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  • Election in Kerala & Confederacy of Dunces

    Election is nigh in Malayalee-land.

    The federal and provincial political theater has always had its dependable cast of characters—mostly vaudevillian, corrupt, and inept, with a proven track record of inflicting immense harm upon the very people they claim to serve since Independence.

    Politicians from Kerala, however, are a breed apart. Their incompetence and corruption are beyond dispute, but what truly sets them apart is their unshakeable belief in the moral and intellectual superiority of the “Kerala model” of human development. They speak of it with the reverence of medieval monks preserving sacred texts, never tiring of its glory, nor of lamenting the unfortunate condition of the lesser mortals inhabiting other Indian states.

    The first elected government of Kerala was formed by the Communists. Having endured one too many encounters with loudmouth leftists in Delhi, Indira Gandhi reportedly assembled an informal “kitchen cabinet”—complete with tea, biscuits, and mild constitutional subversion—to engineer a bloodless coup.

    But she did not stop there. Like a political necromancer, she resurrected the defunct and guilt-ridden Muslim League, along with an assortment of Hindu caste blocs and Christian clergy, ensuring that Kerala’s politics would henceforth be entrusted to a rotating fellowship of the perpetually indignant. Their communist counterparts, never to be outdone, split into factions, reunited, split again, and eventually stitched together alliances from ideological leftovers—many of whom proved even more doctrinaire and regressive than their rivals.

    Thus emerged two grand banners under which all ambition, hypocrisy, and moral posturing would be conveniently organized: the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Left Democratic Front (LDF). The irony, of course, is that both claim ideological purity while practicing political opportunism with breathtaking consistency—each accusing the other of the very sins they commit with greater efficiency.

    The UDF

    The United Democratic Front is best understood as a coalition of eternal negotiation. Its ideology is less a coherent framework and more a delicate balancing act between community arithmetic, historical grievances, and seat-sharing squabbles. Every election cycle, the UDF presents itself as the reasonable alternative—less ideological, slanted slightly to the left, and always just one internal disagreement away from collapse. Its motley leadership, with the Gandhi royalty at the center as the reluctant arbiters of impossible wishes, specialize in seeking votes they never quite earned. They eternally rely on identity politics from a sea of parochial islands, trusting that the voters will remain preoccupied with opposing “the enemy” rather than scrutinizing their own representatives.

    Their discourse on development proceeds cautiously, in the tone of landlords negotiating rent—measured, evasive, and careful not to alienate any bloc whose support they might need sooner than later. The UDF voter, meanwhile, is a connoisseur of compromise—firmly convinced that stability lies in maintaining the status quo. Their ultimate goal of governance is to have a member from their own congregation, caste, or religion in the assembly. If their families really needed economic growth, they could always just send their children abroad.

    The LDF

    The Left Democratic Front operates with the confidence of a movement that believes history is on its side—even when Marxists are declared an extinct species around the rest of the world. Its rhetoric is rich with revolution, resistance, and righteous indignation, though its governance is all about a partisan bureaucracy with excellent public relations work paid for by the people. The LDF prides itself on ideological clarity, which it demonstrates by explaining complex global injustices at great length before addressing local potholes. They exhort students to boycott classes and workers to skip the day in the factory or office so they can join protests against the “grand schemes of imperial forces.”

    They hope to see the “party-villages” taking over the state while the natives parrot words prescribed to them by the party’s secretariat. The leader appears mildly amused at how loyal—and useful—his subjects are, both the literate and the less so. In return, he hands out jobs, contracts, awards, and university degrees. Occasionally, a few deviants might be cut into fifty-one pieces as a reminder of the party line. Its cadre remains deeply committed, disciplined, and ever ready to defend the party on social media, where revolutions are now most efficiently conducted. To its critics, it is a system that has mastered the art of appearing perpetually radical while co-opting the most radical elements of its population.

    The NDA

    The National Democratic Alliance in Kerala is less a political force and more a state of persistent and optimistic anticipation. Every election is heralded as the moment of breakthrough—the year when Kerala will finally align with the broader national mood. That moment, like the quest for the Philosopher’s Stone, is always around the corner but never found. The NDA campaigns with energy, conviction, and a firm belief that ideological clarity will eventually triumph over entrenched local loyalties and decades of hoary tales about fascism.

