Attaining political nirvana through Moditva

I'd like to grab a copy of this book, called Moditva. The book, conceptualized and executed by the ruling party of India, the BJP, has all the clever slogans used by Narendra Modi since his election campaign.

Just as Russian President Vladimir Putin has successfully manipulated words and messages to make his territorial designs on neighboring sovereign nations look normal, justified, even, Narendra Modi, the Indian Premier, has been able to build a fabulous fan base with his wily aphorisms and alliterative mantras.

The Nazis had historically perfected the art of the effective political speech so as to hold almost an entire nation of exemplary Germans in its thrall. However, in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, one hears of the virtue of the alliteratively-delivered mantras that moves into the human brain by dulling it down into an ideal, non-critical receiver of messages. Caesar's nemesis Anthony was smart but he desisted from giving smart speeches to the public, as smart speeches might just trigger off the discerning nerves in the human neurocircuitry.

I am hoping there is progress from Moditva to Modisatva before Modi leaves office.

Some of the best alliterative slogans from Narendra Modi are, "Toilets befor temples" and "Development over deity." He has gone a long way to bolster his secular credentials to erase the taint of the Gujarat riots of 2002 under his stewardship.

Global time of modernity triumphs over "Hindustan" time

HMT watches, marketed throughout my childhood with the jingle, "If you have the inclination, we have the time," will no longer adorn the wrists of Indians.

Hindustan Machine Tools, one of India's largest public sector undertakings (PSU's, an acronym, which the public sector bashers of India had nicknamed "poshu", meaning "beast" in Bengali, were anathema to many in Socialist India because of their under-productivity and inefficiency) has closed shop, finally.

Indian Premier Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurated HMT in collaboration with the Japanese multinational, Citizen, in 1964. Nehru's objective was to supply every Indian worker with a wrist watch, so she/he (mostly he) would value time, understand the importance of being on time and speedy accomplishment of tasks. A favorite quip of Nehru's was "Talk less, work more". HMT, along with other massive PSU's embodied the Nehruvian vision of a modernizing and industrializing India.

Since the opening up of the Indian economy to foreign brands, the sales of HMT watches had plummeted, but one of HMT's domestic competitors, Titan, a creation of the Tata corporation, had tolled a death knell for HMT watches long before foreign brands had.

I wore my first wristwatch in middle school; it was an HMT slim band watch with a tiny round, dial, the smallness and the lunar-shape being indicative of the wearer's gender, of course. It had belonged to my mom. 

My very first wristwatch, which my dad presented to me during my last-year in high school was a Titan. It looked much more snazzier than an HMT, and had Roman numerals, something I totally loved. My father, who was a champion of the private sector, gleamed with delight as he announced the watch to have been made by a private corporation.

Looking back, the Titan had more attention to detail, as I remember the design was slick, and the color scheme reflected harmony. It was a better watch in the department of aesthetics, though I am certain it kept time the same way as its HMT counterpart did. 

Bye, bye HMT.

Gandhi of the grain

Hailed as the "Gandhi of the grain" social activist, Vandana Shiva has been hailed as the Gandhi of the grain, for her tireless and valiant crusade against the monoculture of genetically modified seeds.

For me, the idea of owning intellectual-property rights for seeds is a bad, pathetic attempt at seed dictatorship,” Shiva says. “Our commitment is to make sure that dictatorship never flourishes.”

An excellent profile of Shiva is here.

An yellow revolution

India's recently elected Prime Minister, Narendra Singh Modi, deviated from the usual silly speech patterns into which a majority of Indian Premiers fall. During his maiden Independence Day address to the Nation, Modi focussed on local problems.

India is plagued by a toilet problem; there are very few clean, usable, public toilets available for ordinary people in this nation. Many houses in villages and urban areas don't have proper toilet facilities either. The scarcity of toilets forces people to defecate and piss here, there, everywhere, thus creating monuments of health hazard. 

