Our mind has not yet digested the fact that the earth is round. We feel thrilled by Nehru’s statement, in his independence speech: "Tonight, when the world sleeps, India shall awake to its destiny", awed by a French travel writer’s imagining, while passing by Mecca at prayer time, of being " at the center of a vast corolla, spreading all over the world, of kneeling and rising figures", charmed by the title of a J.J. Goldman song : "Un dimanche soir sur la terre", with its evocation of a world plunged in the melancholy atmosphere of a Sunday evening.
How annoying, upon further thought, to have to acknowledge the fatal flaw at the heart of each of these statements. How annoying too, are time zones, removing our beloved ones from us not only in space, but in the time of daily life ( when we wake up, they are not doing the same, there).
The Copernican revolution was the first of the great mental revolutions. It is probably also the most disturbing in our idea of the world. The next one, in chronological order, was the Darwinian revolution. It is profoundly annoying to religious persons, but not all of us are like that. It can be very amusing to compare our manners with those of the great apes ( how fortunate, by the way, that the "violent ape" theory, which states that we are violent and militaristic apes, like the chimpanzees, is being challenged by observations of the bonobos, also our close cousins, yet peaceful and immensely fond of sex). Moreover, we do not often go to the zoo and hence rarely see our cousins, but we often lift our heads to gaze at the stars, and feel awed, yet a bit forlorn.
The next revolution, the Freudian one, has entered our daily language, yet it lacks the immediate appeal of the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. With it, one enters the phase where conceptual revolutions become like great monuments that everyone passes by, but most people have only a vague figure of to whom they are dedicated to.
Thos becomes more obvious with the Einsteinian revolution, around which there floats the myth that only twelve people in the world understand what it is about. Everyone has heard of E= MC2, but even to go on Wikipedia to try to know more about it smacks of presumption. It is like a remote, frozen planet in our cultural universe, understood only by some specialists, and the stories they tell are so fantastic – of a particle passing through two points in space at the same time, of a phenomenon being influenced by the fact of beng observed – that one cannot help shrugging one’s shoulders. It is as if scientists had taken leave of their common sense.
But this is precisely the pattern made by scientific revolutions through time : as human beings, we seem to be predisposed to believe that the earth is flat, that the sun and other stars move around it, that there is a God, who created us in his image, that we are the wisest creatures in the universe, and that the objects around us obey to certain laws, like they cannot go through two doors at the same time. This is the way the world should be. And this is exactly what the scientific revolutions have been dismantling through history.
Like an animal keeper in a zoo who feeds and cleans a chimpanzee, but torments him by forever changing his cage, with each one more uncomfortable than the other, Science has given us running water and antibiotics, but it keeps givng us a less and less human-friendly vision of the world and, like the chimpanzee, we have grown silently resentful of it while still being dependent of it.
The coming scientific revolutions ( for now is no longer the time of the solitary geniuses, when the world can be thrown out of kelter by an Einstein scribbing an equation on the back of an envelope; nowadays scientific research is undertaken by large well funded teams, their every progress made known to the world by specialised reporters) are anticipated by something approaching dread, like the knowledge that next autumn one will be sent to a renowned, yet particularly awful boarding school, and after this, one shall no longer be a child. Yet the simile is not appropriate: a little boy wants to grow up, even as he dreads the moment of leaving his childhood, for he knows, by observation of older children, that they have become strong, beautiful and full of knowledge. What the future scientific revolutions promise to offer has the feeling of gifts meant to improve one, yet that could go horribly wrong: genetic manipulation , artifical intelligence. One wishes one’s parents didn’t try so hard to give one the very best there is on the market.