    However, the Muslim community’s aversion, the Christians’ apprehensions, and the resistance of left-leaning Hindus have left the NDA in the lurch with no redemption in sight. Whenever they get close to the finish line, the U & L factions prove remarkably nimble on their feet, calling a truce just to keep the intruder out. The leaders have learned to live on subsistence allowances from the Center as low-key operatives in the political landscape of Mall-land. As the technocrats at the top will soon realize—we are like that wonly! For now, the NDA remains the most optimistic participant in the electoral process—a party that contests not just elections, but probability itself.

    * * *

    And so, the stage is set once again. Speeches will be made, alliances rearranged, scandals recycled, and manifestos printed with the solemnity of sacred scripture. The voter, as always, will deliberate carefully—before returning the same actors to the same stage in slightly altered costumes. Democracy, after all, is not about change. It is about the freedom to complain about the same things, repeatedly, with renewed enthusiasm.

    Happy voting!

  • The Champions

    The Champions

    Winning the championship this time felt almost inevitable. The juggernaut took time to gather pace and even stumbled briefly during the Super Eight stage. But once it hit its straps, it mowed down everything in its path. From the outside, the wheels seemed to roll forward with ruthless efficiency. Yet the parts were human—an ensemble of frailty and triumph.

    Sanju Samson

    When he knelt down, letting the helmet and bat tumble away as he raised his hands, it felt as though the cricketing gods had finally anointed him. Not long ago, he had been down and out, resigned to a fate shaped by a string of low scores and a place out of favour. But fate had other plans. The loss to South Africa, Rinku Singh’s family emergency, and the virtual knockout matches that followed revealed a Sanju-shaped void in the batting lineup.

    No one had ever crossed 80+ scores in three consecutive knockout matches on the way to a championship. Riding the vagaries of T20 batting, he unfurled a series of sublime shots, his face carrying an almost spiritual calm. The believers finally exhaled when the prophecy was fulfilled.

    Hardik Pandya

    Hardik is a champion who has tasted glory many times. Like a trapeze artist, he searches constantly for that perfect arc where time and space align—leaving the audience gasping as he pulls off feats reserved for supreme athletes. It could be a blazing drive through the V, a hard-length ball that traps a marauding batter, or a lightning throw from the boundary to end a charge.
    Yet the final reminded everyone that glory is also a conspiracy of time and space. Without that divine alignment, Hardik too is mortal. No matter how fiercely he chased it, the arc would not appear. But Hardik will never stop chasing.

    Ishan Kishan

    When Ishan first burst onto the scene, he startled everyone with audacious shots and manic hitting, trying to score as much as mathematically possible. Pessimists dismissed it as desperate thrashing that would not last—and it did not.
    What followed defined him. He accepted exile gracefully and returned to the wilderness of domestic cricket. There he flailed, but with purpose, carrying his provincial team all the way to the championship. His swivel-pulls, launched from the remotest corners of the country, sent the non-believers out of the cricketing orbit – seeing is believing, and we saw it match after match.

    Jasprit Bumrah

    Bumrah carries a three-dimensional pitch-map in his mind. His run-up is short and unconventional, but by the time he releases the ball, he has processed a million mental models—like a data scientist narrowing probabilities—to arrive at the most likely mode of dismissal. Bowling becomes an art born of applied artificial intelligence, whenever the fragile body allows him. Against such precision, a batter’s power and instinct rarely stand a chance.

    Axar Patel

    Axar is the one who quietly picks up everyone’s slack—the wise, self-effacing elder brother who appears whenever the family needs help. When things settle, he slips back into the background, ensuring everything stays in order.
    The impossible catches, the teased-out wickets, the runs conjured when others had failed—each act was simply about the team’s wellbeing. No rancour. He has your back.

    The Captain

    SKY made his reputation in the most fickle format of the game. For some time now, the 360-degree strokeplay has not flowed as freely as it once did. Yet he adjusted, moving himself around so others could flourish.

    He seized the important moments and guided the team with quiet assurance. In the end, his legacy may not lie in the shots he played, but in a general’s belief and unwavering loyalty to his troops, even for the beleaguered Abhishek and Varun caught in the cauldron.

