Skinned in the game
If you can romanticize it, it is a figment of your privilege. Romanticization doesn’t apply to the deprived. For instance, if your greatest concern about the ongoing lockdown is that you’re missing shopping in malls, then you belong to the privileged class. And there is nothing wrong with it — because it’s aspirational — but try not to be blind to the bare realities. The worst victims of this lockdown are those we aren’t directly hearing from. They are both outdoor as well as indoor; either cramped under a dilapidated flyover or stuck inside a home with their perpetrators. The former are mostly daily wagers — which includes the beggars you meet at traffic signals as well as the hawkers whom you mistake for beggars — and don’t really have a place to call home. The latter have something called home but that’s a case of misfortune because they are trapped in confinement with their abusers: could be a harassing father, husband or brother. Earlier, there was respite, temporary nonetheless, for these people but thanks to the standstill nature of business today, there is no escape. For the rest of us, it’s a lockdown. For these individuals, it’s a lockup — in open as well as in private.
Gurgaon has been full of surprises. My offline friends and online followers can’t wrap their heads around the many birds that I capture on my IG stories. To them, Gurgaon sounds like a city filled with dust; they don’t expect fauna from a concrete jungle. Not that they are wrong; this city is indeed dusty but when you get lucky, you get really lucky. In my 25+ years in Mumbai, I hadn’t spotted even a tenth of the birds there that I’ve seen here. From barn owl to rufous treepie to hoopoe to rain quails, the list keeps increasing. The peafowls start screaming at 6 and then the day is spent listening to the calls of robins, bulbuls, mynahs, fantails, lapwings and so on. For the patient lot, it can be dearly satisfying.
Whenever sci-fi fans discuss time travel, they turn overzealous with passion and underwhelming with facts. It’s one thing to attend Shivaji’s coronation or witness JFK’s assassination but quite another to brush away core biological repercussions. If at all you travel back in time to whichever century of your choice, you will turn into a ticking time bomb — no pun intended — because you’ll be carrying germs which the past has no defence against. Hasn’t coronavirus taught you anything? You are a much evolved being today and if you go greet somebody from the Elizabethan era, you are technically being a murderous asshole. Let’s not forget that the likes of Columbus and Cortes are the greatest mass murderers of all time because they didn’t even have to use weapons. Their mere presence in the foreign lands — Americas is called New World because it was new to these inconsiderate plunderers — killed the natives via diseases they had no immunity against. And they didn’t even have to time travel.
When Nicholas Nassim Taleb dies, his tombstone must read ‘skin in the game’. Not because what’s left of humans after death are bones but because those are the four most powerful words to come out of the 21st century. They tell us who is up for what. Bleeding from a distance doesn’t make a difference. You’ve got to have your skin in there. Failing which, you are just another bystander wanting to drive attention to yourself. For example, if you are concerned about the plight of migrant workers and stray dogs in these testing times, it’s your moral responsibility to donate/support organizations — and there are lots and lots of credible ones — don’t offer this bullshit that you can’t trust any of them — and make a tiny difference.
Speaking of ‘skin in the game’, I wonder what role the NRIs play as far as their concerns for India goes. And I am not referring to remittances here. For reasons more fabulous than Alice in Wonderland, they somehow know this country better than those who actually live here. So cute to observe their unsolicited pontifications from a safe distance. Whichever sides they lean politically, their exaggerations baffle me. According to the right-leaning desi nuts from Europe/Australia/USA, India is going through its golden phase since independence. According to the left-leaning cretins from those geographies, India is in steady decline on all fronts. Both are incorrect as the daily truth lies somewhere in the middle. To somebody enjoying the luxuries that come with Western environment, India has to appear like a massive hotchpotch of emotions. This situation is a direct result of our lack of respect for data. Aryabhatta might have gifted the world zero but math isn’t our strong point. Ask for any information — be it the number of people who die in India due to car accidents, percentage of women getting married before the age of 18, the total population of Muslims, the poorest state in the country, or the expiry date of Indian democracy — and you’ll get at least five estimates. Take the COVID-19 testing scenario: we still don’t have an accurate number. The mismatch between public hospitals and private hospitals reportage is galling. Similarly, as of now, the national lockdown is supposed to end on May 3rd whereas different states have set their own sweet dates for the same. Maybe, just maybe, we, the resident Indians, deserve our obnoxious NRIs.
What’s common to every child in this godforsaken subcontinent? Each one of us was beaten up during our childhood at the hands of our parents (mostly). They called it old school discipline. Modern society sees it as abuse against minors. If you ask me, it drills into a bigger problem: the acceptance of violence and the failure of vocabulary. And to me, that’s an enormous problem. When a parent hits a child, they are unwittingly demonstrating to their offspring how words fail. The worst part about this exercise is, instead of admitting that the parent failed in employing the right words and tempo, they shift the blame on the child. Their recourse to violence — the degree of assault doesn’t matter; a slap is still violation of personal space — tells us how inadequate we can be. Of course, we are pining for an ideal world where words resolve conflicts and defuse tension. But then, a major chunk of our problems could have been averted at parenting level, no?
