Divorce rates and the indian dream

Amit Varma, in his recent post, articulates on how modernization and technology have bridged the gap between the sexes in recent times. Interestingly, he titles his post 'We Should Celebrate Rising Divorce Rates' and I would imagine he does that with a tongue in his cheek. Though his thesis seems convincing on first read, some clear counterexamples came to my mind in the very beginning. One is that of Kerala, where the empowerment of women has not really been fostered by the advent of modern technology. The matrilineal system is known to have existed in the state since ages. The second counterexample is that of an Islamic country like Saudi Arabia, where, in spite of technological sustenance, the condition of women in society remains decadent thanks to the preponderance of the Shariah laws.

Mr. Varma is perhaps correct in his main thesis- that increasing divorce rates in a country like India is definitely indicative of women empowerment. But I feel he is simplifying the causal connections associated with the empowerment of women in society. For a portrait of 19th and early 20th century British society, I'd recommend a reading of Virginia Woolf's AROO, an essay that I briefly talked about in an earlier post. That said, the quality of life that women in Kerala enjoy (literacy rate of 97% against the national average of 55%; sex ratio of 1.06 as opposed to the national avergae of 0.93; highest and lowest life expectancy and infant mortality rates in India) is something that I find immensely surprising and at the same time ennobling. One finds writers like Amartya Sen (in The Argumentative Indian and Development as Freedom) and Shashi Tharoor (in his India:From Midnight to the Millenium and the more recent The Elephant, the tiger and the cellphone, a collection of essays on India) raving about the Kerala miracle. Sen, tries to articulate some reasons for these successes but I still feel there remain lessons to be learned - for Mr. Varma and the rest of us too.

anecdote

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, perhaps the greatest astrophysicist of the twentieth century, loved to tell the story of a visit to Princeton in the mid 1980s, where he was feted in honor of his recent Nobel Prize. At the dinner, he found himself seated next to an earnest young man. As physicists often do to make conversation, he asked his dinner companion, "What are you working on these days?" The reply was, "I work on string theory, which is the most important advance in physics in the twentieth century." The young string theorist went on to advise Chandra to drop what he was doing and switch to string theory or risk becoming as obsolete as those in the 1920s who did not immediately take up quantum theory.

"Young man," Chandra replied, "I knew Werner Heisenberg. I can promise you that Heisenberg would never have been so rude as to tell someone to stop what they were doing and work on quantum theory. And he certainly would not have been so disrespectful as to tell someone who got his PhD fifty years ago that he was about to become obsolete."

- From "The trouble with physics" by Lee Smolin

Vanity and vada pav

Some interesting historical comments about Mumbai along with the washing of Thackeray's (or should I say Thakre) dirty linen in true editorial fashion in this HT article. The other hilarious piece of news that I heard recently was the possibility of the ubiquitous vada pav being patented by Shiv Sena as an exclusively Marathi recipe. They want to rechristen it to Shiv vada pav. Other repercussions notwithstanding, my primary concern is the collateral damage it will cause to my father's love for the mumbai ispecial delicacy. Vada pav might lose one of its more loyal connoisseurs to the brickbats of marathi chauvinism. Happily touring the US right now, my father doesn't know what's in store for him when he steps out of Sahar, oops....Chattrapathi Shivaji International airport.

Same-sex marriage

A commendable resolution from the californian judiciary as this article suggests. And while the Chief Justice's statement - The essence of the right to marry is freedom to join in marriage with the person of one’s choice- noteworthy his comparison of same-sex marriage with inter-racial union was a bit enterprising, I thought. Notice the following criticism of the resolution. And while it might have its wisdom in Christian bigotry as opposed to scientific reasoning, I couldn't help noticing that it conveyed a fundamental point:

“Sure, it works at the surface level,” Mr. Stewart continued. “But it is actually defeated by the deeper reality of marriage itself. Marriage in its deep logic has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the union of a man and a woman. To apply Perez in the genderless marriage context is actually to betray it.”

A silly question popped up in my mind by the time I was finished with the article, the latter part of which was pretty uninteristing- Is it necessary for two sexes to exist in higher forms? Is there a distinct biological/evolutionary advantage to it?

From Woolf's AROO

Thanks to Deepa Nair, I had the good fortune to read Virgina Woolf's A Room of One's Own, one of the greatest feminist essays of the 20th century. It was 'Feminism 101' for me personally, and I tried to read it dutifully suppressing any preconceived biases of what the area ought to be about. It would be an understatement if I said that I was overawed by Woolf's masterful prose that sparkled with a rare genius combining depth, vision and balance. It is beyond me to write my own views on the subject and I shall stay clear from untrodden paths. For now, I quote two passages from the essay:

1. In the first passage, Woolf emphasizes that writers, especially practitioners of fiction should consciously avoid a sexual bias in their endeavors, something humans seem to be naturally predisposed towards.

Even so, the very first sentence that I would write here, I said, crossing over to the writing–table and taking up the page headed Women and Fiction, is that it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman–manly or man–womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilized. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace. Not a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer. The curtains must be close drawn. The writer, I thought, once his experience is over, must lie back and let his mind celebrate its nuptials in darkness. He must not look or question what is being done. Rather, he must pluck the petals from a rose or watch the swans float calmly
down the river.

