How To Secularise Secularism

Dipankar Gupta





Note to Rajnath Singh: just make the law intolerant of intolerance

Secularism, as we know it, is an idea whose time has gone. When home minister Rajnath Singh says that it is an overused term, and several people nod in sane agreement, the season has surely come to burn the leaves.Religious tolerance, in its purest form, is hardly a bankable commodity on a social scale. Nowhere in the world have people become tolerant because of lectures on secularism. Humankind is flawed at the start, for no matter where we are, or how developed we are, we always believe that people other than us are intrinsically inferior.
Asking for tolerance is much like whistling for the moon; yet, in practice, actions against intolerance might work if you whistle for the police instead.Ultimately , secularism is not about the milk of human kindness, or about tolerance, but about an intolerant law that will not tolerate public intolerance.It is only when the administration gets flaccid on this count that our spontaneous tendencies surface, but we nearly always rush to the wrong address for help.
The one wrong address, for a very long time, was the Congress party , but there were others too. The more the administration gave in to violence against minorities, the more it talked about secularism as tolerance; just words, nothing in deed. As legal action did not follow with the right kind of vigour, the term pseudo-secularism gained credibility. It was all talk, as neither side had any intention of calling in the cavalry to implement the law.
This process got its ribbon-cutting start when Indira Gandhi introduced “secularism“ in the Constitution, much as one would a totem pole. It was revered from far but far from revered; caste politics and Sikh killings owe their origin to her brand of politics. Over time, and this had to happen, a full scale war of words ensued. This kept the fur and spittle flying, but the need to buckle down and punish the guilty never really surfaced.
Secularism, therefore, is not about good and bad people, but about an unflinching law that won't brook public demonstrations of intolerance. It is never love, nor the urge to be hugged; secularism is just to make sure that ordinary people can lead ordinary lives without fearing what tomorrow might bring. When the law is on your side you don't need eyes in the back of your head.
It is the law, not irreligiousness, or shutting up the church, that makes us secular. In fact, Henry VIII was hardly secular because he flouted the Pope, divorced and re-married. If the Vatican did not approve of his behaviour, it could go fly a kite. From this historical act a rather simplistic idea grew that secularism was about separating church from state.
Yet, one cannot cast Henry VIII as secular just because he defied religious authorities. Religious persecution continued in Europe, not because the church said smell, go, hunt and kill, but because it was now the king who issued such diktats. The unquestionable authority of the priests was now replaced by that of the king. Truth was still being handed down from above and the subjects continued their weary lives as subjects.
It is only with democracy that secularism truly appeared. This is not because we suddenly became good, and traded in our cruel hearts for loving ones. What made the real difference was that there were now legal penalties for communal and religious violence. Did all of this begin because those who birthed democracy were personally tolerant, packed with moral rectitude and goodwill? Far from it! What had changed was the need for massive numbers to overthrow monarchy and absolutist rule. A population divided by religion and sects was far too fragmented to topple the king; a united front was essential for this purpose. It was out of this seedling that citizenship emerged, but it had to toil its way up as it kept getting stamped upon. Massimo d'Azeglio, a mid-19th century scholar, put it nicely when he said: “Now that we have made Italy , let us make Italians.“
Secularism becomes a habit when the law works systematically , and without exception, against sectarian intolerance. It is this legal intolerance of intolerance that teaches us to be civil and not moral science in a classroom, nor sweet and inconstant political talk.Though it might still hurt to tolerate and make room for other communities, it would hurt a lot more to break the law.Take the law out of the frame and see hatred spew out in religious spirals even in advanced, “civilised“ democracy .
Across time, intolerance is spurred by social and economic insecurity . When jobs are scarce, when one's self-esteem has got a hiding, we start blaming other communities and see all kinds of evil in them.How is this best combated, with words or with deed? Recall post-Partition's hot and heady mood, and yet how Nehru succeeded in keeping religious passions from taking over our just born democracy .He succeeded, in large measure, because he promised jobs, dams and steel mills. He hardly talked of pure tolerance, or even secularism; he just did it.
If secularism and pseudo-secularism are bandied about freely , and abusively , today it is because partisans on both sides are clueless on how to develop our economy . This is bipartisanship for you, Indian style!