The lack of toilets poses special problems for girls and women in India. Often times women are forced to seek out dark, empty, corners, away from populated areas, to relieve themselves without sacrificing on shame. In the process, they endanger themselves gravely, as is evidenced by the recent gang rape and murder of two little girls in Uttar Pradesh. They had gone out into a field to pee and never came back.

So, when Modi pledged to fill every public school in India with a separate toilet for girls by August 2015, he displayed a commodious intent, a big-heartedness by caring for the little people (figuratively speaking, India is a nation where the majority are "little" with resources and power of Lilliputian proportions, but women are littler by virtue of their gender).

Heeding his call for toilet-investment, corporations like Tata Consultancy, donated money. 

May the chrome-yellow revolution for the girls of India begin.

Welcome to India

The reign of Capital

Yet another book on "Capital"?

Novelist Rana Dasgupta's new work of nonfiction has a punny title, playing on the political and financial significance of the word capital, for the book is both on money and on the presence of new wealth in New Delhi, the capital city of India.

According to the New Yorker Magazine:

In the interviews with rich young Indians that make up much of the unsparing portrait of moneyed Delhi, no telling detail seems to escape Dasgupta's notice. His novelistic talents are matched by his skill at eliciting astonishing candor from his subjects. The best passages are incisive summaries of the human and environmental costs of the elite's wealth and privilege and his persuasive predictions of crises yet to come. Dasgupta constantly seeks to upend conventional wisdom about Delhi, the murky circulation of its money, and the roots of its periodic outbursts of violence, making this one of the most worthwhile in a strong field of recent books about India's free-market revolution and its unintended dire consequences.

The doodle I missed

To celebrate the 92nd birth anniversary of ace Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray, Google India had doodled in a memorable scene from Ray's best known 1955 film, Pather Panchali (the "Story of the Road")--that of the brother and sister duo of Apu and Durga running across the rural landscape to catch a glimpse of the train that crossed through their village. 

The train was a magical sight to the siblings, who couldn't eat two meals a day, so acute was the poverty in which the family, and in a rural Bengal depicted in the film, lived.

Below is a scene of Durga and Apu from Pather Panchali.

India the ban-capital of the democratic world

My desire to read University of Chicago scholar Wendy Doniger's book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, has been aroused.

Why? Because it's now banned in India.

Penguin India recently caved in to the demands of a Hindu Right Wing activist, Dinanath Batra that all copies of the book be destroyed because it allegedly misrepresents Hinduism from a deeply salacious point of view.

To allay fears that India is going the way of Hindu fascism, Batra said that he is not against alternative perspectives, it's just that there should be "guidelines" for expressing dissent. The octogenarian RSS is not aware, as so many of the old, semi-literate fogies of Indian politics and the Indian religious establishment are, that alternative and dissent mean flagration of "guidelines". 

Whether or not Hinduism has the DNA of real "dirty" sex embedded in it or not is moot; what's lamentable, as activist Arundhati Roy observes, is the fact that free speech has been censored in a country that prides itself on being the world's most populous democracy.

The censorship of the book comes in the heels of earlier censorships of books with religious and cultural content, like Joseph Lelyveld's The Great Soul, a biography of Gandhi. Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, who is poised to be India's next Premier, personally campaigned for a banning of the book because it had allegedly portrayed Gandhi as a "homosexual". Modi had also asked for a national ban of the book.

Two other books that have been banned in India are: Jitendra Bhargava's The Descent of Air India, and Tamal Bandophadyay's Sahara, The Untold Story.

Bhargava's book doesn't have any religious content, but it takes to task the dealings and the abuse of power of former aviation minister Praful Patel. Patel is accused of ruining the once-significant national carrier Air India.

Neither of these books have been banned, but both Patel and Subrata Roy, founder of Sahara Pariwar, the unscrupulous Indian conglomerate with holdings in every business imaginable, have slapped defamation suits worth crores of rupees in Indian courts. The defendants don't want to fight their battles in Indian courts when the plaintiffs are powerful and can bribe their way around the judiciary.

