Is India Poor?

Posted on February 11, 2025 by secondsaturn

It is true that poverty in India has declined. It has declined in absolute terms to just about 4.62% of the population, a massive step up from the 66% we had at the time of Independence. It is also true that the poverty one got to see some 50 years ago, and even perhaps 30 years ago, is no longer the case in India. Except for the pavement dwellers and beggars at traffic lights, the number of poor who are visible in the streets, shops, markets and public transport are much lower. Even to the naked eye, India’s poor is indeed less than 5% of its people. Today’s people are better dressed and except the technologically challenged elderly people, almost everyone owns a smart phone. Slums are clean, villages are peri urban areas with Amazon deliveries and icecreams. People speak better, read better, and can follow complex written instructions to run mobile phones and laptops. More encouraging is the fact that the distribution of knowledge of new technology crumbles the arrogance of knowing of the older class stratifications. While in olden times, household helpers would ask us to write their bank deposit or withdrawal slips, today it is our domestic servants who help us with glitches in smartphones or wi fi routers. Therefore, the redistribution of technical knowledge that also accompanies the fall in absolute poverty in India, seems to establish very securely the fact that India is overcoming its destitution.         

Yet, there are economists and influencers who have presented official data to show that India is still trapped in poverty. The reasons for India’s concerns are the falling share of savings as percentage of GDP, the shrink back of the manufacturing sector, the lack of formal and perhaps even informal employment, the lack of skilled workforce due to the poor standards of education, rising expenses on health and education and the falling consumption of households. However, if the per capita GDP income subjected to the deflators of inflation has not fallen in absolute terms, this might be hasty to comment that India is getting poor. What makes India a possibly poor in future are the falling share of savings as percentage of personal income and the rising share of education and health expenses compounded by unemployment. This means that India is suffering from a want of structured income and employment and for which the possibility of maintaining of net worth of households have come under fire. But is this a correct view of things?

What do we see around us? We no longer find people in tattered clothes, emaciated bodies, we do not hear of people dying from want of medical care, nor do we see dropouts from education. Instead, both education and health business seem to be growing, the real estate market climbs steadily as land prices soar and cities sear into farmlands, expanding suburbs. There does not appear to be poverty at all.

The latest Household survey data by the Government of India shows that the relative inequalities in consumption has declined in both rural as well as urban areas, more for rural India than its cities. Then why do we say that India is poor? We say that India is poor because its economic development and growth is happening in the poor segments. In culture, in education, in healthcare, industry, food systems, transportation, it is the poor person’s growth. Educational institutions are churning out some rote materials called education and no wonder the graduates are not worthy of employment. The footloose educated are thronging to the service sectors such as Swiggy and Zomatoes, Blinkits and Instamarts, delivering needs of simple stuff to simple people. The need for online has increased as the population is increasingly dispersed spatially across the city, far away from its place of work. This reduces the time for shopping for daily provisions and hence the online services. Start ups in Shark Tank are overwhelmingly about banana chips and snacks, or sundry software projects for espionage products like door cameras. Healthcare seems to be conventional, hospitals and packages for surgery. The OTT platforms are replete with cheap dramas of kitsch. All the above are poverty ridden. India’s innovative capital, its administrative and governance capital, its health capital and educational capital are driven by its poor and delivered to its poor. In no sense any aspect of India’s development can add to its assets, tangible or intangible and the slow erosion of savings as percentage of personal income amply reveals that.

Politics of India is also the politics of the poor; it thrives on jealousy and envy of those who have done well, just the immediately well to do. Indians are scared to take on the powerful class, salivating at videos of celebrities and weddings of Ambanis; the target is the better performing classmate, who may be mercilessly ragged and brutally murdered. Indians are also among the world’s highest number who die by suicide, telling us that a falling stock market may not be the only source of despair.

India of the present is the India of the French Revolution, war of classes fought on moral righteously of exploitation and the language of rights. Those who were the middle class intelligentsia of the society find themselves losing their assets and worthiness; those from below are driving the growth engine of the country with talents and knowledge that they know of, learning to do nothing better.

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Asha Purna Devi, 8th January 1909 to 13th July 1995

Posted on January 13, 2025 by secondsaturn

On the 8th of January the media and social media celebrated the birth anniversary of Ashapurna Devi, a prolific novelist of Bengali language who never ceases to fascinate her readers by the sheer volume of her work and by the fact that she was an unschooled and prepubertal bride married off by a conservative father and yet rose to a status where she could appreciably fill up the emptiness left by the demise of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee. Those who knew her personally remember her writing even in the kitchen. But more informed sources say that she wrote sitting at a desk of her own in the deep hours of the night’s dense silence.

Ashapurna did not use her surname, but she came from a Bengali Baidya family, a caste that especially seems to have emerged as a distinct social group through the opportunities offered by the British rule. Economic prosperity and cultural modernity did not always go hand in hand as the guilt of material wellbeing found a compensation in the hardening of the conservative shackles upon the women of the family. Women found their escape, many times in the politics of the freedom movement but mostly in the printed books and journals. As a part of this pattern, Ashapurna’s mother was a voracious reader of books, and it was this atmosphere at home that propelled her to teach herself to read and write. Her inspiration was of course Tagore to whom she wrote once a fan mail. Tagore wrote back to her with his best wishes and blessings but in that letter, he addressed her as Sampurna. That began her soul’s journey from the aspirant fulfilled of dreams as in Ashapurna to the complete realization of the self, as the name Sampurna meant. What is interesting is that her novels, if arranged chronically would reflect the journey of an aspiring woman to one who wholly evolved into emancipation. To my mind, this journey of evolution from a suppressed woman to a fully liberated one should be the principal focus of feminist research.

