Bad to worse. Then better, maybe.

“We are headed for a Malthusian crisis,” he said, with professorial confidence. “Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years.” He paused. “The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world’s six billion people in the most just way possible?” http://nyti.ms/wPL7Ah


In early 2007, 75000 Mexicans rioted over the sharp rise in the price of tortillas, staple diet of the poor. This was not front-page news. http:// aol.it/zpnUlE Yet a sharp-witted troll in the US blithely cited the civil disturbance as one of the noteworthy symptoms of the coming global crisis. Trolls are member of a growing Internet subculture which is marked by a fluid morality and a disdain for pretty much everyone else online. If the reading of the situation by the troll sounds like loony tunes, please remember that it is the opinion of someone who lurks in the underbelly of the Internet and hardly ever comes in touch with normal folks. Come to think of it, there is more than an iota of truth in what he said although his final solution may sound extreme. Take a country like Incredible India of the Economic Miracle fame. Its citizenry is blessed with more mobile phones than access to toilets, more cars than roads to run them on, more electrical appliances than electricity to power them. Iniquity, inequality, corruption, make-believe ‘garibi hatao’ programs, child abuse, delayed and/or miscarried justice, hell holes doubling as prisons, orphanages, hospitals… such is the proletarian lot. Is the Malthusian crisis is at the root of it all? Even if it is, there may be a more humane alternative to the troll’s prescription of decimating the numbers of the lesser god’s progeny. How about asking old Karl Marx’s ‘opiate of the masses’ to ride to the rescue? Renunciation is a virtue in the Hindu scheme of things. So it may just do the trick. This way, the powers that be are also spared the worry of the likelihood of a bloody rebel. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World had soma, a tranquilizer without after effects. Should Brave New India not emulate the shining example?

Kill Bill.

I had always thought of man as a polluting animal, first and foremost, who leaves a lot of mess, physical and/or emotional, in his wake. Then I chanced upon Philipe Gigantès’s Power and Greed: A Short History of the World (Robinson, London, 2002). That really made the scales drop from my eyes, big time. PG introduced me to the villain of the human continuum: the Grand Acquisitor. (He writes in a footnote that there is no such word as ‘acquisitor’. I found it on the Internet, though. http://bit.ly/z0A4a7. It looks like it has been lurking unobtrusively on page 16 of Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary [1913 + 1828].) The moral of PG’s thesis is man has been an acquisitive brute all along. His mate has been his worthy partner-in-crime. The pantheon of the Grand Acquisitors includes all the historical figures who have been hailed by orthodox historians as heroes and saviours. To me, this suggests that man’s past as a hunter continues to haunt his present and his future. We cannot help being marauders and practising one-upmanship whatever we are doing. Like Gordon Gekko, we too begin following the “Greed is good” mantra. Has the time come to pay for our historical blunders? Your guess is as good as mine, I guess. Aldous Huxley summed it up rather lucidly in Ape and Essence:

Church and State.
Greed and hate.
Two baboon persons
In one supreme gorilla.

In short, kill, torture, maim, character-assassinate, lie, twist facts, go on a bull raid in the stock market … you name it. Anything to be hailed as the Top Dog, Chief Honcho, Numero Uno, Big Boss.

Wish you a long life, friend.

“Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities.“ (TS Elliot, Gerontion)


We happen to know a doctor – a successful and proficient eye surgeon − who is petrified by the thought of growing old. She quizzed Ujwal and me closely about our attitude. Our casual shrugs seemed to puzzle her. Frankly though, immortality is a non-starter with me. Living forever would bore me to death which would refuse to oblige as is its wont. While reading Robert Ludlum’s posthumously published thriller, The Sigma Protocol (Orion, 2001), presumably based on the myths and mysteries surrounding the Bilderberg Group, I came across a mention of the Galápagos tortoises that reputedly lives for two hundred years. This triggered off my recall of the end of Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer. where a band of immortality seekers comes face to face in a dungeon beneath a British stately home with the man-ape whose lifespan has been artificially elongated. Good grief! For once, I disagree whole-heartedly with this Woody Allen utterance: “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying.”

Take no offence.

