Dark days far from gone!

Joe Biden took over as the post-madness President of the United States today. We must not forget, though, that far more serious than Donald Trump the individual is the long-developing phenomenon that brought him to power and the legacy that he is leaving behind.

It is a fact that the inclusive, altruistic, cooperative, farsighted movement in human affairs with a pronounced concern for improving the condition of long-disadvantaged people (from the poor to Blacks, women and the LGBT tribe) started ebbing all over the world after the 1960s, and was rapidly rolled back ever since the rise of the Reagan-Thatcher consensus (conservative in social values, free capitalistic in economic conviction) in the west coupled with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the sharp turn of China towards a no-holds-barred materialistic/acquisitive/me-first culture around the same time (India more or less tamely followed suit, with no strong and separate ideology to guide us: real thinkers with constructive visions of the stature of Rammohun,Vivekananda, Gandhi and Tagore had stopped coming into the limelight a long time ago).That rather drastic shift did pay rich dividends, partly because the formerly mentioned movement had betrayed too many ideals, leaving behind a whole range of negative reactions from terror and horror  to merely a bad taste in the mouth, and partly because the opposite  effort sharply improved living conditions for a vast chunk of the human population within about thirty years, along with making billionaires by the hundreds and millionaires by the hundred thousand – the latter naturally got a huge stake in the new dispensation to want to do their utmost to keep it going unchallenged.

However, from the time that seminal book Globalization and its discontents was written (and actually much before that, as readers of J.K. Galbraith and Robert Lekachman know), it started becoming plain to the most clear-eyed observers of world affairs that all was not well with us. a) The physical environment was becoming rapidly and dangerously polluted as an unfortunate but apparently unavoidable spinoff of the kind of high-consumption lifestyles that more and more people were adopting; b) crime and social dysfunction proliferated, even at the family level, everywhere in the world as more and more people insisted that freedom and democracy meant not civilized negotiation, gradual compromise and quiet living but an aggressive attitude of grabbing, self-advertizing and thrusting forward in every sphere of life – every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost began to be taught as ‘wisdom’ in virtually every business school, not just in criminal gangs; c) people by the hundred million, feeling cheated, rootless, culturally disoriented, utterly insecure about the future in a scenario of ultra-rapid change (change which visibly and grossly benefited the already privileged), began to be attracted more and more to every kind of religious demagoguery that promised meaning and stability and community and certainty of better things ahead (even if that meant martyrdom as a terrorist!); and to control all this flux and chaos, d) more and more it became obvious that authoritarian rulers offering neo-fascist dispensations and miracle cures were becoming popular all over the world: they alone were confident of where they were going, they alone knew all the answers, they alone could lead their country towards a new heaven on earth. Their shrill, hyper-exaggerated (and plain lying-) messages were intensively, ceaselessly propagated to their increasingly blind and devoted followers through the bullhorns of social media, which gave them direct, continuous and relentless access to tens of millions of people in a way that Orwell would have marvelled at, and it became the despair of the regular, old-fashioned mass media which decided to become ever more noisy, trivial and sensationalistic to stay relevant. It is against this background that the rise of Donald Trump has to be understood, along with so many other ‘strong men’ all over the world.

It is one of my pet theories – buttressed by a lifetime of close observation and reflection – that any kind of excess in social manners and mores invariably provokes an excessive reaction in the opposite direction. Also, that nobody has the whole truth, nor does anybody tell the whole truth as s/he knows the truth all the time. If you accept these two premises, you will agree with me that democracy, if it is to remain healthy and effective, must always function in the spirit of tolerant debate, adjustment and compromise, consciously avoiding all extreme positions, every participant willing to obey the basic rules and to accept the majority decision taken without threat or coercion – however unpalatable or unsatisfactory it appears to him or her personally. Now a lot of people might dislike my saying this, but that does not change the fact that in the name of change and progress and improvement, far too many people of too many different persuasions have pushed the limits of civilized discourse too far for too long. To take a few examples, those who call themselves liberal democrats in the US and secular liberals in India have, all the while paying lip service to the ideals of democracy and free speech and tolerance, insisted that they alone are always right, and all those who disagree with them must be derided, shouted down, isolated and if possible ostracized, put beyond the pale. Therefore you are instantly branded racist if you so much as mumble that a lot of black people do take to drugs and crime too easily, and need to be dealt with firmly by the law, though never abused; you immediately and forever become a sexist if you dare to say publicly that women can be bad people too; you are instantly branded a religious bigot if you point to statistics which show that members of a certain religious community take to violent terrorism far more than others; they shut you out completely as a heretic if you suggest that capitalism (or socialism, depending on which circle you are rubbing shoulders with) might have a lot of faults; why, they call you a grammar Nazi if you insist on the importance of correct and polite language! ‘(I have every right to mangle a language as much as I please’). Notice, those who take most pride in calling themselves enlightened and civilized created this atmosphere: ‘You only have the right to agree with me: free speech for me/us/what is politically correct right now, not for anyone else’. How dare you say you don’t particularly thrill at the idea of homosexual love, when we in our own little ghetto have decided to worship it?