Scholars with interest in women authors find in Ashapurna Devi a feminist because of the trilogy namely Prothom Protisruti, Subarnalata and Bokul Katha. But as she matures her novels become progressively patriarchal. Agni Pariksha lionizes child marriage, working women are often exiled from families, liberated women from fashionable families are the villains and are found as templates of present-day soap serials. Beyond the trilogy, Ashapurna seems to be done and dusted with oppressed women trying to find windows of assertions as humans. She now emerges upon the world of her readers, as one who is indeed free of the domestic bonds and transcends the world of the bride into the world of a genderless observer, distanced and dispassionate, not of women but of families, the world of institutions, architecture of the city, rise in new professions and the rule of modern law based upon rights but low on responsibility. Here she critiques a modernist view of liberation, which she finds individualistic and selfish, loathing ambitions and even a desire for consumerism. She is aware of the vulnerability of the family as an institution, seeks the fulfilment of this as an establishment, acknowledges its desirability and along with such realizations, starts to tread carefully conscious that a feminist assertion of women’s rights and individualities can wreck the system. Her writings veer increasingly towards a search for stability of the family and what gets more interesting is she lets the man off the hook and instead lays the burden of protecting the family upon the woman. She starts to look upon men as vulnerable, plagued by modernity, pathetically emaciated and dangerously stripped of their selves, who can only be saved by women of merit, will, strength, talent and empathy through adjustments, compromise and even camouflage of their talents. Here, she starts to read like a make chauvinists dream, and this is why, bland feminist scholars are wont to discuss her works beyond the trilogy.

 I am not decided whether I would wish to take to Ashapurna as a feminist writer; I would like to consider her as a dispassionate judge who does not a prioritize situations and instead, likes to discover a woman as a bundle of responsibilities instead of voices asserting rights. Through her depiction of failed women, failed in family, failed in career, failed in education, failed as a ahomemaker, she searches for the impossibility of a successful woman; her women remain Ashapurna, the Sampurna elude her readers in her novels. But the writer in her is emancipated because she can write along with a husband, in laws, sons and daughters in law. That alone speaks volumes for her personal success. I wonder whether the scholars would like to retrieve her as a career woman and a homemaker through intensive interviews of her surviving heirs. I am not aware if such a project has ever been attended.

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Raj Kapoor on 100

Posted on December 8, 2024 by secondsaturn

Dastangoi’s production on Raj Kapoor, like each of its productions is an experience to listen to and watch as well. Based on a resurrected form of storytelling lost to the past few centuries, Dastangos, as in the storytellers recreate a tea stall discussion on topics. This edition was about Raj Kapoor, held in Delhi’s Kamani Auditorium on the 5th of December 2024.

With extensive research and apt positioning of facts chronologically and logically, the storytellers without being explicit conveys compellingly that all of Raj Kapoor’s productions are snatches of his autobiography. Prithviraj Kapoor also plays himself as Mughal e Azam, as Sikander and as Justice Raghunath as much as Raj Kapoor is only himself in Awara, Anari, Aah, Aag, Barsat and the many films those he made. Always a director at heart, he took to acting mainly to keep the money flowing in for the kitchen that fed five children to run along.

Creativity and finances were always cross purposes, Raj Kapoor braved financial ruin and even destitution to pursue his dreams to bring sheer joy on the silver screen. Angered whenever the producers spoke about money, Raj Kapoor turned arrogant and even eccentric whenever he felt that cinemawallahs made money out of artistry. For him, Sarswati and Lakshmi stayed apart, evil rivals of each other. His wife, who never even uttered a complaint about her difficulties concerning the purse remained the silent woman who stood like a massive mountain of support behind the greatest showman ever.

Raj Kapoor’s first lost love was his teacher in school, the woman whom he searched everywhere as the transcendental as well as the residual symbol of purity, rising above every corruption in the world. This was the pursuit of Saraswati. Nargis, Vaijayanthimala, Padma, Padmini Kolhapure and his other heroines were his constant search for the goddess in a living form. When once asked in an interview why he clad his women on screen so scantily, Raj Kapoor said that because they were pure.

Raj Kapoor struggled emotional battles too with a disciplinarian and depriving father, a father whose approval he desired but never got, a father, who instead of extending shelter threw him repeatedly out of the house, a father who he never seemed to make proud, he remained the eternal Awara, a man who fitted nowhere, a man who belonged nowhere and a man who had no anchor. He imagined himself as a fakir, a man without a roof above his head, a man who had nowhere to go when the sun went down. Sleeping on the floor even in five-star hotels, Raj Kapoor’s only attachment seems to be the whisky and food, and indeed he was a walking encyclopedia of food joints.

The essential Awara or the Fakir helped Raj Kapoor explore the streets of cities, highways of the country, abandoned spaces of the villages, each of which appeared in his films; there is nothing in Raj Kapoor’s cinema that has not been a part of his firsthand experience of life.

Colour stunned and numbed him for a while till he made his hugely successful venture, Sangam, experimental in cinematography but totally a commercial entertainer without the usual social messages of Raj Kapoor.

