the full moon of March. They, the Japanese, will only have their enlightened haiku poetry for the effects during the moon of March that draws world's attention to them.

The Bane of India Today
What prompted me to start this article today (18th March 2011) is that I happened to be with Bella, my pup, when she was ignoring as usual the television program on the screen usually preferring to sit on the bed and chewing the newspaper instead. On this particular day she thought that she would prefer to chew on one of my scientific publications I had left around. I sat down to educate her on the import of my paper when my attention was drawn to the programme on Headline Today TV Channel on India Today Conclave. What I saw reflected very sadly on the goings on in the minds of one set of Indian visible class who consider themselves to be intellectuals especially when they are taught that the style of glossy multimedia is sufficient for the exercise of their intellect. It was so much in contrast with the upsetting events set up by the tides of March! The TV part has to be got over with straightaway.

The seemingly politically naive Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had been fooled by the editor/proprietor Aroon Purie to accept being the keynote speaker. Manmohan spoke with his usual remarkably self effacing monotone did not speak on things on which he he should have spoken on because the Parliament session was on. Purie, as chairman of the session, had no such compunctions and he let loose obviously selected persons from his channels and his circles for making TRP ratings and political rain-checks with the opposition. After all, BJP gave him his padma bhushan. Purie allowed the office of the Prime Minister to be hit with as many below-the-belt punches that could be included until he the PM was allowed to leave.

Credit must be given to the Prime Minister to walk away politely but pointedly refusing to take the token of appreciation from the organizers even though Poorie was seen pleading with the PM behind the stage. Kudos, and plenty of Kudos, to the Prime Minister on this point.

Aroon Purie is no great journalist nor a statesman. He got caught for lifting a paragraüh on Rajnikanth and sloppily defended himself by shamelessly placing the blame for the goof-up to his juniors. This is normal among Indians even at highest academic levels. Thia ia normal for India Today, if one reads the blogger, NIranjana. Purie had started India Today to use up the facilities in his Thomson Press, modelling it on proven Time/Newsweek styles in both its language and its politics. He copied well like many other successful Indians in academics or business. He gave over the reins of his office to his son, like many other powerful Indians.

I personally think that the high point of India Today (1985-1996) was when Niranjan Das was its graphic editor. Niranjan Das left for better positions

The decline of India Today magazine coincided with the departure of Niranjan Das. The magazine soon targeted the young and upwardly mobile ans focused on lifestyle, travel, health and Bollywood. Since the upwardly mobile prefer not to read on these matters, the total readership of India today has shrunk by one third from nearly 30 million to nearly 20 million in the last three-four years itself. The present present managing director of India Today, Ankoor Poorie, son of Arun Poorie naturally, has more interest in DadA electronic music of Zurich with little interest in reading.

There is a money-crunch in the Purie family coffers and some public gaze is necessary for the fortunes of the poor family members. Aroon Purie's 31 year old daughter, Koel Purie, failed to make it as an actress and got an opening on India Today TV channel with the (obviously meant to be titillating) "On the Couch with Koel". She also got to interview Sarah Palin during which Koel managed the near impossible of coming second to the ex-Presidential candidate in a one-to-one interview.

The India Today Conclave thought it financially prudent to get Shah Rukh Khan ---the Bollywood Star second in frivolity to Salman Khan --- to be the second speaker after the Prime Minister and prop up the India Today coffers through advertisement opportunities from increased TRP. Its like getting Sylvester Stallone to speak after Jimmy Carter. Shah Rukh Khan is a self-confessed shameless mercenary artist doing things only for money, such as dancing for the guests at fat weddings. SRK was perhaps chosen (by Ankoor and Koel Purie?). Koel Purie got to chair the session.

My pup lost interest in the session and I had to amuse her for some time.

When I came back Koel Purie was telling the audience that she knew that the audience had other things in mind since their bladders were full (she actually said that!!!) but she was sure that SRK would be happy to answer any question. The last question was obviously a planted one. A lady asked SRK if he still has his six-pack muscles, much to the thrill of Koel Purie and without leaving SRK embarrassed. Without any hesitation SRK promptly obliged. He pulled out his shirt and showed off his bare stomach mumbling something like it a four-pack now. The audience was thrilled!. I could not get the video at that time, but because of its TRP power, they showed it several times during the day. One of these repeat broadcasts is given below:

What can one say!
Is this public display of stupidity in any way in sync with the aspirations of a common man or the intelligence of Indians who should be influential in thoughts that would shape a future.
It is bad enough to see our parliamentarians creating havoc in parliament by their very unparliamentary ways under the approving eyes of opposition leaders.
Did India Today have to put SRK as the person following the Prime Minister just to get the daughter of Aroon Poorie some prominence?

During deadly serious scenes of Tsunami, and nuclear disasters that inundated us did we have to come out to breathe the repelling India Today air?

Where have all the flowers gone... when will they ever learn. This is a song that I sang happily in my youth imagining all the girls I failed to attract as girls that had gone. The lady singer Mary Travers has passed away and the Peter Paul and Mary rendition (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYii6nxhvUk) of the song was a little sad to see, in a way. The falguni moon from their early days (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t4g_1VoGw4&feature=related) still remains as bright as the spirit of the Japanese people will remain.

The spirit of the ordinary Indian has remained bright and colourful as abir on holi.
When holi comes on 190311, and spring begins on 200311 rang-panchami comes with all its colours today 230311.
We learn from the tide that has come in our affairs.