The mighty shouldn’t fall but the mighty will fall. Yesterday, chess prodigy Alireza Firouzja finally checkmated Magnus Carlsen and the expression on the defeated face said so much. It was so ghastly that you felt as if something happened that shouldn’t have happened. Checkmate? From a 16-year-old? In a banter blitz game? Of a world champion? So many questions harangued that otherwise stoic face from Norway. But all these took place and it took place so fast. Maybe Carlsen shouldn’t have used a mouse and gone for a touchpad like Firouzja does. Maybe it was bound to happen sooner or later. A checkmate is a big deal amongst grandmasters. We, the lesser mortals, seldom witness it. Anyway, the superbright kid won the tournament and took home — although he has left Iran and moved to France in protest against the former’s sports apartheid policies — $14000, leaving the mighty with a lot of answers. Hopefully.
Trump era should have been a reality TV show. His presidency ends in January of 2021 and so far, his critics have proved only one thing: they are totally ineffective. They write long op-eds in elite newspapers against the orange human, he posts longer tweets with spelling errors. They go high horse-riding on primetime TV, he creates a circus out of his press conferences. There is not a single recorded victory — moral or otherwise — for his naysayers. I can see what’s happening though. Both sides, Trump — at this point, he doesn’t need his supporters to vouch for him — and his opponents are buying time. This is a strange outcome of the recent impeachment procedure that lost steam. By now, he knows he will win the second term. And with this belief in his empty skull, he is doing what he’s absolutely great at: not giving a damn about anything at all.
Your pain teaches you more than your mirth. Being somebody with a weak constitution, it doesn’t take much for me to have a terrible day (physically speaking). However, my recent bout with migraine has been an eye-opener. It’s very difficult to function with a constant hammering inside your head. You pretend to be normal on the surface but you are off balance inside. You don’t sleep well. You don’t stay awake well. It’s a vicious cycle that continues until one evening you start feeling nice. The lightness of being, if you may. You are already aware of its impermanence but you try to stay in it for as long as possible. By 9pm, you fall asleep and hope to not wake up before 6. But then, you have a dog in your room who has to go to pee at 3.30 in the morning. Long story short, I am proud of myself for not popping painkillers the way I used to do last year. People pat your back. I pat my forehead.
Wisdom can wait. There is no certainty it’s arriving anyway. So, in the meantime, let’s drown in the salty ocean of knowledge. Let’s go through trivia, cultural tidbits, lingual facets and historical nuggets to acquaint oneself with the broad spectrum of irony. Nothing is how it seems. There are hidden layers behind known knowns. In our haste to understand, we brush away details. Here are some snacks for thoughts:
- Just because Shakespeare wrote some memorable plays in quarantine (Plague of 1606) or Newton did some groundbreaking work in physics and optics in isolation (Plague of 1665) doesn’t mean you and I will change the course of history in this pandemic. Our biggest victory would be not getting obese by the end of this lockdown phase.
- On a similar note, non-violence indeed played a major part in the mobilization for our independence but why don’t we bother ourselves with the unprecedented violence of Partition? Is the road to peace paved with blood clots? A deeper reckoning is amiss here.
- Tulu might be a not-so-popular language today but doesn’t it enjoy an august place in the Pancha-Dravida language family? If not, why did the original lyrics of the state anthem of Tamil Nadu, Tamil Thai Valthu, mention Tulu? Sadly, the final adoption removed that line.
- The recent hanging of Abdul Majed in Dhaka behooves so many doubts: one theory could be that the Indian intelligence agencies might have located him and handed him over to Bangladesh. He claims to have gone by air but with no stamp on his passport? Besides, who goes home to die on time?
- Speaking of fundamentalism, it’s cute how half-read Indic folks gloat over the Sanskrit origins of Jakarta tracing it back to Jayakarta. If only they read a bit more and learned that it was a Muslim ruler, who after conquering Sunda Kelapa, renamed it as Jayakarta implying ‘precious victory’. Do we indeed forget or simply choose to stay ignorant of such gorgeous details?
- There are over 100 versions of Ramayana — an epic credited to a Dalit sage named Valmiki — and one of them hails from Mizoram. Now, do you associate this state from northeast India with one of the longest stories ever written? Exactly.
- Just about 200 years ago, 1814 to be precise, British burned down Capitol Hill. Around 100 years later, US and UK fought the First World War together and then the Second World War too. There are no permanent enemies.
- In the wake of the fall of the Ottoman empire, more Greeks left Turkey (1.5 million Greeks against 0.5 million Turks) than Turks from Greece but we hardly hear anything about the Greek side of this story. Or for that matter, the Armenian genocide by Turkish forces solely based on ethno-religious grounds. Why is this so? Can suffering be patented? If so, for how long?
- Joppa, Jaffa, Yafa, Yafo all refer to the same city which is more familiarly known today as Tel Aviv (officially known as Tel Aviv-Yafo). Yet, it is no patch on my Mangalore which is known by seven other names: Mangaluru (Kannada), Kodial (Konkani), Kudla (Tulu), Kaudal (Urdu), Maikala (Beary), Mangalapuram (Malayalam), Kodeyaala (Havyakka) and Manjarun (Sanskrit).
Wisdom, where art thou?