In more than one way, Raj Kapoor measured himself against Satyajit Ray, both having created a new interest in Indian cinema abroad, both being influenced by the Italian neorealism. But Ray kept an arrogant aloofness from Raj Kapoor, while Raj Kapoor, hurt by his indifference made a film with the Bengali theatre director, Shambhu Mitra, yet another of his iconic production, Jaagte Raho. It was a bilingual film but to be one upon Ray, he inserted a bhangra, which entered the parlance of the Bengalis of the generation as a vernacular adage, kya main jhoot boleya.

As all geniuses do, Raj Kapoor also an out of stories, his soul exhausted of its song, his body bereft of rhythm, it was then that he decided to make the biggest project of his life, his dearest film, his autobiographical character, Mera Naam Joker. The ruin of the film, ruined him financially, crushed him emotionally but more than that, he felt let down by the world. For the first time, he misread the pulse of the people and misjudged their tastes. After the magnificent success of Awara in the Soviet Union, Krushchev analyzed the popularity of the film as a whiff of hope and optimism in war torn Russian empire. Unfortunately, the Joker could no longer transport that joy to his audience; the joker could not make the viewers laugh and with this, the joker’s existence came into a jeopardy; the generation of film goers rejected Raj Kapoor lock, stock and barrel.

The rejection of the joker was a rejection of Raj Kapoor; with empty rooms, empty studio, empty hands and empty purse, Raj Kapoor, suddenly resurrected with Bobby. Where no one believed that he could still make films, Bobby rocked the box office with newcomers and a youthful love story, derived from the many Archie comics that he was addicted to. From then onwards, it was only success for him; letting go of himself and his lifeworld, Raj Kapoor now looked to the new generation, new age, new love, new values, new challenges and here recovered his calling of film making. Forever an ascetic, a fakir, Raj Kapoor had to take on the role of a social elder, thinking of the new generation, entertaining them without putting himself as a frame bomber.

It was not failures but his successes that would make Raj Kapoor develop signs of insanity, often creating a nuisance of himself, reacting out of control to situations and even madness in pursuing the train that served good food.

The tragedy of Raj Kapoor’s life is that nothing of it remains; neither as the relic of his studio and museum, nor as his legatees, all of whom are mediocre stars and none is a producer. Only that little children are still named Raj and Nargis across Russia and central Asia, shows that the hope he delivered in the war-ravaged countries, continues in their hearts. The tune that every host in the erstwhile Soviet Union must play at parties and gatherings is Awara Hoon Main. It is their unofficial national anthem.

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Valmiki Pratibha

Posted on November 22, 2024 by secondsaturn
A magical dance – by non-dancers!

Valmiki Pratibha: Performance directed by Alokanda Roy with the prison inmates and staff of Presidency Jail, West Bengal.

Dr Susmita Dasgupta

On the 17th of November 2024, Alokananda Roy’s production of the 100th and final stage show of Tagore’s dance drama, Valmiki Pratibha was hosted at the Rabindra Sarobar Stadium, Kolkata. It was a production that even the mighty Bollywood could learn from, it was a production that Bangkok’s Ramakein could be envious of, it was a production that could have the Uzbeks and the Kyrghyz dancers or the Russian ballerinas pine for perfection. In short, this was a production that Tagore truly deserved but never got. It was, I think as my parents tell me, as magical as watching Uday Shankar perform on stage.  But the unique feature of the production was that the performers both on and off stage were inmates, staff and the released prisoners of the Presidency Jail, now called as the correctional home.

In 2000, Mr BD Sharma, IPS, DG Prisons invited Ms Alokananda Roy to grace a few cultural programmes in the Alipore Jail where she was suddenly inspired to use dance to realign the convicts. Ms Alokananda Roy is a celebrated dance exponent of the city and the prison became her calling. Dance was exercise, a discipline at the deployment of the body in time and space and into a rhythm that used the body’s unspent energies to converge towards the aesthetic unity of a tangible form. In the dance drama, one not only needed to calibrate the body but also to coordinate with many others to harmonize the individual action into a collective rhythm of the performance. This convergence, or realignment as it is usually called in the parlance of prison reforms, was used to dissolve the unmanaged anxieties which often lead to social anomie, or crime in this case.

In her own words, Alokananda says that she worked with non-dancers, those who never knew what dance was, and even derided as a non-masculine craft. She used this to her advantage as she pumped a huge energy into the movements with the detailed precision of a martial artist. And with this, they became the bandits in the band of Ratnakar, who would then become Valmiki, the subject matter of the play, Valmiki Pratibha. The coordination of movements of the dancers were as well ordered and coordinated as those one gets to witness in the Synchronized Swimming events at the Olympics. The movements were as precise to include even the finger and toe phalanges. What was more important is that the dance emanated from the song and its rhythm, rather than it be a set of movements superimposed on a song, a folly that choreographers often make.

The music was not merely the accompaniment but held and carved out the melodies and harmonies to lend altogether a new level of meaning to the lyrics. With the costumes and props as detailed as the choreography and the lighting as graded as the singing and music, the prison inmates and staff had put up a show that could give the arrangements of A R Rahman a run for his money. And all of this was done by the wardens and superintendents along with the inmates of the prison!!!