A timely reminder that freedom of speech is restricted in India and that citizens are not free to speak inconvenient truths or express opinions that unsettle the powers.

The Japanese Wife: A love story or a triumph of widowhood?

The title of Aparna Sen's 2010 movie, The Japanese Wife, is misleading. There is nothing uniquely "Japanese" about Miyagi, and her being the Indian Shubhomoy's wife does not disrupt the story's cultural code in any significant way because the Indian husband and his Japanese wife never meet one another in flesh and blood.

The film could have been named The Indian husband and it wouldn't have mattered a wit.

If a title, like an epigraph to a text, represents a work of art's central meaning, then Sen's movie should have been "Water 21st century", an unintended sequel to Deepa Mehta's Water (set in 19th century Bengal).

The film's major figures are widowed women: There is Shubhomoy's aunt, a widow who raised Shubhomoy single handedly after his parents die in a flood; Sandhya is a young widow who is Shubhomoy's aunt's best friend's daughter. The aunt wants Shubhomoy to marry her, but Shubhomoy is already in strong epistolary love with Miyagi and can't marry Sandhya. Sandhya returns to the aunt's fold because her in-laws mistreat their now-widowed daughter-in-law.

Shubhomoy is the lone male who is passive and quietly fulfills the role of a provider. He perpetually defers fulfilling his desires, prime among which is a burning desire to be with his Japanese wife physically. But Shubhomoy is too poor to travel to Japan or to send a ticket to Miyagi. He has sexual feelings for Sandhya, seeing her as a proxy Miyagi, but he can't act upon them because of Miyagi. Shubhomoy wants to be faithful to his Japanese wife. 

After she remains a wife for 20 years, Miyagi too becomes a widow. Upon suffering a prolonged bout of pneumonia, Shubhomoy dies and the news of his death reaches Miyagi. The movie ends under a canopy, as it were, of widowhood; we see a shaven-headed Miyagi, adorned in a spotless white cotton saree, get off a boat on the banks of the Ganges with a small suitcase in hand. She asks a villager in broken English, "Bheyar is the house of Bhyomoy, the village schoolmaster?"

There is a cut to the Indian widow Sandhya welcoming the Japanese widow to the house of the widows with a smile and a warm "esho" ("welcome"). 

We are left to imagine the life hereafter of three widows in a house in the Sundarbans, all of whom in one way or the other have been served by Shubhomoy. 

They had sucked the life out of him. I feel sorry for Shubhomoy. 

Oh, but the film would have been vastly interesting had it taken the matriarchal trajectory. The Japanese Wife is blandly bereft of all such possibilities. It's Aparna Sen's Waterloo I believe, where the focus is, as the director herself says, on the "haunting improbability" and the "beauty" of the love story which is "surreal in its innocence." 

I didn't see the adjectives materialize into anything palpable in the texture of the film's world. 

I saw a triumph of widowhood.

Down the biscuit lane

Two biscuits float in my memory when I try to recall my childhood days in India: The paper thin (true to its name) Britannia thin arrowroot biscuit, and the Parle Glucose.

The former tasted papery, while the latter had a sugary sweetness about it. One is shaped like a chakra with a serrated edge, while the other is rectangular in form, looking more like a carved terracotta artifact than a biscuit.

Both went well with the first cup of tea we had in the morning.

I chanced upon two contemporary ads of the biscuits and realized that the biscuits, like people and their lives, have come a long way. Britannia now has the middle name of "nutrichoice" while the "Glucose" from Parle has been replaced by the letter "G".

I was disappointed to learn that Britannia nutrichoice thin arrowroot biscuits, while retaining the shape of a chakra, has undergone an identity change into becoming a stomach-friendly biscuit that cools down the stomach after a bout of binging on spicy Indian snacks.

Parle-G, on the other hand, is shooting straight for the brains.

What do the red ants say?

Sanjay Kak's documentary on the Maoists of India, Red Ant Dream.

