Might as well enjoy India’s very last general elections.

The writing is already on the wall. The portents are there for those who want to see them. It is a wonder how our crack political analysts continue to ignore their message, why they refuse to take the final leap of imagination. (That’s not strictly accurate: on Saturday, 29 March 2014, Kanti Bajpai in his Times of India article on Page 16, “Journey Towards Soft Fascism” did hint at the shape of things to come. There may be more such comments I have not read.)

NaMo, pronounced the proper way (“Na” as in “Narendra”, “Mo” as in “Modi”) is a command in Sanskrit to bow down, to worship. Make no mistake. You are being told in no uncertain terms to change your behaviour, to perform an act of supplication. Ignore the message at your own peril, boys and girls.

Modi brooks no opposition to his relentless march to 7 Racecourse Road in Lutyens’ Delhi. He has already put all his potential rivals in BJP (Big Guns one and all, mind you) in their place – in the shade – out of reckoning – so demoralized that it will take them quite a while to recover, let alone even think of retaliating. In this respect, he reminds me of Indira Gandhi versus The Syndicate, c. 1969, a modern reenactment of the legendary David versus Goliath encounter. And, all this notwithstanding all his talk about being a strict follower of party discipline and so forth. http://bit.ly/1lxr2eG

In a smart move to lend legitimacy and glamour to NaMo, they have even commissioned his “authorized” political biography launched close to the date of the general elections. The 310-page tome is written by a little-known British (our former masters, remember? Clever, clever!) author and filmmaker, Andy Marino. Marino’s provenance seems at best somewhat sketchy (PhD in Eng. Lit.). (Are there such creatures in the world as literary mercenaries?) His “literary” output consists of obscure non-fiction (A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry and Hershel: The Boy Who Started World War Two). If one were to take him at his word, though, he has had “a long relationship with India” and has been “interested in its politics and history as far back as I can recall.”

Be that as it may, in his Hindustan Times interview http://bit.ly/Pc9S8A Marino certified Modi’s straightforwardness adding that he was “complex” and “a better administrator or anybody so completely possessed with enthusiasm for what he does. His brain runs non-stop thinking about ways to improve everything, and there’s an incredible energy.”  As far as Modi’s honesty is concerned, Marino says that he checked and cross-checked his answers and found them above reproach. (For the convenience of the dyslexic as well as book-hating readers, Rannade Prakashan and Blue Snail Animation have published a 45-page NaMo comic book, Bal Narendra, apparently in the Bal Hanuman vein. So, no efforts have been spared in nurturing the NaMo mythology.)

The BJP campaign slogan is “Agli baar Modi Sarkar” (Coming next: Modi Government). This has the same shade of the recent abject capitulation by Penguin and Aleph about Wendy Doniger’s books on Hinduism. Of course, the reason for not promising a BJP Sarkar may be twofold: (1) The earlier BJP rule was not entirely free from taints of corruption and scams. (2) If Modi comes to power, it will be most likely as the leader of a coalition. Like Manmohan Singh, he too will have to face the vagaries of running a coalition government. Eventually, given his popular support and, more important, his forceful and aggressive personality, he may be able to drive a tougher bargain with his partners. As time passes, NaMo will begin to better appreciate the systemic impediments in his path. Once again his inherent nature will not allow him to accept defeat meekly. His only option then will be to take matters in his own two capable hands.

As liberal conventional wisdom would have it, NaMo’s final ascension to absolute no-holds power, if it ever comes to pass, may seem a disaster. The other way to see it is as a happening belonging to the class of what Robert and Elizabeth Bjork of UCLA Bjork Learning & Forgetting Lab have called “desirable difficulties”. It will allow the decisive Shri NaMo to dismantle the wasteful democratic superstructure of elections at both central and state levels thereby saving the country enormous amounts of resources and removing in a single stroke one of the biggest causes of corruption. Decision making and implementation can be speeded up. Work ethics and discipline will improve by leaps and bounds as in the days of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. Business and “development” will get the priority that Middle India is hankering after. India will be able to compete with China on a level playing field. All this would not happen overnight but during the course of the next five years.      

Remember, though, that all medicines would be placebos except for the patient’s belief in their healing power.

Less travel. Less waste.