Since the production could delve so deep through its details into Tagore’s genius, the drama brought out the spirit of the play as never before. Valmiki’s is a journey of the anxious and uncollected soul into the surrender to a higher purpose. The higher purpose yet hidden from the soul nonetheless waits to be discovered, the certainty of its existence and yet the anxious anticipation and apprehension of its discovery braced every step of every dancer. Each moment in the composition was raised towards the climax, making the drama a heady experience of rapid movements and elevated rhythm.

The star of the show was of course Valmiki. I have watched Valmiki being played by major music schools of Kolkata in my childhood, when the Bengali culture was still at its zenith but never did I see a performer who could integrate his conviction of violence and its confusion with its abandonment into nonviolence, a man so entrenched in his everyday life so as to be utterly so mindless about his own genius, a man so surprised by himself that he is led into confusion and a man, hitherto so unquestioning to fall into a series of existential doubt to the point he starts to fear himself, his detachment, his own genius. Usually, performers in the role of Valmiki abandon the dance movements and simply walk about the stage to express bafflement and foreboding, but in this production, Valmiki never for a moment came out of his dance mode even when he was required to only stare ahead in bewilderment. Such was the power of Alokananda’s choreography. The songs of Valmiki were sung by B.D Sharma, each moment of the transition from puzzlement to perplexity, to elation and excitement and eventually to content and surrender was expressed in the style, diction, voice tonality and pitch. Rarely have these songs been renditioned in the way that Mr Sharma could do.

The of the Vanadevi were sung by the wardens, far surpassing those I hear from leading music schools of the city; but most outstanding were the songs sung by the bandits, somewhat crude in diction and coarse in voice, each note composed by Tagore was touched in detail. The animals were choreographed stunningly once more with detailed costumes. There were many hand movements with handkerchiefs and ribbons, which showed the perfected moves by the dancers.

The showstopper was the curtain call, because even this was choreographed to the hilt, every bow was calculated, every position placed perfectly and even the dancers who played the animals remained in the state of four leggedness and winged avatars and took their bows by nodding horns, spreading their feathers, the swan and the owl, flapping their wings. When a piece of paper was accidentally dropped, a performer immediately picked it up; this is a colossal mark of the sense of order.

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Ram vs Krishna

Posted on October 11, 2024 by secondsaturn

A young professor at a reputed University uses a novel method to teach about myths; he uses film stars and their fandom to explain the popularity of Ram or Krishna. This ingenious way of teaching has the power to immediately transport the students to literally live as contemporaries in the age of the mythical heroes. To my mind, this is exactly how history should be taught always. The only caveat in the model is that the teacher must be well read in the myths herself.

Often, we have only a vague idea of Ram or Krishna, unable to discern the differences between them. Furthermore, these myths were created over centuries shaping up with the vagaries of historical forces, carrying with them structures of power, contestations over centrality, cultural hegemony and resistances towards them. Many historians of repute mix up between the Ram of Valmiki and Ram of Tulsidas eschewing the fact that there are as many constructions of Ram as there as Ramayans, which have crossed three hundred in number. Likewise, Krishna myth is largely divided into two sets, one the Sanskrit language texts like the Puranas and the Mahabharata describe him as a hero and a king while in a later text, the Bhagavadgita he becomes a facilitator, and which is also when he becomes the God. It is entirely possible that the Gita was a later appendage to the Mahabharata, because many Upanishadic as well as Bhakti elements from later centuries enter it.  

Krishna, as the lover boy seems to be specifically the invention of Mirabai. However, the 13th century philosopher, poet and musician, Amir Khusrau introduced erotic love into Divine worship. Khusro wrote bhajans on Ram and close on his heels, Kabir carried Ram to northern India and especially Rajasthan. It appears, and it is true even now that Ram was better known in the eastern valley of the Ganga River system than beyond the Yamuna. But Mirabai, took the Krishna of Sanskrit religious texts and tweaked him into a lover boy, capable of extreme erotic sensualities with unrestrained promiscuity and abandonly adulterous.

Ram, on the other hand, is restrained; known for his sacrifices and abandonment of self-interest. He is exiled just as he is about to inherit the throne, he loses his wife just as he felt well settled in that exile, he kills the greatest foe of the Aryans on earth, namely Ravana and despite that the commoners in his kingdom forced him to give up his wife. Through the ages, Ram’s mutual contradictions between his duties as a king with obligations towards his subjects versus his duties as a husband with commitment to his wife are forever a subject of heated debates. Ram, despite being a staunch monogamist, an exception to the trend of polygamy among men of position, is forever judged as being not man enough. No one, however, judges Krishna, despite his infidelities, debaucheries and misdeeds. He cheats in war, goes back on promises, neglects his lady love, forgets his friend and yet, he does not lose either his sheen or glamour. Both are avatars of Vishnu.

Tagore commented that Ram is God despite being human, while Krishna is human despite being a God. Ram is propelled to Godliness; his worth is that he put his self interest after everybody else’s; this makes him eventually the Maryada Purushottam in Ramcharitmanas. Krishna does not become God despite the copious odes to his heroism in the Puranas and the epic; he becomes God when he become every woman’s lover boy so much so that the men in Vaishnavism imagine themselves as Radha, Krishna’s female consort. Ram is a king, a son, a brother but perhaps never a good husband or father; Krishna is a good friend, a good lover, but never quite anything of worth as a family man. Krishna is loved because of his flaws; Ram is judged despite his perfection.

