A lot is happening

What do Elon Musk, the Taliban and rigid Gandhians have in common? They do not believe there has been a population explosion over the last century; rather, they are afraid that the world is on the verge of being depopulated. Well, Musk is a nut (you don’t believe nuts can become hugely successful in a worldly way? You have obviously never heard of Howard Hughes and Adolf Hitler): he believes that we must procreate much more rapidly because ‘Mars needs us’, whatever that means. The Taliban are much saner in comparison, they only want an endless supply of suicidal mujahideen. And Gandhi taught his followers there can never be too many people around, because ‘God gave each man only one mouth to feed but two hands to work with’. Evidently no one ever explained to him the iron law of diminishing returns when you have to work with several productive factors in fixed supply, like land and fresh water and nature’s capacity to recycle toxic substances, when one factor (namely population) keeps increasing to monstrous levels (almost nothing to one billion 1800 years; one billion to nearly 8, the next two hundred years only). I wonder how Musk at least would feel if he were forced to live in, say, a one-room accommodation in Dharavi slum without a private toilet and able only to visit a government hospital when he is sick, or to sit for some job entrance examination where millions fight over a few hundred vacancies…

Manoj Jha, RJD member of the Rajya Sabha and a professor at Delhi University, singlehandedly and greatly raised the prestige of Parliament as the ultimate representative of the people on Tuesday the 21^st July by delivering an eight-minute apology (maafinama) to the entire country for the untold misery and loss visited upon us during the long pandemic, blaming all governments since Independence for the pathetic situation we find ourselves in today (attention to public health and emergency management has NEVER been a priority to any government at the Centre). I hope his speech will percolate deep and wide into the public mind, and go down in history. I wish even a single member of the ruling party attending the session had the guts, the honesty and the empathy with his voters to applaud. Jha was not even singling out their Supreme Leader for dereliction of duty!

Our current CJI, it seems, has taken several bulls by the horns by calling the sedition law a colonial hangover and promising to examine its Constitutional validity and relevance. In this context, I would like to note, like Jha, that no government since 1947 has thought fit to remove it from the statute books, for reasons that should be obvious! (the Supreme Court has also recently expressed deep consternation that our entire hospital sector is being run like corporate business, geared only to maximize profits, all ideas of rendering an essential social service be damned).

Meanwhile, recent sero-surveys have indicated that close to two-thirds of our population may have developed antibodies to Covid – which means we are close to herd immunity – and even Dr. Randeep Guleria, director of AIIMS Delhi, a committed and passionate doomsayer since early last year, has now gone on record saying it is high time that schools and colleges were reopened. Will India soon become the only major country in the world where they will be kept indefinitely closed? And will any half-sane person claim that that will be another feather in our national cap?

Here in West Bengal we have created history of sorts by declaring that 79 Madhyamik candidates have jointly stood first (with 599 marks out of 600!!) and not one of the many lakhs failed. Go figure. It terrifies me to think of what kind of future awaits these hapless youngsters, especially in the job market.

All kinds of unconnected musing brought me back to reflect upon the life and death of Harihar Ray, the indigent itinerant priest who was father to Apu in Pather Panchali, and died ‘unhonoured, unsung’ and virtually unwept in Varanasi, far away from his native Nischindipur. In this age of absolutely virulent and vicious insistence on reverse caste- and gender entitlement, there are still good men, poor Brahmins, who live simple, honest, hardworking lives, quietly doing the humble best they can for their wives and children until they drop dead, and they vanish without even a public eulogy: who cares? Not even their own families for very long: Apu neither shed tears nor remembered by the time he got married. While all around us we can see the most privileged (and often worthless-) children of  SC, ST and OBC folks who have already got the best of all possible worlds – father IAS, mother successful surgeon, luxury accommodation, fancy cars, five star dinners, holidays abroad – and still getting every kind of unearned advantage from school to college to jobs and even seats in legislatures, so much so that getting at least an OBC certificate through fair means or foul has become one of the fastest ways to social advancement for hundreds of thousands, and then being resentful whenever anybody even insinuates that they got it all because they were born in a lucky time, because their ancestors were badly treated, sometimes many generations ago… many years ago certain expert committees urged the government to cut out this ‘creamy layer’ at least from all such entitlements, and the CPI(M) alone among all political parties has always insisted that affirmative action should be based solely on the criteria of economic and educational deprivation, but no one has ever bothered to take them up in any meaningful way. And one last question: why should someone, who has been allowed to get through school on much easier terms than his peers, continue to get similar advantages through college and in the job market? By greatly relaxing entry requirements for our future doctors, teachers, judges and civil servants, are we benefiting the nation in any way at all?

Our sins and follies are deep, old and toxic.