Top this off with the increasingly ominous development, hugely exacerbated by social media (which have become a major phenomenon only in the current century), that most people neither know nor respect facts any more. Democracy, or indeed any form of civilized discourse and decision making, depends crucially upon people basing their opinions on reason and facts. Now facts have always been difficult to ascertain, fluid and protean: science in the broadest sense has tried to, and hugely succeeded in, widening the ambit of facts that we can be more or less sure of, but, while its success with the natural world has been truly remarkable (physics, chemistry, even biology), the application of the scientific method to social affairs has been far less so. Things have not been improved by the fact that there are far too many ‘experts’ around on every subject these days muddying the waters, so that any fool of a bigot can call upon any number of experts to buttress his opinions, however far-fetched they may be (learn from the pandemic-scare experience). So there are still endless debates over simply what the facts are: are women really weaker than men, are Blacks really lazier and stupider and more criminal minded than whites, are Muslims intrinsically more fanatical and violent than others, are most Mexicans rapists and drug dealers, did China spread the virus to terrorize and dominate the rest of the world? And as these questions have become more and more politicized, so have the debates grown more heated, more acrimonious. The confusion is worse confounded by the fact that more and more people base their opinions on social media inputs (which are known to spread deliberate misinformation with mischievous intent), naively accepting the most extreme opinions disguised as facts most likely to be true, which makes for a very volatile, very explosive situation.

Now consider a third most unhappy development over the last generation: the kind of ‘democratic, egalitarian’ education that has been dished out to hundreds of millions of young people all over the relatively-free world was designed to insanely boost everybody’s self-esteem: everyone was talented, everyone had great potential, everyone could be tycoon, rock star or president; nobody could be called stupid, lazy, delinquent, undisciplined or unsocial any more (especially if he has made big money!). Everybody is, or has to be, a winner, no matter whether that is in a school track race or in a race for the Nobel Prize (people were encouraged to forget that winners need losers much more than losers need them: you can’t win something unless one or many others have lost!) Teachers’ criticism was muted by fiat, examination standards lowered and scores raised to absurd levels for the hoi polloi, at least up to the college level, so that Everyman could develop a swollen ego, brought up to think that they are all wonderful creatures and the world exists to serve their pleasure. No one, from street lumpen to cabinet minister, must say sorry and back down in acknowledgment of being wrong or unfair; self-assertion is the be all and end all. Just look around you, and maybe at the mirror, to check out whether I am right.

Then think quietly and calmly: what happens if this goes on for too long? All those who feel left out, cheated, marginalized, humiliated, even many gentle and reasonable folks among them, begin to yearn for a leader who would articulate their long-suppressed grievances, who would make the world look simple to negotiate again, who would restore at least some old-fashioned values (work hard, take responsibility, don’t abuse the elderly), greatly raise their self-esteem even if they didn’t deserve it, painlessly usher in either a return to a mythical, lost golden age (‘Make America great again’ is the war cry of a man who neither knows nor cares that America looked greatest in the world’s eyes just after she became the generous rehabilitator of half the world, having won a world war before that on behalf of tolerance and democracy!) or a new, crudely imagined heaven (where only upper caste Hindus prevail, or Bible Belt white Americans).

Donald Trump, like Hitler, did not appear out of thin air. Alas, we have stopped reading serious history – that is another great failure of the current era – or we would have known and recognized the processes by which such ‘leaders’ rise to power, over and over again. The most successful leaders, those who rise most meteorically, are the most cunning, most shameless, most callous and most opportunistic: they are guided solely by the raw will to power, and they know how best to knit together the angst of all the disparate disgruntled elements into a tsunami of reaction which will raise them to the throne. And if the volatile, explosive mix that I mentioned above lasts, Trump will be back again (remember, 70 million-plus voted for him still, after four disastrous years!), or someone even worse, because there will be vast numbers of fanatical idiots eager to raise him to power. Also remember, a lot of people manage to be content, if not actually happy, even under regimes like the Nazis and the Bolsheviks – until their nearest and dearest are put on the chopping block. As in ancient Rome, so in today’s world; as in the US, so in India. It bears worrying about.