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The Illusion of Progress: Gadgets vs. Real Education in India

Posted on September 21, 2024 by secondsaturn

Last afternoon I visited an exhibition in Yashobhumi, Dwarka in Delhi. Organized by the India Didactics Association, the exhibition promoted by the Ministry of Medium and Small-Scale Industries, is a gathering of so-called educators whose principal product across the board are toys, gadgets and merchandise. While some laptops and tablets are priced affordably, the bulk of the products with high margins were smart boards and smart tabs with AI components. There were toys in the form of readymade electronic circuits which could be assembled to power robots and operate dummy CNG machines. The most ridiculous products pertained to value education; training to teachers on some nonsense of digital moral science that ensnare parents too. This, is the view of education in new India.

That education is the development of the mind seemed to be completely obliterated by the extensive and intensive use of gadgets. What we never seemed to appreciate is that gadgets need a separate and distinct span of attention, dedicated time and focus to get used to and work around. The precious time that could be given to genuinely creating the mind, abilities to think and write now are set to be taken over by gadget learning time. The gadgets are also overwhelming, especially the smart boards; banking on superfast connectivity of 5G optic fibre, these gigantic contraptions are likely to wean attention of the children from both the teacher as well as the subject and dedicate, instead to the gadget.

The name Didact suggests a regressive mode of teaching known as didactic. This is a one-way education purposed to eliminate all modes of two-way communications, questions, reflections, critique, interpretations and so on. Gadget-based education is just this, teaches perhaps the handling of gadgets but eschews real education. Along with private schools, these companies feed on the innate need of and hunger for education in society; no commerce can be as lowly as those of the exhibitors in this case.

 The use of gadgets in education is targeted at some specific goals; by loading schools with expensive contraptions, society is eager to create an elite who are gadget geeks. These elites will be able to only operate gadgets but because they are unable to learn the logic behind these gadgets, such an elite will remain subservient to the west, where education pays attention to cognitive abilities. The claims of cognitive and problem-solving abilities which the gadget-based education claims are those of workmen and her tools, not of inventors and innovators. Thus, the gadget companies, in the name of educating are creating a pool of workmen, who may be operators but little of anything else. It is sad that the Ministry of MSME has failed to notice this.

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House Work

Posted on August 5, 2024 by secondsaturn

Man or woman, young or old, stay at home or working, married or single, living in a family or all by oneself, everyone must know how to do housework. Housework is a genre which encompasses a wide range of diverse, time consuming, focus dissolving multilayered chores. These span tasks like making the bed to cooking breakfast, arranging books, papers, bags and clothes, cooking to washing, sweeping, cleaning and dusting, man management to gadget maintenance, payment of bills and salaries, planning for savings and arranging for spending, the taxes and insurances and a host of other things. Taken together, the list can be formidable. If one was to list out the tasks under housework that we are to do each day, then it would be clear that we are required no less than a good four hours, a lot of sweat and sheer exhaustion to finish these. Yet, such jobs need to be attended to and done.

Housework is important only because our homes are the spaces which give us that firm Archimedian spot from which we can move the world. Thus, the house must be built on solid grounds. It is the space from which we propel ourselves to conquer the outer world; it is our greenroom in which we, as social actors prepare to face the audience. The better one is at housework, the better are the prospects of one’s life in the workspace. A good career can only be supported by an organized home.

Housework, raised into artistry in the early days of political liberalism came under attack with the rise of feminism, on one hand and communism and decolonialism on the other. In all the above mentioned the inner space becomes more truthful than the outer space; humans defy the claims of the wider world, the mainstream and cling on to their private spaces, like crabs in a well pulling one another back from climbing out. The entire politics of existence is then to protect this inner space from invasions from the world outside as well as against impulses of humans to graduate out of the closed space towards larger participation. Paradoxically, the neglect of housework belongs to this zone of protection of the inner spaces.

Since housework slips into a protected space, it is no longer looked upon as being of service to anything other than itself. Hence, to saddle woman to housework is read by them as being incapable of straddling that space. Housework then starts to get looked upon by women as conspiracies of patriarchy for demeaning them. It was indeed once a division of labour between women and men, in which the former was supposed to find her world; in the later days of liberation, women learnt to regard housework as a patriarchal conspiracy and so much conflict is kicked off over sharing of housework. Housework becomes a burden for those who are not trained in it; that housework is a patriarchal norm is a social construct, that housework must be done well is a technical need. Should we dissociate patriarchal ideas from housework and purely treat it as a technical need, we will free ourselves of social domination and instead find a sense of liberation in completing tasks.

The social media is agog with advertisements of adult ADHD in which one is shown with heaps of unfolded clothes lying strewn all over the room; this is nothing but the outcome of one not adept at the science, craft and art of housework. The lack of knowledge of housework leads to ADHD, this is the key takeaway from the story. Housework must be done, not as something, as a phenomenon striated with structures of domination but as a matter of fact, task to be done for that is the steppingstone for organizing the rest of the day.

The inner collapse of the inner spaces that is a property of politics of post coloniality, post modernity, post feminism, post patriarchy, post structural and indeed post capitalism, in which suspicions of the outer world withdraws people into inner spaces which are hermetically sealed from the outside world. The space of the house, spaces inside institutions, offices and other places of work or even leisure become protected zones, to be protected against any demands upon them and responding to any demands within them towards progress or improvement. Such mentalities give rise to the frog in the well attitude in which the inhabitants are veering themselves away from reality. Any discourse that refuses to engage with reality traps itself into sets of beliefs and notions, loses rationality and sinks the human power of reason.

