Conservatism as Heresy

My second blog, and already I seem to be developing an unfortunate knack for bombastic titles – last time it was due to a lack of inspiration; this time, I assure you, it’s because I don’t know what else to call it. I had said that this blog was to be what I set out to say one week back, and perhaps to justify the title from last time – and as is my wont, again I bypass those, and talk of something that came up yesterday. In a way this can be regarded as a continuation of setting the rules, and a set of thanks to some people who I never actually did (or even can) thank for their doings – thus the air of a preface still lingers, and the author can perhaps be pardoned for not living upto his word. This won’t have too many ridiculously overt attempts at witticism, and even the declared purpose sounds rather somber, hence the more sophisticated (I trust your judgment on that) of my readers may quit at this point – else I’ll bore you with rather simple thought, worthy of a child. But it’s essential that it be stated at least once. I’ll try to put it in some coherent order, and wherever I find the cue, interject the chronology of the thought and why it came back yesterday.

Back in 49/14, Hindusthan Park, among the many dusty volumes double-parked in the bookshelves was a book called “Conservatism as Heresy.” I’ve forgotten most details, except that it was a blue and white book, and had essays about…say, why Australia should be all white, or why the French should conduct nuclear tests. I hadn’t graduated much beyond Enid Blyton when I first opened the book, so I can’t pretend to have read the pages upon pages of fine print, but I went through the titles – and can recall (unless it’s retrospective memory and nostalgia playing their usual tricks) a certain sense of outrage at the fact that anyone should defend things I knew necessarily to be tricks of the colonialists, greed of the imperialists, or just plain ‘bad’. But later as I grew, I would draw some solace from the fact that one could make such apparently good (or at least space-filling) cases for what flew against the face of conventional wisdom. At least it was refreshing.

And that’s probably the long and the short of it. But I’ll (brace yourself) elaborate. A few days ago I passed a birthday (I’m now getting to that stage when you cease to celebrate birthdays, but rather suspiciously watch them go by), and a friend gave me Jim Morrison’s biography. Chapter one, and already I’m set thinking. Of course, you’d say that one can’t apply everyday standards to a guy like that, and even I had said in my last blog that vanity and idiosyncrasies can become someone with reason to be vain. Yet I’d think it a bit far-fetched to tout as early signs of genius what otherwise comes across as plain bad manners – Jim apparently cellophane-taped his brother’s mouth while he slept, mimiced an invalid on a wheelchair, told his mother that she ate like a pig, and so on an so forth… Many good things too, and no doubt that he ‘felt’ like few else on planet Earth – so his early life maybe pardonable, but I wouldn’t be so sure about lauding anyone for it. Actually that’s the minor aspect - for after all if a man was to be held culpable for every mistake of his life dug up by enthusiastic researchers, few would ever qualify for …um, salvation – so it’s always in good taste to look at the brighter side of a man. For you’d surely judge Shakespeare by Hamlet, and not go, “Ooooh…he killed deer in some rich lord’s park…how horrible!” Let’s just say those were different people, that was a different place, and time. Animal rights were not perhaps as fashionable in the Tudor world.

What then was the major aspect? It was the sudden realisation of the long-past fall of an old adage. Reflect on this – not in early childhood, but at the peak of his powers Jim (, and not just Jim, a whole host of artists and poets and musicians) would resort to drugs and alcohol to ‘expand the consciousness’…to have that vision of ‘reality opening its maw’ or… Now, even at this late age, when few ideas have been left as holy, that’s one thing that I still haven’t grown comfortable with. You’ll see in my last blog, I say that a couple of important realisations in my life came to me in a slightly drunken haze (not actively suppressing the subconscious, or some such thing I had said), and immediately feel the need to follow it up with a caveat on health for ‘younger readers’, and how I hate to lose control of my faculties, moderation’s great etc. etc. That means that I don’t like that idea for some cultural predisposition – and really have convinced myself that, forget the pains of rehab, a few moments worth of high is not even worth a bad hangover, or a pot-belly. And in my college which is officially acknowledged as the grass-capital (ha, ‘tis not just ‘bout Das Kapital) of India – I had this minorly irritating habit of nagging people into quitting their little drugs, or at least give them a righteous dressing down, and feeling all nice and warm inside about it. I had done my bit of grass, and I am not averse to alcohol, but I have convinced myself that I don’t like them enough to make habits out of them.