-II-

Sometimes writers make broad sweeping statements in a striking and beautiful manner, leaving us with an odd mixture of feelings. It has to do with the mood in which we are reading . When we plunge in a novel, we go back to that eager we had as children listening to a bed time story – we recreate the dim lights, the way the words rang in the room, how one’s parent’s hands flew about, throwing stark shadows on the walls. We are thrilled to let our imagination to take over control of our mind. It wants to rest from reality. Fiction is fuzzy, warm and ordered. Reality is cold, blurred and incoherent – after jogging, having reached the place where the footpath meets the highway, one’s mind was clean and sharp from the physical exercice, taking in things with sharpness – and what it saw in the dimming light was cars zipping by, the tangled bush atop the pile of rocks, and the unlovely sugarcane, a bland, metallic taste to things, like when, as a child, one stuck a spoon in one’s mouth to see how it tastes. One suddenly has a recollection of passing by a clerk’s office in a hospital one day – the horror of administrative blandness , the world of file drawers and memoranda, piled upon the blank, one dimensional world of the hospital, in which everything is exactly what it is, and nothing else, a chair is a chair, a bed is a bed, you are a body about to undergo an operation.
Fiction is respite from this blandness of the world, it is a sweet overgrowing of ivy over the ugly concrete wall. Going beyond the cozy feeling of listening to a bedtime story, it can obtain the vividness of the dream state, where a special atmosphere pervades everything, and the most banal actions we do, or objects we see, seem imbued with a profound meaning,. Natasha dancing with Prince Andre, in War and Peace, or Joseph K… waking up in the first line of The Trial , to find that he is going to be arrested ( Kafka’s novels are especially strong in creating this dream atmosphere).
In the middle of this, suddenly drops in the authorial voice, like, in the middle of a dream one hears the newscaster telling us good morning at seven o’clock as the radio alarm goes on. Normally, it wakes one up, breaking the pleasant feeling. But sometimes, the voice of the newscaster blends in the dream which goes on for a few more moments. The newscaster is talking of serious worldly events and we are interpreting them within the world of the dream.
I felt this the other day when, while reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s autobiography ( "Living to tell the tale") I came by his statement, while describing how he grew among women , of how "this gave me the strong feeling that it is women who run the world, endlessly tending and repairing it while we men always destroy it by our brutality". Coming as it did, steeped in a magic atmosphere ( he had, before, given a moving description of his elder aunt in the room next to his, of her eyes, her smell and her clumsy gait, only to reveal that at the last line that, according to his mother, he could not possibly have known so much about her, as she had died before his birth), I took it as uncovering a profoundly buried truth. Later, I poked holes in it – it was only true in so far as we would see the world as a sort of house, which women keep neat and tidy, and in which men are naughty boys forever breaking the vase in the living room. There was something inert about this vision. Yet something of the flavour of an occult secret revealed, still clings to it.
Another authorial statement I once heard, puzzled me –and I guess, shall do so to the end of my days, for it is an unsolvable mystery. I forget which author it was, and he ( I think it was a man) said : " She was very beautiful, and like all great beauties, unhappy, for such women attract only the worst kind of men. The others feel unworthy". What mixed feelings this hit me with ! First of all, glee: serves them right ! Followed by envy towards the author: how many beautiful women does he know, that he can say this with such confidence ? I know nothing about very beautiful women. There are not so many of them, and they are rarely alone. I have never gone to talk to one. Ha ! This proves the author’s point, then: I feel shy towards them, and I am a good man ( I am sure I am). Therefore, good men do avert their gaze from very beautiful women, these overbright suns which end up clouded by a nebula of bitchy girlfriends and medallion men.
As they drive their sports cars, gifts of shark toothed lawyer boyfriends and sugardaddies, little can they guess how, like the Chorus in a Greek tragedy, their Fate- like crochety aunts are already prophesying their doom at Sunday reunions, while their spider like, cardigan –knitting fingers undo a loop with vicious ease. Soon, the overdone wedding with a loudmouthed property developer, too soon, the lonely evenings as he spends more and more time with mistresses – on the king size bed, her tears, melting on the linen sheets, join those of her sister souls in time, the dancing girls in the palaces of the kings of before, to form a river of sorrowful beauty.
Yet doubt persists. How can the author be so sure ? How many beautiful women can he know, anyway ? After all, he is only a writer, not a casino tycoon. What kind of world would it be, in which Angelina Jolie married the scriptwriter of Mr and Mrs Smith, instead of marrying Brad Pitt ? Marilyn Monroe doesn’t count, the proof of her being crazy was that she married Arthur Miller and tried to become a geek too. Ok, this is too nasty. Let us count, then. Marilyn Monroe makes one. Juliette Recamier counts two, although Chateaubriand was noble and glamorous apart from being a writer. Graham Greene also had an affair with a beautiful woman, whose name I cannot remember. That’s three. This is a catch 22 situation: if I can make this list long enough, it means that beautiful glamorous women can go out with writers, which means the guy who wrote the lines above would have known enough to write these lines. If I do not get enough, it means that they do not, and that the writer is right in his estimation that beauty is an exile on a lonely island, in which one ends up mating with gorillas. But wait a minute, if I do get enough names, in the list, how come the writer would still have written those lines, unless writers themselves also counted as "the worst of men". Ach, what an annoyance his statement has proved to be.