Reason moves send; reason understands facts in themselves to discover a whole new set of facts that extends the horizons of human understanding. Housework needs to be treated as a thing that can extend the human towards the world, free her of anxiety and attention deficiency and thus raise productivity of societies and bring peace and calm to the self.

The inability to do housework is the basic reason for the ADHD syndrome, it is the foundation for procrastination, of letting go of command over one’s everyday life; few alcoholics or drug abusers are found who can do household tasks with elegance. The lazy husband who lurks about shirking work is the guy who has never been trained in housework. The angry and complaining wife is the one who is inept at housework. Marriages break fundamentally because of the lack of acumen of housework. When I just started reading story books in school, I read a story by Enid Blyton about a lazy pixie who picks up a shoe that pinches him till he has done his housework. This pixie used to be peevish and sour, cynical and rude to the world and people avoided him. As a result, he became lonely and desolate. But as soon as he, harassed by the shoe that pinched whenever the pixie relented, became neat and organized, he became a changed person and his social relations improved remarkably. The story had a deep impact upon me and since then, I started to see carefully whether a grip over household chores made a person different from the ones less capable of attending to washing clothes, cooking, arranging papers and so on. On the face of things, I have always been right. Those who are attentive to home tasks live longer, stay fitter, healthier and happier.

There is definitely a scientific explanation behind this and which is that tasks well completed leaves the brain free of anxiety; it is like a post work out stage in which both the body and mind having engaged, attended, worked at and completed tasks are now in the physical mode to do more and more work.

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Soil Erosion and Its Sociology

Posted on July 11, 2024 by secondsaturn

This monsoon, Madhusree and I, residents of a suburb in Faridabad, planned for a holiday in a small village farm of Sirohi in the district of Faridabad. It was a fairly large farm, perhaps a small holding in terms of the general sizes of agricultural land, having an area of 5 acres. Of this, half was for farming crops while the other half contained mostly a garden kept in the style of a forest with a tiny dwelling unit in one corner of it. Amidst this forest was an even tinier structure in the form of a wooden cottage, modelled like a caravan. The cottage was called Tempe Tintin and was part of a series of similar cottages across many places in the Deccan, all named after the various characters in children’s comics. These projects were created by an artist cum architect staying in Bangalore.

It was a quiet place since the property is leased out to a single party, often solo travellers. We found the cottage cramped, most probably due to our girth. Covered by a canopy of trees, the cottage has a natural sit-out area where the interlocking crowns of the trees protect you from rain and the sun. This being Faridabad, the power cuts are so frequent that we discussed that the property may soon have to wind up because guests would want the fridge, the air conditioner and the geyser. The interior of the cottage was arranged artistically and the design aspects of the structure impeccable. Food is served on the property, homemade daal, sabzi and roti – simple, sumptuous and familiar.

But the eyesore was the vacant land bereft of crops, dry and parched stretching from the forest to the boundary wall of the property. We asked the caretaker, why so much of the land was left unused by the owner? The caretaker said that it was difficult to grow crops here because villagers come at night to vandalize and pillage the crops. They also steal TV sets, cookware and utensils from the farm owners. It was because of the menace of the villagers that these farm owners, for whatever may their land sizes be, left lands uncultivated. The lands were purchased by the landowners, the rich urban professionals from the local land mafia. The inhabitants of Haryana are mostly the Gujjars who have been nomadic and not always held firm titles of land ownership. Land alienation among the Gujjars often goes unnoticed. Yet because they have been herdsmen, even when not migrating, they always have needed access to land. Land was now owned and fenced off, cutting off the core of their existence, namely movement. It is not always the farmlands but public commons such as the Surajkund complex, totally fenced off, large apartment complexes with complicated technologies as security measures have alienated the local people by blocking them off abruptly from their histories, their ethnic genes. No wonder then Haryana is the den not only of social conservatism but also of petty crimes used as weapons of the weak.

The large tribal population of Haryana and the absence of a middle-class intelligentsia except a small section of professionals but without any command over technology of production, has created a social hiatus in which organic solidarity can hardly be achieved. The Haryanvi society suffers from a lack of purpose because the social strata are unconnected with one another, enjoy no relationship of exchange or reciprocity of obligations. This is why, land is so easily alienated for purposes other than to expand or intensify agriculture. The Farmers’ Bill was targeted to disarm the larger farmers of the state, the stripping off of power of the big landholders was supposed to elate the landless nomads.

Land erosion then is a deep matter; it is the function of history, ethnic composition, absence of social cohesion and most of all, of politics which, has no protection for the tribal people, if they are not included in the list of the Scheduled Tribes. It is land alienation and the secret revolt of the weak that is the root cause of soil erosion, for even when we know how to prevent it through planting crops, crop rotation and similar interventions, the social and political set up of the societies, its deep inequalities, the disconnect between the haves and have nots, the loss of land for people and the loss of land used for livelihood for people lead to soil degeneration and soil loss. The sociological dimension is perhaps the cornerstone of the problem of soil loss.