    It may have looked like the machine that rolled forward with ruthless efficiency. But the wheels moved only because of the frailties, faith and stubborn will of the men who turned them.

    If you doubt it, ask Sanju. Ask Abhishek.

  • End of Revolution?

    End of Revolution?

    The upheavals of the two World Wars and the Cold War produced two nations built on the ideology of faith—Pakistan and Iran, respectively. Pakistan emerged as the imperial construct in which religion became a political instrument of military rule. Iran, by contrast, absorbed Marxist polemics of Western imperialism and recast Islamic theology as the engine of a new revolution.

    When V. S. Naipaul visited Iran after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, he found the streets and universities of Mashhad and Qom overrun by believers drawn toward the Ayatollah at the center, surrounded by his coterie, urging, “Iranians should keep the flame of Islam burning.” Ayatollah Taleqani, leading the prayer, spoke about the Prophet’s vision of revolution, and foretold that the Persians—the descendants of Salman-e-Farsi—were to be the pioneers of Islam at a time when the world had deviated from the faith and the ancient debate over true inheritors was to be settled.

    Khomeini’s advertisement in The New York Times in January 1979, while still in exile in France, and his speech on Jerusalem Day in August marked a shift in tone: the conversation moved from claims of equal civilization to the invincibility of faith and its ultimate victory over the world. The liberal world, too, co-opted the Muslim cause globally, framing Iranian resistance and the strife in Gaza as counterpoints to fascism and other manifestations of authoritarianism, conveniently ignoring the colossal failures of their own ideology.

    Revolutionary euphoria quickly gave way to repression. Marxists who had supported the uprising were among the first to be purged. Kurds, Jews, and alleged collaborators soon faced the Supreme Leader’s judgment, and the punishments were swift. Volumes of commentary were written about following the one true faith. The guardians of God became tyrants with solemn faces and flowing gowns, soon revealed as hollow men seeking power over land and veiled women.

    The hard-won revolution had to be protected at all costs, especially from enemies within and beyond the border. The Revolutionary Guard and the long line of Ayatollahs built a fortress of faith. The ranks of Hamas guerrillas, Hezbollah militants, and the surge of the Muslim Brotherhood—armed with belief—were supposed to change the world. However, the domino effect unleashed on October 7 set events in motion.

    How long the war will last, now that the latest Khamenei has exited, and how the IRGC might maneuver to preserve the regime of oppression remains to be seen—only time will tell.

  • Philadelphia

    Philadelphia

    Philadelphia is a city where the dwellers seem gripped by a recurring sense of having lived the exact moment before. The same conversation, the same person with a smirk on his face, the same weather — precisely when your neighbor locked his apartment to leave and the mayor was having a nightmare about his house being bugged by the FBI. Or you might hear the jumbled voices on the radio discussing Dalí and the death of a jazz singer in your car while a Black man walked across the street with a beer bottle in hand.

    It’s a city that has been aging ever since Ben Franklin dreamed that, on the day of his funeral, leaders — thirty-four ministers, preachers, priests, and at least one rabbi — marched arm in arm behind his casket as it was carried to the gravesite. He even dreamed of the Liberty Bell crumbling.

    If you sit in one of the chairs in the old assembly hall of the Constitution House, after climbing the sturdy wooden stairs, you could still sense the rustle of tunics and sombreros worn by your fellow legislators. Perhaps you could still argue with them to make Gujarat the fifty-first federal state.

    If you walk through Center City along the sun-soaked brick buildings, you might meet travelers from neighboring towns afflicted by bouts of insomnia, lost in the constitutional walking tour of Philadelphia. And if you drift down toward the inner city along the Delaware River, you might find Lila, the aging and desperate wharf-bar pickup, and hone your ruminations on life and civilization into something understandable and real before you sail back out to the outer seas again.

    Further north, you might find Mr. George Tharakan stepping out of his Mercedes-Benz in a suit, entering his four-bedroom house, then later emerging in a lungi to inspect the fence he shares with his fellow native. If you glanced through his family album, you would find him wearing the exact same lungi, inspecting his fence on a similar sunny evening in Thiruvalla, Kerala.

  • Debating AI

    Debating AI

    The content below is a summary of the arguments I presented during my debate with Gemini AI. Summary is also a product of Gemini’s infinite wisdom in TPUs.