Source: Times of India, 30-11-2015

Students aim to set ‘scientific’ record

Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT-D) will host 2,000 school students next month, who will attempt to set a Guinness World Record by performing a chemistry experiment simultaneously at the upcoming India International Science Festival.

The mega science festival is a joint effort by ministry of science and technology and ministry of earth sciences in collaboration with Vijnana Bharati, a swadeshi science movement working towards interlinking traditional and modern sciences on the one hand and natural and spiritual sciences on the other.

“The festival aims at encouraging scientific temper among young minds. Fifty students each from 40 private and government schools from the capital will perform the same chemistry experiment as an attempt to make a Guinness World Record,” said KS Rao, dean, infrastructure.

The science festival will be held from December 4 to 8 and is likely to be attended by close to 4,000 young scientists, who will get the opportunity to discuss ideas and interact with industry.

“There would be eight parallel sessions on various topics in which students will get to interact with experts. There is going to be a ‘Young Scientist Conference’ in which papers will be presented on various topics, including indigenous knowledge. There will also be an Industry-Academia conference to give students a chance to learn more about start-ups,” said Rao.

Vijnana Bharati is headed by Vijay Bhatkar who is also the chairman of IIT Delhi’s board of governors. The festival will have themes, including, ‘Indigenous Science and Technology’, and ‘Innovative Agricultural Practices and Livestock Management’.

The festival will have a science film festival to showcase movies and documentaries on scientific themes. “The sessions will comprise interaction with eminent scientists, expo award function, science film festival and showcasing of innovative models and a young scientists meet,” said officiating director of IIT Delhi, Kshitij Gupta.

Source: Hindustan Times, 28-11-2015

India must treat water as strategic resource, fight China’s throttlehold

As if to underscore the contrast between an autocracy and a democracy, China’s announcement recently that all six power-generating units at the world’s highest-elevation dam in Zangmu, Tibet, are now fully operational coincided with protesters stalling the movement of trucks to Lower Subansiri, India’s sole large dam project currently under construction. After finishing the $1.6 billion Zangmu project on the Brahmaputra ahead of schedule, China is racing to complete a series of additional dams on the river. These dams, collectively, are set to affect the quality and quantity of downstream flows.

The water situation in India is far worse than in China, including in terms of per capita availability. China’s population is just marginally larger than India’s but its internally renewable water resources (2,813 billion cubic metres per year) are almost twice as large as India’s. In aggregate water availability, including external inflows (which are sizeable in India’s case), China boasts virtually 50% larger resources than India.

Yet, even as China’s dam builders target rivers flowing to India, including the Brahmaputra, Indus, Sutlej and Arun (Kosi), New Delhi has failed to evolve a strategic, long-term approach to the country’s pressing water challenges. The flash floods that ravaged Himachal Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh between 2000 and 2005 were linked to the unannounced releases from rain-swollen Chinese dams and barrages.

China’s centralised, megaprojects-driven approach to water resources, reflected in its emergence long ago as the world’s most dam-dotted country, is the antithesis of the policy line in India, where water is a state (not federal) subject under the Constitution and where anti-dam NGOs are powerful. The Narmada Dam remains incomplete after decades of work. The largest dam India has built since Independence — the 2,000-megawatt Tehri Dam on the Bhagirathi — pales in comparison to China’s giant projects, such as the 22,500-megawatt Three Gorges Dam and the new Mekong mega-dams like Xiaowan, which dwarfs Paris’s Eiffel Tower in height, and Nuozhadu, which boasts a 190-square km reservoir.

India’s surface-water storage capacity — an important measure of any nation’s ability to deal with drought or seasonal imbalances in water availability — is one of the world’s lowest, in per capita terms. Amounting to 200 cubic meters per head yearly, less than 1/11th of China’s. The 2030 Water Resources Group has warned that India is likely to face a 50% deficit between water demand and supply by 2030.

In 1960, India generously reserved more than 80% of the Indus basin waters for its adversary Pakistan under a treaty of indefinite duration. This pact remains the world’s most generous water-sharing arrangement. (The volume of waters earmarked for Pakistan — by way of comparison — is over 90 times the 1.85 billion cubic metres the US is required to release to Mexico under a bilateral treaty.)