And yet that’s one thing that stands. There are many things that you start off learning - all so apparently fundamental to your being that your very bones seem made from them. And then somewhere doubt and thought creep in, and rationality demands that you re-evaluate everything….e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g!! Old, and new. The clichéd and the fashionable (which is clichéd again) and the idiosyncratic. All - “Freedom of speech is holy.” “Racism, castism is a bane.” “Drugs are bad…hoo boy, bad bad!.” “Patriotism is a nice thing.” “Reservations are the worst.” We pause, reflect, buy some and discard others.

Now morality, as we all know by now, is at best some sort of a Pavlovian conditioning. The proverbial ‘they’ would harp on it, and harp on it, till you get a sense that you can’t live without the refrain. Most of it maybe essential for people to find their bearings in an otherwise prop-less universe – they’re the ‘ropes’ that you learn, the rules of the game – it’s good to know them. But it can become a problem if they become so axiomatic, that you forget doubt, and be willing to kill to defend them. They taught us that at school. And God, am I ever thankful for that.

Like everybody else, the first few years of my life I spent learning the rules of the game, and the next few unlearning them. Something changed when I came to class IX. Our English teacher, Shri Aniruddha Lahiri said in class that patriotism is a narrow virtue. Outrageous, but his logic seemed to hold. In Adrish’s Bengali classes with our normal bourgeois right of middle training, we bayed against reservations, and for capital punishments, while he took the opposite stands. In their physics classes, Mallar Roy and Parthapratim Roy rallied against the nuclear bombs in 1998, while we exchanged high fives. It’s true that with our newly acquired intellectualism, and attempts at sophistication, ill-veiled sophistry, and pure strongheadedness of being 16, 17, 18 – we scoffed a bit at them; we spoke knowingly of their extreme-leftward leanings – and yet it didn’t deter Mallar from singing, “…chai anobik baan, tar tore jay jaak praan” in an increasing uncomfortable class of seventy people (translation: basically a mother asking her son what he learnt at school; the reply is, “We learnt that the country needs the atomic bomb, and no sacrifice, of life or all else, is enough for that.”). Didn’t keep PPR from pointing out that working for TCS was probably not the only thing we might want to do with our lives. Didn’t keep Raktima ma’am from converting her History classes into periodic philosophical lessons (Few examples - “…I don’t care whether you eat beef, or not; but when you go out and people say, “You’re from India – you’re a Hindu. You don’t eat cows,” you tell them no, we’re not all Hindus in India; and yes, we Hindus respect the cow” And why. Why it’s like a mother for all it does for us. You can’t disown that stand then.”

“You know many of you, and I myself too, we’re middle-middle class Bengalis. It’s a good thing, for hardly in any other society will you find such range, such liberalism, with such a sound value system. Yet you have to break beyond the stifling mediocrity that comes with it. I think you too should aspire for snazzy cars like some of my older students now have.” (Well, she did have a farmhouse in Mehrauli, Delhi near the Qutb – but what she said was essentially true.)

“Sophistication is not about whether you can handle cutlery. That’s easy to pick up – takes a week at most. It’s about…”)

Thus were my teachers. I never realised it, until I thought of them now, seven years on. I have done nothing to live up to what they taught me, but that’s not to say I won’t…we won’t. They taught us that conservatism is heresy. And it was perhaps not just my teachers, many of my friends from all over, found it out, so it can’t be a Bong/Calcutta thing to do. But it was easier for us, I guess. Saying the things they did may seem presumptuous now – but let me say it this once, that I’m immeasurably grateful to them that they said what they did, when they did!

(It’s a possibility that the ‘lunatic’ teachers, who made us, could perhaps be there, because the ‘System’ let’s them be. She rediscovers herself by allowing for differences. Thus, what we learnt was perhaps actually nothing that flew in the face of the established order, but just the System doing her make up in the front of an mirror – removing dead cells, rejuvenating the skin, and powdering up the patches where that can’t be done, hiding the wrinkles. An uncle once had talked of an Jiri Trnka puppet animation (I haven’t seen it, but the idea lingers) – there’s a potter puppet who’s creating… ‘a thing of beauty’, on his wheel; but every time he nears completion, a huge hand comes and breaks it, and points out an utterly utilitarian pot to him – That’s what you gotta do. Happens once, twice, several times. Ultimately the artisan gets totally out-of-hand, breaks his wheel, breaks everything, and then he floats down with a tranquil look on his face into the dark, and sleeps in peace. When the lights come up, we see him lying in the palm of…The Hand!! It’s a possibility worth a thought.)