P.S.: Nishant Kamath’s long comment on my last post on the subject clarifies a lot of things about how someone like Trump came to power. The book I am reading now, the latest from Pankaj Mishra (Bland Fanatics), goes some way to explain the phenomenon in greater detail (though of course I do not condone all his views), and also why it is not going to vanish with the departure of Donald Trump from the White House: the rot is very old, and runs too deep.

A most delightful evening

I hugely enjoy old boys dropping in for a chat, but I spend most evenings alone, or only one visitor like that turns up. So it was most exhilarating to see several of them knocking at my door today, one after another, just after my classes were over. There was one from the '94 batch, come to consult me about how his son should handle his studies, one favourite from the 2002 batch and another from 2007 who has almost become family, another from the the 2016 batch and another, 2019. We chatted gaily over cakes and coffee, and then went out together for my regular walk. It was all topped off by a phone call from Kolkata, someone else who has kept in touch ever since he left school in 1998. I wish I could enjoy more evenings like that: I'd have looked and felt fifteen years younger.

It was Swami Vivekananda's birthday today. Google ferrets out so many relatively obscure Indians with no very great claim to fame to feature on their doodles, but evidently he was not found worthy!

Trump: going, going, not yet gone...

‘Horrified’ is a word that falls far short of expressing what I felt when I heard that Hillary Clinton had lost the US presidential election in 2016, and that a creature like Donald Trump was going to occupy the Oval Office for the next four years. Unlike the vast majority of Indians, I have known something about him since the time he tried to build a casino called the Taj Mahal, you see, and along the way somehow became a billionaire most of whose businesses had failed.

‘How much must even American women voters hate Ms. Clinton?’ ‘What has gone wrong with their electoral process that this kind of candidate can be put up by either party and this kind of result produced?’ ‘Has a large part of America become so stupid, so vulgar, so violent, so embittered with their lot that they actually think a dirty rich, nearly uneducated (his vocabulary could give many of my current pupils a superiority complex), boorish hustler/con-man/thug with zero political experience will solve all their problems by waving some sort of magic wand?’ These were some of the questions that stormed through my mind when I first heard about it, even as I hunkered down to endure the next four years, gloomily aware of the sad fact that an American president can not only mess up his own country’s affairs but still seriously affect the rest of the world for better or for worse.

And I have not been disappointed, though I’d have been glad to be. This man has reduced the image of the US presidency to the dust (compared to him, earlier fools, duds and manipulators like Dubya Bush now look like sages and saints), predictably failed to solve any of the problems he had promised to solve (echoes of New Delhi since 2014?), and nearly demolished the whole edifice of American democracy as we knew it before losing out on a second term. I guess we should be glad that he did not precipitate a third world war: but maybe we have only his instinct for self-preservation at any cost to thank for it.

For the whole world, he has set new standards of in your face arrogance, shamelessness, mendacity, self-serving, and total deafness to the most reasonable and valid of criticisms. Also, about how to live perpetually in an echo chamber, listening to his own endless self-congratulation* over every fictitious or petty success (even stooping to highlight Modi’s campaigning for him!) when he is not gorging on the blind, ignorant adulation of his small but noisy cohort of fanatical, mostly redneck or wheeler dealer tycoon-supporters. The whole sorry fiasco of a term ended with a resounding defeat (70 million plus more Americans voted for Biden!), which, like a pathetic, very badly brought up child throwing tantrums he refused to concede in the face of the clearest of facts (or harking to ‘facts’ that only he and his ragtag army of devotees seemed to be aware of!), even in the face of a reprimand from as august an institution as the Supreme Court (loaded with a Republican majority of judges, too, some even of his own choosing), simply refusing to quit until very serious anxiety began to mount whether he would try to thwart the Inauguration of his legitimate successor and would become the first ever President to be physically arrested and dragged out of the White House by the police or the military – and maybe thrown forever into an asylum for the pathologically insane or feeble-minded.