India’s 1996 Ganges water-sharing treaty with Bangladesh guarantees specific cross-border flows in the critical dry season — a new principle in international water relations. This provision means that even if the river’s flows were to diminish due to reasons beyond India’s control — such as climate change or the planned Chinese damming of a key Ganges tributary, the Arun (Kosi), which contributes significantly to downstream Ganges water levels — India would still be obligated to supply Bangladesh 34,060 cubic feet of water per second (cusecs), on average, in the dry season, as stipulated by the treaty. Bangladesh’s share of current downstream flows is about 50%.

But China is not India: With its frenzied dam building, Beijing refuses to enter into a water-sharing arrangement with any co-riparian nation, even though its control over the Tibetan Plateau (the starting place of major international rivers) and Xinjiang (the source of the transnational Irtysh and Ili rivers) has armed it with unparalleled hydro-hegemony. There is deep concern among its riparian neighbours that, by building extensive hydro-engineering infrastructure on upstream basins, it is seeking to turn water into a potential political weapon. China pays little heed to the interests of even friendly countries, as its heavy upstream damming of the Mekong and Salween illustrate.

New Delhi has to brace for China moving its dam building from the upper and middle reaches to the lower, border-hugging sections of the rivers flowing to India. The Brahmaputra is particularly a magnet for China’s dam builders because this river’s cross-border annual discharge of 165.4 billion cubic metres into India is greater than the combined trans-boundary flows of the key rivers running from Chinese territory to Southeast Asia. As China gradually moves its dam building to the Brahmaputra’s water-rich Great Bend — the area where the river takes a horseshoe bend to enter India, forming the world’s longest and steepest canyon in the process — it is expected to embark on Mekong-style mega-dams.

Only five rivers in the world carry more water than the Brahmaputra and only one — mainland China’s Yellow River — carries more silt. The Brahmaputra is the world’s highest-altitude river. It represents a unique fluvial ecosystem largely due to the heavy load of high-quality nutrient-rich silt it carries from forbidding Himalayan heights. The Brahmaputra annual flooding cycle helps re-fertilise overworked soils in the Assam plains and large parts of Bangladesh, where the river is the biggest source of water supply. The likely silt-movement blockage from China’s upstream damming constitutes a bigger threat than even diminution of cross-border flows.

India must get its act together, both by treating water as a highly strategic resource and by shining an international spotlight on China’s unilateralist course. Just as China — through a creeping, covert war — is working to change the territorial and maritime status quo in Asia, its dam frenzy is designed to appropriate internationally shared water resources. No country faces a bigger challenge than India from China’s throttlehold over the headwaters of Asia’s major transnational rivers and its growing capacity to serve as the upstream controller by re-engineering trans-boundary flows through dams.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author, most recently, of Water, Peace, and War

‘We’re not in politics to win’

cholar-turned-politician Ewa Alicja Majewska explains the political mobilisation that informs the new Left Razem Party in Poland, and why it shuns ‘professional politicians’

After Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, Poland’s Partia Razem, or Razem Party, is the newest entrant from the Left to electoral politics in Europe. Formed barely five months before Poland’s parliamentary elections on October 25, 2015, it represents the culmination of various grassroots mobilisations and the coming together of social activists under a single political umbrella. With no sponsors, little media coverage, and no institutional backing whatsoever, Razem surprised mainstream political pundits by grabbing a 3.65 per cent vote share, which has made it eligible for state funding of €3 million for the next four years.Ewa Alicja Majewska, 37, is a feminist philosopher who contested the parliamentary elections as a Razem candidate. In an email interview with The Hindu, the Berlin-based scholar-politician speaks candidly about her journey so far at Razem, the parallels between Syriza and Razem, and the challenges facing the Left in the age of “neo-liberal brainwashing”.

G. Sampath

How did Razem happen?

It was a long process, going back at least 10 years. Many of those who would become members of Razem were for several years involved in the non-parliamentary Left, in social organisations, or in the youth wings of Left parties. Early in 2015, there was a call from some of these entities for the Left to unite. An open letter was circulated, inviting people to join a new, genuinely Leftist entity. Hundreds of people signed up. They now constitute the core of Razem. In May this year, some 300 participants joined the first ever convention of the Razem Party, in Warsaw. The party was officially registered in July 2015.

What was it like to make the jump from academia to politics?

I’ve been involved in politics for much longer than in academia — since I was a kid, in fact. I grew up in a family that was very active politically. My father was involved in the Solidarity movement of the 1980s in Gdansk. I went to my first demonstration when I was three, carried by my dad. I participated in the earliest protests against neo-liberal politics when I was 14. You could actually say that I jumped from politics to academia.

