Back to Delhi

After spending two eventful years in Mumbai, I have come back to Delhi hoping to spend many more eventful years. In no way was my return to Delhi "motivated" by the recent political and parochial events in Mumbai and Maharashtra although I was eminently qualified to be a victim as a Bihari as well as a "fortune seeker".
Delhi has it's shares of problems, perhaps much more than Mumbai: there are these horrible things they are doing to roads, entire roads are being closed for Metro, realigned because of Bus Corridor, new pavements are being laid; there is power shortage even in winter, seriously bad traffic. Girls are still being attacked in their homes by neighbours, men still pee on roads in broad daylight and people still think that everything can be bought with money, men still do not understand the need to queue up. The hindi word Jugad is still the operating principle of the citizens.
But the problems of Delhi are essentially existential - and in resolving them together is the effort of the Delhite to build a better future of herself/himself. Past has got very little to do with it. Present and future are what matters.... Where you come from [figuratively as well as literally] matters much less than what you are and where you are headed. This is where I guess it differs from the colonial cities such as Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai and now Bengaluru.... All colonial cities surprisingly run on pre-colonial sentiments of caste, race, sub-caste and identity and communitarian based society and politics.
It is indeed very surprising that the oldest city in India, Delhi, has the greatest collective urge to think of the future while the relatively youthful ones show a strong tendency to go back to some utopian and idyllic past... which actually never existed.
Why is this so? I do not know... But can guess: Delhi is a clever woman, she does not want to belong to anyone whatever the promises made.... She is suffered very badly for this attitude in the last 1000 years, but she still wants to remain free of emotional attachment.... While the others have tied emotional knots with many a suitor at different points in time and are now suffering from the claims and counter claims of each of the suitors.
I love your independence Delhi... Be that way and you will get the best of us seek your hand, although we know you will decline it with a wicked wink.

Ancient Knowledge and Modern Science

I have just finished reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everthing. Bryson is a prolific and very good travel writer but he deviates a bit in this book and writes about the travels and travails mother earth has undertaken to be where it is and also indicates where she is headed.
For me reading the book has been a humbling experience and a scary one too... from the size of the galaxy to the size of the bacteria that lives at 130 C, I have lost all perspective of size.
From the impact of a moon sized meteor crashing on the earth to the havoc that mutant strains of virus can cause, I have lost all perspective of fear.
From the fact that for the last 300 odd years "modern" science has just been trying to understand things to the fact that some of them have done more harm to us than the collective good scientists have done, I have lost much respect for "knowledge"
What struck me most about the book is right at the beginning.... "Something came out of nothing" That is how the universe was created and the best part of this is that I have read this theory somewhere in a more flowery language.. Can you guess where? If you can't here is a conversation that apparently took place between a guru and a shishya in an ashram more than 2000 years ago:

Student: How did this mighty banyan tree come about?
Teacher: Son, This mighty tree came from the seed
Student: How did the seed come about?
Teacher: Go fetch a seed and see what is inside it
Student: I see nothing inside the seed, teacher!
Teacher: That is correct my son, the mighty banyan tree came from "nothing"

This is from one of the Upanishadas and you will find the whole conversation translated into English in Romila Thapar's Penguin History of India....
Thank you Mr Bryson, your brilliant book has restored my faith in ancient Indian knowledge, in our myths [the large oversized mammals and other weird creatures that you describe from times past are all there in our mythology].
PS: Those interested in scary things, here are three instances from the book of how fragile we are:

1. The whole of 70 odd acres of Yellowstone National Park in the mouth of a volcano, if it bursts one day, and it is due to burst if you belive in probablity, more than half the population of the world will perish as collateral damage:)
2. When you go to sleep remember for the millons of bacteria living off your skin your head looks like a tasty doughnut.
3. Twice in the last 20 years two planetoids have passed the earth's orbit at a few lakh kilometres. This is apparently a miraculous escape, something close to a bullet passing through your shirt sleeves....