"I do not wish to seem overdramatic but I can only conclude from the information that is available to me as Secretary-General that the Members of the United Nations have perhaps ten years left in which to subordinate their ancient quarrels and launch a global partnership to curb the arms race, to improve the human environment, to defuse the population explosion, and to supply the required momentum to development efforts. If such a global partnership is not forged within the next decade, then I very much fear that the problems I have mentioned will have reached such staggering proportions that they will be beyond our capacity to control." A troubled U Thant, whom The New York Times hailed as "this dedicaed man of peace" and who was a licensed "ham" as well as interested in UFOs, wrote this in 1969. If his guess about the timeframe was accurate, time has already run out for mankind. The way things are going lends credence to what he said. The more I think about it, the more inclined I'm to the view that the most important lesson parents can teach their children is not to take offence at the slightest (often imagined) of slights. That may be one little step in curbing the increasingly violent manner in which people respond to almost every event at present. It's no cakewalk to follow this naive advice, though, given that the parents' own upbringing has been in a context of "despise-the-other" and "never trust a stranger". The point is simply this: the root of humanity's problems is human nature. The Stanford Research Institute study funded by the Charles F Kettering Foundation, Changing Images of Man http://digbig.com/4ynew, shrouded in conspiracy theory and mind control rumours ever since, offers the propogation of a safe, officially-approved, neutred, materialistic religion - a sort of a "secular monotheism" - as a probable solution for the future salvation of man. Freemasonary ("true Freemasonary" to be exact) with its "one lodge, the universe - and one brotherhood, everything that exists" and each person having "the 'privilege of labor,' of joining with the 'Great Architect' in building more noble structures and thus serving in the divine plan" has been cited as an example. L Ron Hubbard's Scientology might well be its close running mate. It all smacks of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World to me. By the way, do read Changing Images of Man 2000 here: http://digbig.com/4ynkt.

Talk to me in Web 2.0.

I am, you could almost say, a man of (few?) words. On my word of honour, boys and girls. Words are my preoccupation. Or, shall we say my occupational accomplices? Playing with words comes to me fairly easily. I revel in it. I am word-friendly. I wish I were Lord of the Words. But I find myself at a loss for words far too often to harbour any such delusions of grandeur. http://digbig.com/4xsfr. My love affair with words is probably why I so highly value Aldous Huxley, Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, Woody Allen, Leonard Cohen and even Seinfeld http://digbig.com/4xsfw & http://digbig.com/4xsfx. My antennae, though, are always out for the meaning of words, even subtle nuanaces. The context and the subtext of word usage http://digbig.com/4xsft intrigue and often amuse me. For me, "There's a blaze of light/In every word," as Leonard Cohen puts it so eloquently in his Hallelujah. http://digbig.com/4xsfn. Take, for instance, the way Gmail insists on calling every exchange of email between two people, maybe a bit coyly and self-consciously, "conversation". That's Web 2.0 talk, dude. Keeping in touch. That's what Web 2.0 and social networking are all about, after all. At least, that's the mantra of the Web 2.0 gurus. Having been in advrtising long enough, though, I am painfully aware that many of the so-called breakthroughs in theoretical thinking are only a new use of old words. Or, the same old words in a new context. http://digbig.com/4xsfs.

The Mind of MK Gandhi.