At last, as many millions like me I’m sure were praying, he went too far. On the day the Congress was to meet to vote on whether to put the most sacrosanct stamp of certification on Biden’s election, he egged on a gang of armed goons calling themselves Republican supporters to besiege Capitol Hill and browbeat the legislators into stopping the certification process. There was some violence, some policemen and I think Congressmen were hurt or badly rattled, at least one person was killed by a police bullet while rioting, and then the vast majority of lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats alike, closed ranks to condemn them and ‘(the) injured pride of a selfish man’ (Republican Mitt Romney’s words) who had provoked them, unbothered about the momentous likely consequences. The Constitution and democracy were in danger, they decided promptly – democracy too easily degenerates into mob rule incited by mad demagogues, they remembered – and that was a far bigger concern than what Donald Trump wanted. So the rabble was taken care of, and the stamp of certification granted. In the face of that final ignominy, compounded by a sharp rebuke from his own vice President Mike Pence, the nut still in the hot seat has said there will be an orderly transition on January 20, though, like all losers who know they deserve to lose and cannot bear to face it, he says he still ‘totally disagrees with the outcome of the election’. Believe it or not, even Modi in a tweet has condemned this attitude, and twitter has locked his account in response to his latest barrage of flagrant lying claims of victory. (see this news article).

Now we can only hope he at least knows what a promise is, and that it is important to keep promises. I won’t be surprised if he forgets it completely by tomorrow, or threatens to hang himself from the White House front balcony instead of leaving – he is that sort of animal, he’d be thrilled to know that he made one final front-page-hogging splash before he vanished into richly-deserved oblivion. Also hope that, since it has been said that Trumpism, that hodgepodge of mad dreams of the sullen white trash in an economy in slow but terminal decline, will long outlive Trump, I pray that Biden will be at least halfway successful in bringing some peace, reconciliation, the spirit of decent compromise and collective enterprise with common goals back to America.

And for us, half a world away, it is high time to reflect on this sordid drama, and on what lessons we should learn from it before it is too late, in an India that is increasingly Bharat…

[P.S., Jan. 09: *Despite everything that has transpired lately, he has publicly called his own tenure 'the greatest presidential first term in history'. Of course, his followers are probably apes who could never have heard of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts or Kennedy, and he talks only to them. He has also firmly demanded in his last days in office that no 'disrespect', meaning arrest or prosecution, should be shown to the vandals and looters who had stormed the Capitol: in his eyes, only they are true patriots. Remember someone saying that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel?]

First post of 2021

One of many reasons why I find it increasingly difficult to write new posts on this blog is that I am more aware than ever before that I have serious readers of vastly differing mindsets – from what I know, my youngest reader is a fourteen year old boy in my own town, and the oldest is an eighty two year old woman in the south western part of the United States. How do you write things that might appeal to, or at least not bore, either of them?

I know I am repeating myself, but I cannot restate how delighted I am to be able to hold offline classes every day of the week again. And already, like the pain of a broken leg, the memory of how I survived those seven horrible months has faded into something that I just cannot remember in any detail, try as I might.

I am trying, after a very long time, to socialize again but with a caveat for myself (see last paragraph). And God be thanked, the experiences, few as yet, have been uniformly rewarding. Several old boys have conveyed a desire to look me up too, or done so already, so that’s there. Some of them, like a few favourite kids who are currently my students, have averred that it’s difficult because they find me ‘intimidating’: I wonder, could that really be true, and if so, why on earth?

It’s been freezing cold in Delhi for a while, and then it has been damp and rainy lately, while Durgapur is having rather mild weather, with the sun actually hot at midday. Very disappointing. I hope there will be one last chilly spell before the season turns, and that a few more flowers would bloom in my garden…

Thanks to Nilanjan Halder of the 2007 batch, I have got my hands on Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the twenty first century at last. For someone like me, it promises to be engrossing reading, all 750-odd pages of it. Here is a good, critical review of it already, though it's a bit dated.

My senior batch is likely to be dissolved at the end of January, along with the juniormost. So February and March are going to have a light work schedule again. I am not worrying, because the worst, touch wood, is past, and the vaccine (even if it has only a placebo effect, as is highly likely) is around the corner, so I am looking forward to a normal (fully offline) next session in April, or at most a month later. Before that, a longish sojourn in Delhi with my daughter again, perhaps, and even a little holiday trip thrown in.

Going on 58, I am actually looking forward to becoming a senior citizen with eager anticipation and relish. If only because, as this otherwise ghastly year has taught me, I can now afford to revv down to a lighter workload. From the next session onwards, I am going to shrink the size of my batches. At least I hope I can, if people would let me!

My sole resolution for the New Year is about reviving and maintaining relationships: I shall stop trying so hard and so one-sidedly. That, I have decided finally and at long last, is where I always went wrong – I tried too hard. I shall expect my interlocutors to do most of the trying from now on. Let’s see how that works out.