Patriarchy is in India's collective consciousness

Hail to actress and Indian popular culture's prima donna, Sharmila Tagore, for recognizing this vital truth of India:

Traditionally, we as a nation have tended to view a woman either as devi (goddess) or as property of man but never as an equal.Treating a woman as a devi is pretty ingenious because then she has to be on a pedestal and conduct herself according to the noble ideals a patriarchal society has set for her. Women seem to like being on that pedestal and despite their inner urges cling to this ideal of being perfect at great personal cost. So, in spite of the outstanding advancement of both men and women, mindsets have been slow to change. And these mindsets have influenced our cultural spheres, and have been celebrated in festivals like karva chauth, raksha bandhan, Shiv ratri, appealing to a man’s ego in protecting and indulging the women in his family. So it is not surprising that a mass, popular, highly visible media like cinema, particularly Hindi cinema, has perpetuated these cultural myths. 

On contemporary Bollywood's packaging of the woman as "modern", Tagore muses:

They also reduce modernity to a matter of packaging. A modern woman is defined by her westernized attire. She looks modern but when it comes to making informed choices, she chooses the conventional. The moment she is to be presented to society for marriage, her sartorial style undergoes a complete traditional overhaul, because now she is expected to become part of the collective, her individuality discarded for the sake of the community. It is implied that the modern woman who asserts herself and her independence can never bring happiness to anyone, nor find happiness herself. Often, in the first half of a film a lot of new and dynamic ideas are introduced, only to be diluted and compromised in the second half.

But cinema, especially Indian cinema, is largely a passive reflection of social preferences, values and attitudes at large:

Today, in India ‘women’s empowerment’ is a government slogan; it is a feature of every party manifesto. Yet, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Indian women, seemingly protected by law, celebrated by the media and championed by activists, remain second-class citizens, most obviously in rural areas, but in some senses everywhere.

Beggar farm

Filmmaker Suman Mukherjee's new political and social satire, Kangal Malsat, meaning "War Cry of the Beggars", could very well be seen as an Indian version of George Orwell's political allegory Animal Farm.

The story of Kangal Malsat: In the derelict shanties and dark alleys of Calcutta live two warring groups of the nether world. The Fyataroos have the gift of flying and the Choktars practice black magic. Suddenly, the rival groups are joined together in alliance by an ageless duo - a primordial talking crow and Begum Johnson who consorted with Job Charnock and Warren Hastings. Masterminded by the two ancient progenitors of the city and led by the magically endowed rebels, an army of tramps and vagrants launch an uprising against the Communist government of West Bengal. As skulls dance in crematoria, flying discs whiz through the sky, and a portrait of Stalin angrily admonishes the Chief Minister, the Communist government falls. The political transition, however, sees many of the rebels being rewarded with awards and positions in the new government. 

This unrelenting and bitterly sarcastic political film, based on a novel by Nabarun Bhattacharya, landed director Suman Mukhopadhyay in some trouble with the censors.

Here is a trailer of the film:

Sweet tamarind of Bastar

Is a defining feature of the rough jungle terrains of Bastar, a region in Southern Chattisgarh in the state of Madhya Pradesh in India.

Arundhati Roy inhales the tamarind that perfumes the air and looks up at the families of tamarind trees "watching over the villages, like a clutch of huge, benevolent gods." 

The villages she walks through under cover of the canopy of dense fauna are imperilled by the lurking presence of the Bastar police and special ops forces called the Salwa Judum, commissioned by the Central government of India to fight Maoist guerillas and the tribal residents of the village. The Maoists give protection to the tribals.

In Gandhi But With Guns, Roy writes of her experience touring the Maoist strongholds in Central India.

The literary quality of the writing is high, but as essayist and word Jane par excellence, Joan Didion has observed in a different context, language deceives as it is the tool of the articulate who take it upon themselves to express the truths of the inarticulate with the tool.

Language not only deceives, but it also constructs a secondary truth or reality that may be twice removed from the primary one.