I've always thought highly of MK Gandhi. My unpublished novel, The Last Gandhi Movie, has him as the thematic pivot. I recently read Girja Kumar's BRAHMACHARYA Gandhi & His Women Associates. It perturbed me and gave me serious misgivings. This narrative is based mostly on Gandhi's own writings. In it, the so-called Mahatma comes out as manipulative, pathologically obsessive about sex and sin as well as power-crazed. His logic sounds circuitous, serpentine and often self-contradictory and specious, at times even inane. He apparently played God with the lives of those close to him. He was too intrusive and interfering. His charisma was undoubtedly legendary. If he was obsessive about truth, how come he said/wrote different versions of an event to different people? If he was a god-fearing person, how come he believed the worst of his friends and associates time and again? Also, he was in the habit of praising a person to high heaven for a while and then suddenly cutting the ground from under her feet. He was so deeply involved in and on the centre stage of national politics for most of his adult life. How then did he find the time, the emotional resources and the energy to behave like a virtual puppeteer controlling the lives of those in his fold and under his care? All this seems nothing short of weird to me. His tryst with brahmacharya too is an enigma. He seemingly had an extreme revulsion for sexual intimacy. There was a deep emotional scar left on his psche by his failure to be present at his father's bedside at the moment of his death because he was partaking carnal pleasure with his wife. This is usually trotted out as the reason for his guilt feeling. This reminds me of what Aldous Huxley wrote in Proper Studies: "Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt." And: "An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex." (Attributed by Peter J. Mayhew in Discovering Evolutionary Ecology: Bringing Together Ecology And Evolution. Also attributed to Edgar Wallace. http://digbig.com/4xypc.) In tandem, both seem particularly apt in Gandhi's case. Maybe, Gandhi was a bit like George III in Alan Bennet's dramatic and cinematic versions of his life. In a group reading of Shakespeare's King Lear in the asylum, he suddenly realised why others thought him mad and regained his sanity. http://tinyurl.com/3hqeev. Time for yet another of Huxley's accidentally Gandhi-centric pearl of wisdom (this time from Texts & Pretexts): "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves." On this score, maybe Gandhi was found wanting. And, what about the persistent speculation about Gandhi's tantric leanings as reflected in his brahmacharya experiments with his women associates as guinea pig? There is a cogently reasoned study by Nicholas F. Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho, Was Gandhi a Tantric? http://tinyurl.com/4qdcg2 which nearly convinces one of the likelihood. After reading Girja Kumar's book, taking Gandhi at his own words seems a bit dicey to me. Even if we find him innocent of prurience, we cannot always believe in the consistency of his utterances. Dr Sushila Nayyar told Ved Mehta that "brahmacharya" was a latter-day invention of Gandhi to ward off criticism of his interaction with his female intimates. Earlier, she used to sleep naked with him for reasons of nature cure (p.41 of Girja Kumar's book). What can we make of all this? Perhaps, the answer is as simple as the moral of this Zen tale. Nan-in, a Japanese master of the Meiji era, received a university professor who came to enquire about Zen. When serving his guest tea, Nan-in kept pouring even after the cup overflowed. The professor after watching could contain himself no more: "The cup is overfull. No more will go in." Said Nan-in: "Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions and speculation. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?" Milord, I rest my case.

Bad boy.

That I was far from the ideal son to my parents is now apparent to me. In fact, my performance on that score was far below par, nay dismal. I must have been pretty self-absorbed, insensitive and indifferent child. Take my knowledge of my parents' antecedents, for instance. All I know about my father's father is the name, Keshav. From hearsay, I know that his son spent his early life in Navi Wadi http://tinyurl.com/5b97y5. But that's about it. About the parents of my mother http://tinyurl.com/6c2lsy, whose maiden name was Manak Ajinkya, I'm totally blank. Her elder brother who lived opposite Roxy Cinema http://tinyurl.com/4m58jq apparently brought her up and gave her away in marriage. Her second brother, a qualified physician, had migrated to Great Britain probably at around the time of World War I. (This too I came to know much later in life accidentally when my mother asked Manna, my college friend, who was sailing to London for higher studies to try and trace her brother's whereabouts. He could not.) The third brother lived in Gamdevi with his family. Her younger sister, married and with three children, lived in Nowroji Street in her own house http://tinyurl.com/44dzbz close to where I live now. My mother studied in the Kamlabai Girls' School situated in the same street, opposite my aunt's house. It seems she considered aborting me because she was going to have a child pretty late in life http://tinyurl.com/6hfxxx but was persuaded not to do so by her friend and physician. (Just think of the huge opportinity of writing an angst-splattered tale of "The man who almost never was" I've let slip through my fingers!) As I was the only son in the family, I was over-pampered http://tinyurl.com/5pctle. My mother was involved, at almost every Hindu religious feast, with some puja-paath or vrata. She used to recite every now and then Shivalilamrut (Tales of Lord Shiva's Miracles), particularly the 11th Adhyay (chapter). We used to have Laghurudra and Satyanarayan Puja every other month or oftener. On Shravan Mondays and Shivaratri, I used to accompany her to the Shiva Temple at Babulnath. On the Ram Navmi day, we used to visit twelve Shri Ram temples. http://tinyurl.com/5plowr. Vata Savitri, Gauri Pooja, Diwali ... you name it. She used to do it. She also used to go to an astrologer as well as a Guru for a while. I remember there was a lot of fuss and furore when I touched the feet of this Guru on my mother's instructions at my thread ceremony. I did not have any friends to talk of till the end of my high school days. So, I used to accompany my mother wherever she went in the evening. After I started going out with my friends, my mother took my desertion of her in her stride. She was always generous, nay magnanimous, about my trespasses and transgressions. Even in her last illness when she was suffering from blood cancer and died on 28 July 1962 in Bombay Hospital, it was Ujwal (of whom both my parents were very fond) who took care of her. I abdicated my responsibilty as usual, owing probably to a fault line in my character. This pattern of behaviour has been repetitive. I have abdicated my responsibility as husband and as father as well and repeatedly. Remorse has been my companion for quite a while. There comes to mind, however, what Aldous Huxley wrote in his Preface http://tinyurl.com/6ft3yg to the 1946 reprint of Brave New World:

"Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoiong. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean."

So what amends should I be making?

At http://tinyurl.com/68wrzb (Aldous Huxley Recollected An Oral History page 83), Huxley's daughter-in-law/Matthew's wife, Ellen Hovde, recalls how both Aldous and Matthew refused to acknowledge that Maria Huxley, her mother-in-law, was dying of cancer. Maria who had watched over Aldous like a mother hen right from the day they were married found this denial very hard to take. On page 104, Theosophical Society's Sydney Field, a friend of the Huxleys, mentions the oft-quoted account of how Aldous read to his dying wife from The Tibetan Book of the Dead. After Maria's death, Aldous told his sister-in-law, Juliette Huxley, that Elieen Garrett, "a genuine medium", had contacted Maria who told her that she had been helped by what he had done for her in the dying moments. Was that how he made amends to her, I wonder?

Dan Brown’s ‘truth’.

As a child, Dan Brown (born in 1964 – which puts him bang in the so-called Conscious Revolution era, a time of spiritual awakening in American history, demographically speaking – Viet Nam protests, feminism, ecology, a rebellious counterculture, that sort of stuff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Revolution) had what might be called a ‘proper’ Christian upbringing. He used to attend Sunday school and summer camps run by the Church. He also used to sing in the Church choir. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Brown. Yet he grew up to write the bestselling novels, The Da Vinci Code (1993) and Angels & Demons (2000). Fiction though they claim to be what they’re saying strikes an echoing chord in the mind of anyone who knows his history. I think they’re popular not because they’re racy thrillers but because they offer a premise that seems reasonably plausible. The fundamentalists will do anything to keep their monopoly of knowing and dispensing truth. Kill, torture, maim, character-assassinate, lie, twist facts… you name it. All of which reminds me of what Aldous Huxley wrote in Ape & Essence:

Church and State.
Greed and hate.
Two baboon persons
In one supreme gorilla.

Also, of the incidence earlier in the same novel where there are two groups of apes facing each other with a different flag waving behind each one. Each group of apes has an Albert Einstein, on his hands and knees, on a leash. Each of these Einsteins is facing the other and speaking of how terrible their exploitation is. The scene ends with the announcement of the death of modern science by suicide.

Perils of Amanda, the hyper writer.

I’ve read about Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860-1939), yes. I have not read a single one of her three novels, Irene Iddesleigh, Delina Delaney and Helen Huddleston, though. Her first novel was dubbed by the humourist Barry Pain "the book of the century". For his pains, he got the sobriquet, "clay crab of corruption" from the mistress of aliteration. It’s an irony of sorts that Pain has long been forgotten while Ros is still remembered. She’s even going to be celebrated in her native land, Ireland. Come 26 September, fans will read from Irene Iddesleigh in a Belfast pub. The one who manages to read the longest without laughing will win a copy of a Barbara Cartland novel, a return ticket to Ros’ hometown Larne and a copy of the writer’s ‘how-to’ handbook. Just to give you an idea of the daunting challenge, here’s an excerpt from Irene Iddesleigh: “The living sometimes learn the touchy tricks of the traitor, the tardy and the tempted; the dead have evaded the flighty earthy future and form to swell the retinue of retired rights, the righteous school of the invisible and the rebellious roar of the raging nothing.” Or, this bit from Delina Delaney: “Have you ever visited that portion of Erin's plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness?” And, this gem from her poem, ‘Visiting Westminster Abbey’ (from Fumes of Formation – her other book of poetry being Poems of Puncture):

“Holy Moses! Have a look!
Flesh decayed in every nook!
Some rare bits of brain lie here,
Mortal loads of beef and beer,
Some of whom are turned to dust,
Every one bids lost to lust;
Royal flesh so tinged with 'blue'
Undergoes the same as you.”