How was your experience in campaigning, asking people to vote for you?

Being a bit reserved and modest, I could never ask anyone to vote for me. I mostly maintained an active social media profile, counting on the fact that people might remember me from my publications, political activism, and television and radio appearances in the early 2000s. My activist background helped some people to understand that even as a political party, Razem could represent the typically excluded — the poor as well as the queers, the trans, the gays, the lesbians, the artists, and the cultural producers.

What was your politics before you joined Razem?

I come from a section of the radical Left where the power of the state is as much criticised as the phallogocentric powers of capital. This radical, anti-authoritarian, queer-feminist position is, I think, necessary for any left wing party today if it is not to surrender to authoritarian tendencies. This also brings on board a human rights orientation and a sharp feminist optic. I have been active in the alter-globalist movement, and in grassroots queer and feminist networks.

How would you rate your party’s performance in the recent parliamentary elections?

I think that for a party that was born in May and registered in July, crossing the 3 per cent vote share mark (5,50,000 votes approximately) in October and qualifying for the state subsidy of €3 million is a tremendous achievement. Whenever I have doubts about party politics, I always repeat to myself that we need this money — while all kinds of right wing parties have used these funds to strengthen their conservative politics, progressive politics could also do with this support.

What do you think is the reason for the failure of the Left parties in Poland?

I do not think we have had Left parties in Poland since the collapse of the Polish Socialist Party, which was forcibly dissolved in 1948. We’ve had great socialists in the anti-communist opposition (I know how paradoxical this sounds), in the liberal Social Democrat party, and above all, in the social movements, workers unions, and academia. Now all these people have come together within Razem, and hopefully we will overcome the last 25 years of neo-liberal brainwashing and institutionalised neglect of human rights.

How do you see the future role of Razem? Is there a realistic chance of it forming a government, as the Syriza did in Greece?

The Law and Justice Party that won the elections had showcased its moderate leaders during the campaign. But after winning, it appointed hardliners to the prime ministership and other key posts. This could alienate their voters and fuel conflict, which could destabilise the government. It may be somewhat impolite, but for the sake of my compatriots, our country and myself, I sincerely hope this scenario comes to pass. If we manage to continue the current growth in popularity, we could end up rallying a great number of people behind us.

I understand that Razem does not have a leader as such. How then is the party structured? The media feels a need to identify every party with a personality. How do you address this requirement?

The Razem Party’s ‘management’ consists of 30 people — a 10-member Board and a 20-member Council. This is the largest leadership team for any party Poland has seen, and also the most egalitarian. There is no chief or president of the party. During the electoral campaign, there were press conferences practically every day in many Polish cities, precisely to showcase the many different ‘leaders’ to the public. There are also many brilliant people in the party who did not become candidates in the parliamentary election. But they are great activists and workers.

Razem’s candidate selection policies have also attracted a lot of attention.

Yes, apart from our consciously egalitarian approach, I am also proud of the fact that our electoral list had as many women candidates as men, and they were from every social stratum. There were single mums running small businesses, teachers, computer programmers, workers, academics, local activists. We had no ‘professional politicians’ — people whose only domain of expertise is institutional politics — for we believe that this kind of professionalisation has a destructive impact on the quality of political life.

With the Left in India proving ineffectual, there is no real parliamentary alternative at the national level to neo-liberal politics. How is the scenario in Poland?

Frankly, my knowledge of contemporary Indian politics is limited. Therefore, all I can offer is a historical perspective. While Poland and India have little in common, the various systems of what Immanuel Wallerstein aptly called ‘European universalism’ apply to both countries. Many aspects of the Western ideologies embraced by these two countries can be identified as forms of this ‘universality’, which structurally maintain the economic and political hegemony of the West.

The West’s use of resources and labour from Poland and India is actually similar. But there are important differences: Poland has never been a regular colony, and colonial prejudice has not been unleashed on such a brutal scale here as in India, or the other countries colonised by the West. As much as both countries could be seen as semi-peripheral, they also differ in scale, social divisions, and forms of political exclusions.

So what are the options for the working classes and minorities when the only electoral alternatives on offer are varying shades of neo-liberal politics?