Over and above being supremely articulate, Roy writes in English and translates the life-worlds of the Bastar residents and their Maoist vigilantes for a Western audience. Can English do justice to the language of the Chattisgarh tribals who speak a tongue that bear no resemblance to the major Indian languages?

Better perhaps to read this? (down below)

Satnam's Jangalnama is about the Gonds; According to the blog The Middle Stage he writes in Punjabi and revels in a

Depiction of the day-to-day life of the Gonds that Jangalnama touches its greatest heights. Satnam marvellously opens up for us the peculiar innocence, fragility and unworldliness of these people. Many Gonds, he reports, cannot count beyond the number twenty; after they reach this limit they start all over again from one, and finally add up the twenties. How then are they to imagine that around them lie mineral resources worth thousands of crores in the world market, or even to hold their own in small transactions with shopkeepers and moneylenders? Because of their indigence and ignorance, most Gonds do not live beyond the age of fifty, yet they are not particularly exerted by questions of life and death, and do not have extended rituals of mourning for those who pass away. Their sense of time is not of minutes and hours, but rather of day and night, of the coming and going of the seasons. Many have never seen a bus or a train, or any of the wonderful machines which are forged from the iron ore that is extracted from sites beneath their own feet.

America adrift

Two films, A Sandra Bullock-George Clooney starrer and a Robert Redford acted (Redford is put off by the word "star" in connection with actors), Gravity and All is Lost, respectively, are about men and women who are adrift, one in space and the other at sea.

The films seems to reflect, as Maureen Dowd says in her profile on Robert Redford, the national mood, which is that of a nation unmoored.

I am a fan of Hollywood, and an ardent critic of its Indian counterpart, Bollywood. Hollywood has its high and low moments and defects; but from time to time one can hark back on films coming out of this entertainment goliath and claim that in some ways some films manage to mirror the American soul (if there is such a national soul). 

I rarely see a Bollywood movie that deals with the Indian soul in the sense that it catches the national mood in a particular state of anger, melancholia, elation or depression. What Bollywood does is take on an event by the neck, convert it into a crude story, and fling it at the audience with song and dance sequences.

How else does one account for the birth of a movie like Raanjhanaa, which glorifies male obsession for a female object of love? In these times when stalking, brutalizing and raping of women in India are disturbing the national conscience, a movie celebrates a cause of that disturbance.

And, the surprising part is that Raanjhanaa is a big hit in India.

Anyhow, India has been adrift for a long time. Care to make a movie reflecting this, Bollywood?

A Tale of Three Cities: India's entry into Modernity

What Marx said: Marx's prophecy: In the 19th Century Karl Marx observed that India, among other nations in the Non-West, is pre or non-modern, as it lacked vital structures of modernity, i.e. a thriving industrial/manufacturing base. It should therefore be yanked into modernity through "violence" if it needs be, because on its own India cannot progress and needs the guidance of Europe.

In other words, it's a good thing that Britain and in fits and sparks other European nations, colonized India.

It's interesting that Marx suspended his usual humanitarian principles when it came to judging what makes the non-West modern.

The West is modern and will always be the image of the non-West's future. So to be modern is to recast oneself in the image of the West.

Fast forwarding into the 21st century India, let's look for some markers of modernity:

Is the 21st century Indian Middle Class "modern"?

A Middle Class family in pictures.

UB City: India's glitziest shopping mall.

There is an "Indian dream" equivalent to the "American dream." (Upward mobility).

"The Indian middle class is hungry for new experiences and is optimistic," observes Mr. Dilip Kapur, founder/CEO of Hi-Design, an Indian luxury leather goods firm, and adds that for retailers and brand builders like us it is explosively exciting."

In essence, the Indian middle class is fulfilling Marx's prophecy of becoming "modern" by asserting their consumption power.

The definition of "modern" has radically changed since the time of Marx, but in the 21st century, wealth and upward mobility, and consumption are clear markers of what it means to be modern.