    ————————

    …that was a very detailed and nuanced discussion. Your arguments focus on the critical shortcomings of the Nehruvian project and the idea that Nehru’s political choices inadvertently created and sustained India’s core internal and external challenges.

    Here is a summary of the main arguments you put forward:

    1. The Danger of Flawed Idealism (Nehru vs. Patel):

    The Thesis: Idealism, when based on a wrong hypothesis and neglecting ground facts or the policies of rivals, is more dangerous than pragmatism.

    The Critique of Nehru: Nehru’s idealism (e.g., in foreign policy) led to a strategic failure (e.g., ignoring Patel’s warnings on China and the security of Tibet) and favoured a moralistic approach (UN on Kashmir) over a decisive, realistic, and preemptive one.

    The Counter-View of Patel: Sardar Patel’s pragmatic, realist, and less state-socialist approach would have been more progressive and beneficial for national security and economic growth, despite being deemed “less progressive” by the prevailing socialist ideology of the time.

    2. Intellectual Inflexibility and Image Maintenance:

    The Argument: Nehru’s deep intellectual confidence and commitment to a specific ideology (democratic socialism) may have functioned as a shield to avoid honest debate and critical engagement with policy failures.

    The Consequence: This created a risk where unchallenged ideas and policies amounted to “gambling” with the future of one-fifth of the world’s population, leading to the institutionalisation of detrimental systems.

    3. Bad Policies vs. Good Intentions (Institutionalising Corruption):

    The Critique of the Economic Model: The construction of modern infrastructure and scientific institutions does not excuse the creation of the “License Raj” and the institutionalisation of corruption.

    The Mechanism: The excessive centralised state control and bureaucratic intervention required for Nehruvian planning created endless points for rent-seeking and stifled private enterprise and genuine growth for decades.

    4. Failure of Secularism and Internal Fragmentation:

    Flawed Secularism: Nehruvian secularism was not a tool for genuine reformation and integration for all minorities, but rather one of non-interference (e.g., failing to reform Muslim Personal Law while reforming Hindu law).

    External Exploitation: This selective approach created a sense of an “unintegrated” population (especially in regions like Kashmir and Bengal), which became the ideological justification and strategic leverage point for Pakistan, despite its meagre resources, to challenge India’s integrity and prosperity.

    5. Conclusion on Gandhi’s Vision:

    The final summation is that the implemented hybrid vision—a mix of Nehru’s modernism and a diluted version of Gandhian pluralism—led to the creation and sustenance of intractable enemies both internally (communalism/fragmentation) and externally (unresolved conflicts with Pakistan and China), ultimately hindering India’s true potential and security.

    —————-scary!!

  • Up and Onward, Jemimah

    Up and Onward, Jemimah

    Jemimah hit a hundred chasing a mammoth score, with tough-as-nails women from Australia standing between her and victory. She did not raise her bat to soak in the glory. She knew the fight was far from over, and her team had folded a few times already in the tournament with the finish line in sight.

    She became the cheerleader for her tiring self, her team, and a nation that barely rallies behind its daughters. She had spent almost the entire game from the start in the hot and humid cauldron. The steely look in her eyes, the muttering to herself, and the chatter with her mates falling midway in the fight played out before thousands of compatriots. Yet she found an ounce of energy for a few more hits, as if she were riding the crescendo of a symphony.

    The symphony was made of human frailties. Losing to three of the SENA teams in the lead-up to this game had sullied expectations for this side. Their bowling barely inspired confidence. Fielding was in disarray—dropping simple catches, conceding overthrows, stumbling over balls hit straight to fielders. Jemimah herself had failed and been dropped from the team a few times already, and she didn’t even know she was one down until five minutes before she was sent out.

    Her captain and the oldest player in the team, Harmanpreet, was a complex soul trying to break the karmic cycles of those who walked ahead of her out of the park and toward an assured oblivion.. She carries a tortured look, as if fighting a demon that never lets her be. She, too, was cramping, but decided to lash out, believing Jemimah would anchor the ship still teetering in the tempest with a prayer. The match could very well have been her last had India lost. But the partnership with Jemimah became their ticket to redemption. Other batters brought much-needed wind to the sails, even as they faltered along the way.

