60 years after.

Is in-your-face hypocrisy the birthright of free Indians, as much as it was of their forefathers? I’m amused by the ad released by an international bank which claims to have been in India from 1902. It is said to be an open secret that this worthy hires goons to recover debts from lenders, something that the Pathans who were in the same business before Independence used to do all by themselves. The ad is for celebrating “60 years of partnering with independent India”. Good lord! Then there’s a recent article by a “political psychologist’ agonising over why the partition was a violent-infested event. In all of its long arguments, it never even once considers the simple truth that partition was a property dispute after all and, in India as elsewhere in the world, property disputes trigger extreme passions and are more often than not settled with a knife, a chopper and a gun – not to mention hired goons. Then there’s all this hoopla about the ‘progress’ India has made. At whose cost? The poor and the destitute whose meager holding and right to livelihood is trampled upon? The faceless, voiceless, powerless non-citizens that never even come within the orbit of calculations of the planners? http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/are-you-hungry-tonight.html & http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2007/04/homeless-in-india.html. There was no freedom at midnight, girls and boys. There was only a ‘transfer of power’ to bully, to exploit, to manipulate from the British to the Indian comprador capitalists, as the Indian Troskyist Vinayak Purohit mentions in his memoirs. Purohit is a Socialist who worked with Dr Ram Manohar Lohia. (By the way, his Troskyist pseudonym according to his Sri Lankan colleague, Hector Abhayavardhana, was most probably ‘Pankaj’ or “Pokoz’. Don’t ask me to even guess the reason why. http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/history/etol/pseud.htm#india.) Coming back to the present, the only Indian worth remembering at this juncture, to my simple way of thinking, is probably the one whose cause Medha Patkar has been championing all these years. Nostalgia must not be a bare-faced lie.

A neo-Luddite relents. Sheepishly. Shame-facedly.

A confirmed neo-Luddite, I've been ranting and raving about the near impossibility of progress ever happening. The scales, as Bertie Wooster used to say, have finally fallen from my eyes. One everyday product I've started using of late promises real advancement: homogenised milk in a carton. It frees me from a lot of hassles. No boiling the milk every morning. No removing and storing the cream on top. No washing the boiling pot. No changing and washing the milk container. Storing space in the fridge saved. Cooking gas saved. Pour as much milk as you need straight from the carton. Throw it - the carton, not the milk - away once it's over. Sheer bliss! Hope Captain Murphy doesn't get into the act, though. Cross my fingers and toes for that.

The very idea of progress. Brrrrr!

“What we call ‘progress’ is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance,” thought Havelock Ellis. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man,” argued the irrepressible George Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman: Maxims for Revolutionists, 1903). http://www.quotationspage.com/subjects/progress/. As a firm Murphy loyalist, I agree totally. I want to live in reasonable comfort. But when it comes to making a change for the sake of improving the way one has been living or because familiarity has bred contempt, I tend to be chary. What one’s likely to end up with are not comfort and greater well-being but worry and unhappiness – and avoidable and wasteful expense. Call me a Neo-Luddite if you will but I prefer to stick to the old and the familiar instead of the bold and the ‘progressive’ if left to myself. Maybe, I’m a born technophobe or a plain pessimist. http://personal.vineyard.net/dwright/luddite.html. (P.S.: May I add that, in the Indian context and work culture, a Neo-Luddite is likely to fare better than a progress addict?) Finally, let me remind you of what Samuel Butler wrote (Notebooks, 1912): “All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.”