By this definition, the likes of Mukesh Ambani, one of India's super rich, (sort of an Indian Warren Buffet), is ultra modern.

In other words, the story of India's "rise" and by default, the story of her coming of age into the globe as a "modern" nation, is the story of the middle and the rich class.

What about those left behind and excluded from the narrative?

Here's what journalist, activist and Booker Prize winning author, Arundhati Roy has to say about the narrative of modern and rising India:

"There are other ways of being modern" says Roy and the shapers of this narrative of modernity in 21st century India are the rural indigenous and urban poor, who are also the displaced rural indigenous.

The other India: Listen to how this other India is perceived in one of the many visions of aspirational India:

Aman Sethi's A Free Man is about the other India that too, as Roy says in her interview, has its own vision of what it means to be modern in contemporary India.

New Bengal?

A video that claims to advertise Bengal, an ex-illustrious state of India, as a "melting pot" where "diversity" reigns.

I caught a fleeting, almost ephemeral glimpse of a few Chinese faces. That's "diversity" Indian style.

If this is the "new" Bengal, I want to know what's so new about seeing the same old fat faces who have been strutting the cultural landscape of Kolkata? Ranjit Mullick? Rudraprashad Sengupta? Soumitra Chatterjee? New? Young? Fresh?

And the music: It's abysmal. To be honest, the video doesn't reflect a dynamic or modern Bengal, but the timeless chimera that Tagore created in his fiction--the "Bangala'r Maati and Bangla'r Jol" province that served the poet's imagination well.

The real Bengal, where is it? The mall's? The metro? Where's the business sector? Any new music in the offing? Where's the global Kolkata we so hear of? The sushi dens and the Pizza Huts? They too are legitimate nodes of the Bangla geography aren't they?

Victims brutalizing women in the cities

The gang rape of a Mumbai journalist bears eerie resemblance to many other recent gang rapes of young women in the Indian metropolises.

The female journalist had been photographing a particular site for a Mumbai magazine; she was accompanied by a male colleague. As was the case with the gang rape of the physiotherapy student in Delhi late last year, the male colleague was beaten and tied up, while the perps dragged the woman to a nearby area and raped repeatedly.

All of the perps were mid to late teens who lived in what journalist Robert Neuwirth would call (fancifully) "shadow cities," or in plain old English, unauthorized shanties. 

In short they hail from poverty, and sub human living and life-conditions. They are victims of the great Indian poverty which like a ever-expanding juggernaut is rolling on side by side with an economic boom. 

The inequality between the boomtowns and the shantytowns are growing by the hour, as it were. Worse still, the shantytowns too are booming, in a purely physical and numerical, not economic, sense of growth, in the shadows, literally of luxury high rises and obscenely opulent hotels and office buildings. 

In the India of the old economy, the poor used to live in spatially segregated colonies or slums: the "jungles" of poverty, as an Indian saying goes, signifying everything chaotic or poor with the metaphor of the jungle, grew in the outskirts of affluence in a Jagirdari style. This was horrific in and of itself, but the new economy has brought hordes of the "jungle" dwellers smack into the midst of the oases of extravagance.

One theory (mine) is that this spatial yoking of extremely unequal and therefore culturally heterogenous life conditions and peoples is accentuating the victim status of those already victimized by poverty. The young men who resort to gang rape emerge out of shantytowns and take out their anger at the system and whatever apparatus the system is supported by on young women, usually of the educated and the upwardly mobile kind. 

I hate to oversimplify, but it looks like the "janwaars" as Indians would describe men like these--poor, psychically anarchic and sexually voracious and brutal--are living in too much proximity of their economic better halves and venting their wrath through sexual violence on women.

Why not brutalize the system, instead of the women?

Maybe, just maybe, distorted gender relations and patriarchy, aren't the only causes behind this emergent culture of sexual brutality against women in the cities.

Teacher, teacher where art thou?

I remember the names of some of my teachers and a few faces as well. There a Mrs. Sen, a Mrs. Dutta, and a Mrs. Swing, Mrs. Wright and a Mrs. Sen Sharma among others.