    There is no video of Kapil Dev’s 175 against Zimbabwe, when the World Cup-winning team was on the brink of elimination. But that team of 1983 changed the destiny of Indian cricket and the spirit of a nation. Yet it was still a man’s victory.

    Women’s team coach Amol Muzumdar, too, has his tryst with destiny. He never got the chance to wear the blue, waiting in the shadows through a long career despite being one of domestic cricket’s greatest run machines. He started his career waiting for a chance to play for India, padded up and waited for an eternity and a day, while Tendulkar and Kambli batted to glory.This was his Chak De moment—seeking redemption alongside the girls who know what it means to be so near, yet so far.

    But this is Jemi’s time—to change the destiny of millions of girls and help them chart their own course to the future.

    It is already late.

    Photo Credit: Emmanual Yogini

  • All roads lead to Shakespeare and Company

    All roads lead to Shakespeare and Company

    In this age when smartphones have taken over civilization, the French still cling to their paperbacks—and demand deference in conversation. Parisians still laugh out loud in cafés and frown if you ask for directions without saying Bonjour first!

    Walking through Paris convinces you that history and culture aren’t just facts or curiosities here. They breathe, thrive, and redeem even the casual visitor. The writers who once flocked to France must have been chasing what only the French could describe as joie de vivre. Even the picturesque countryside still echoes with Zola and Maupassant. Notre-Dame is still on the long road to recovery from the ashes—reenacting Hugo’s own reasons for writing The Hunchback, as it takes many modern-day Quasimodos to preserve the cathedral and watch over Paris.

    From the cathedral you can spot a bookshop founded in 1919 by Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate. Her shop, Shakespeare and Company, famously published James Joyce’s Ulysses, , shocking the literary world. Ever since, it has been a haven for writers from across the globe—Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald—until the Nazis forced its closure in 1941.

    Another American wanderer, George Whitman, lingered long enough among the growing piles of books to add beds tucked between the shelves for poor and weary writerly souls in exchange for helping with daily chores. This was just in time for the Bohemian winds that swept across the world. Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell, Brecht, and Miller were among the thousands—both famous and aspiring—who spent nights reading, resting, and dreaming of writing their own opus.

    Today, the store has a reading room upstairs, and there is always a literary event or two. You might even stumble upon Jeet Thayil or Guy Gunaratne reading from their own books.

    The French will hold on to their books. If you want to discover what they’re reading, go to Shakespeare and Company!

  • A house in dreams

    A house in dreams

    Every member of the family carried a house within them—a dream shaped by their longings, fears, and memories. Though they spoke of walls, windows, and rooms, each vision revealed not bricks and wood but the architecture of their own hearts.

    The father, who had already traveled a million miles, thought about the house he was going to build:

    The house is where I would find my moorings at the end of a hard day. At night, it takes the form of a ship anchored at the wharf, leaning into the widening shimmer of the ocean. The balmy breeze across the yard would unfurl the sails and carry us a few more knots.

    I want the entrance to rise into a cathedral ceiling, with glass windows all around and a den in front where I can watch storms and lightning pass by. The dwellers of my Ark would hold onto one another until morning breaks—and then I can let them fly into the bluest sky. Perhaps I need a longer glass to see far enough.

    Shrugging off the captain’s apprehensions, the daughter dreamed instead:

    My house begins in the attic, where I have a bird’s-eye view of the landscape beyond the fence, where I can listen to rain rattling on the roof and feel the moist nights tick away as water drips from the drain. Then the sunshine flutters its mosaic across the slanted windows. I want to walk down the stairs into the living room where the family gathers. This house of my dreams is grand and old, and I sense a déjà vu—of being transported to a timeless time.

    The son, impatient with his sister’s hopeful reverie, thought to himself:

    The idea of a basement comes from human fear of death and an expectation that bad things will happen. A dingy crawl space would be preferable. To me, the house feels like a mausoleum built upon such a basement. I know the trusses and walls will crumble someday, and there will be an onslaught of dust until everyone inside turns ghostly. The laughter, sobs, and voices trapped in the air will die a natural death, and I will want to go far away. I would erase every trace of my footprints, too.