Bongs and Communism

For some both these two words would be synonymous... To an extent this would be true. Intellectually 90 per cent of Bongs are socialists and politically at least 47 per cent of them are Communists of different hues. Even the formidable Congress leader Subrata Mukherjee was branded by his own partyman as a melon.... Green outside but actually Red inside... Such is the influence of Marxist thought in Bengal...
But I think that is only on the surface.... Bongs are certainly not defined by their left thinking but by great intellectual confusion at best and blatant hypocrisy at worst. To give two example: Bengal has ove rthe last 100 years sent most widows to Vrindavan [how these young women were taken to Vrindavan and abanadoned is the subject of many a Nengali classic]. Nearer my time, in a place where my grandfather settled down after partition [a small town in 24 Parganas about 40 Kms from Calcutta], since 1972 every one in the mohalla has voted for CPI or CPM, but I have seen with my own eyes a "guru" visiting each house in winter and some of the housewives washing the feet of the guru and drinking that water....
But I guess there was a time when Bengalis called themselves rational and did not accept anything that did not pass the test of dry rationality... One of the biggest literary figures and proponents to cut and dried rationality was Syed Mujtaba Ali, a true renaissance man. His stories could make you cry and his anti-Nazin and anit-Communist jokes which he claimed to have collected as a student in Germany are real gems of Bengali rational thinking and humourous writing.
Here is a sample: A Russian Citizen was punished for 50 years for publicly calling a Cabinet Minister "Insane".... The judge although a communist was liberal and took the pain to explain to the "offender" the quantum of punishment: 10 years for insulting a government servant and 40 years for leaking out a state secret.....
If you are interested, you can read one of Mujtaba Ali's classic collection of hilarious stories "HasyaMadhur"
Sadly, rationality and laughter are almost dead in Bengal, little wonder that most Bengali look either bloated with self-importance or shrunken with constipation

Beggars as Choosers?

If you live in Delhi or Mumbai beggars at traffic junctions are a common site. In South Delhi and in the western suburbs it is pretty common to see young kids playing on the kerb, mothers with babies in arms begging for food, Children playing small tricks on the roadside to earn a fe rupees. But of late you would not have failed to notice a new phenomenon.... beggar are increasingly being engaged as salespersons and the line between street side begging and street side selling is getting blurred.
Initially, at least in Delhi small time vendors used to compete with full time beggars for space and mindshare on the traffic junctions.... not small time vendors are jostling for space with full time beggars turned out as part-time salespersons of recognised brands. There are the usual children's toys, agarbattis, chinese stuff etc that these people have been selling to shore up their incomes from begging, but more recently they have been selling well recognised branded stuff.
And I would like to out on record the fact that the worst offenders are newspapers and branded international society magazines.... the names of Mid Day, Hello, Cosmopolitan among others come to mind immediately. Also in the race are pirated book sellers.
These beggars turned salespersons represent a massive pressure on you..... first with their blatant knock [all beggars in India have the right to draw your attention by any means]; then by appealing to your consumer side by showing the goodies they want you to buy and if that fails then by telling you on your face "buy something, I haven't had my morning cup of tea"....
Nothing wrong with these people, they behave just as some of the corporate types that visit your office from Airtel, ICICI Bank or some such do. But everything is wrong with people who engage their services.... First of all no one knows what is their term of engagement, secondly and especially if it is a child's toy why do you get a filthy beggar to sell it to a child [I never buy ballloons from beggars on streets]? thirdly, those sitting in board rooms are clearly not aware of what this means for the erosion of their brand.... I have stopped reading Mid Day sometime back and do not even look at the magazines sold by beggar/salespersons... finally, I find it strange that print media one of the most virulent critics of social exploitation engaging this practice openly... Just imagine buying a copy of a leading newpaper froma beggar and a report inside read "beggars are exploited in our country". That would be a real irony...