To be honest none of these teachers have impacted me on account of their teaching or on account of having inspired me with what they did in the classroom.

These were teachers at the school I attended in India from K through 12.

Back then, I categorized teachers as good or bad. The kind one's--the one's who didn't scold us or discipline us at the drop of a hat, were "good," and the "strict" one's--those who were harsher and used the tactic of intimidation and humiliation as a tactic to establish control over students, were "bad."

All these teachers were however, universally feared regardless of the quality of their teaching.

Upon entering college, I had more of the same: Professors who taught because it was their job to teach; they didn't leave much of an imprint on my mind as inspirational or insightful.

The parameters for judging educators in India, were, I suppose, entirely different.

None match those highlighted by Mark Edmundson in his new book, Why Teach? In Defense of Real Education. 

A good teacher in America and by default in the Western hemisphere, is somebody who sees teaching as a "calling" and an "urgent endeavor" in which the lives and "souls" of students are at stake.

I believe that in India, teachers didn't burden themselves with the task of shaping lives and souls; instead of "shaping" we, the students were merely accompanied through the various levels of education by our teachers, I feel. 

In America teachers are historically said to shape, influence and inspire learners. It's only lately that they are beginning to resemble the Indian teachers.

Real teachers, laments Edmundson, himself an English Professor at the University of Virginia, are an endangered species in the current academic ecology. The conditions of the ecology, argues the professor, are the consumer mentalities of students, their families and those who administer the educational systems. Administrators are bent on giving students, not real education, but a "full spa experience, whereas educators are eager to escape the actual teaching into esoteric research.

I don't recall ever receiving a spa treatment by school administrators in India, but then again I got my education under a socialist regime. These days, I hear, a deep consumerist culture drives private education in India and students with resources receive the spa treatment to an extent that many schools graduate students without needing them to follow a rigorous academic regimen, or any academic regimen at all. Diplomas are to be had in exchange for money.

But nobody laments in India and no voice like Edmundson's arise. Decline is a given in India and people turn a blind eye to it.

Decline is pervasive in American culture as well, but thinkers like Edmundson make a note of it. 

Time after time

Anand Patwardhan and Simanthini Dhuru's 1995 documentary, A Narmada Diary, takes a fascinating look at forms of tribal resistance against mass-scale industrialization.

The object of tribal ire in the film is the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the river Narmada, a project that displaced thousands and stole traditional means of livelihood.

London's Tate Modern recently held a retrospective of Patwardhan's socially conscious films. It says the following of A Narmada Diary:

The opening and closing ‘entries’ in the Diary are symmetrical; official government documentary footage extolling the irresistible benefits of a hydro-engineered and electrified rural future (‘Speed and Technology’) is counterposed to images of the seemingly timeless harvest festival of Holi, celebrated in March 1994 at the village of Domkheri, threatened with imminent submergence by the rising headwaters of the dam. Linear, progressive, industrial time confronts cyclical, ritual, agrarian time. But in their closing reprise of the traditional ceremony, Patwardhan and co-director Simantini Dhuru let us see what we can now more fully understand: the body-painted, head-dressed adivasi dancers confront and burn their demons, singling out the newest, greatest malignity of all, the Sardar Sarovar dam itself. Their ritual dance is a configuration of actuality, of living collective experience, open to history. Resistance has been integrated, innovatively, into the everyday activity, language and rites of the people of this region – overwhelmingly adivasis, long scorned as ‘tribals’, are descendants of the pre Aryan, aboriginal inhabitants of India.

What interests me is the kernel of the film--the collision of two temporal paradigms. Truly, as the blurb above reminds us, "industrial" or technological time has, with the help of all the apparatus of capitalism and industrialization, gained immeasurable advantage over the other time, illogically defamed as anachronistic. Yet, as the tribal resistance demonstrates, time's "other" isn't unworldly at all; rather, it is infused with elements of real, day-to-day living.