    The mother, who packed their belongings from rented apartments time and again, always returned to her own dream:

    This house is a refuge, a boundary drawn against the melancholy of the world. A shelter for the displaced and broken human spirit to restore body, mind, and soul. There should be a dining area beside the living room, ready to welcome and nourish those who come home battered and bruised. And in the bedrooms, soft light will heal them.

    post script:

    Together, their dreams did not form a single blueprint but a constellation of desires—an ark, an attic, a mausoleum, a refuge. The house in their dreams was never just a dwelling; it was the story of who they were, and who they hoped to be.

  • On Folk Arts

    On Folk Arts

    It seemed like a long time ago when time was still timeless, I had an affliction of color and sound. My mind, for the first time, was registering the overwhelming play of bright colors and engrossing sounds of the yearly festival at the temple in our neighborhood. Even the colors of candies stacked by seasonal peddlers upon their makeshift stalls added an ethereal sheen to the phantasmal vision unfolding before my eyes.

    The soothsayer’s song in praise of snake deities, loud and stout-looking actors on stage enacting extra-terrestrial battles from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the balloon man with his mobile paraphernalia—those were the early connectors to the heritage of the land, expressions of a world order that defied the onslaught of time as long as they endured.

    It was much later that I began to notice earthier and more primordial forms of folk art such as Ayyappan Paattu, songs in praise of Dravidian gods (Muthappan, Vishnumaya), along the sidelines of flashier performing arts. In them, I could sense a kind of cathartic realization of individual and collective dreams and fears—emotions that might otherwise have remained buried in the subconscious or erupted into something sinister and dark. The national festival of Kerala, Onam, was borne of a folk legend and became an occasion to celebrate all kinds of folk arts—ritualistic and secular (such as Tiger Dance, Kummatti Kali, etc.). More than its significance as an age-old tradition, Onam created a grand setting for people to celebrate life and revel in others’ joy.

    Some of the shapes and forms I witnessed in the traditional settings of Kerala were intense enough to quiet my growing apprehensions about the lack of development and modernity in the state’s social life. The richness of folk art easily filled the gaps of deprivation and countered the snobbery prevalent among the audiences and practitioners of classical arts. Often I marveled at the striking similarities between Theyyam and Kathakali costumes, and how Theyyam invariably broke into cries, in contrast to the refined aural and literary traditions of Kathakali. The social dynamic at work here was too stark to ignore.

    The dialectics of folk art were cleverly adopted and manipulated by political strategists, especially the communists, who embedded their ideology in seemingly innocuous variations of folk music enjoyed by workers in the fields. Later, popular poets used the structures and sounds of folk music to lend their art a vivid imagery and unexpected dimension. Listening to such poems in native languages like Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, etc., became a unique experience. Translating them would never have made sense.

    Yet, the most impressive of all folk arts has always been music. The rhythms and sounds of folk music have a rare ability to cut through the carefully manicured fences of culture and language. The aspirations of common people rising in unison resonate naturally with their counterparts across the world and touch hearts in a singular way—whether it is a group of Moravian gypsies assembled in a tavern, a Texan singing Americana, a Baul singer walking down the beaten fields, or farmers on a nondescript islet in Kuttanad rhapsodizing about the harvest season and the pleasures of a simple, unhurried life of yore.

    Living in a time when hypermodernity and globalization are often confused and utterly inadequate to describe the human condition—and, to a great extent, the condition of the earth—folk art may offer the much-needed healing for our electrocuted humanity. Although we will never return to the refuge of a rural and agrarian setting, the only lasting answers to our complicated problems may be simple ones.

    I remember reading Milan Kundera, who devoted an entire chapter to folk music and modern society. He spoke about men weary under the weight of their own egos and mistrust of their identities:

    ...and I felt happy within these songs, in which sorrow is not reckless, laughter is not crooked, love is not ridiculous and hate is not apprehensive, where people love with their bodies and souls, where they draw knives or sabres in hatred, dance in joy, throw themselves into the Danube in despair, where, for that matter, love is still love and pain is still pain, where the original emotion is not yet devoid of itself and where values are still unravaged; and it seemed to me that within these songs I was at home, that I had my roots in there. That their world was my primal point of reference… (The Joke).