I cannot believe it. I was born in a family that used to migrate every summer either to Matheran or Mahabaleshwar and, besides, travelled at least once a year to Pune as well. This was while I was very young. In fact, probably in 1944 or 45, I even attended with my family MK Gandhi’s prayer meeting in Panchagani, where he was summering. (This is the hill station that has quite a few residential schools and is quite close to Mahabaleshwar.) Later on, too, I travelled far and wide on work. In spite of all this travelling background, I have come to believe of late that travel is a waste of time, effort and money and certainly not all that it’s cracked up to be. In the olden days, they used to say that travel broadened one’s outlook. You met new people, made new friends, learned about new customs different from what you were used to, saw new places and added to your knowledge. When I travelled on work, people envied my lot. Well, in those days, travel was probably necessary to deal with distant clients and suppliers. You could not really do it on telephone. Today, with the Internet and teleconferencing, frequent business travel has become unnecessary in quite a few instances. A few months back, I took a taxi to go for a meeting in Dadar and was caught at the Walkeshwar traffic signal in a traffic snarl because the Prime Minister or, maybe, the President was going in a long cavalcade to Governor’s House. He had come to inaugurate something or the other. Sitting in the taxi twiddling my thumbs for half an hour, I wondered why they couldn’t get him to inaugurate whatever he was supposed to via teleconferencing and spare us all the traffic jams and the delays. Think of the time and energy and inconvenience it would have saved, apart from exposing the VVIP to risk in transit. My opposition to travel also extends to holidays. I’ve come to believe that holiday travel doesn’t really help you to relax. The unearthly check-in timings, the delays en route, the ever-worsening terrorism scenario and the rest have added too much stress to holiday travel. I know a lot of people continue to go on holidays. My theory is, they do so because everyone else does. Also, they want to boast that they’ve been to such-and-such a destination and stayed at such-and-such fancy resort and so forth – and bask in the green glow of envy. Furthermore, they want to bore us with their out-of-focus holiday videos. If you want to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa, you can do so peacefully and leisurely in the privacy of your own living room by logging on to one of the several websites that has its pictures. In the process, you will have saved yourself so much bother and money and stress. You can eat your fill of pasta at the nearest five-star restaurant at a fancy price, if you are so inclined. Few of us can tell real pasta from fake, in any case. Teleconferencing can easily take the place of transnational meetings. All this is not such a bad idea because we will be conserving precious fuel, reducing pollution and the risk of exposure to terrorist threats as well as the peril of flying aircraft well past their prime staffed by underexperienced and unfit crew. I know everybody and his uncle and aunt will call my thinking goofy. I’m sure to be hugely unpopular with the travel and tourism lobby. I still feel, travel if you absolutely must is a good rule of thumb as of today.

It’s a puzzlement.

Maybe I shouldn’t be putting these thoughts down on … I almost wrote ‘paper’. But I’m perturbed. Seeing them in front of me may prompt a probable answer. There’s a practising Advita preceptor whose view of the working model of the world tallies with mine. Where I veer away from his worldview is that he postulates the ‘guru’ as the gatekeeper to Consciousness. I’ve never believed in the guru-shishya parampara. Anyway, I’m friendly with one of his most devoted shishyas (disciples). He casually said a couple of days back something that I found puzzling. He was talking about an infrequent visitor to his guru’s daily satsanga (discourse). I know the concerned person at second hand, by reputation, to be an intellectual, highly successful in business and on intimate terms with the crème de la crème. From some of her published letters to her guru, I feel she’s devoted to him. And, yet, her shortcoming in my friend’s view seems to be that she doesn’t regularly donate to the guru as some other well-to-do disciples do. From what I can see the guru in question – whose unwritten motto for his daily satsanga is “Nobody is invited. Everybody is welcome.” and who spontaneously gave a one lakh rupee donation for the Kargil war – does not need her donation. But as my friend puts it, it is a way of showing your unstinted devotion to the guru. Here’s why I found this disturbing. It reminded me of Suketu Mehta’s description – in Maximum City – of how the wielders of illegitimate power keep a tight grip on their followers. “Show respect or else” seems to be the guru mantra. “Pass the leader the lion’s share of the booty" is one of the ways of showing respect. It’s the dhandawala’s way. Or, the way their kind of business works. My question: Is everything a dhanda these days? It’s a puzzlement, as the King of Siam would have said. P.S.: On the other hand, maybe, it’s none of my business.