There has always been one option for the working class and the excluded anywhere in the world: to organise; to work across artificially built ethnic, religious and gender differences; to fight for their rights, and build new forms of production and redistribution, so that capital is tamed in its anti-social effects.

A recent Left political formation in Europe that raised a lot of expectations, only to disappoint its supporters, is Syriza. How can Razem ensure it avoids the same pitfall?

I must say I am quite concerned about the all-too-easy satisfaction that some on the Left take in Syriza’s failure to embrace the political responsibility for Grexit. I think this satisfaction is a perverse symptom of some Leftist frustration, wherein the biggest celebrations are always in the moments of failure. Syriza has shown that another election is possible, that another politics is possible, that a non-corrupt government is possible in Greece, which really is a caste society for European standards.

I can’t help smiling when I think of Yanis Varoufakis’ first statements in the EU negotiations, when I remember the moment when Syriza first entered the Greek parliament, and I was there interviewing their shadow education minister, the great academic and architect, Theano Fotiou. I was so proud to see that someone from a similar socio-political background as mine was actually capable of doing state politics in another European nation. I would rather cherish these aspects of Syriza’s political presence than seek to compensate my frustrations with the easy pleasures of looking at the failures of others.

Coming back to Razem, we are currently in this comfortable position where we do not have to worry about the country’s budget deficit. We have another problem: people living in austerity that’s far worse than in Greece or Portugal, and practically since 1989. While Poland does not have a sovereign debt crisis like Greece does, the price paid for it was to adopt the kind of sharp neo-liberal policies that south-western Europe hasn’t seen until now. In this context, it needs to be stressed that the poverty, instability, and precarisation in Eastern Europe surpasses anything known in Western Europe in the last 40 years.

It should be said over and over again: we are not in politics to win. People who only want to win should take up some sport, join the army, or participate in beauty contests. For us, politics is a domain in which equality is at stake in a highly mediated world of conflicting value systems, and diverse traditions. In these conditions, politics should be perceived not as a popularity contest but as a field of work, one in which the perspective is always in plural.

After years of neo-liberal brainwashing that has sent all centralised forms of state management to the dustbin of history, we embrace anew the vision of the state as a way of mediating differences in order to bring about equal rights and access for everyone. This is a revolutionary change in itself, but to also see people mobilising around such ideas, especially in Poland, where state communism was rejected as totalitarian, and where the media, universities, and churches smashed any remnant of socialism, is a revolutionary moment.

In a world where national sovereignty is increasingly undercut by global capital — via international trade agreements and entities such as the WTO — is there much scope for a party like Razem to make a difference?

Our party has not yet worked out the details of our international policy. However, we are against these so-called “international trade agreements”, which in fact constitute an official acceptance of the hegemony of corporate capital, and should be confronted with democratic resistance and harsh critique from legal, political and environmental standpoints. We are in favour of taxation of ‘big capital’, especially in Poland, where several multinational companies operate without paying their due taxes in our country. We are for a responsible and egalitarian wage system, and protection of workers’ rights, which contradicts practically everything the WTO has opted for.

Some critics have argued that the age of Keynesian reformism is over and there is no going back to it for Europe. But Razem’s political programme is broadly social democratic — will it work?

Our supposedly moderate agenda is the most radically egalitarian political option ever realised — I am thinking of the short period of 30, perhaps 50 years, when the West was able to protect workers’ rights, offer reasonable pay, and social and health insurance. My choice to join this party does not exclude my firm belief in a much more radically egalitarian political program. However, unlike my many colleagues on the Left, I do not believe in eternal life. I believe I only have a few decades to try and change the world, not just by ideas, but also by actual political practice. And if this modest agenda can be achieved, and with Razem I do believe that some things can be changed, I want to participate and put some of my work in it.

Do you think the Left can sustain itself as a political movement within a nationalist framework or does it need to be necessarily international?

I think this is a very artificial way of speaking about the Left, and we should find more complex tools for analysis. Any Left, even if it tries to be the most international in the world, has participants embedded in local contexts. The nationalist framework is not a leftist framework. It is a fascist one, and I think this notion should be taken out of Left politics for good.

