The Great Indian Novel

I have enjoyed every page of "The Great Indian Novel" written by Shashi Tharoor. There are two Indian writers, whose English I admire very much; one is Shashi Tharoor and the other Arundhuti Roy. Apart from the language, I admire his sense of humour and wisdom sprinkled almost everywhere in the book. It is really a Novel of epic proportion, although to some extent a melodrama based on The Mahabharata. It is entertaining and amusing. He has traversed many centuries at his sweet will at the stroke of a pen, in a free flowing imagination. 

Ganapathi or Ganesha is Ganapathi here, but Bhisma is Gangaji, who has many similarities with Gandhiji. "Yes he told us everything, Gangaji, from those gaps in his early years, that the British had been so worried about, to the celibate experiments of his later life, when he got all those young women to take off their clothes, and lie besides him, to test the strength of his adherence to that terrible vow. He told us everything, Ganapathi, yet how little do we remember, how little we understand, how little we care." I am only quoting from his book.

This is what Pandu Said to Kunti in Shashi's Novel: “In Kerala the men of Nair community only learn that their wives are free to receive them by seeing if another man's slippers are not outside her doors." Pandu goes on saying "Our present system of morality is not really Hindu at all; it is a legacy both of the Muslim invasion, and the superimposition of a Victorian prudery on a people already puritanized by purdah."  On a plain reading this is all jumbled up, because Mahabharata was written even before the other two religions came into existence. But you seldom notice this. In a moment you are taken many thousand years away from past to present and vice versa.. Such is his great writing skill, still vibrating some historically relevant facts.

This is when Dhritarashtra is described as the head of the Kurava Party, drafting its press releases and official communication, formulating its position on the foreign policies, and establishing himself as the party's most articulate and attractive spokesman. ( Read Jawaharlal Nehru )

He takes Gangaji to the strike against the Jute Mill owners at Budge Budge, where the Jute Mills were compelled to give a 35% rise in wages, compared to nothing, and later on 20% proposed by them. This was all done because of a fasting unto death stand taken by Gangaji.  ‘Fasting is my business' was uttered by Gangaji, which can be interpreted by many many ways. But this 35% was for a day, reduced to 20% next day, and finally to  27.5% as fixed by the government arbitrators.

The anti salt tax movement is described here as anti-mango tax movement, but with all the ingredients of the same, in tact in a curious way. To quote " But Gangaji's action was the signal for a defiance of the Mango Act. Kaurava Party protestors, across the country took to emulating their leaders, wave after wave of Khadi clad satyagrahis plucked and planted the contraband fruit, openly bought and sold it, an non-violently prevented the government's mango inspectors from continuing with their work" .

Dhrrtarashtra , the de-facto head and poster boy of the Kaurava Party does  not have any son Duryodhan here, but a daughter Priya Duryodhani. And he goes on to write " Dhrrtarashtra  addressed all his letters from prison to Priya Duryodhani well before she was old enough to understand any of them, rather than to the long suffering wife, who had offended by delivering her."

It was definitely not Duswala, the real and only daughter of  Gandhari, but like Jawaharlal Nehru, writing to Indira Gandhi. from the prison. And what about the Kaurava party, deliberately named so perhaps, probably meaning what it meant both in letter and spirit. After all Kaurava Party and the Congress Party, ruled most of the time Delhi and Hastinapur (very close to Delhi).

And then there is Jayaprakash Drona, ( or Jayaprakash Narayan perhaps ) coined after the name of the great teacher, which both the Kauravas and Pandavavs had.

In this book he meets the Pandavas thus. "One day the Pandavas, were playing their favorite sports of cricket, of course, Ganapathi, that most Indians of organized past times, with its bewilderingly complex rules, that are reduced in practice to utter simplicity, its underlying assumptions of social order,... when a mighty swipe by Bhim sent the ball high over the others' heads, soaring out of the ground, and landing with a loud splash in disused well. " And Jayaprakash Drona, in stead of picking up the ball (originally a Musal), by attaching one arrow behind another , picked up the ball with a rope, creating a small loop at one end. This gives Drona the chance of explaining the importance of Sunya, the zero, which was an Indian invention, this was never there is Mahabharata.