Aldous Huxley insightfully explained the Ros phenomenon as follows: "In Mrs. Ros we see, as we see in the Elizabethan novelists, the result of the discovery of art by an unsophisticated mind and of its first conscious attempt to produce the artistic. It is remarkable how late in the history of every literature simplicity is invented...”. He contnues: “This is how she tells us that Delina earned money by doing needlework: ‘She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father's slight income by the use of the finest production of steel, whose blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness’.” Nick Page (In Search of the World's Worst Writer) tells us: "For Amanda, eyes are 'piercing orbs', legs are 'bony supports', people do not blush, they are 'touched by the hot hand of bewilderment'." Have alook at three woodcuts from Irene Iddesleigh here: http://www.oddbooks.co.uk/amanda/irenepics.html.

Expiry date.

"People ought to be born with expiry dates," I told a friend yesterday at the Chandanwadi Electric Crematorium. I was only half joking. Of course, we're all born with expiry dates. Only we don't come stamped with the information on a bar code. We got to go when we got to go. Knowing the exact time is not a part of the human condition. We can't even plan the details of our exit. Like do we want someone reading to us The Tibetan Book of the Dead in the final moments as Aldous Huxley did for his first wife Maria whe she was dying? As in life so in death, pure chance and random happening hold sway. Maybe, that's the only way to go.

Never judge a book by its title. The cover is probably the better bet.

We owe a lot to Shakespeare including many a famous book title. Aldous Huxley borrowed from him, if memory serves, at least two titles for his novels (Brave New World, Time Must Have A Stop). On 6 September 2003, I had written in my weekly column about a BBC opinion poll. Poor Willie had to play fourth fiddle to Newton, Churchill and Princess Diana in it. http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_361190,00030007.htm. Then I stumbled on another gross miscarriage of justice when Stephen King walked away with The United States' National Book Foundation’s 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. This puts him on par with John Updike, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison. I like the way Yale University Professor Harold Bloom sums up the situation in his comments to The New York Times: "He is a man who writes what used to be called penny dreadfuls. That they could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy." http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s946535.htm. One is tempted to say at this point: “What did you expect from the moronic Britons and Americans?” The temptation is a passing phase, though. Soon, one remembers it happens all the time anywhere and everywhere. The entire human race is subject to the hypnotic influence of top-of-mind icons and images – irrespective of caste, creed, gender or nationality, I guess. But wait a second, there's solace for those who're discouraged by the ignoble defeat. Read No doubts about his genius at http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/mag/stories/2003083100270400.htm. Did you know that 'the genius' used as many as 9,36,433 words in his literary output in the 16th Century – which works out to five times the number of words in modern German!

More about Shakespeare from my personal QuiteATake.com Archives [Issue #76]

AS YOU LIKE IT. Sites-for-types department.

For Shakespeare aficionados, Hamlet: an executive summary (and S-W-O-T analysis) in PowerPoint at bmillar1.users.btopenworld.com. For nitpickers and one-person fault finding missions, Movie Mistakes, Hollywood's Big Brother movie-mistakes.com and for movie goers in a hurry, Ruined Endings ruinedendings.com. For surfers who prefer to pose their queries in plain English, French, Spanish, German, Italian or Portuguese, Answer Bus (it doesn't work at times, though) misshoover.si.umich.edu. For disbelievers of the 'real' computer bug, NMAH Object 1994.0191.1 americanhistory.si.edu.

Talk is cheap. It keeps them willingly under surveillance.

Aldous Huxley, I reckon, was only partly right about technology in Brave New World. He thought eugenics was the key to world governance. Actually, it turned out to be the insidious technology of communication. Take mobile phones as a case in point. By making them an affordable status symbol of contemporaneity, technology has made people wireless yet willing collaborators in their own surveillance. Now the powers that be can know where you are and what you are up to at any precise moment. And, what's ironical is that you are picking up the tab for your watchers. Similarly, the photophone has spawned a network of unwitting spies. The Big Brother may be watching you through whose cellphone you can never tell. So what about the emerging biometric technology of scanning fingerprints before permitting access to the ATM? Read an article on this topic at http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/national/12855627.htm.