    Notes:
    Some of the most evocative uses of audio and visual expositions of folk arts have appeared in popular and offbeat Indian cinema. Aravindan’s Kummatty comes to mind—the entire film based on a folk tale and roused by folk music. Nokkukuthi (Scarecrow) was another experimental effort, based on M. Govindan’s poem depicting a ballad. Other folk arts such as Theyyam and Kalam Paattu have long had their place in popular films. Mani Kaul also made a documentary on Rajasthani puppetry and a film, Duvidha, based on a folk tale.

  • In Light of India – III

    In Light of India – III

    The project of nationhood

    Octavio Paz was deeply aware of the rise of the right-wing Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, and the renewed Hindu-Muslim divide. While he acknowledges the inherently secular and moderate nature of Hindu traditions, he observes that radicalization began with Tilak and was later consolidated by Savarkar. The result was the by-product of neo-Hinduism (Hindutva): ): a monolithic vision of Hindu identity, territorially united and stripped of caste divisions—something unknown to Hinduism’s historically fluid, “history-less” culture. Drawing on his own experience of Mexican nationalism, Paz cautions against such rigid identity-making, where society is divided into the acceptable and the abominable:

    “All this would be funny were it not frightening. Nationalism is not a jovial god: it is Moloch drunk with blood…In India, many nations live together and they are all fighting with one another. One of them, Hindu nationalism, wants to dominate the others and subject them to its law – like an Aurangzeb in reverse. Another, in Kashmir, wants the state to unite with a hostile nation, Pakistan – thus ignoring the lesson of Bangladesh.”

    For Paz, the weakness of secular politics was equally troubling. He cites the Shah Bano case, when Rajiv Gandhi overturned a court ruling to appease conservative clerics, defying the constitution. He also points to Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian centralization of power as another example of expediency corrupting democracy. Having seen the disasters of socialist totalitarian regimes in Latin America, and the hollow triumphs of military nationalism, Paz insists that India’s national project must remain grounded in secularism and democracy, guarded by constant vigilance.

    Contraptions of Time

    Beyond politics, Paz also turned to India’s ancient philosophies, searching for deeper explanations of its society and history. He dwells on medieval and Vedic literature: its erotic art, its strict metrical forms, and its striking absence of sin when compared to Western traditions. He lingers on the Atharva Veda:

    “Time created the Lord of creatures, Prajapati.”

    “Desire (Kama) was the first to be born. Desire arose in the beginning which was the first seed of thought.”

    In Indian thought, sex is not sinful but vital, a regenerative energy at the core of life. Tantric traditions treated pleasure as a goal, though finite; the enlightened path required abstinence and meditation to break the chain of rebirth. Chastity, in this view, was strength for the great battle: liberation from time itself.

    Paz turns to the Bhagavad Gita and the Buddha to contrast two visions of life’s purpose—one active, one renunciatory—yet both converging toward transcendence. His reflections culminate in a phrase he once used in his Nobel lecture:

    “Every civilization is a vision of time.”

    For India, that vision was cyclical. The Maya of linear time was illusion; the real was Brahman (Absolute Being) and, at its depth, Atman (Self). Thus man was impermanent as the cosmos, and unreal as an apparition. Paz saw this metaphysical and social “negation of time” as having two consequences: first, it prevented the birth of history as a literary or scientific genre; second, it immobilized society in the form of caste. Invasions and upheavals were seen only as dissonances in a larger cyclical flow. This equilibrium, centuries old, was now being shaken by modernity—first among the elites, and increasingly among India’s middle class.

    Conclusion

    Paz ends In the light of India still seeking answers to the questions the country posed him. Along the way, he launches a scathing attack on the capitalist model of development, and revisits Gandhi’s forgotten alternative: Gram Swaraj. . Gandhi had envisioned a billion villages of farmers and artisans, bound by nonviolence and Dharma as the covenant between civilizations. Yet population growth and Soviet-style industrialization thwarted this dream, turning villages into pits of misery and despair.

    For Paz, the reformation of civilization must begin with a reflection on time itself. India had offered him that vision—cosmic, cyclical, inexhaustible—even as its politics and society wrestled with modernity.

    I would not have known how deeply personal India was to him, or how profoundly she inspired one of the finest thinkers and writers of our time to tell us what the people of India, seem to have irretrievably lost.