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India General Elections 2024 – All Parties Are Fascists

Posted on June 2, 2024 by secondsaturn

The campaign speeches for the General Elections of 2024 tells us that fascism, when it comes to roost is a general phenomenon and not restricted to a single party or ideology. The attribute of fascism, like a pandemic is that it affects many colony microbes and viruses, mutating them into more horrific forms of themselves. While attacking the fascism of the BJP, each political party in the running have revealed the worst side of their intents. Let us take them one by one.

The campaigns of the Congress led by Rahul and Priyanka have repeated how members of their family have died martyrs for the country and how shabbily Modi treated them in the Parliament, making false accusations and false cases. Hence, we should vote for them. This is to demand from the electorate, loyalty towards the protagonists of the Congress because of their personal sufferings. This is also what a fascist does, makes one become part of his/her own trauma circle. Rahul Gandhi is thus no less a fascist since he demands loyalty to his person. It is the less educated, less articulated, the very whatsapp consumers who actually are saying on the streets that Modi’s treatment of political leaders spells danger for democracy. But this is not what Rahul said, he said that he was the victim, and we were to stand with him, not for what he did but because of what his family has done and claims, therefore entitlements through the family legacy. This is where he plays the dynasty card. Here Rahul produces the similar effect as Modi who goes to the exact opposite position to say that he has no family at all, not even his wedded wife. Both play on the same dynasty card, one who has one and one who is bereft of one.

Rahul Gandhi is so immersed in self-pity, which is also a form of self-aggrandizement, that he has taken the CPM as an ally to fight the big Modi without even batting an eyelid to see how damaging and endangering this party is to the democratic universe. Speeches from the CPM is all of envy, in today’s India its candidates, especially the young women are lauding the torn underwear of their fathers. How obscene can that get. Enduring poverty is pornographically alluring; the imagination of the woman is that of a maidservant and hence they oppose all the cash transfer projects, essential tool of economic development worldwide as alms to beggars. This is not only daft considering that they say that Bengal has produced two Nobel Laureates from Economics and here they have absolutely no idea of the essentials of public policy. During the CPM ruled Bengal, the syllabi of schools and colleges were so backdated that even in Jadavpur University, I felt like a dinosaur. The CPM’s great game plan is to keep everyone poor; envious of success, they bear the mentality of the “Little Man” of Wilhem Reich. The little man is the foundation of fascism, weak as he is, he cannot tolerate the successful, for he desires the success and yet incapable of achieving it. Communism relies on the little man as much as fascism does, it’s the envy of those who cannot for those who can. CPM minded intellectuals made defeatist cinema, wrote defeatist literature, wrote poetry of doom, raised into high art through closed network of nepotism of critics and journalists. Fascism and communism cannot survive without nepotism, not always for cornering resources, but more to build circles of trauma.

The TMC campaign continued as usual, it with nervous panic mode, paranoid and scared. With the best potential against fascism, with the most wonderfully governed state, TMC could nothing against BJP’s malicious maligning of them. Those videos were fake right from the beginning, everyone knew and waited for them to contest the visuals. campaign against it. When Sandeshkali happened, it very gingerly said that it was fake. When Partho Chatterjee was arrested the TMC should have got their own investigators, so many retired police officers are lolling away in the foyers of clubs, they could jolly well stalk the lobbies of the machinery. Authoritarian in structure, the TMC does not believe in democracy within the party; it protects its contribution to politics as a sacred shrine, neither speaking about is good work, nor allowing people to participate in its process. It is like God, a giver from the unseen space of Nabanno. It arouses human desire to be counted as equal and yet denies anyone entry into its closed circles. All anger with TMC emanates from its paranoid huddling in exclusionary spaces. Hitler did that in his last days, so Nazis did well before they were caught and executed. If TMC is hunted down, it imbibes the imagery of the victim so much into itself that it willy nilly surrenders to the hunter. It shows a venomous intolerance for opposition in its slogan birodhider borjon; why in a democracy should the opposition turn into an untouchable is a question that one must ask.

Each party has emerged as a fascist undermining the Indian democracy relentlessly. Social media influencers and even a panel of Supreme Court judges have noticed the rise of hate speech, but they have not connected this to fascism namely the game of democracy that ends up in foul. This election, it is foul play, foul as the rule of the play. It is not important that Modi has spewed venom officially and on camera; it is a matter of graver concern that the opposition has not been able to respond with any greater measure of reason.

The question arises then why has Democracy been compromised just as we have turned 75 years of age? The solution to this puzzle lies in the tenuous labyrinth among liberalism, individual agency, technology, and capitalism. Democracy’s success lies in juggling among these paradoxical elements. A disbalance in any one of these plunges it back into varying forms of authoritarianism in case of weaker democracies and fascism if democracies like India are strong to begin with. The task of politicians is to be able to constantly veer through the maze, like AI tools, managing the right balance all the time. Political discourses, civil society activism, intellectual discussions and academic investigations must take all of the above into account to help democracies survive.

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Industries of West Bengal

Posted on May 23, 2024 by secondsaturn

The Trinamool Congress has posted a list of some 70 odd industrial units which have been closed during the life and times of the CPM in Bengal. This is a snide comment on the supposed promise to give jobs made by some CPM leaders as part of their election promises. What job would they provide when these were the very jobs their trade union militancy had taken away? CPM sympathizers have now said but what about Tata and Singur, did not Buddhadeb Babu go back on his mistakes and corrected his course? Let us examine the case of Bengal industries.