However, we live in nation states. We speak different languages. Our states differ in economic position, in access to power, in stability, in institutional tools for upholding human rights. We have to aim at an international formula without forgetting where we come from. We have to unlearn our privilege while at the same time being capable of putting pressure on our local governments, not just on some far away government somewhere else. We need to retain a very strong sense of responsibility for the abuses done by our own state institutions against the citizens of other states, where such abuses have occurred. Of course, we should hold accountable any power that exploits or attacks us. But none of it should take place under a nationalist paradigm.

This is particularly important, for supporting gay rights in Ukraine is not enough; one must at the same time address the centuries of Polish abuse of Ukrainian people and resources. We need to be local and international at the same time, trying to undermine nationalism and yet allowing people from oppressed ethnic groups to enjoy autonomy. This is not a simple matter altogether.

Would you recommend that more writers and artists and academics should get into politics?

I want single mothers to get more involved, and also the unemployed, and retired people. And writers, too, and anyone who wants to contribute toward a more egalitarian world. I see no point in promoting artificial solidarity with particular professions or groups.

Any final words for readers back in India?

Well, I would like to thank them for their interest in the politics of a minoritarian leftwing party in a country as distant from India as Poland. I am excited by the possibility of sharing some of our experiences and hopefully trying to make a similar connection with the Left in your country in the future. This is one of the many ways of practicing solidarity, and I really appreciate this opportunity.

Keywords: Ewa Alicja Majewska, Left Razem Party in Poland, Portland politics

Idea of Bombay, making of Mumbai

The most hopeful human stories and the most polarising conflicts have played out vividly in this city by the sea. On the seventh anniversary of 26/11, a personal history of Mumbai

People like me, people who came of age in the eighties in middle-class urban India, grew up in a different India. We were something of an in-between generation. Our grandparents lived through the transition from colony to nation; our parents grew up in the years of nation building. We grew up taking independence and a certain degree of development for granted, without having all the gadgets, the conveniences, the consumer goods, and the general first world-ness that the young of today were born into.

We also grew up with messages of unity in diversity surrounding us. We were all one, despite our religious and cultural differences, advertisements and pre-movie short films (and when TVs came into our homes, Doordarshan) told us. ‘Ek, Anek’, as a particularly cute animated short put it.

Peter Griffin

And while even our young minds knew there was an element of propaganda here, we chose to believe in it, or at least to subscribe to the notion that that was the way things should be.

To stripling me, Bombay pretty much exemplified this. After living in Visakhapatnam, Secunderabad and Madras, none of them small towns by any means, I was now in a true metropolis. The neighbourhood where we lived, the kids in my school, the markets, the buses, the trains, most of all the trains: all of this city teemed with diversity; it was like living in a Films Division short.

I grew up, with more friends whose families had come here from various parts of India — one, two, maybe three generations ago — than those who could claim centuries of city-born ancestry. Quite natural in a city that did not really exist as a city before hunks of its hills were toppled into the gaps between islands to make new land. We celebrated each other’s holidays and high days with gusto, visiting each other, sending across sweets and savouries to each other to better share the joy.

When you visited relatives back in the ‘native place’ during the summer holidays — in this city of migrants, everyone seemed to be from somewhere else — your Bombayness was acknowledged with gentle proscriptions along the lines of ‘you can’t do X here; this is not Bombay.’

The way it was

Don’t get me wrong. It is not that the city was immune to communal and religious divides, that caste and class lines did not exist — it would be beyond childishly naive to suggest that — it was just that it felt like we were living in a country that was trying to rise beyond those schisms and, more important, in a great city that was leading the way in that effort, a city that had always been a pioneer in progressive thought. (Remember the Quit India movement? Remember where it was launched?) In Bombay, one could believe, the place you were born in, the god you bowed to, the language you spoke, the food you ate, none of these would stop you from making it as long as you were willing to work hard.

That changed in 1992. The demolition of the faraway Babri Masjid that December brought riots to Bombay. For those of us who lived here through those times, there was a chill in the air far colder than the city’s puny winters could ever bring. Men shaved off their beards lest they be mistaken for Muslims. Nominal Christians who weren’t the most regular of churchgoers made sure their crosses were visible. Nameplates that had names easily identified as being from the ‘wrong’ community were taken down, leaving behind clean rectangles on otherwise weathered walls and doors. The first mentions of vegetarian housing societies came up. People talked softer in trains and buses for a while. Those riots, the ones that followed in January 1993, and then the bomb blasts that March, they killed many innocents. And they also delivered a mortal wound to Bombay’s belief in its invulnerability from the small-mindedness lesser towns and cities were plagued by. When the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party coalition that came to power in the next state elections renamed the city Mumbai, it was just a literal ending to the idea of Bombay; that city had already become something else.