2. This passage in many ways, is a microcosmic mirror of the entire essay. It captures Woolf's thesis (that a woman requires a room of her own and an income of five hundred pounds a year to be able to pursue something as transcendental as writing fiction) and her call for the emancipation of women.

‘What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so? Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne—we may stop there. Of these, all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men, and of these three, Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairly well to do. It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to say: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve were University men: which means that somehow or other they procured the means to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hard fact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well to do, and I challenge you that, if he had not been well to do, he would no more have attained to write SAUL or THE RING AND THE BOOK than Ruskin would have attained to writing MODERN PAINTERS if his father had not dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income; and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew John Clare in a mad–house, and James Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug disappointment. These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It is—however dishonouring to us as a nation—certain that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance. Believe me—and I have spent a great part of ten years in watching some three hundred and twenty elementary schools, we may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.’

Nobody could put the point more plainly. ‘The poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance . . . a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.’ That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own. However, thanks to the toils of those obscure women in the past, of whom I wish we knew more, thanks, curiously enough to two wars, the Crimean which let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing–room, and the European War which opened the doors to the average woman some sixty years later, these evils are in the way to be bettered. Otherwise you would not be here tonight, and your chance of earning five hundred pounds a year, precarious as I am afraid that it still is, would be minute in the extreme.

Of the past

1.

It's playtime.
I want to undress you
with these eyes
and play
those delightful games
that we had invented
in the past.

I hope you play your part
and help me up
whenever I fall.

Please,
do not desert me
when I am blindfolded,
helpless and alone.

2.

Unmoved by those who suffer,
Unaffected by the chirping sparrow,
Inconsiderate of the those below,
Oblivious to the plaintive roar
pleading its way through extinction.
Our lives are
a characteristic immoderation,
anesthetically impervious
to evocation.

3.

The colours
bled through the sky
as the twilight undressed
and disbursed
the remains of a yellow sun.
The elements descended into her
and found welcome.
They were released
that night;
with the parting
of her legs.

----
Improvising on a quote I heard a while ago - Activity is surgery without anesthesia; Imagination is anesthesia without surgery. Experience is what one needs :-). Clearing my gmail inbox is my way of revisiting the past these days. That is how I happened to chance upon these little friends.

All of us probably remember the time when the papers were filled with outrage from the intelligentsia following Bal Thackeray's endorsement of Adolf Hitler. The demagogue, surprisingly, stood by his admiration for Hitler even after the criticism. While this might not even be a passing thought for many of you out there, I was intrigued by the possible causes behind this 'telepathic' connection. It is true that we find it plausible that Thackeray can draw inspiration from the life of Hitler (it definitely seems more plausible than the case of Hitler himself who confessed to have been guided in his mission by the music of Wagner) but I still find that the causal connection needs to be articulated. To me, Hitler was acknowledgedly a great mobilizer of masses and a propagandist of unprecedented competence, being able to steer an entire country using his fiery speeches and idealogical harangues. On the other hand, I find myself incapable of separating this acknowledgment of Hitler from a fundamental belief that he was a psychotically deluded man to have committed the atrocities that he did. Notwithstanding his other qualities, Hitler's commitment to his belief that the extermination of an entire ethnic body could resurrect a nation from its economic and social problems is nothing but a delusion and I personally find it impossible to look at him as a role model in any mode of representation or interpretation.

Let me now quote a passage from Amitav Ghosh's essay The Fundamentalist Challenge to invoke his views on the subject of the 'telepathic connection' that I mentioned earlier (People who have read the piece will forgive me for a contrived juxtaposition. While Ghosh does not particularly deal with Thackeray's admiration of Hitler, it is I who has taken the liberty of transporting Amitav Ghosh to the present context for I believe that the views apply):

I was amazed because I could not immediately understand why extremist Hindu beliefs should translate so fluently into sympathy for a group that had no religious affiliations at all, a group whose ideological genealogy ought to have inspired revulsion in these middle-class professional men. It only became obvious to me later, reading reports from Bosnia, Croatia, Sudan, Algeria, Sri Lanka, and other strife-torn lands, that for this species of thinking, religion, race, ethnicity, and language have no real content at all. Their only significance lies in the lines of distinction they provide. The actual content of the ideology, whether it manifests itself in its religious avatar or its linguistic or ethnic one, is actually the same in every case, although articulated through different symbols. In several instances- Sri Lanka, for example- extremist movements have seamlessly shifted their focus from language to religion.

What then is this ideology that can travel so indifferently among such disparate political groups? I believe that it is an incarnation of a demon that has stalked liberal democracy everywhere throughout this century; an ideology that, for want of a better word, I shall call supremacism. It consists essentially in the belief that a group cannot ensure its continuity except by exerting absolute cultural and demographic control over a particular stretch of geography. The fascist antecedents of this ideology are clear and obvious. Some would go further and argue that nationalism of every kind must also be regarded as a variant of supremacism. This is often but not necessarily true. The non-sectarian, anti-imperialist nationalism of a Gandhi or a Saad Zaghloul was founded on a belief in the possibility of relative autonomy for heterogeneous populations and had nothing to do with asserting supremacy.

These are thoughts that must have struck many of us in some form or the other. George Bernard Shaw's following famous quote, "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it" probably applies to every other form of identity where supremacism manifests.