The demise of the Bengal industries started with the Nehruvian policy of mass industrialization. Industries of Bengal were by nature patent driven innovative ventures which were not conducive for mass production. Unfortunately, for the Dutt Committee Report, the insistence was on heavy industries making some reservations for the small-scale ones, mostly homegrown in deference to the democratic principles in the ownership of capital. But the industries which were founded upon high technology and filed patents went completely unrecognized. The industries for mass production swept out the ground for the innovation led industries through the purchase of large-scale machinery often from Soviet Russia, USA, or European countries. The technology was confined only to the machine and hence it was imported. Industrialization grew by import substitution that often meant the reproduction of the imported machines at home. The infamous “jugaad” is part of the effort at imitating imported machines from the west. Such a model of industrialization was thus only imitative and reproducing what already existed rather than what industrialization ought to have meant, namely innovations. Were the Bengalis recognized and encouraged for their innovations, the Indian industry would perhaps also have grown by innovations and thus lay the foundation for a more genuine industrialization than a merely imitative one.

In the imitative industrialization, the need for technical knowledge is low. Joseph Schumpeter mentions that such technology plateau an happen also when technologies stop growing. It is thus, at the close of the capitalist cycle that the real “dead labour” rises in the form of the machine, reduces labour to a mere cog in the assembly line and separates the labour and capital for good. The intervening role of the manager comes in, not as perhaps Daniel Bell observes as a dilution of the labour and capital divide but possibly as a reinforcement of the same. The alienated labour who is now an automatoned guy is stoned into repetitive jobs and develops deep resentment towards dehumanization. As his powers of creativity are done into redundancy, the worker becomes a zombie desperate for meaning in life. Such are the real moments of the strike. Strikes demand humanization. Democratic politics is often a euphemistic moment of the mob attacks by men and women thus demhumanized by processes over which they have no control. The slew of strikes in Bengal is therefore a strike against dehumanization; such militancies masked the larger battle of the poor, the less educated, the lower culture class to belong at par to the elite. This may explain the rise of the communist party as a recalcitrant power in Bengal, a weapon of the dehumanized culture class of the underbelly rather than being only about labour and capital.

However, when industries really went away, the people were distraught, migrating across the country and living under harsh conditions, dehumanized than ever before. It was through the experiences of the migrant worker that Bengalis learnt to be slaves, taking the torture in the bargain of making a living, realizing that one must live on.

The CPM suddenly woke up to a deindustrialized Bengal, changed its veneer and posed as a pro industrial state and invited the Tata Motors to set up an automobile pant in Singur. The land acquisition proved disastrous as the Tatas were keen to acquire the fertile and well irrigated lands on the left bank of the highway rather than the slightly depressed non irrigated lands on the right. This land was cultivated mainly as kitchen gardens and subsistence rice farming. Mayhem broke at the destroying of livelihoods. When I went to Singur for my field work, farmers were clear that in today’s day and age of high technology, jobs would not be created for them and the only employment they would have been that of a guard. While the farmers saw no future for themselves in industrialization, they treated industries as a direct assault on their livelihoods and security.

A quick background check on the farmers of Singur revealed that these families were not traditionally farmers but in fact retrenched factory workers from the closed jute mills of Bengal. Farming was the subsequent stage in their lives which gave them the security that the industries did not. Similarly, when I asked a guava seller in Dhakuria what kind of industrial training he would have liked to get a job in the factories, he retorted that he had lost his job as a floor supervisor in Bata Shoes. The Bengal story is replete with retrenchment of workers owing to closed factories. Hence, industries and jobs do not seem to be too connected to each other in this state. Politics around factory jobs do not do well among the Bengalis living in Bengal. While Bengal has a large proportion of migrant workers across the country, working as housemaids to labour force in the small and medium industries, and is also home to the highest number of MSME units in the country, large and heavy industries with slew of factory workers stepping inside the gates at the sound of the siren seems to be a thing of the past.

The Bengali is therefore not willing to offer himself as an industrial labour and hence the lowest labour productivity in the country. This is the real reason for the lack of heavy industries in Bengal. If we go by the theory of economics, then labour is the ultimate producer of value; the bargaining power of labour goes down against capital is the component of value addition as the ratio of gross value is low. Labour militancy is often a sign of unsuitability of the type of industries set up in a society. Labour militancy represents the point beyond which movement along the diagonal of the Edgeworth box curve is not possible, negotiations have broken down. Bengali workers’ bargaining point is at a much higher point into the profits of the company; they would work only when wages are much higher. Companies do not wish to provide wages at such rates due to the low productivity of the worker, which in turn is withdrawal of labour for the prevailing rates of wages.

The Bengali who does not wish to work for wages in Bengal is also the same worker who will work much better for less money outside the state. Thus, industries anywhere is good for he Bengali who can migrate easily and adapt well into various weather conditions. Within Bengal, the worker, who probably has come from a rural background into the city would like to pretend that he is a “Babu” and hence must get a commensurate lifestyle as that of a city middle class. As a migrant worker, he is anonymous among a people who do not count but among his own, he would not want to be shown as a lesser being. The concerns of social status for a Bengali is detrimental to his work culture.

If Bengal has to industrialize at all then we should industrialize with labour intensive high technology industries in which skills should be the principal demand. Large mass scale industrialization with labour lined up against the assembly line, hierarchically organized would lead to bitter battles over dehumanizing; constant demand for higher wages and lower productivity pertains are symptoms of alienation.

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