Through flood and fire

(Melting pot: “Bombay was all about differences coming together and somehow working.” Picture shows a stretch at Dharavi. Photo: AP)

Mumbai is still a resilient city. As we sprang back from the riots of 1992 and 1993, so did we recover, quickly, from the cloudburst and floods of 2005. We survived the body blows of the multiple blasts that ripped apart local trains in 2006. We got through the full frontal terror attacks of 2008, the seventh sad anniversary of which we mark this week. Yes, even then, we stopped what we were doing and stayed home and watched our televisions, but we were soon back at work, a little quieter, a little more thoughtful, a lot more fearful, but what does one do, livings must be earned. Each time, we went back. We regained our swagger and our style.

Mumbai, like Bombay, has no time to spare, where distances are measured in minutes and hours, not kilometres. It is still a place that rewards hard work, where fortunes can be made from humble beginnings.

Mumbai is a more crowded city than Bombay ever was, but that was inevitable; gold-paved streets are magnetic, but an island only has so much space in which to grow. And this has meant that we pay ludicrous prices for the cubes of air we call our homes, that we spend precious hours just getting to and from our places of work, that our open spaces are threatened, that builders can buy politicians and bureaucrats will conspire. (For me, it’s meant that my family had to move out of the city, to its little sister across the creek. Once it was called New Bombay, then the municipal signboards welcoming you to the city were blackened with tar, and a new name was painted over it in rough letters: Navi Mumbai. That name become official too. Just history repeating itself in a different geography.)

Mumbai is still safer for women, for children, for the aged, than most other cities are. It is still a home to the arts and culture and sport and entertainment and all the fine things that are worth working hard for, the better to appreciate and enjoy them.

We live more comfortable lives, certainly, than most of India. We can take our electricity for granted most of the time. And though we panic about the water levels in our lakes, we somehow make it through each year until the monsoons arrive. Our air is far from clean, but the sea breeze bails us out most days, blowing away some of the smog.

And yes, we are richer. And yes, we have so much that more developed countries have, the big brands and the High Streets, the glass towers and the luxury cars. Heck, we may not be Shanghai yet, but we have our very own suspension bridge.

But in the Mumbai of today, it has become okay to talk of the Other.

Bigotry is now legitimate; it no longer speaks in whispers, it is loud, it shrieks on our streets, shuts down shops, and sometimes the whole city. It does not want you to live in its buildings, it does not want you to cook your way, dress your way.

In this unsentimental city, hurt sentiments take centre-stage more often these days. (And we, the media, cannot absolve ourselves from blame for providing a steady stream of the publicity to the publicity-seeking hurt sentiment that comes our way.)

Again, don’t get me wrong. Just as it was not a total free thinker’s paradise when my generation was growing up, it certainly is not hell in which we find ourselves in our middle age. Things are undoubtedly and demonstrably worse in other parts of India and, yes, the world.

We will survive

“Mumbai, like Bombay, has no time to spare… It is still a place that rewards hard work, where fortunes can be made from humble beginnings.”

Mumbai still is, and regularly proves itself to be, more progressive in its thinking than most places. In Mumbai, hard work still rules, and good ideas can still find a home. In Mumbai, you can still say what you believe, and be sure that no one will try to kill you if what you say offends them… reasonably sure, that is. I can still casually call the city Bombay, as an old friend can do, without more than the odd idiot on Twitter scolding me. Perhaps one day louts-for-hire may gherao this newspaper’s office if their paymaster’s delicate feelings are hurt by something we say, but this newspaper will still come out the next day, and its journalists will still walk the streets unafraid.

But here’s the thing. Today, liberal voices are more hushed; free speech advocates now censor themselves. This can only be a bad thing in a city founded on free movement: of people, of goods, of money, of ideas.

Bombay was all about differences coming together and somehow working. Bombay celebrated its differences, made the most of them and like some medieval alchemist, it conjured up success and growth. One couldn’t expect any less from a city that was imagined up out of seven islands and lots of swamp and sea.

But maybe that’s a lot of poetic tosh, born of too much brainwashing by the Films Division in one’s formative years.