-II-

The other day I had an interesting discussion with some friends regarding an article entitled "Are we Indians mediocre?" at the link below :

http://www.desijournal.com/article_print.asp?ArticleId=243

What my friends said, to sum up a long discussion, was that Indian creativity is handicapped by two factors, one cultural and the other socio-economic.
Most Indians, they argued, do not really understand Western culture. The intellectuals do, but not the normal middle class Indians. The latter are very good at learning the technical skills of Western technology. They are also very fond, in their youth, of the trashy entertainments of pop culture, both the Indian and the Western type – pop music, television, computer games and chat. If they go to Europe, they will be happy to visit museums, shopping malls and amusement parks. But the philosophical basis of Western culture remains foreign to them – its trust in man’s reason and wisdom, its emphasis on the development of man’s analytical and creative faculties, as well as his physical faculties through sports. Its strong sense of curiosity and wonder at the world. Unfortunately, even when doing very well at learning science, such Indians do not understand the other leg upon which rests Western culture, which is the humanities. Yet the humanities are crucial to appreciating the world, for they give one three great skills in this respect: character, proportion and background.

Character – a sense of individuality and energy in any idea
Proportion – it can be the sense of ethical proportion ( justice) or the sense of aesthetic proportion ( beauty). There is a dialectic between character and proportion. Character is an active principle, a breaking out into the world. Any strong personality starts by being biased, opiniated. Proportion is a static principle. A great work of art is in a state of equilibrium, its strong lines of force finely balanced.
Background – is, simply, the background : a great mass of cultural and historical knowledge. The background feeds the foreground, knowing more tends to strengthen one’s appreciation of things, provided one has character and proportion.

The problem with ignoring the humanities is that one tends to fall in the divinities. As our Indian grows in age, and that the allure of pop culture fades, he withdraws into a life of arranged marriage, work and puja, with maybe watching some Bollywood movie by way of spicying up his life. He even starts to dislike Western culture as being hedonistic and materialistic. But he never realises that beyond this vulgar aspect of Western culture, there exists a noble philosophy, which is the source of all the West’s wealth, greatness and sophistication: a culture of questioning ( "sapere aude", have the courage to know, was how Kant defined the Age of Enlightenment) and exploration.
As long as the average Indian ignores these fundamental aspects of Western culture, it will be difficult for India to be as brillant and creative as the West. It can be a great factory of medium quality goods, and a great outsourcing destination, but it cannot match the love of life which makes the West shine in sports, culture and science. India will prefer to wrap itself in the routine of work, ritual, and some Bollywood dreaming on the side.

The socio- economic aspect is linked to the caste system. The latter tends to be seen as a cultural phenomenon, but it is also pretty much a socio-economic system, whereby the Dalits ( untouchables) are landless labourers, who work for intermediate farmers ( of the Shudra caste) and large landlords ( usually upper caste). Such a feudal agrarian system demands that the Dalits be kept ignorant and docile, and India’s elitist education system serves it well, with its emphasis on elite universities, and its neglect of primary education, especially in the rural areas. Illiteracy in India is of more than 30 %, with far greater proportions among the Dalits.
Seeing things from the point of view of its landlords, India’s feudal agrarian system is working well. If it comes to having a modern industrial economy ( 19th century- 1950’s type), dependent on a moderately educated workforce, the waste in human resources is quite huge. If one thinks of "high modernity", the high technology industries such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology, which need a highly educated workforce and a nexus of universities and research institutes like bubbling cauldrons of innovation, clearly the set up is not ideal. Yet India is doing well in the new technologies. Because of its size, even its elite population is big enough to create a dynamic in this respect. Also, the boom has been mostly in the south, where the society seems to be less feudal than in the north. India is large enough to contain both a booming IT sector, and Dalits for whom access to the village water tap is but a distant dream.
Apart from its enormous human suffering and waste of talent, the caste system also clogs up the politics and administration of India with its caste based politics, and its quotas for entry in the service. It distorts the life of most Indians by influencing their love life and their careers. It is clearly a great poison, like the pestilence which came from the sea of nectar during its churning by the gods and demons– and there is no Shivji to drink it.

About my friends' arguments: I guess many people will find the statement "Most Indians do not understand Western culture" quite infuriating and patronising. They could point out, for example, that many Westerners, especally the young are crassly ignorant of Western culture, and indeed of any culture, and end up as conformists and religious extremists. They could also point out that one does not need to be immersed in Werstern humanities to understand the concepts of character, proportion and background as these will also operate in non Western literatures. Therefore, someone could be immersed in Hindi literature and be greatly elegant and creative in thought.

I guess that what my friends are trying to say is that while they see India forgeing ahead in science and culture, and producing many brillant writers and thinkers at the top end, such as Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, Pankaj Mishra, Amartya Sen, yet middle class India remains profoundly conformist in their eye. They believe this stifles India's creative energies.

Anyway, I found the argumentation interesting, so I decided to post it here. I guess it could bring in it strong reactions, but then the whole debate is a pretty challenging one.