And there are many a poems in this book, one I quote here, imposed  on Pandu, meaning probably Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose : " I had such hopes, my dearest one / Of rising to the fore; With the Swastika, and the rising sun / I thought I wound win the war".  And what about Gangaji, when the news of death of Pandu came by.  "The Mahaguru was moved enough to sit in silence and spin for hours, talking to nobody, immersed in reflection".

In the 'Jatu Griha' phase, when there was a conspiracy to burn the pancha pandava alive, Vidur uncle  comes in a government jeep, marked CBI and cautions them about impending danger. We see Jayprakash Drona giving socialistic speech in this phase. " We hear a great deal of socialist talk from New Delhi. The government tells us it is reserving the commanding heights of the economy for the people, for the public sector. Iron and Steel to build the big ships, in which none of us will ever sail, Power to light the home of the rich who have electricity.... But what about land, the earth, the soil, which each of you and the four - fifth of your countrymen till to feed yourselves?"

The Chinese invasion is invasion by Chakars. They tossed our ill-fed, ill-clad ill-shod jawans aside and permanently  erased the MacDonald's line ( Read McMahan Line). Achieving their objectives in a few days, capturing enough territory to create an all-weather line to connect Tibia ( read Tibet) with Drowniang, they declared cease fire unilaterally.

Shishu Pal ( read Lal Bahadur Sashtri ) was a good Prime Minister. And like everyone else Karnistanis ( read Pakistanis ) had underestimated him and attacked Hastinapur. Our Army had learnt from the Chakra ( read Chinese ) humiliation, and hit back so hard that our troops were within just 7 KM of Karnistan's most populous city, when another cease fire intervened. Shishu Pal then sat at the conference table and meticulously gave back everything that our boys had own in the battle-field. "Peace demands compromise" he murmured and  ' tossed  and turned his way into an eternal sleep'.

Here are a few more lines mimicking  Shree Bhagabat Gita " I can not attack them for doing their duty / Duryodhani is Dhritarashtra' daughter. / She may not be a thing of beauty / But she is PM, she's earned her hauteur./ I admit her rule was not always just -  / She betrayed some of us, abused our trust - / But still she is our nation's leader: / India's masses have shown they need her."

Not surprising that Financial Times has said about this book  " A real tour de force only an Indian could write."

Liking Vs. Loving

Recently I found  a speech by Jonathan Franzen delivered at  Kenyon College. Franzen won the 2001 National Book Award for his novel “The Corrections”  and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for the same novel. He is also the author of the novels Freedom (2010), Strong Motion (1992), and The Twenty-Seventh City (1988). His nonfiction includes the books The Discomfort Zone (2006) and How to Be Alone (2002), along with contributions to The New Yorker magazine.

I liked this speech so much that I read it again and again.  NY Times published it with the title “ Technology Provides an Alternative to Love.”  But the original title is  “ Liking is for Cowards, Go for what Hurts”.

The speech is very insightful and has gems embedded in almost every line.

He says “ Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to  what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object  and is consigned to a drawer.”

“ To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of  techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes – a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be,effectively, a mere extension of the self.”

He says from mobile phone to facebook, everything is evolving through this path. 

This he is describing as techno-consumerism.

Coming to facebook he says

“We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.”

Realize we do not pay the price of friendship for being in the private hall (which is again public ) of fame of so many persons simultaneously. Nor have they paid as such. This is simply a make believe life. We are seeking self flattering in our own mirror.

Finally consider the following coming from Franzen :

“ My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about ‘getting down in the pit and loving somebody.’ She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard. The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships.

Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person.

Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly  you’re having an actual life.

Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie.

But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every  particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno- consumerist order: it exposes the lie.

This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are.

And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific.

Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being.

Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

 The big risk here, of course, is rejection.

We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an  infinitely big pool of potential likers.

But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have  it rejected, can be catastrophically painful.

The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world  of liking” .

So the choice is yours.