Perhaps the Idea of Bombay began to die before the name did. And perhaps now, while it still gasps for breath, it’s really past hope and we should let that idea go. That would make me sad.

There’s a part of me, though, that doesn’t want to believe that: the part of me that still calls the city Bombay, as if using that name would conjure it back into existence. Who knows? Maybe there are enough of us, and if we all think about it really, really hard…

(Email: peter.griffin@thehindu.co.in)

Keywords: Mumbai, human interest

Knowledge isn't Wisdom

J KRISHNAMURTI





Thought is the response of memory that has been stored through knowledge; knowledge is gathered through experience. That is, experience, knowledge, memory stored in the brain, then thought, then action.This is our pattern of living, and the whole process is based on this movement. Man has done this for the last million years. He has been caught in the cycle, which is the movement of thought. And within this area, he has choice.He can go from one corner to the other and say , “This is my choice, this is my movement of freedom“ -but it is always within the limited field of the known. And knowledge is always accompanied by ignorance because there is no complete knowledge about anything.
In our search for knowledge, in our acquisitive desires, we are losing love, we are blunting the feeling for beauty , the sensitivity to cruelty; we are becoming more and more specialised and less and less integrated. Wisdom cannot be replaced by knowledge. Knowledge is necessary , science has its place; but if the mind and heart are suffocated by knowledge, and if the cause of suffering is explained away , life becomes vain and meaningless.
Information, the knowledge of facts, though ever increasing, is by its very nature limited. Wisdom is infinite, it includes knowledge and the way of action; but we take hold of a branch and think it is the whole tree. Through the knowledge of the part, we can never realise the joy of the whole. Intellect can never lead to the whole, for, it is only a segment, a part.

Word Play In Private And Public Discourse

M P K Kutty





We are making waves in our social media. It is true that the average individual finds an opportunity to occupy public space and make himself heard. This should be considered a blessing of democracy and an advance towards equality of opportunity .The downside is that a torrent of words gets into circulation, often influencing a wide spectrum of people ­ with both positive and negative results.We live in times when spurious “realities“ are manufactured by various players in the public domain ­ by the politically powerful, by speech givers and writers, by bloggers and also by those claiming allegiance to certain religious groupings.What we get, as a result, is a varied and confused interpretation of reality . There is so much smoke but very little light. To decipher the truth in the huge haze populated by words becomes a Herculean task! If the written word is a powerful means of reaching out to a vast audience, so is the spoken word, more so when transmitted via widely consumed media, including social media. We are no strangers to the phenomenon of casual remarks made by those in the limelight causing political storms or remarks becoming subjects of discussion in the media for days and weeks together. Indiscriminate andor irresponsible utterances by people in responsible positions and who are influential are creating more havoc in public consciousness than doing anything positive towards creating an atmosphere of peace and harmony .
We don't need a Dale Carnegie to analyse what roles spoken and written words play in building bridges of reconciliation or in aggravating conflicts and confrontations.We need to use a language that brings people closer together for common, holistic benefit. What we say or write needs to be directed at improving relationships and clearing any misunderstandings, and perhaps offer positive solutions rather than further contribute to divisive tendencies.
There is this explosive statement attributed to Marie Antoinette of France, (consort of Louis XVI) who, upon hearing that the country's peasants had no bread, said “Then let them eat cake!“ Among other things, this story doing the rounds could have further angered the people, leading to the French revolution ­ according to some historians.
There is much to be said in favour of the scriptural affir mation: “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.“
Are our words coloured with bitterness and anger? Then we need to look within and know what causes such disturbance on the inside. Words, at times, are ters of our state of mind. Words have power. Words can be used effectively to soothe tempers. On the other hand, a high-octave emotional speech intended to provoke for the wrong reasons could instigate violence and lead to destruction.
The Bible says that in eternity we will be judged by the very words that we have spoken. And in this life, our success or happiness will depend to a great extent on how we communicate our thoughts. How others react to what we say also depends in large measure on the kind of words spoken by us and the context.
Throughout life, we go on sowing words ... Are they words of encouragement and appreciation?
Are they negative? Are they unfairly judgmental and critical? Do our words wound others? Well, life is a great whispering gallery that sends back all the echoes. Let this be our prayer: “Set a guard, O Lord, over my mouth; keep watch over the door of my lips!“