Now, forever I have believed in the importance of opinion – it’s never the vacillating people of the middle path who ever do anything effective – for they just do not know how to. That’s the importance of the ‘-isms’ – to effect anything constructive you need the benefit of dogma, some clear idea about how you’ll go about it, whatever ‘it’ might be. The creators are always on the edge, and at the edges of society. That’s the case for passion and of extremism.

And yet of course, it gets to be a problem if the vast bulk of the populace starts living at the edges (the ills of a polarized society).The fever of passion, heady muse, all takes its toll on the person. The masses need their peace, of being, of the mind, to continue their … um, duties – of living, and propagating life. Hence our horror at terrorist’s bombing our trains. While Israel continues to raze Lebanon to the ground. International response has been very mute, and all that of course is more distant, and I often get the feeling that it’s not always that we get enough info to make a rational judgment – BBC and CNN cover it as if it’s two equal sides at war – one picture of an injured Lebanese girl, followed by an Israeli woman crying, and soldiers looking worried. Images convey so much. Casualties are usually statistics on figure – one thousand, or two, what difference does it make – even dispense with zeroes freely, and I don’t care. But images convey such a lot – tugging at your heart-strings. You’d be stupefied into doubt. Yet I hate the Israeli stand – no matter what great long-term benefits for civilians it secures, this reasonably-unprovoked disturbing of a status quo seems unpardonable. The first half of my life I didn’t quite understand the ‘Middle-East problem’ beyond a vague sympathy for Israel as a victim nation (like India as they say in our media – but basically a natural middle-middle class Hindu boy’s doubt of anything Islamic). “I don’t know enough,” was good enough for me. Then two people shook me out of it with tales of Israeli atrocities - an aunt from England, and another friend. Yet, when an Israeli friend I met at a workshop – who used to sketch T2 tanks when he got bored with the lectures - said, “They just won’t let us be...we do so much…yet, they hate us so…,” there was such intensity in his voice and eyes, that all my well-versed pro-Palestinian arguments seemed to fall flat in the face of such…feeling. Now, at long last, I know a sufficient amount – if not ‘enough’, and yet I can’t take a stand. Thing is, many times if you know enough you can not take sides. And it’s important. Give me a gun – I wouldn’t be able to shoot a Pakistani, an Indian, or a Kashmiri – just because I can in parts empathise with all the three stands on the Kashmir issue. Not because I’m sissy, I just can’t. And that’s great. Nor would I be able to invade a neighbouring country, nor bomb trains – for that takes a lot insular pavlovian conditioning to do that. Maybe the terrorists who bombed our trains in Mumbai, they too were inspired by some visions of greater good, maybe when you’re to despairingly small and weak, that’s the only way you can hit out at an immense state machinery like India. On Tuesday, the 11^th of July, I cannot describe to you the impotent rage I felt at them – I could/would have shot them then. Yet now I’d like to ask why. Why anyone’d hate me so, and whether I might be going wrong somewhere. Bombay of course was never affected. Beyond all the talk of the resilience of the people, ‘salaam Bombay’ and all that (I do appreciate that greatest of our cities), perhaps we also didn’t have much of an option. People talk of Londoners during the Blitz – well, whichever of them could holidayed in the country during the blitz, and the milk-man – well, perhaps he just didn’t have the option. And resilience in the face of disaster – well, in India, thousands of years worth of war and drought and flood and epidemic and cruel rulers and well-meaning but bungling rulers, have taught us that well. So we are never as affected, as others made soft by peace. Thus we need to ask them, and ask ourselves.

And whether you live at the edge or plonk at the centre, that’s the importance of doubt, that’s the importance of being the Devil’s advocate. The only sacred thing that I have learnt is that nothing, absolutely nothing is or should be, sacred. Education implies that you understand the ‘other’ stand. Maybe if all of us knew all their stories well, and they ours, Kashmir and Palestine wouldn’t be such banes of our existences. If you live on the edge, at the extreme – your passion demands that you know all the possible objections thoroughly. I didn’t discuss my opinions today (nor will I usually do that ever) – but tell me sometime what you believe, and I’ll try tell you the merits of the other stand (So, of course, irrespective of my anti-reservation opinions, in the past few days I have had two tooth-and-claw fights fighting for reservation as if my life depended on it – screaming voices, gleaming eyes. And the worst bit is, I wasn’t decimated by five well-educated opponents). If it survives the scrutiny, there’s some chance that your fundamentalism just might have something fundamental about it. And even without such grand goals probably, one hopes things will just be better. I live in hope.